Ralph at Cato

You would have never believed it, not ten years ago, or even now.

It must be a fake picture 😉
What is he doing?

What is the Unreasonable Man, Ralph, the man “on the left,” trying to convince those who might be viewed “on the right”?  Left or Right, never the twain shall they meet?

I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down

Ralph Nader compromise?  Not chance.  He wants to be Unstoppable:  by joining with the Libertarians and Conservatives in common cause.

Strange Bedfellows?

Maybe the conventional “wisdom” or common bromides used in political and conventional media discourse is badly wrong or hopelessly simplistic?  — Naw!  Can’t be.  It will never happen?

If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music which he hears,
however measured or far away.

— Henry David Thoreau

“If I do not want what you want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong.

Or if I believe other than you, at least pause before you correct my view.

Or if my emotion is less than yours, or more, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel more strongly or weakly.

Or yet if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, let me be.

I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up changing me into a copy of you.

I may be your spouse, your parent, your offspring, your friend, or your colleague. If you will allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself, so that some day these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear to you as right — for me. To put up with me is the first step to understanding me. Not that you embrace my ways as right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeming waywardness. And in understanding me you might come to prize my differences from you, and, far from seeking to change me, preserve and even nurture those differences.

The point of this book is that people are different from each other, and that no amount of getting after them is going to change them. Nor is there any reason to change them, because the differences are probably good, not bad.”

3 thoughts on “Ralph at Cato”

  1. Which does the news item say more about, Nader or the libertarian movement? Shall we attribute it more to something in Nader’s personality, or more to the seemingly rising popularity of libertarianism?

  2. I think….a little of Nader with more of developing rise of awareness, reaching of libertarianism. It can knock on the door but he has opened that door, seen the potential for whatever his motive. I think I see this some in ASSK in government of Burma. Australia had Idealists involvement in early government, (they eventually withdraw) this maybe the beginning of somekind of beautiful. OR it will possibly also be failure to launch..

  3. When you started to read the passage from the book you could be angry on yourself for being too flexible with the inflexible people or too adaptable in places where you should just be yourself. The society has given us a guide that we people ‘should’ be “adaptable” in any circumstances which most of people have it written on their resumes – and it is the truth. But then if you want you can figure that people are like actors playing different parts for all those inflexible people and they start to accept that people are different, some more flexible then others, some with better acting skills then others. Another thing to figure out about the UNREASONABLE MAN is his contribution to the Society according to George Bernard Shaw -winner of Noble Prize of Literature:
    “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world.The unreasonable man adapts the world to himself.Therefor all progress depends on unreasonable man”

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