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Comment by yourbandsucks | Hacker News Reader

And a few years prior, Yeats had written that "The center cannot hold", and that "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity".

Worth remembering, IMO. Lots of passionate people calling for a conflict, and it's not clear that they've thought about ramifications very deeply.

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> Brute force plays a much larger part in the government of the world than it did before 1914, and what is especially alarming, force tends increasingly to fall into the hands of those who are enemies of civilisation. The danger is profound and terrible; it cannot be waved aside with easy optimism.

> The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points. This was not always the case. A hundred years ago the philosophical radicals formed a school of intelligent men who were just as sure of themselves as the Hitlerites are; the result was that they dominated politics and that the world advanced rapidly both in intelligence and in material well-being.

> It is quite true that the intelligence of the philosophical radicals was very limited. It is, I think, undeniable that the best men of the present day have a wider and truer outlook, but the best men of that day had influence, while the best men of this are impotent spectators. Perhaps we shall have to realise that scepticism and intellectual individualism are luxuries which in our tragic age must be forgone, and if intelligence is to be effective, it will have to be combined with a moral fervour which it usually possessed in the past but now usually lacks.

-- Bertrand Russell, "The Triumph of Stupidity" https://russell-j.com/0583TS.HTM

You have me at a disadvantage here because I'm not sure which sentences you're trying to emphasize or how they relate to the debate.

It sounds like you're saying that you're so right, self-doubt would be an unnecessary encumbrance.

How many words of Chinese do you know? How much Chinese history? Have you ever seen a subsistence farmer?

> It sounds like you're saying that you're so right, self-doubt would be an unnecessary encumbrance.

What sentence gives you that idea?

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