User:Alcmaeonid

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Who goes there?
I can't help it. It always puts me on edge when it's dark and someone knocks on my cyberdoor. Reading virtual identities is a tricky affair under the best of circumstances but out here in the dim recesses of the net? I think you know what I mean. Now where the hell did I put those damn glasses?

Please feel free to offer any worthy ideas that relate to any of my edits/additions.

As Willie Nelson once said: "The cyberlife ain't no good life... but it's my life." Or something to that effect.

Mortal's chiefest enemy
Standing on the ramparts of my crenelated firewall, I look out onto a dark virtual night of dancing meat puppets, hungry trolls drooling over flamebait, lurking, shadowy identity thieves, ever thankful that these trusty walls are hardened & high, this moat deep & wide, infested with rolling crocodiles. Below me, at the gate, the guards fisk a stranger seeking asylum. On the distant horizon, the pyrotechnic flamewars rage. I don't have to tell you: it's a crazy, dangerous world out there.

But lo. Off to the west. That fabled land, oasis in the desert, the Republic of Wikipedia! Where night and day wordsmiths labor, seeking out knowledge from it's hidden sources and transforming it into pages open and free to the people.

Food for thought
"Some archaeologists are slow to realize 'that they are burning the book of history as they read it.' More loss of scholarly information is suffered through excavation in the cause of scholarship than through tomb-robbing for collectors and museums, yet the non-publishing excavators continue to enjoy credit for their discoveries (credit better paid to the ancient creators of what they unearthed) rather than be branded as academic felons." - John Boardman, "The Greeks Overseas."

Comments

 * I contracted Hellenophilia about ten years ago and am currently in a treatment program that allows me to cope and function somewhat normally on a day to day basis. It was shock to me (and a lesson hard won) just how infectious libraries can be. God only knows where all those books have been. And librarians... well they can be a treacherous lot!
 * I have several articles in preparation, mostly on ancient historic subjects.
 * "Polite? Why it's merely the truth and the truth is always good manners."

Clippings

 * "The more I see of man the better I like dogs." - Madame de Staël
 * "The word 'humanity' is most repugnant; it expresses nothing definite and only adds to the confusion of all the remaining concepts a sort of piebald demi-god." - Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts
 * "In reality the roots of human conflict are more deeply tangled. Class divisions are only one of the causes of conflict, and rarely the most important. Ethnic and religious differences, the scarcity of natural resources and the collision of rival values are permanent sources of division. Such conflicts cannot be overcome, only moderated. The checks and balances of traditional forms of government are ways of coping with this fact." - John Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern
 * “Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence, then, evil.” - the Theodicy problem succinctly summed up by Epicurus.
 * "The fame of the famous owes little to their achievements and everything to the success of the tributes paid to them." - Jean Genet
 * "I ain't no psychiatrist, ain't no doctor with degree. But it don't take too much HI-Q to see what you're doin' to me - you better think!" - Aretha Franklin
 * "Mille piacer' non vagliono un tormento." - Petrarch
 * "To explain diversity is to go behind the chaos, to the original undiversified nothing. Diversificacity was the first germ." - C.S. Peirce
 * "We also find physics, in the widest sense of the word, concerned with the explanation of phenomena in the world; but it lies already in the nature of the explanations themselves that they cannot be sufficient. Physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume toward the latter." - Arthur Schopenhauer WWR 2, 172.
 * "Judged strictly, there does not exist a science without its "hypotheses," the thought of such a science is inconceivable, illogical: a philosophy, a faith, must always exist first to enable science to gain thereby a direction, a meaning, a limit and method, a right to existence." - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals: 3,24
 * "What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books." - Thomas Carlyle
 * "Surge ai mortali per diverse foci la lucema de mondo." - Dante

Hall of Shame
A dark tale from Wikipedia's back pages

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