people-from-edmonton

"The accusation of bitterness implicitly acknowledges that a great many people have never been granted the social goods likely to lead to the luxury of cultivating sympathetic emotional lives."

"I need my sisters and younger sisters to go on social media and see this every day and not just see, I’m not going to say names, male leaders of the world. Because, that’s all that you do see,” Mahary said. “And, I need to see the first ladies’ work on social media.”"

"“Summer is upon us and I love trying funkier, skin-contact wines at this time of the year. Petillant naturel (naturally sparkling) and skin-contact Italian or Austrian grape blends are what I lean into during the warmer months, Also, you can’t go wrong with crisp Txakolina from Spain or Vinho Verde from Portugal to sip on a patio on a hot day.”"

"“To me, the role of a first lady, and any powerful woman for that matter, in helping the generation beneath us to come up, is not to stand in the way, it’s not to compete, it’s to facilitate, it’s to provide a bridge.”"

"“We’re here on Facebook Live panel. Do you know how important that is? Growing up, I didn’t have Facebook Live. I didn’t see the first lady of Nigeria or the first lady of the Congo or any of these first ladies because I didn’t know they existed, I didn’t know what they were doing,”"

"That is treated with what I call zen, peace, and love,”"

"“After years of traveling the world and getting to visit all of these incredible places, I’d go to these fancy restaurants and be intimidated by the wine menu. I was tired of it!”"

"“The beauty of the culinary world is that it unites people over food and beverage. Since food and beverage are basic human needs, the bonds formed feel genuine and inspiring,” Grace says. “I love learning about peoples’ wine experiences and from the community in general.”"

"Maybe you don’t want to drink a big heavy Napa Cab right now — or maybe you do, I don’t know!”No judgment here, but her recommendation is to lean into something refreshing and seasonal."

"“I’m very much of a hands-on type of person. I like to be on top of everything and enjoy watching a grassroots movement come to flourishing. I realized that Eritrea could use more financial aid, after visiting the country for the first time a couple of years ago,” the Canadian model whose parents immigrated from Eritrea shares, regarding her decision to start a charity of her own as opposed to joining an existing organization as an ambassador. “So I looked at this as an opportunity. Especially as an Eritrean woman,”"

"“It shouldn’t take me having to go do all this and having a blue check by my name for people to take me seriously!”"

"“Just drink what you like, don’t let people judge you for it!”"

"“Also, you can’t go wrong with crisp Txakolina from Spain or Vinho Verde from Portugal to sip on a patio on a hot day.”"

"I think one of the take away messages is young women can drive a film and both women and men love it!! It is a joke that this still male dominated business appear to only be comfortable with testosterone filled mega-movies. Even the movies where a female is the lead, they play testosterone filled women, or men in a corset. I admire how fit and beautiful these women are but we don’t have to be big and muscular to dominate in a movie."

"As an actor I want to play as many different characters as possible. Throughout my career I’ve had the great opportunity to do just that and I love every second of it. Every new role is challenging and a learning experience. Some experiences have been less smooth than others, but overall there is never a dull moment and that’s what life is all about to me."

"When you’re an actress you reach the subtext. You play all these different roles and as a therapist, which I am now, I specialise in family treatment of addiction and trauma and I’m also with clients where I have to take different kinds of presentations for each client. Everyone responds differently. A soft glove or a hard hand in a soft glove, so in a way with the adaptability there’s really not that much difference from acting."

"We can escape and destroy evil through these shifts in our mindsets. As a therapist today, I can say that actually people do find freedom when they shift their mindsets away from hopelessness and powerlessness."

"You know when you’re starting out as an actor it’s like “just give me a job, as long as I can keep my clothes on I’m happy!”."

"Do you want to be what you are or do you want to be what continually changes what you are?"

"I regard free speech as a prerequisite to a civilized society, because freedom of speech means that you can have combat with words. That's what it means. It doesn't mean that people can happily and gently exchange opinions. It means that we can engage in combat with words, in the battleground of ideas. And the reason that that's acceptable, and why it's acceptable that people's feelings get hurt during that combat, is that the combat of ideas is far preferable to actual combat."

"You can't have the conversation about rights without the conversation about responsibility, because your rights are my responsibility. That's what they are, technically, so you just can't have only half of that discussion. And we're only having half of that discussion. Then the question is, "Well, what are you leaving out if you're only having that half of the discussion?" And the answer is, "Well, you're leaving out responsibility." And then the question is, "Well, what are you leaving out if you're leaving out responsibility?" And the answer might be: "Well, maybe you're leaving out the meaning of life." Here you are, suffering away. What makes it worthwhile? Rights? It's almost impossible to describe how bad an idea that is. Responsibility: that's what gives life meaning. Lift a load. Then you can tolerate yourself. Look at yourself: you're useless, easily hurt, easily killed. Why should you have any self-respect? Pick something up and carry it. Make it heavy enough so that you can think, yah, well, useless as I am, at least I can move that from there to there. For men, there's nothing but responsibility. Women have their sets of responsibilities: they're not the same. Women have to take primary responsibility for having infants, at least, and also for caring for them. They're structured differently than men for biological necessity. Women know what they have to do; men have to figure out what they have to do. And if they have nothing worth living for, then they stay Peter Pan—and why the hell not? The alternative to valued responsibility is impulsive, low-class pleasure. Why lift a load if there's nothing in it for you? And that's what we're doing to men and boys that's a very bad idea. "You're pathological and oppressive." "Fine, then! Why the hell am I going to play? If I get no credit for bearing responsibility, then you can be sure I won't bear any." But then your life is useless and meaningless, and you're full of self-contempt and nihilism, and that's not good. And so that's what I think is going on at a deeper level with regard to men needing this direction. A man has to decide that he's going to do something: he has to decide that."

"Part of the reason that politicians have come to believe that the public is stupid and has no attention span is that television had a 30-second attention span. So you had to assume your audience remembered nothing, knew nothing, and could flip out to a different channel at any moment. Plus the bandwidth was insanely expensive. Now all that is gone. I think that will be a revolution in political discourse."

"When you try to analyze the operation of the set of ideas, you ought to find out first who the current proponents are in the conversation that's going on now. But then you need to trace it back to deeper ideas and the philosophers, and sometimes the theologians even (depending on how deep you go), from whom those ideas flow. And in order to understand the entire structure of the system of ideas and its interrelationships, so that you can understand its motivation and its nature, you have to delve deeper into the underlying history of the ideas."

"It's so interesting to watch the young men when you talk to them about responsibility. They're so goddamned thrilled about it. It just blows me away. It's like, "Really?!" That's the counterculture: Grow the hell up and do something useful! "Really? I can do that? Oh, I'm so excited by that idea! No one ever mentioned that before!" It's like, "Rights, rights, rights, rights…" Jesus! It's appalling. People have had enough of that. And they better have, because it's a non-productive mode of being. Responsibility, man: that's where the meaning in life is."

"Lex Fridman: How often do you gaze upon death, your own? How often do you remember, remind yourself that this ride ends? Jordan Peterson: Personally? Lex Fridman: Personally. Jordan Peterson: All the time. Lex Fridman: 'Cause you as a deep thinker and philosopher, it's easy to start philosophizing and forgetting that you might die today. Jordan Peterson: The angel of death sits on every word. How's that? Lex Fridman: How often do you actually consciously— Jordan Peterson: All the time. Lex Fridman: —notice the angel? Jordan Peterson: All the time."

"I've tried to maintain a relatively balanced view of the excesses on both sides of the political spectrum, but one thing I have clearly experienced repeatedly is that the Left will shun and exclude to a degree that's almost unknown on the Right. I've never had anyone on the Right, that I've talked to, refuse to talk to a hypothetical guest, for example. And I've had people on the Left, they just do that all the time. And I don't get that exactly. I think maybe it has to do with the association in personality between agreeableness and Leftist's proclivity. So the socialist types, the Lefties, are technically more agreeable. And I think maybe among agreeable people, if you don't go along with the agreeable game you are much more likely to be categorized as a predator."

"A huge problem on the social media side is that we put undue access to status in the hands of people who will misuse accusations to garner attention."

"Why would a dragon hoard gold? Because a dragon represents everything that you're afraid of. What's embedded in everything that you're afraid of? Absolutely everything that you need to find. Run from what you're afraid of? Run from exactly what you need to find."

"You can kill people with compassion. That's the Freudian Oedipal situation. Think about working in a nursing home. There's a rule of thumb that we can use as a guide when interacting with people in general. It is this: Do not do anything for anyone that they can do themselves. You just steal it from them. Imagine that you're working with elderly people. It might be easier to do something for them than to let them struggle through it. But you just speed their demise by taking away their last vestiges of independence. People do the same thing with kids. The answer is: struggle through it."

"The kids are starting to burn this place and to trash it. They're dragging a grand piano down the stairs. It's the destruction of high culture, about which they're nothing but cynical, because they don't believe that hard work and sacrifice can produce something of any value. They want to bring it down and destroy it. You can see it in the story of Cain and Abel. Abel is hard working and everyone likes him, and he makes the proper sacrifices, so his life goes really well. And that's part of the reason that Cain hates him. He's jealous and resentful, but worse than that—if you're not doing very well and you're around someone who is doing very well it's painful, because the mere fact of their Being judges you. And so it's very easy to want to destroy that ideal so that you don't have to live with the terrible consequences of seeing it embodied in front of you. And so part of the reason that people want to tear things down is so that they don't have anything to contrast themselves against and to feel bad. And that's exactly what's happening here. Kids are destroying all of this culture, because the fact that it exists judges them."

"Jung said that science is nested in a dream. The dream is that if we investigated the structures of material reality with sufficient attention and truth, we could then learn enough about material reality to then alleviate suffering—to produce the philosopher's stone, to make everybody wealthy, to make everybody healthy, to make everyone live as long as they wanted to live or perhaps forever. That's the goal—to alleviate the catastrophe of existence. The idea that the solutions to the mysteries of life enable us to develop such a substance, or multitude of substances, provided the motive force for the development of science. Jung traced that development of the motive force to over the period of 1,000 years. Jung went back into alchemical texts and interpreted them as if they were the dream upon which science was founded. Newton was an alchemist, by the way. Science did emerge out of alchemy. The question is, What were the alchemists up to? They were trying to produce the philosopher's stone, which was the universal medicament for mankind's pathology."

"The lion lying down with the lamb is the idea that is either projected back in time, saying that there was a time, or maybe that there will be a time, when the horrors of life are no longer necessary for life itself to exist. And the horrors of life are, of course, that everything eats everything else, and that everything dies, and that everything is born, and that the whole place is a charnel house. It's a catastrophe from beginning to end. This is the vision of it being other than that. There's a strong idea that human beings can interact with reality in such a way that the tragic and evil elements of it can be mitigated, so that we can move closer to a state of being where we have the benefits of existence without the catastrophe that seems to go along with it."

"The idea that paradise, the proper habitat of a human being, is a walled garden is a good one. It's an echo back to the chaos/order idea. Walls: culture. Garden: nature. The proper human habitat is a properly tended garden."

"The Bible is a collective attempt by humanity to solve the deepest problems that we have. The deepest of all problems that we have is the problem of self-consciousness. The unique predicament of human beings is that we are self-conscious. Not only is it true that we are mortal and that we die, but most crucial is the reality that we know we will die."

"St. George is the hero who goes out to confront the dragon, and he frees the virgin from its grasp. I would say that's a pretty straightforward story about the sexual attractiveness of the masculine spirit that's willing to forthrightly encounter the unknown. It is a straight biological representation to me, and it's a really, really old story. It's the oldest written story we have, and it's basically the ancient Mesopotamian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, which basically plays out that story. You've seen this story played out a hundred different ways, and you never get tired of it, because it's the central story of mankind."

"There's an insistence that the Being that's spoken into being through truth is good. This is the most profound idea ever. It is also the most believable idea ever. What cures in therapy is truth. Of course, you must encounter the things that you're afraid of, but this is enacted truth, because if you know that there's something you need to do by your own set of rules and you're avoiding it, then you're enacting a lie. You're not speaking the lie, but you're enacting it, and that's the same thing: untruth. If I can get you to face what it is that you know you shouldn't be avoiding, then what's happening is that we're both partaking in the process of you attempting to act out your deepest truth. That improves people's lives radically. The clinical evidence for that is overwhelming. We know that if you expose people to the things that they're afraid of and are avoiding, they get better. You have to do it carefully, cautiously, and with their approval and participation. Of all the things that clinicians have established that's credible, that's #1. It's redemptive insofar as both people are telling the truth. The difference between deception and repression is very small. People can handle earthquakes and cancer and even death, but they can't handle deception. They can't handle the rug being pulled out from underneath them by people who they love and trust. This does them in. It makes them ill, it hurts them psycho-physiologically, and worse than that it makes them cynical, bitter, vicious, and resentful. And then they also start to act all that out in the world, and that makes it worse."

"Without the support of your father—practically and metaphorically—without that behind you, without the knowledge of you as both a biological and cultural creature, without that depth of knowledge, you don't have the courage to do it, because you don't know what you are or what you could be. You're a historical creature, so you need all this collected wisdom, and all this dream-like information, and all this mythology and all this narrative, to inform you about what you are beyond what you see of yourself. You're pummeled down, and people pick on you, and there's 50 things about you that are horrible, and you have a self-esteem problem, and you're sort of hunched over—you've got all these problems, and so it's not easy to see the divinity that lurks behind that. Unless you're aware of the heroic stories of the past—the metaphysics of consciousness—I don't think you can have the courage that regards yourself as the sort of creature that can stand up underneath that intense existential burden and move forward in courage and grace."

"The proper path of life is to take the tradition and spirit that is associated with consciousness as such, and to act it out in your own personal life in a way that is analogous with the way Christ acted it out in his life. What that means, in part, is the acceptance of the tragic preconditions of existence. That's partly betrayal by friends and by family and by the state, it's partly punishment for sins that you did not commit (the arbitrary nature of justice), and the fact of finitude. Your duty, and the way to set things right in the cosmos, is to accept all those details as necessary preconditions for being and to act virtuously despite all that. That's a very, very powerful idea."

"There's no difference between the conquering of the unknown and the creation of habitable order."

"It's an open question, the degree to which the cosmos would order itself around you properly if you got yourself together as much as you could get yourself together. We know that things can go very badly wrong if you do things very badly wrong—there's no doubt about that. But the converse is also true. If you start to sort yourself out properly, and if you have beneficial effect on your family, first of all that's going to echo down the generations, but it also spreads out into the community. And we are networked together; we're not associated linearly; we all effect each other. So it's an open question, the degree to which acting out the notion that Being is good, and the notion that you can accept its limitations and that you should still strive for virtue. I don't think we know the limits of virtue. I don't think we know what true virtue could bring about, if we aimed at it carefully and practically. So the notion that there is something divine about the individual who accepts the conditions of existence and still strives for the good—I think that's an idea that's very much worth paying attention to. And I think the fact that people considered that idea seriously for at least 2000 years indicates that there's at least something to be thought about there."

"Something that's everything lacks limitation. There are advantages to not being able to do things. If you had everything you wanted at every moment at your fingertips, then there's nothing. There's no story. It's like Superman being able to bounces hydrogen bombs off of him. The whole series died because he didn't have any flaws. There's no story without limitation."

"Most of the adventure genre is about how there is some enemy that's lurking, and someone rises up to confront it and maintain order. There's no getting away from that story."

"Our ideas emerged out of the ground of our action over thousands and thousands of years. And when philosophers were putting forth those ideas, what they were doing wasn't generating creative ideas—they were just telling the story of humanity. It's already there. It's already in us. It's already in our patterns of behavior."

"The dragon is the imagistic representation of the functional category of predator. It's like this: If you're a monkey, then a bird will pick you off, like an eagle. That's the wings. If it wasn't an eagle, then it was a cat (dragon claws), because they climb trees and give you a good chomping. And if it wasn't a cat, then you go down to the ground and a snake would get you, or maybe the snake would climb up the tree. So a dragon is a cat-snake-bird. And that's the thing that you really want to avoid. And the other thing is that it breathes fire, which is interesting because fire was both greatest friend and greatest enemy of humanity."

"Embodied imitation and dramatic abstraction constituted the ground out of which higher abstract cognition emerged. How else could it be? Clearly we were mostly bodies before we were minds. Clearly. And so we were acting out things way before we understood them."

"And then Snow White has to wait for the Prince to come rescue her, and you think: "How sexist can you get, that story?" Well, seriously, because that's the way that that would be read in the modern world, like, "She doesn't need a prince to come rescue her." That's why Disney made Frozen, that absolutely appalling piece of rubbish."

"The question is: In these societies, cross-culturally, who is elevated to the status of elder? And you might say 'Well, it's the roughest, toughest, most dominant chimp, oppressive, patriarchal male.' and that actually happens to not be the case at all. And so what you do see is that productive males who are older, they have to be productive, who are simultaneously generous and reciprocal, and are recognized as such in their communities, hold the status of authority and help govern properly. And so we could say that there's no evidence whatsoever on the scientific or anthropological front that the doctrine that the prime human motivation for the construction of social relations is power. And I would add to that further that if you think that power is the fundamental motivation of humankind, that is a confession not an observation. And so look out for people who make that claim because they're making that claim to justify to themselves their own use of psychopathic and narcissistic social mediation strategies. And so I don't see that the leftists who make the claim that power is the fundamental motivation have a shred of evidence on their side sociologically, scientifically, anthropologically, politically, economically, theologically or ethically."

"[About what Canadians may think about him being ordered, in 2023, to undergo social media communication coaching:] Either someone like me is wrong, or all of the institutions in Canada have become dangerously corrupt. Well, who the hell is going to believe the second one?"

"The truth is something that burns—it burns off deadwood, and people don't like having their deadwood burnt off, often because they're 95% deadwood."

"If religion was "the opium of the masses," then communism was the methamphetamine of the masses."