The Moss Kingdom

Amusing headline - Fox is actually enlisting their followers to help them "Fight Government" and to Fight "Corporate Waste."  The former is a bit blunt even for Fox, the latter would be self-destructive.

Elizabeth Warren, a most articulate woman, said:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Such a commonsense, simple statement of a basic tenet of society. It gets complicated beyond this level, but most people would agree with this statement in general.

Here's a quote you'll hear in pop culture constantly these days:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

According to Wikiquotes, this is by Ben Franklin, though often misattributed to someone else. And like the oft-spoken Shakespeare tidbit "To thine ownself be true" the quote is taken out of context.

I'm here to say that the quote is wrong. Stupidly wrong.

It's not wrong because, as this Psychology Today article notes, insanity is quite a bit deeper than repetitive action. Take "insanity" here in its glib, pop-culture form, i.e. something like "unconsciously stupid, with prejudice." But even then, the quote is still wrong, because it ignores context.

It doesn't just ignore context like the Shakespeare quote, which is spoken by Polonius, Ophelia's father. Polonius is a dithering idiot, who genuinely loves his daughter but cannot (refuses to?) understand the intensely emotional state Ophelia is in. Later, Ophelia commits suicide. "To thine ownself be true" is not wisdom, it's the quintessential example of a well-meaning but oblivious parent.

Ben Franklin's quote is often misattributed to Albert Einstein, which is a bit ironic as well, because the context that the quote misses is the context of ever-changing reality. Back in Franklin's day, it was easy to believe the world is mostly static, people's beliefs and attitudes similarly constant. Today, due in part to the work of scientists like Einstein we see that our material reality truly is in a state of constant change. Yes, there are some apparently immutable laws of physics, but at material level we're swimming in Heraclitus' river, constantly changing from moment to moment.  And our daily experience in this age of rapid technological and social change confirms this.

In the context of consistently changing environment, doing the same thing repeatedly may well produce different results, because the aspects of the situation may react differently. To give a simple example, I might cast in my fishing line 20 times in nearly the exact same way, and only on the 21st will I catch a fish. Or I may speak out in protest; one moment I may be attacked for my rude self-indulgent behavior; the next, I may be applauded for my brave actions. In both cases, it is likely that I cannot know for sure which way it will go. I can reasonably assume the possibility of different results. It is not only sane but potentially advantageous to "do the same thing again and again" and expect something different.

In fact, doing things repetitively is a huge part of how humans learn. We learn iteratively, going over something again and again within the context of changing situations, eventually forming a spiritual (mental-emotional) picture related to the action and how it affects the world around us. We do this successively throughout our lives, building up layers of these pictures. Indeed, the more creatively curious a person is, the more likely they'll do the same thing again and again -- but they'll do it in different places, times and with different people.

I'm slow, so it took me a moment to notice the cape and then connect the mental dots.

Here I am again, grammar nazi posting about a minor crime, but one that has become rampant.  It must be stopped.

When we were young, we said things like "me and Del are going to the store." We were corrected many times to say "Del and I are going to the store." OK, that's good. If we took Del out of that sentence, it would be the childish "me is going to the store." Plus we switch to say the other person first as a simple matter of courtesy, like opening the door for someone and letting them go in first.

The problem is, that "____ and I" form gets imprinted without an understanding of why we say it that way. So now, that "and I" form is like a suffix, making it into one word: "Del-and-i."

So now people say "he gave Del-and-I some chocolate." But again, this is still wrong. Take Del out, and we get "he gave I some chocolate" which is obviously weird to an adult native English speaker. The number and form (case, actually) should match.  For this one, it would be "he gave Del and me some chocolate." Take Del out (more chocolate for me!) and the sentence still makes sense.

There are lots of examples of such crystalized phrases, but the "___ and I" one is particularly annoying because it's committed in the name of correct grammar.  Instead, it's about the same as "me and ____."