I just got a surprise. There is an old acquaintance and comrade of mine
who used to be a member of the Socialist Workers Party and he is blind.
His name is Maurice Peret. He once was the SWP candidate for house of
delegates in the West Virginia legislature. At a certain point he joined
the NFB and gradually started using more of his activist energies on
the NFB than on the party. Eventually he dropped out of the party and
dedicated himself pretty much fully to the NFB. The last I heard of him
he had moved to Baltimore, Maryland and was working for the NFB at their
national headquarters. Well, a little while ago he contacted me through
Goodreads. He said that he has now rejoined the party. It seems that he
was perusing Bookshare and noticed that a number of Pathfinder Press
titles there were scanned by me and from there he found my profile on
Goodreads. He said that Pathfinder was working on increasing
accessibility for their books. I bet they are because of his
instigation. I invited him to join this list. If he does I will have
some questions for him concerning the turns the party has made that make
me entirely too uncomfortable. I had David Rolands on this list once and
put some of those questions to him, but he didn't give much of an answer
and then disappeared on us. I neglected to suggest that Pathfinder
should start supplying publisher quality books to Bookshare, but now
that I am in contact with him I can suggest that later. But I felt
compelled to mention this here because I was completely surprised to
hear from him after so many years.
--
___
Sam Harris
“Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely
to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of
wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in
which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases
and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a
refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has
good reason to believe. The methodology isn't perfect, and the history of
science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is
just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected
by-what, religion? No, by good science.”
― Sam Harris
