B Kevin

“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.”
― Methodist Pastor David Barnhart

“The way to get on with a cat is to treat it as an equal - or even better, as the superior it knows itself to be.”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Snake, the Crocodile and the Dog

“the ‘WWI origins’ literature has assumed such vast dimensions that no single historian (not even a fantasy figure with an easy command of all the necessary languages) could hope to read it in one lifetime – twenty years ago, an overview of the current literature counted 25,000 books and articles.”
― Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“The debates about evolution, global warming, and homeopathy have been explicitly manufactured and funded by a variety of corporate, religious, and political entities from outside science, who are not in the least interested in the quest to divorce our human biases from our understanding of the world. They are not committed to taking the science seriously and are instead devoted to taking their own aims and giving them a thin patina of scientific respectability, enough to justify their claims to equal or greater validity than the existing and overwhelming scientific consensus. These groups are not interested in examining the data and happily reject it when it does not meet their preordained conclusions, inventing new “data” to suit their purposes. In the cases of global warming and evolution, these “controversies” were invented to push back against a perceived political agenda on the part of science and scientists. And the forces behind intelligent design and climate change denial were not wrong about that—science is political, and always has been, in that it informs decisions about the best policies in the public sphere, as well it should. And science certainly is a threat to the institutions pushing these antiscience agendas. Science will always be a political threat to some institutions, simply by virtue of its attempts to respect no authority other than data and logic. So much the worse for those institutions. And that’s another sign that these “debates” are not like the debate over quantum foundations—because those working against the scientific consensus are allied with (and often funded by) groups that are simply against the idea of science itself, like some fundamentalist religious groups.”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics