Sociology

"We stand apart, unembroiled, conscious of our own principles, conscious of what we hope and purpose. … Neutrality is a negative word. It does not express what America ought to feel. We are not trying to keep out of trouble; we are trying to preserve the foundations on which peace may be rebuilt."

"The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous."

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."

"Most people understand the need for neutrality. The real struggle is not between the right and the left — that's where most people assume — but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities."

"No identification of self or mission. No interference with the social development of said planet. No references to space or the fact that there are other worlds or civilizations."

"The State must be made efficient for the work which concerns only the people of the State; and the nation for that which concerns all the people. There must remain no neutral ground to serve as a refuge for lawbreakers, and especially for lawbreakers of great wealth, who can hire the vulpine legal cunning which will teach them how to avoid both jurisdictions."

"Information smacks of safe neutrality; it is simple, helpful heaping of unassailable facts. In that innocent guise, its the perfect starting point for a technocratic political agenda that wants as little exposure for its objectives as possible. After all, what can anyone say against information?"

"In recognizing that words have the power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation. In an attempt to get rid of that quality, they are looking for some neutral means which will be a nonconductor of the current called “emotion” and its concomitant evaluation."

"Most of us are not neutral in feeling, but, as human beings, we have to remember that, if the issues between East and West are to be decided in any manner that can give any possible satisfaction to anybody, whether Communist or anti-Communist, whether Asian or European or American, whether White or Black, then these issues must not be decided by war. We should wish this to be understood, both in the East and in the West."

"And it will always happen that he who is not your friend will invite you to neutrality, while he who is your friend will call on you to declare yourself openly in arms. Irresolute Princes, to escape immediate danger, commonly follow the neutral path, in most instances to their destruction."

"The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato. Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."

"The peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings of humane instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality."

"No one took the voice of the journalist further away from ‘neutral background’ (or seemed less able to stop himself doing it) than Hunter S. Thompson. Even at the start of his career, he was no believer in journalistic neutrality. … Certainly Thompson is a peculiarly misshapen sort of moralist, one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him."

"The eloquent Lysias, posing as a non-lover, had concealed designs upon Phaedrus, so that his fine speech was really a sheep’s clothing. Socrates discerned in him a “peculiar craftiness.” One must suspect the same today of many who ask us to place our faith in the neutrality of their discourse."

"Armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable."

"In their book-length analysis of Doctor Who, John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado characterize the political outlook of the program as consistent with the BBC's particular brand of political neutrality: skeptical, aggressive, quizzical, and amused towards all forms of political power. In Doctor Who the attitude gets further flavored by the Doctors "Romantic" hero mystique. This characteristic allows him to adopt a "liberal-populist role in criticizing 'sectionalist' forces of 'Left' and 'Right,' and in rebuking the 'official' and the powerful, whether in big business, the military, government or 'militant' unions." … The political form that most resembles these critiques is liberal democracy, which places sovereignty in the hands of the people."

"Donald Judd spoke of a "neutral" surface, but what is meant? Neutrality must involve some relationship (to other ways of painting, thinking?) He would have to include these in his work to establish the neutrality of that surface. He also used "non" or "not" – expressive – this is an early problem – a negative solution or – expression of new sense – which can help one into – what one has not known. "Neutral" expresses an intention."

"My leading idea was the establishment of a journal removed alike from servile partisanship on the one hand and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other."

"People say that my works are "neutral". But if you paint something, it is "something", and it cannot be neutral. Being neutral is a mere expression of a form of intention."

"The rights of neutrality will only be respected, when they are defended by an adequate power. A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral."

"Perhaps what I am about to say may seem strange to you, who are socialists, and vaunt humanity and your duty to your neighbor, but I never seek to protect a society which does not protect me, and which I will even say, generally occupies itself about me only to injure me; and thus by giving them a low place in my esteem, and preserving a neutrality towards them, it is society and my neighbor who are indebted to me."

"While we enforced the neutrality which we prepared to observe, we declared at the same time that that neutrality must cease if British interests were assailed or menaced. Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own, have denounced this policy as a selfish policy. My Lord Mayor, it is as selfish as patriotism."

"Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality."

"It was an axiom of "containment" that no part of the known world could be considered neutral. "Neutralism" was among the Cold Warriors' gravest curse words, applied with caustic hostility to India and even France. Those who were not with were against, subjected to intense economic and ideological — and sometimes military — pressure to fall into line."

"Science values objectivity, rationality, and neutrality. It has concern for the truth. The humanities value subjectivity, imagination, and commitment. They have a concern for justice. Design values practicality, ingenuity, creativity, and empathy. It has concerns for goodness of fit and for the impact of design on future generations."

"A guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximize that effect, and some try to minimize it. You come from one of the latter and you’re being asked to explain yourself to one of the former. Prevarication will be more difficult than you imagine; neutrality is probably impossible. You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence. I know that and they know that; you had better accept it."

"Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them."

"Hayek forced into public discourse the question of the compatibility of democracy and statism. And unlike Burnham, he made no pretense of neutrality about the phenomena he described. … In responding to Burnham and Hayek … liberals were in fact responding to a powerful strain of Jeffersonian anti-statism in American political culture … The result was a subtle but important shift in liberal thinking."

"The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics."

"Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity."

"Doing nothing is not the absence of a policy; it is, in fact, the adoption of one. "Neutrality" favors the side with the biggest arsenal. "Nonintervention" is a form of interference."

"Neutrality is too often assumed to require the bleaching out of all traces of faith, excluding religious belief and discourse from public life. But it doesn't, and we can see why by appeal to the notion of public reason, articulated most clearly by the late political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls was quite clear that the religious have no obligation at all to keep their faith entirely to themselves. "Reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or non-religious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any time," he wrote, "provided that in due course proper political reasons – and not reasons given solely by comprehensive doctrines – are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines are said to support.""

"Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. "Ye shall know the truth," says Jesus, "and the truth shall set you free." Now, I've chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal."

"I had no sense of being inferior or superior to the people about me; I merely felt that they had had no chance to learn to live differently. I never criticized them or praised them, yet they felt in my neutrality a deeper rejection of them than if I had cursed them."

"Surely, we want to be objective if that means telling the truth as we see it, not concealing information that may be embarrassing to our point of view. But we don’t want to be objective if it means pretending that ideas don’t play a part in the social struggles of our time, that we don’t take sides in those struggles. Indeed, it is impossible to be neutral."

"In order to get the proper perspective, we must take a quick glance at the past. Seven years ago, Western Europe faced the threat of imminent aggression by Soviet forces of overwhelming strength. In that hour of mortal danger the North Atlantic Treaty was signed. The decision to accede to the Alliance required great vision and great courage on the part of many of the members. For the United States, it meant abandoning their traditional policy of isolationism from the affairs of Europe. For Norway and others it meant abandoning their tradition of neutrality. The free world owes a deep depth of gratitude to the Statesmen of the Western Democracies in these days. Their vision has reaped a rich reward for us all. The Alliance which they brought into being saved the free world from the unfathomable disaster which threatened it. Peace in Europe has been preserved. Soviet westward expansion has been halted. A shield of armed forces has been built up which, though not yet strong enough to resist an all out attack, is at least a significant deterrent to aggression. The forces of NATO are no longer a dream, they are a reality."

"In a world already moving in certain directions, where wealth and power are already distributed in certain ways, neutrality means accepting the way things are now. It is a world of clashing interests – war against peace, nationalism against internationalism, equality against greed, and democracy against elitism – and it seems to me both impossible and undesirable to be neutral in those conflicts."

"It was things like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, he thought, that made you believe the world was maybe just as well off destroyed."

"I'm either a mutant or a cripple, and I refuse to be a cripple. People pity cripples, but they're afraid of mutants … Fear implies respect."

"It is a generally accepted assumption that sporadic pregnancy losses occurring before an embryo has developed represent a ‘physiological’ phenomenon, which prevents conceptions affected by serious structural malformations or chromosomal aberrations incompatible with life from progressing to viability. This concept is supported by clinical studies in which embryoscopy was used to assess fetal morphology prior to removal by uterine evacuation. Fetal malformations were observed in 85% of cases presenting with early clinical miscarriage. The same study also demonstrated that 75% of the fetuses had an abnormal karyotype. Fetal chromosomal aneuploidies arising from non-inherited and non-disjunctional events are common. Indeed, in a recent study using comparative genomic hybridization to study the chromosomal complement of all blastomeres in preimplantation human embryos, more than 90% were found to have at least one chromosomal abnormality in one or more cells. The clinical implications of minor, mosaic and possibly ‘transient’ aneuploidies remain unclear. However, while most fetuses with severe developmental defects will die in utero some aneuploidies can be compatible with survival to term. The most commonly encountered is trisomy 21, although 80% of affected embryos perish in utero or in the neonatal period. In most cases, the extra chromosome is of maternal origin and caused by a malsegregation event in the first meiotic division. The risk of this increases with maternal age and may be considered to be a biological rather than pathological phenomenon. Although fetal chromosomal aberrations may be identified in 29% to 60% of cases in women with RM, the incidence decreases as the number of miscarriages increases suggesting other mechanisms as a cause of the miscarriage in RM couples with multiple losses."

"There was a world of mutants, men and women who were more than normal men and women, persons who had certain human talents and certain human understandings which the normal men and women of the world had never known, or having known, could not utilize in their entirety, unable to use intelligently all the mighty powers which lay dormant in their brains."

"The people finally know. They've been told about the mutants. And they hated the mutants. Of course, they hated them. They hated them because the existence of the mutants makes them second-class humans, because they are Neanderthalers suddenly invaded by a bow and arrow people."

"Genetic bases of defective chromosome content or structure In a biological sense, genetic defects leading to abortion may originate from two partners: The conceptus and the uterus. From the conceptus side, it is well established that chromosomal anomalies lead to implantation defects. However, they occur mostly stochastically; to be the genetic cause of a recurrent loss, a genetic defect leading to systematic chromosome anomalies has to be found, as nicely reviewed recently by Kurahashi and coworkers. Abnormal chromosome structure may originate from defects in the checkpoint mechanisms that constitute a quality control factory of the cell, which is able to detect meiosis anomalies and is called Spindle Assembly Checkpoint (SAC), constituted by pro teins such as Mad1, Mad2, Bub1, Bub3, BubR1, and Mps1. A very recent study addressed this question on the general issue of defective reproduction performance, by screening two candidate genes, aurora kinase B (AURKB) and synaptonemal complex protein 3 (SYCP3). In the AURKB gene, the authors identified low frequency (0.5%) non synonymous variants (c. 155C.T, c. 236T.C, and c. 880G.A) inducing the changes p.A52V, p.I79T, and p.A294T in the polypeptidic chain, respectively. 236T >C and 880G >A were associated with antecedents of pregnancy losses. This preliminary study is one of those that pave the way toward evaluating genes playing a role in the quality of the meiotic progression. Two other genes have been investigated to this respect in miscarriage, BUB1 and MAD2. The authors showed firstly that as generally assumed, half the embryos from spontaneous miscarriages have an abnormal karyotype. By western blotting, the authors quantified the two proteins and estimated that they were under expressed in pathological cases. The authors also isolated chorionic villi where they targeted BUB1 and MAD2 expression by short hairpin RNA (shRNA) and showed that this induces an abnormal karyotype at a ~ sixfold increased frequency, compared to controls (indicating that mitotic defects can also be induced when these genes are dysfunctional). The role of MAD2 in such defects was independently confirmed by another study on trisomic abortuses. Clearly, therefore, anomalies in spindle assembly can lead to aneuploidies, and infertilities in the most severe cases, such as in the case of the recently identified mutation of the cohesin STAG3, leading to premature ovarian failure, but less severe mutations in the SAC genes could lead to variants that have more subtle effects. There is clearly space for studying this aspect of spindle stability on a wider basis than what has been performed up to now in the context of recurrent miscarriage."

"We hypothesize that the increased risk of spontaneous abortion with male age is a consequence of an increasing frequency of chromosomal anomalies in the spermatozoa with male age, which in turn increases the risk of spontaneous abortion. The influence of male age on the proportion of spermatozoa carrying a chromosomal anomaly or with damaged DNA has been documented in several groups of men. It may well result, in part, from the continuous replication of stem cell chromosomes from puberty onward; indeed, male stem cells have undergone about 150 chromosomal replications at the age of 20 years and about 600 by the age of 40 years. The chromosomal anomalies found in spontaneous abortions include autosomal trisomies, present in about 50 percent of abortuses with chromosomal anomalies, monosomy X (present in about 20 percent), and triploidy (16 percent). The remaining 12 percent correspond mainly to tetraploidy and structural anomalies of the chromosomes. The two most frequent anomalies sometimes have a paternal origin: Autosomal trisomies stem from nondisjunction during spermatogenesis in 10–20 percent or more of cases and, in monosomy X, the missing chromosome is most often the paternal one. Moreover, sperm chromosome aneuploidy may play a role in the etiology of recurrent pregnancy loss."

"I'm telling you, with everything we know, about science, about the makeup of the human body, what happened in that classroom is impossible. That kid attracted an arc of electricity from thirty feet away, and not just from the Jacob's Ladder, I mean, after a second it was like it was coming out of the whole… building."

"We're stumbling around in a very dark age basically trying not to kill each other. So it hurts me when you say "So what?" Because you are not just different, Jeremy, I think you have a mind that we won't evolve to for like thousands of years — you're maybe the man of the future right here and now."

"Robert Anton Wilson is the unacknowledged elephant in our cultural living room: a direct and indirect influence on popular books, movies, TV shows, music, games, comics, and commentary. … Wilson is a primary source for the ironic style of conspiracism, a sensibility that treats alleged cabals not as intrigues to be exposed or lies to be debunked but as a bizarre mutant mythos to be mined for laughs, metaphors, and social insights."

"People love a nice shot of an orange sunrise over the islands in Casco Bay, of waves crashing on the rocks in front of Portland Head Light, or of seagulls fighting over rotten bait. But the time tested crowd favorite is a picture of a mutant lobster. They’re actually a lot more common than one might think, sometimes they come up with multiple claws, sometimes they’re different colors, and sometimes they’re so riddled with shell disease that they’re almost unrecognizable."

"6.2 Genetic factors The finding of an abnormal parental karyotype should prompt referral to a clinical geneticist. Genetic counselling offers the couple a prognosis for the risk of future pregnancies with an unbalanced chromosome complement and the opportunity for familial chromosome studies. Reproductive options in couples with chromosomal rearrangements include proceeding to a further natural pregnancy with or without a prenatal diagnosis test, gamete donation and adoption. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis has been proposed as a treatment option for translocation carriers. Since preimplantation genetic diagnosis necessitates that the couple undergo in vitro fertilisation to produce embryos, couples with proven fertility need to be aware of the financial cost as well as implantation and live birth rates per cycle following in vitro fertilisation/preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Furthermore, they should be informed that they have a higher (50–70%) chance of a healthy live birth in future untreated pregnancies following natural conception than is currently achieved after preimplantation genetic diagnosis/in vitro fertilisation (approximately 30%). Preimplantation genetic screening with in vitro fertilisation treatment in women with unexplained recurrent miscarriage does not improve live birth rates. Preimplantation genetic screening in conjunction with in vitro fertilisation has been advocated as a treatment option for women with recurrent miscarriage, the rationale being that the identification and transfer of what are thought to be genetically normal embryos will lead to a live birth. The live birth rate of women with unexplained recurrent miscarriage who conceive naturally is significantly higher than currently achieved after preimplantation genetic screening/in vitro fertilisation (20–30%)."

"Of all creatures, only the Binder had bested the Lord of Hellwell. Then the gods had come to challenge his power. They had been puny in the early days, struggling to discipline their mutant powers with drugs, hypnosis, meditation, neurosurgery — forging them into Attributes — and across the ages, those powers had grown. Four of them had entered Hellwell, only four, and his legions had not been able to repel them."