3 years Ago
Retribution, not justice
Published by marco on
“I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions–poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed–which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.”
Revolution is not safe
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“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”
The first revolution
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“The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things and see there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown.”
You just don’t get it, man
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The article ”That’s Why It’s Poetry” by Eugene Volokh (Reason) commemorates the recent death of Lawrence Ferlinghetti with a wonderful story, not directly about Ferlinghetti, but about one expert witness’s testimony at his trial for obscenity for having published Howl. It wasn’t so long ago in America that people were being prosecuted for obscenity.
That trial was in 1957. Just over 60 years later and it seems kind of far-fetched to think we may see the like again. The goal is to sanction unsanctioned[1] ideas, to keep... [More]
Unbreakable / Unverwüstlich
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“There’s this famous story about Sonny Barger, the old Hells Angel who woke up from a coma after a motorcycle accident. And the nurse said to him, “Well, I hope you’ve learned your lesson, Mr. Barger.” He said, “Yes, I did.” And she said, “What’s that?” He said, “I can do anything and survive.””
How to ask the Internet
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“This is a well-known internet phenomenon: The best way to get the right answer is not to ask a question, but to confidently assert the wrong answer.”
4 years Ago
Dragging him down
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“As soon as a man does something admirable, the entire universe conspires to see that he never does it again.”
Democracy is machine learning?
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“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
How the Few Rule
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“Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is... [More]”
Hunter S. Thompson called it almost 50 years ago
Published by marco on
“The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage and whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office and sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.”
Definitions of Diplomacy
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I recently saw two definitions of diplomacy that I liked very much. I’ve included them below with the original attributions and have made no effort to ascertain their accuracy. I think the quotes stand on their own, regardless of who is purported to have said them.
“Diplomacy is the art of building ladders to allow people to climb down gracefully.”
“Diplomacy is the art of telling someone to go to hell in such a manner that they look forward to the trip.”
Memory
Published by marco on
“Maybe the greatest miracle is memory”
Found in the article Two Poems by Michael Garrigan (ecotheoreview). Both are quite nice. I had to look up Thomas Merton.
A surfeit of unearned confidence
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“You suffer from the arrogance of ignorance.”
Fortune-telling
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“Yours is like all fortunes, Shadow: opaque on arrival, inevitable in retrospect.”
Soft tyranny
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Life in the 21st century is all about the soft tyranny of lowered expectations.
By all means
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“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Whether Napoleon actually said it or not is immaterial.
Puritanism
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“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
The linked article above includes a related quote:
“That seems to be the haunting fear of mankind — that the advancement of women will sometime, someway, someplace, interfere with some man’s comfort.”
Focused laser-like on the present
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“The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present, and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose.”
Shit Rolls Downhill as Public Policy
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“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.[1]”
Rising above the muck isn’t even that hard
Published by marco on
“[in America] the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head.”
We’ve known for a long time
Published by marco on
The post Two centuries and nothing has changed referred to the image below,
It’s nicely put together, but it’s also not the original quote, which someone included in the comments in a giant wall of text from an English translation.
I found the original in German:
“Die kapitalistische Produktion entwickelt daher nur die Technik und Kombination des gesellschaftlichen Produktionsprozesses, indem sie zugleich die Springquellen alles Reichtums untergräbt: die Erde und den Arbeiter.”
The... [More]
Learning from History
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The original quote is shown below.
“Was die Erfahrung aber und die Geschichte lehren, ist dieses, dass Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt und nach Lehren, die aus derselben zu ziehen gewesen wären, gehandelt haben.”
The following is my best attempt at a direct translation, which I hope imparts just how balky the original is.
“But what experience and history have taught, is that society and governments never learn anything from history and acted on lessons from... [More]”
The sunken cost of being conned
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“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
Eco on Writing
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“Writing is a way of revealing the contradictions of life that one would like to resolve. Writing fiction, like poetry, means simply to display those contradictions but not necessarily to resolve them. In fact, the reader, through his interpretive cooperation, decides what the story means.”
5 years Ago
Beats Thinkin’
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“There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labour of thinking.”
Fanaticism
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“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”
If Wishes were Mutexes
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Text Editing Hates You Too (Lord.io)
“Although holding a lock across process boundaries may sound questionable to you, most other platforms try to use imperfect heuristics to fix concurrency issues. Or they just hope race conditions don’t happen. In my experience, prayers are not a very effective concurrency primitive.”
Going along to get along
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“[…] getting along in society includes some recognition of not being the worst person you can be even though you have a right to do so.”
On successfully navigating tricky grammatical seas
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“When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I’d love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie.”