... the Vidal quote, much as I (believe me) appreciate the sentiment (4D: "___ is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn": Gore Vidal), has no clear relationship to STYLE and is not memorable in the slightest (sidenote: the lack of a serial comma in this rendering of the quotation is painful). I had the Vidal quote down to ST-LE and ... well, it's early (before 4am when I started), I should've known that when none of the regular vowels worked, insert Y, but for a few seconds I was, as the crosswords say, at sea. My point is, please, one fill-in-the-blank quotation clue per puzzle, max. Preferably none. It's a bad clue type. Nobody likes them (no you don't, please stop).
Nobody? Wait a minute! I like them! Even though the Gore Vidal quote was the last — or second-to-last — thing I got in the puzzle, I really enjoyed the take-away insight into writing style. I'm going to use that. I'm using it now!
And I like that Hanlon's razor, even though I disagree with the "never." I recognize that the "never" makes it jaunty and the "adequately" is an adequate loophole.
Here's the Wikipedia page for Hanlon's razor. Excerpt:
Some of the oldest attributions of the idea date to the 18th century. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in the first entry of his influential epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774, first English translation 1779): "[...] Mißverständnisse und Trägheit machen vielleicht mehr Irrungen in der Welt als List und Bosheit. Wenigstens sind die beiden letzteren gewiß seltener." ("misunderstandings and lethargy perhaps produce more wrong in the world than deceit and malice do. At any rate, the latter two are certainly rarer.") Another variation appears in The Wheels of Chance (1896) by H.G. Wells:
... Andrew Roberts, in his biography of Winston Churchill, quotes from Churchill's correspondence with King George VI in February 1943 regarding disagreements with Charles De Gaulle: "'His 'insolence ... may be founded on stupidity rather than malice.'"...
I see that Hanlon's razor is related to the principle of charity. That's a long-term interest of mine.
As for Gore Vidal, here are 26 of what The Guardian called his best quotes. I'll cherry-pick from the pre-picked cherries:
"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."
"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."
"Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be."
"Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself."
"There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices."
"There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise."
There's one more that I want to highlight, but it's so apt for 2024 presidential purposes that I've got to make it into a separate post.
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Buckley and Vidal's fundamental policy difference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho9M-q_kcn8
Buckley and Vidal's fundamental policy difference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho9M-q_kcn8
My increasing experience is that you shouldn't attribute to incompetence that which could be adequately explained by malice, and that malicious bureaucracies have a very strong incentive to appeal to incompetence.
The IRS never incompetently sends me a higher tax refund. The DMV never incompetently flags my tag as paid for a year by accident, the city never incompetently miscalculates my property tax by removing a zero, the federal government never incompetently hires a bunch of white men that they thought were black women etc etc etc
He's quite dogmatic, and absolute, isn't he. Lot of "never," "ever," and "no/nothing" in his aphorisms. Probably explained by the last one in the quote list. But, Gore was kinda that way, wasn't he.
What does it say about me (or about America in the 60s and 70s) that I am mosfamiliar with Vidal from his appearances on The Merv Griffin Show?
Life was better back then.
I like Churchill's charity toward Charles de Gaulle, it was much more in line with reality than Eisenhower's assessment, "a character". To Ike's generation, a character was an entertaining lunatic, whereas De Gaulle was singularly tedious.
Hanlon seems to have borrowed (misattributed with inadequate citation?) from Seneca (4 BC-AD 65) who wrote that "All cruelty springs from weakness"
Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
He claims we're all bisexuals but that's a pretty gay analysis of sex. Sex is how babies are made!
"Rex Parker" is a total dipshit. Unfortunately, most online commentary about crosswords is written by philistines -- because anyone with taste knows that most crossword puzzles do not merit individual discussion at all.
'Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity' (Hanlon's razor)."
All too often, it seems to be just the opposite:
Never attribute to stupidity which is adequately explained by malice.
I don't think most of the falsehoods and leftist narratives we have been fed by our Government and our legacy media comes from stupidity.
The thing about the fill-in quotes is that they are easily googled if one is so inclined.
"Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself."
Yes. But Jefferson Starship proved that you can build a city on Rock n Roll.
"Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself."
I think that sex or the desire for sex is the driving force of civilization. Men build things to impress girls. Why do people want to go to school, get a good job, and have money? To make themselves desirable, to get sex. People who live in mom’s basement don’t get much sex. However the typical Dudley do right guy is deceived, you get more sex by being somewhat violent and aggressive, girls like sex with jerks. But eventually the girls come around for the guys with money, sometime before 30. Of course there are exceptions, but lifelong pairing from high school is rare. In my opinion.
Cecile's scalpel.
that's a pretty gay analysis of sex
I had the same thought, and then I thought of Heinlein (who, in my opinion, never wrote convincingly about gay sex but who unquestionably wrote a lot about rather indiscriminate sex), and wondered whether instead it's a pretty '60s and '70s analysis of sex.
Speaking of quotations, a new one from Conover Kennard over at Crooks and Liars got my attention.
Commenting on Wayne LaPierre's resignation as head of the NRA after 30 years of ripping off millions upon millions of dollars from the organization to further his personal lifestyle has taken the easy way out in the face of the NY AG's lawsuit to ensure that there will never ever be any NRA debt for which the piper has to be paid. Kennard says:
This "towering figure" of a man was MIA after every school shooting. The NRA's Twitter account would go silent, too. Dead children mean nothing to the NRA. Kids were just collateral damage to their mission. . . What a cowardly man who stood for nothing except for greed. He certainly never cared about this country, as the body count increased with each year since the Columbine massacre . . . .
Fuck you, LaPierre. [I] hope NY Attorney General Letitia James destroys what's left of you — [you] piece of rancid shit. I hope [you] suffer from nightmares, hearing the screams of dying children . . . .
I couldn't find the exact quote, but in one of his essays Vidal suggested that people are only interested in sex, death and money.
Alexander: "My increasing experience is that you shouldn't attribute to incompetence that which could be adequately explained by malice, and that malicious bureaucracies have a very strong incentive to appeal to incompetence.
The IRS never incompetently sends me a higher tax refund. The DMV never incompetently flags my tag as paid for a year by accident, the city never incompetently miscalculates my property tax by removing a zero, the federal government never incompetently hires a bunch of white men that they thought were black women etc etc etc"
I agree, but I must offer up one exception from my personal experience when I was still ratber young and doing my own taxes and having been transferred from the east coast to tje west coast, I decided to rent out my East Coast home in the event I was transferred back after my 3 year west coas stint was up.
I made a rather significant error related to the house rental fees/expenses etc and I received a personal phone call from the IRS reviewer who walked me thru the mistake I made and then he walked me thru filing a revision which resulted in my receiving several thousands in a refund rather than my making a relatively small payment.
I never asked but my sense was he was probably a former military guy who saw I was a youngish naval officer with a family and took the time to help me out.
So that's my one exception to the Alexander Malicious Bureaucracy Axiom.
To fault an aphorism for generalizing is like faulting a military march for being too definite. It goes with the form. IMHO.
As for De Gaulle, sometimes a humiliated people need an arrogant asshole to represent them, and he was certainly one. (His ego probably exceeded MacArthur's, and that's saying a lot.)
A history prof of mine used to observe that a lot of Americans detested De Gaulle because he didn't always act like a patriotic American should.
The quote has also been attributed to Napoleon.
The original quote has also been attributed to Napoleon.
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