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"All progress we have made in the realm of civil rights has been accomplished through identity politics." I thought identity politics was the problem that civil rights were trying to overcome. Maybe we mean something different by that term. I will let the author make her case and try not to let language get in the way.

Imagine if were expected to learn to read and write musical scores, but never listen to or perform the music. There is little to be gained from "sonic intuition". So why do we have an unwritten law: mathematics must not be visualized?

While talking about triangles, he re-defines the Parallel Postulate in the cleanest way I have seen. In formal terms: Two straight lines that have a continuous half-rotation (180 degree) symmetry are said to be parallel. The equality of angles around a transverse line falls out of this definition. I could also define a straight line as having a half-rotation symmetry.

Dmitry does not mind that his brother Ivan is in love with Dmitry's wife Katerina Ivanovna because he is after his father's girlfriend Grushenka. What is poor Alyosha to make of all this? I won't find out for a while because the library book is due back. Three weeks to read this whole book? And apparently I have to finish it to get anything out of it at all. So I have to wait until it re-appears again.

In the boat reference frame the distance from its back to the dock is contracted. OK, but then he subtracts the boat length to find the distance to the dock. No, the front and back are separate events in space-time. The distance from the front to the dock must be calculated separately. The distances don't add up because they occur at different times. I get the light reaching the boat front before the dock, not after.

I think this example is wrong. A boat travels at half the speed of light toward a dock. Does a light beam from the back of the boat reach the front before the boat reaches the dock? In the reference frame of the dock, the boat length is contracted. OK, but the distance to the boat must also be contracted, not increased by subtracting the shortened boat. There is nothing special about the space occupied by the boat.

Indian philosophy embraced the concept of nothingness just as Indian math embraced the concept of zero. The conceptual leap that led to the invention of zero happened in a culture that accepted the void as the essence of the universe. The symbol that emerged to represent zero, the circle, encapsulated the message that mathematics cannot be separated from spirituality. Zero means nothing, and it means eternity.

This does not make sense to me. If the Turks had no resources to defend Constantinople, where did they get a half million men and plenty of ammunition to win at Gallipoli?

On 25 April 1915, the Allies could have won an easy, bloodless victory by their surprise attack; but 259 days later, when they withdrew in defeat from their last positions on the blood-soaked beaches of the Dardanelles, it emerged that they had lost one of the costliest military engagements in history. 500,000 soldiers had been engaged in battle on each side, and each had suffered 250,000 casualties.

Armin Meiwes found someone willing to be killed and eaten by him. By libertarian standards this is moral because it was a free mutual choice. The German courts disagreed and Meiwes went to jail. He refused to eat meat there because factory farming is inhumane. This makes sense as the animals could not consent to their treatment. Lesson: the only meat that can be morally eaten is that of a consenting human being.

Deciding important public questions while pretending to a neutrality that cannot be achieved is a recipe for backlash and resentment. A politics emptied of substantive moral engagement makes for an impoverished civic life. It is also an open invitation to narrow, intolerant moralisms. Fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread.

I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned. And television is worse. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder when it will end.

I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the moustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all.

I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books than I learned anything useful from, except that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. This is not a new insight, but the truth of it is something you have to experience to grasp.

Was it all Nietzsche's fault? He was brilliant, complicated, and sure that he was right. What drove him was a conviction that Western civilization had gone badly wrong. Humans had forgotten that life was not orderly and conventional, but vital and dangerous. His appeal was that it was easy to read a great deal into his work, and was riveting to a younger generation who wanted to rebel but were not sure against what.

One well-connected widow who turned Izvolsky down was later asked if she regretted having having missed the chance to marry someone who had done so well. "I have regretted it every day," she replied, "but congratulated myself every night."

Now he has wandered into a discussion of group selection among Jews in competion with gentiles. It would be easy to quote him out of context here.

The next paragraph has Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin.

He sure likes to wander. He just quoted from Karl Marx, Jared Diamond and Ibn Khaldun.

Here I am, visiting in Rome. What a great place to give me perspective on a book about our classical heritage.

Theodore Roosevelt: “Democracy comes short of what it should be just to the extent that it fails to provide for the exceptional individual, no matter how poor his start in life, the highest kind of exceptional training; for democracy as a permanent world force must mean not only the raising of the general level, but also the raising of the standards of excellence to which only exceptional individuals may attain.”

The teaching was strict, the learning hard. But waiting at the far end of the journey would be civilized human beings, citizens who had learned what their culture was about. It may be telling that we do not find many instances in the ancient world of pupils set to writing their own poems: their task was not to express themselves, but to bow humbly at the feet of others. They were apprentices, to know, not be known.

The use of the word culture hails from the halls of anthropology. If only there it had stayed. But it slithered forth from the laboratory to infect us all. Here was a word hot for serving up on a steaming platter to the over-degreed and half-educated. It excuses ignorance and inoculates the ignorant from any responsibility to know anything beyond their kith and kin. Culture now is any chunk of social reality you like

Severe punishment in the course of instruction does harm to the student, especially to little children. It makes them lazy and induces them to lie and be insincere. Their outward behavior differs from what they are thinking, because they are afraid that they will have to suffer tyrannical treatment (if they tell the truth). Thus, they are taught deceit and trickery. This becomes their custom and character.

When tax assessments are low, the subjects have the energy and desire to do things. Cultural enterprises grow and increase. Eventually, the taxes will weigh heavily upon the subjects and overburden them. The result is that cultural enterprise disappears, since when they compare taxes with their income and see little profit, they lose all hope. Finally, total tax revenue goes down and the civilization is destroyed.

“There are few religious people in towns and cities, as people there are obdurate and careless, connected with the use of much meat, seasonings, and fine wheat.” Not to mention unlimited sex, which reminds me of "Soumission".

“The 4th generation is inferior to the preceding ones in every respect. They actually despise the qualities that built the edifice of their glory." Is the secular West in its 4th generation?

The section on gravity leaves one with the impression that the Moon orbits the Earth. Wrong, they both rotate around a common centre of mass. Gravitation reveals a fundamental symmetry - every atom in the universe is attracted to every other atom. The Earth and Moon attract each other, and momentum is conserved by rotating around the centre of mass. The role of symmetry and momentum is left out of his description.

Ibn Khaldun describes evolution in the 14th Century: "Creation started out from the minerals and progressed, in an ingenious, gradual manner, to plants and animals. The animal world then widens, its species become numerous, and, in a gradual process of creation, it finally leads to man, who is able to think and to reflect. The higher stage of man is reached from the world of the monkeys."

There have been numerous sages among the nations of mankind. The knowledge that has not come down to us is larger than the knowledge that has. Where are the sciences of the Persians that 'Umar ordered wiped out at the time of the conquest! Where are the sciences of the Chaldaeans, the Syrians, and the Babylonians, and the scholarly products and results that were theirs!