Even Verne — who is wrong to say that anything that can be imagined can be done — subordinates imagination to “what can be done,” or reality.
Verne is obviously wrong: we can *imagine* all sorts of things we cannot do, e.g. squaring the circle in Euclidean geometry, building a perpetual motion machine, implementing a happy, non-tyrannical Communism, and so on.
Knowledge of what you cannot do is much more important that fantasizing about things that are not and cannot ever become real.
Stories, works of the imagination, are beneficial only to the extend that they reflect reality, even in fantastic guises.
The OP reflects the very problem. Someone could assert the principle “anything that can be imagined can be done” only if he is ignorantly living in an imaginary world and denying reality.
“Anything that can be imagined can be done” would be a very important thing, if it were true. Since it is false, it isn’t an important saying.
Imagining it to be true doesn’t make it true.
And that was, of course, my point.
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“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
This is easily shown to be FALSE.
Thus: A accuses B of wronging her. C does not know whether A’s accusation is true or false.
If B did wrong A in the manner accused, there is a situation of injustice.
If not, then A has falsely accused B, and there is a situation of injustice.
C being neutral is not unjust.
The neutrality of C is the foundation of DUE PROCESS. Neither A nor B have any claim on C’s allegiance, so long as C is in a state of ignorance regarding the particulars, even though C knows that EITHER A OR B has acted unjustly, and so there is ‘a situation of injustice.'
“Most important, and of greatest concern, was how intelligents thought. An intelligent signed on to a set of beliefs regarded as totally certain, scientifically proven, and absolutely obligatory for any moral person.”
“A strict intelligent had to subscribe to some ideology—whether populist, Marxist, or anarchist—that was committed to the total destruction of the existing order and its replacement by a utopia that would, at a stroke, eliminate every human ill.”
“The mentality of the intelligentsia constituted a cruel parody of religion, preserving “the external features of religiosity without its content.”
“What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation.”
“It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.”
Nothing so far has made America accept Communism — but a race war might.
Well, most of us won’t accept it, but our elites might.
If America falls to Race Communism, it will achieve what Communism always achieves: totalitarian terror, misery, mass murder, the end of freedom, and incalculable human suffering — for a century or so, until it collapses under its own evil weight.