A quotation from Orwell

Swift falsifies his picture of the world by refusing to see anything in human life except dirt, folly and wickedness, but the part which he abstracts from the whole does exist, and it is something which we all know about while shrinking from mentioning it. Part of our minds — in any normal person it is the dominant part — believes that man is a noble animal and life is worth living: but there is also a sort of inner self which at least intermittently stands aghast at the horror of existence.

George Orwell (1903-1950) English writer [pseud. of Eric Arthur Blair]
Essay (1946-09), “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels,” Polemic, No. 5

Sourcing, notes: wist.info/orwell-george/76060/

A quotation from Teddy Roosevelt

   All men in whose character there is not an element of hardened baseness must admit the need in our public life of those qualities which we somewhat vaguely group together when we speak of “reform,” and all men of sound mind must also admit the need of efficiency.
   There are, of course, men of such low moral type, or of such ingrained cynicism, that they do not believe in the possibility of making anything better, or do not care to see things better. There are also men who are slightly disordered mentally, or who are cursed with a moral twist which makes them champion reforms less from a desire to do good to others than as a kind of tribute to their own righteousness, for the sake of emphasizing their own superiority. From neither of these classes can we get any real help in the unending struggle for righteousness.
   There remains the great body of the people, including the entire body of those through whom the salvation of the people must ultimately be worked out. All these men combine or seek to combine in varying degrees the quality of striving after the ideal, that is, the quality which makes men reformers, and the quality of so striving through practical methods — the quality which makes men efficient. Both qualities are absolutely essential. The absence of either makes the presence of the other worthless or worse.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) American politician, statesman, conservationist, writer, US President (1901-1909)
Essay (1900-06), “Latitude and Longitude Among Reformers,” The Century Magazine, Vol. 60, No. 2

Sourcing, notes: wist.info/roosevelt-theodore/1…

You can add "obeying people who believe they are gatekeepers of knowledge" and then "realising that gatekeepers of knowledge are merely self opinionated with long job titles given to them by friends".

innocence (n.) : a state of permanent optimism, such as believing that when UPS says a package will be delivered between 8am and noon, it will actually be delivered that day, or that when a company announces a change "to serve you better", that they actually intend to try to serve you better.

I was snarky on tumblr, now I am mortified.
I should just... fall on my pen.
#cynicism

After pondering Cynicism a bit, I came across a TED talk about Stoicism. Appropriately, it doesn't have the hyped-up crowds and boosterism of so many TED talks, instead, it's an academic philosopher calmly lecturing on the history of Stoicism and how he thinks it is relevant to modern day. Also appropriate, it was delivered in Athens (but in English)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhn1Fe8cT0Q

Massimo Pigliucci is becoming one of my favorite philosophers. I first encountered him over 10 years ago when he was working on evolutionary theory. He has a podcast about stoicism, that I'm looking forward to listening to.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stoic-meditations/id1328933559

The reply from Kilkenny CoCo about the #SlowerSpeedsSaferRoads campaigns says the reduced speed limit applies only to L roads "outside Urban towns" (nice tautology) with the current 80km/h speed limit. No dataset. Of course, we as #OpenStreetMap Ireland (or even Kilkenny) don't have all the L numbers for all the roads in Kilkenny, but I guess that's our problem. #opendata #openstreetmap #cynicism

Do your best to resist #cynicism, because cynicism destroys nuance, and almost everything valuable in life exists inside nuance.

Resist saying #cynical things like “who cares about privacy; your data is already out there”, “who cares about stopping climate change; it’s already too late”, “who cares about voting; we don’t have a democracy any more”, and any number of similarly simplistic, thought-destroying nonsense.

Cynicism is faux-intellectualism. It’s attempting to impress people with rational-sounding generalizations that lead to absurd, defeatist behavior. It’s a claim of “being real” while being too lazy to think through the problem. It’s feeling superior by kicking a table on which someone else is doing their homework.

Nuance exists even during a crisis—it’s arguably even more important then. Things can ALWAYS get worse, and things can ALWAYS get better. Working to make things better is worth doing. Feeling smug and telling people to give up is not; it’s the asshole’s easy way out.

A crowd of people wearing smiling death masks congratulate and applaud a fascist at his triumph. Naturally, as if they were just playing their role in a tragedy they themselves wrote. Little people in big roles they never had the character and talent to perform.

Good piece on why we don't need more cynics, by @Daojoan. My only criticism would be scale and time. As a climate scientist change has been glacial on part of climate action. Not acknowledging that the world might be irrational far longer than your pragmatic meliorism seems important. In order to not turn into a cynic by the slow grind of time you need at times to scale down where you can build (for sanity), to be able to scale up.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/we-dont-need-more-cynics-we-need-more-builders/

“All the major philosophical schools in antiquity regarded #eudaimonia as the highest good, often even the very aim and purpose of philosophy, although the various schools, such as the Cynics, the Stoics, and the Epicureans, may have conceived of it in somewhat different terms.”

#Cynicism #Stoicism #Epicureanism #Buddhism #FirstPrinciples #eudaimonia
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/202006/what-is-eudaimonia