The Dumb Thing Smart People Do

Was Shakespeare a fascist?

I don’t really know what the word ‘fascist’ means and I can’t remember reading Shakespeare. Clearly this makes me perfectly suited to criticise lots of intelligent people.

Lets begin.

If someone could be bothered reading Shakespeare they’d see words they’d not seen before. They’d also see familiar words used very differently.

In the meme-universe of language, words change. It’s a pretty hostile universe: word-memes die, new ones emerge or they morph into something else. Survival of the fittest.

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Fertile Mental Habitat

No configuration of squiggles or grunts, inside or outside your head will ever capture the complexity of the world (and beyond). Just because these configurations aren’t perfect though doesn’t mean they can’t be useful.

A highly imperfect but useful squiggle is as follows:

Input = Output

Here I’m talking about your mind – you get out what you put in.

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