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The image of Prometheus is one of the most common in western culture

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The site closely resembles what Berlin might have looked like in Nineteen Sixty-One

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than this one in Arizona

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It is the essential thesis of democracy that laws have no virtue in themselves,

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...has decided that an individual human being is more important than a legislation, which has no life.

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Such abstract thoughts are easier to comprehend when viewed in terms of individual human lives.

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The state exists to serve both the individual and the collective good, and has no purpose when it neglects both the individual and the collective good, as is clearly the case in the instance of immigration when the good of the collective, that is the world economy, and the good of the individual, immigrants, is subjugated to the good of a minority group, regardless of how large this minority group is. There exists a common misconception that it is the duty of the state to protect its citizens, either collectively or as individuals. The population of any state is, at the time of this writing, a minority within the population of the world, and thus any actions taken to secure the position of the citizen of any stat above the citizens of other states are inherently antidemocratic. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that Mercantilism is an ineffectual economic system and that attempts to secure the economy of one state at the expense of the world economy are doomed to fail. When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he made it clear that the United States was to be a country where the rights of “all men” not the rights of the citizen, which are never mentioned in that document, were to be upheld. A leader who neglects the welfare of all men in favor of the supposed welfare of his voters must be either corrupt or foolish, and a state led by such leaders can only fail, turning perpetual inward and spiraling into oblivion and stagnation. In the context of The Bean Trees, Taylor’s actions are the actions of a patriot and a humanist, one who is not content to see the world run for the profit of the few at the expense not only of the many, but in the end, also of the few.

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The state exists to serve both the individual and the collective good; it has no purpose when it neglects either. Unfortunately, our current harsh immigration laws do just that. The good of the collective, the world economy, and the good of the individual, the immigrant, are subjugated to the good of a minority group, the citizens of the United States. The population of any state is a minority within the population of the world. Therefore, any action taken to secure the position of the citizens of any state over that of the citizens of any other state is counterproductive. When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he made it clear that the United States was to be a country where the rights of “all men” were to be upheld. The word "citizen" is never mentioned in the document. A leader who neglects the welfare of all men in favor of the immagined welfare of his voters must be either corrupt or foolish, and a state led by such leaders can only fail.

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Metaphors

“A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image,” said Orwell, “while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (eg, iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”

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Short words

Use them. They are often Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin in origin. They are easy to spell and easy to understand... “Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.” (Winston Churchill)

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Unnecessary words

Some words add nothing but length to your prose. Use adjectives to make your meaning more precise and be cautious of those you find yourself using to make it more emphatic. The word "very" is a case in point. If it occurs in a sentence you have written, try leaving it out and see whether the meaning is changed. "The omens were good" may have more force than 'The omens were very good"...In general, be concise. Try to be economical in your account or argument (“The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out”—Voltaire). Similarly, try to be economical with words. “As a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigour it will give to your style.” (Sydney Smith) Raymond Mortimer put it even more crisply when commenting about Susan Sontag: “Her journalism, like a diamond, will sparkle more if it is cut.”

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Active, not passive

Be direct. A hit B describes the event more concisely than B was hit by A.

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Jargon

Avoid it. You may have to think harder if you are not to use jargon, but you can still be precise. Technical terms should be used in their proper context; do not use them out of it. In many instances simple words can do the job of exponential (try fast), interface (frontier or border) and so on. If you find yourself tempted to write about affirmative action or corporate governance, you will have to explain what it is; with luck, you will then not have to use the actual expression.

Avoid, above all, the kind of jargon that tries either to dignify nonsense with seriousness (The appointee...should have a proven track record of operating at a senior level within a multi-site international business, preferably within a service- or brand-oriented environment , declared an advertisement for a financial controller for The Economist Group) or to obscure the truth (We shall not launch the ground offensive until we have attrited the Republican Guard to the point when they no longer have an effective offensive capacity —the Pentagon's way of saying that the allies would not fight on the ground until they had killed so many Iraqis that the others would not attack). What was meant by the Israeli defence ministry when it issued the following press release remains unclear: The United States and Israel now possess the capability to conduct real-time simulations with man in the loop for full-scale theatre missile defence architectures for the Middle East .

Try not to use foreign words and phrases unless there is no English alternative, which is unusual (so a year or per year, not per annum; a person or per person, not per capita; beyond one's authority, not ultra vires; and so on).

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Tone

The reader is primarily interested in what you have to say. By the way in which you say it you may encourage him either to read on or to stop reading. If you want him to read on:

Do not be stuffy. “To write a genuine, familiar or truly English style”, said Hazlitt, “is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command or choice of words or who could discourse with ease, force and perspicuity setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.”

In “How to Be a Better Reporter”, Arthur Brisbane put it like this: “Avoid fancy writing. The most powerful words are the simplest. ‘To be or not to be, that is the question,’ ‘In the beginning was the word,’ ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep,’ ‘Out, out, brief candle,’ ‘The rest is silence.’ Nothing fancy in those quotations. A natural style is the only style.”

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Syntax

Try not be sloppy in the construction of your sentences and paragraphs. Do not use a participle unless you make it clear what it applies to... To never split an infinitive is quite easy... Make sure that plural nouns have plural verbs... Use the subjunctive properly... Take care with the genitive... Respect the gerund... Do your best to be lucid (“I see but one rule: to be clear”, Stendhal). Simple sentences help. Keep complicated constructions and gimmicks to a minimum, if necessary by remembering the New Yorker's comment: “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.”... Mark Twain described how a good writer treats sentences: “At times he may indulge himself with a long one, but he will make sure there are no folds in it, no vaguenesses, no parenthetical interruptions of its view as a whole; when he has done with it, it won't be a sea-serpent with half of its arches under the water; it will be a torch-light procession.”

Long paragraphs, like long sentences, can confuse the reader. “The paragraph”, according to Fowler, “is essentially a unit of thought, not of length; it must be homogeneous in subject matter and sequential in treatment.” One-sentence paragraphs should be used only occasionally.

Clear thinking is the key to clear writing. “A scrupulous writer”, observed Orwell, “in every sentence that he writes will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?”

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Originally posted by Blayne Bradley:
i liked the article and i think it was well done.

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Racism is heavily prevalent among many anti-immigration organizations, with new anti-immigrant lobbied joined some older groups such as the Klu Klux Klan, which devotes much of its web site (www.kkk.bz) to arguing that people of non-northern European descent were never supposed to be allowed to immigrate and there is doubtless a great degree of truth in their belief that many of the signers of the Constitution agreed with their views; however, regardless of the personal views of any signatories, such a specification was never written into the Constitution and if it had been, would have been overturned some time ago, or else the country would have collapsed in the late nineteenth century.

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Many of the constitutional framers "agreed" with an organization that began a hundred years after the birth of the nation. Makes sense to me!

In defense of Peligius, I am inspired to paraphrase a recent favorite: Sir Philip Sidney

"The Poet claimeth nothing, and therefore never lieth."



:::On a more serious note::: Thank You Jhai for that engrossing post. I hadn't heard all of those quotes, and they are, every one of them, good to remember. Perhaps VERY good to remember. Perhaps not?

I jibe and crow alot out of turn, but I really do like that some of you go the distance in responses for Peligius. This is encouraging to me in a strange way, though I don't know why.

[ July 14, 2006, 05:31 AM: Message edited by: Orincoro ]

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Originally posted by Kwea:

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Originally posted by Blayne Bradley:
i liked the article and i think it was well done.

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I rest my case.

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"Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves? The streets of cities inundated with light, green branches on the thresholds, nations sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past loving the present, thinkers entirely at liberty, believers on terms of full equality, for religion heaven, God the direct priest, human conscience become an altar, no more hatreds, the fraternity of the workshop and the school, for sole penalty and recompense fame, work for all, right for all, peace over all, no more bloodshed, no more wars, happy mothers! To conquer matter is the first step; to realize the ideal is the second. Reflect on what progress has already accomplished. Formerly, the first human races beheld with terror the hydra pass before their eyes, breathing on the waters, the dragon which vomited flame, the griffin who was the monster of the air, and who flew with the wings of an eagle and the talons of a tiger; fearful beasts which were above man.
Man, nevertheless, spread his snares, consecrated by intelligence, and finally conquered these monsters. We have vanquished the hydra, and it is called the locomotive; we are on the point of vanquishing the griffin, we already grasp it, and it is called the balloon.
On the day when this Promethean task shall be accomplished, and when man shall have definitely harnessed to his will the triple Chimaera of antiquity, the hydra, the dragon and the griffin, he will be the master of water, fire, and of air, and he will be for the rest of animated creation that which the ancient gods formerly were to him.
Courage, and onward! Citizens, whither are we going? To science made government, to the force of things become the sole public force, to the natural law, having in itself its sanction and its penalty and promulgating itself by evidence, to a dawn of truth corresponding to a dawn of day.
We are advancing to the union of peoples; we are advancing to the unity of man. No more fictions; no more parasites. The real governed by the true, that is the goal.
Civilization will hold its assizes at the summit of Europe, and, later on, at the centre of continents, in a grand parliament of the intelligence. Something similar has already been seen. The amphictyons had two sittings a year, one at Delphos the seat of the gods, the other at Thermopylae, the place of heroes. Europe will have her amphictyons; the globe will have its amphictyons. France bears this sublime future in her breast.
This is the gestation of the nineteenth century. That which Greece sketched out is worthy of being finished by France. Listen to me, you, Feuilly, valiant artisan, man of the people. I revere you. Yes, you clearly behold the future, yes, you are right. You had neither father nor mother, Feuilly; you adopted humanity for your mother and right for your father. You are about to die, that is to say to triumph, here.
Citizens, whatever happens to-day, through our defeat as well as through our victory, it is a revolution that we are about to create. As conflagrations light up a whole city, so revolutions illuminate the whole human race. And what is the revolution that we shall cause? I have just told you, the Revolution of the True. From a political point of view, there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty. Where two or three of these sovereignties are combined, the state begins.
But in that association there is no abdication. Each sovereignty concedes a certain quantity of itself, for the purpose of forming the common right. This quantity is the same for all of us. This identity of concession which each makes to all, is called Equality.
Common right is nothing else than the protection of all beaming on the right of each. This protection of all over each is called Fraternity.
The point of intersection of all these assembled sovereignties is called society.
This intersection being a junction, this point is a knot. Hence what is called the social bond. Some say social contract; which is the same thing, the word contract being etymologically formed with the idea of a bond.
Let us come to an understanding about equality; for, if liberty is the summit, equality is the base. Equality, citizens, is not wholly a surface vegetation, a society of great blades of grass and tiny oaks; a proximity of jealousies which render each other null and void; legally speaking, it is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity; politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight; religiously, it is all consciences possessed of the same right.
Equality has an organ: gratuitous and obligatory instruction. The right to the alphabet, that is where the beginning must be made. The primary school imposed on all, the secondary school offered to all, that is the law. From an identical school, an identical society will spring. Yes, instruction! light! light! everything comes from light, and to it everything returns.
Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old, we shall no longer, as to-day, have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand,
an interruption of civilization depending on a marriage of kings, on a birth in hereditary tyrannies, a partition of peoples by a congress, a dismemberment because of the failure of a dynasty,
a combat of two religions meeting face to face, like two bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite;
we shall no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising from distress, misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the sword, and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events.
One might almost say: There will be no more events. We shall be happy. The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial globe accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between the soul and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth, as the planet around the light.
Friends, the present hour in which I am addressing you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future. A revolution is a toll.
Oh! the human race will be delivered, raised up, consoled! We affirm it on this barrier. Whence should proceed that cry of love, if not from the heights of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is the point of junction, of those who think and of those who suffer; this barricade is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas, and a heap of woes. Here misery meets the ideal. The day embraces the night, and says to it: `I am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me.' From the embrace of all desolations faith leaps forth.
Sufferings bring hither their agony and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are about to join and constitute our death. Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn."

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But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

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With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it--all sought to avert it. While the inaugeral [sic] address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--seeking to dissole [sic] the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came....
ne eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether"

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Originally posted by Pelegius:
The speaches I cited by Churchill and Lilcoln are better becouse they have a degree of depth to them. I never much liked the Gettysburg Adress, it says to little. The greatest speech, albeit fictitious, is Marc Antony's Eulogy in the Shakespearean version of Julius Cæsar.

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What does it actually say? It is essentially empty rhetoric commiserating a bloody battle.

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Originally posted by Pelegius:
Twenty minutes of content is better than three minutes without any. You may have noticed that the best films tend to be long, becouse the explore concepts in depth. The Best of Youth, one of the finest films I have ever seen, is six hours.

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A good speech can reiterate what a country is about, a great speech can redefine it.

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It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.

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A good speech can reiterate what a country is about, a great speech can redefine it.

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Twenty minutes of content is better than three minutes without any.

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Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Pelegius:
Twenty minutes of content is better than three minutes without any. You may have noticed that the best films tend to be long, becouse the explore concepts in depth. The Best of Youth, one of the finest films I have ever seen, is six hours.

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Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head:

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Twenty minutes of content is better than three minutes without any.

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In many situations, three minutes of content is better than 20 minutes of content.

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I can think of several references to Prometheus in the cultural lexicon: Prometheus Bound by Æschylus (perhaps slightly esoteric), Prometheus Unbound by Shelly, The Prometheus Statue at the Rockefeller Center, The Prometheus Mural at the New York Library and a line from the musical "Camelot." In adition the addictive Promethean is in common usage, making the Prometheus myth is not just a well-known myth, it is cornerstone of our culture. When the Rockefeller center was built, a quote from the same play I quoted was inscribed in large gold letters, no footnote, none needed.

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modern philosophical communication

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VLADIMIR:
We can still part, if you think it would be better.
ESTRAGON:
It's not worthwhile now.
Silence.
VLADIMIR:
No, it's not worthwhile now.
Silence.
ESTRAGON:
Well, shall we go?
VLADIMIR:
Yes, let's go.
They do not move.

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(From- well- this one is a common image. )

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In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

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Originally posted by Teshi:

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I can think of several references to Prometheus in the cultural lexicon: Prometheus Bound by Æschylus (perhaps slightly esoteric), Prometheus Unbound by Shelly, The Prometheus Statue at the Rockefeller Center, The Prometheus Mural at the New York Library and a line from the musical "Camelot." In adition the addictive Promethean is in common usage, making the Prometheus myth is not just a well-known myth, it is cornerstone of our culture. When the Rockefeller center was built, a quote from the same play I quoted was inscribed in large gold letters, no footnote, none needed.

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Pelegius! Listen. The fact that the story of Prometheus is mentioned or featured in a bunch of places or works does not make it a 'common' image. I'm sure the story of Prometheus is buried so deep in our society that if we looked we could find it everywhere. I'm not saying that your reference to Prometheus is bad or wrong I'm saying you have the wrong idea about what is ordinary- what is "common". By all means, feel free to use ancient/obscure images, stories, references here and there but when you do briefly remind us what the story is. What seems like second nature to you may not be to your neighbour.

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