Doldrums

“When a language treats inanimate objects in the same way as it treats women and men, with the same grammatical forms or with the same “he” and “she” pronouns, the habits of grammar can spill over to habits of mind beyond grammar. The grammatical nexus between object and gender is imposed on children from the earliest age and reinforced many thousands of times throughout their lives. This constant drilling affects the associations that speakers develop about inanimate objects and can clothe their notions of such objects in womanly or manly traits. The evidence suggests that sex-related associations are not only fabricated on demand but present even when they are not actively solicited.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“Perhaps the problem is with therapy itself: a profession that has become our new religion, offering quick and easy answers for life’s complex and essentially unanswerable problems. In its zeal to ameliorate our suffering, has therapy reduced all our problems to symptoms, equating suffering with abuse, and holding forth the false hope of redemption through the resurrection of lost innocence?”
― Elizabeth F. Loftus, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse

“What if he's right?" I asked. I told myself that I was only looking for a tactical assessment, an official opinion for the official record. But my words came out doubtful and frightened.

She paused. For a moment I wondered if she, too, had finally lost patience with the sight of me. But she only looked up, and stared off into some enclosed distance.

"What if he's right," she repeated, and pondered the question that lay beneath: what can we do?

"We could engineer ourselves back into nonsentience, perhaps. Might improve our odds in the long run." She looked at me, a rueful sort of half-smile at the corner of her mouth. "But I guess that wouldn't be much of a win, would it? What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?"

I finally saw it.

How long would it take an enemy tactician to discern Bates' mind behind the actions of her troops on the battlefield? How long before the obvious logic came clear? In any combat situation, this woman would naturally draw the greatest amount of enemy fire: take off the head, kill the body. But Amanda Bates wasn't just a head: she was a bottleneck, and her body would not suffer from a decapitation strike. Her death would only let her troops off the leash. How much more deadly would those grunts be, once every battlefield reflex didn't have to pass through some interminable job stack waiting for the rubber stamp?

Szpindel had had it all wrong. Amanda Bates wasn't a sop to politics, her role didn't deny the obsolescence of Human oversight at all. Her role depended on it.

She was more cannon fodder than I. She always had been. And I had to admit: after generations of generals who'd lived for the glory of the mushroom cloud, it was a pretty effective strategy for souring warmongers on gratuitous violence. In Amanda Bates' army, picking a fight meant standing on the battlefield with a bull's-eye on your chest.

No wonder she'd been so invested in peaceful alternatives.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“The air was filled with a big noise and I tried to move. I felt the heaven was going down upon the earth and that it had engulfed me. I have really touched God. He came into me myself, yes God exists, I cried, and I don’t remember anything else. You all, healthy people, he said, can’t imagine the happiness which we epileptics feel during the second or so before our fit.… I don’t know if this felicity lasts for seconds, hours or months, but believe me, for all the joys that life may bring, I would not exchange this one.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky