After such long expectation and a weekend romance with Christmas songs, I am back to listening to John Coltrane. I suppose that I got just the right dose of the X-mas oldies to cover me at least until mid December and then I can revisit the Christmas spirit. In the meantime, I thought I would dedicate this Recycled Post of the Week to a post I wrote one year ago at the end of November 2006, entitled “What’s always bothered me about Rudolph’s plight.”
Grave Error 
did you see the Economist article on the Coltrane book?
The definition of “freak” is variant, dependent upon the social class of the individual.
We have an on going “human nature” discussion at my site. The best answer provided that I could find is from the cerebral juggernaut, Tabula Rasa:
You aren’t/your nature isn’t, what you would like to believe it is, it’s a matter of the snap judgments of relevant individuals within your social sphere.
The short of it, you are what other people think you to be.
Bemoaning the nature of it, is absurd and pointless, because again, discrimination is natural, and unstoppable.
Rudolph and the misfits aren’t any more victims, than any other social individual. It’s one of those, accept it and move on kind of instances, in my perspective.
Being is being perceived. Yep, Yogacara and Barkeley.
Not familiar with those names …
Behavioral scientists or psychobabblers?
Sorry, misspelled Berkeley’s name. Yogacara is a school of Buddhism that essentially created the “to be is to be perceived” concept of “idealism” later copied, unknowingly, in Western thought 1200 years later by Bishop Berkeley. Essentially, the external world only exists as we create it in our minds. The material world is nothing more than our idea of its existence.
So they wouldn’t be behaviorists, but more likely philosobabblers.
Well, if that’s the assertion, then definitely babblers.
Then again, most philosophers after the Greeks and pre-Socratics were mouthpiece self-aggrandisers.