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1 year Ago

But why go faster?

Published by marco on

“There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who’s always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is... [More]”

Burn bright or go home

Published by marco on

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.”
Jack Kerouac (On The Road)

Warmongering usurping diplomacy is madness

Published by marco on

“Once war was considered the business of soldiers, international relations the concern of diplomats. But now that war has become seemingly total and seemingly permanent, the free sport of kings has become the forced and internecine business of people, and diplomatic codes of honor between nations have collapsed.

Peace in no longer serious; only war is serious. Every man and every nation is either friend or foe, and the idea of enmity becomes mechanical, massive, and without genuine passion.

When... [More]

C. Wright Mills in 1956 (The Power Elite)

You’re nobody until…

Published by marco on

“La personalité commence là où la comparaison se termine.”
Karl Lagerfeld

2 years Ago

Ironically deluded

Published by marco on

“Criticism of US foreign policy looks like Russian propaganda to people who’ve spent their entire lives marinating in US propaganda.”

Finally: a good definition of a fascist

Published by marco on

“A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.”
Henry Wallace in 1940 (CounterPunch)

Cannon Fodder

Published by marco on

“My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers—the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being “reamed out” by managers—are part of what keeps wages low. If you’re made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you’re paid is what you are actually worth. It is hard to imagine any other function for workplace authoritarianism. Managers may truly believe that, without their unremitting efforts, all work would quickly grind to a halt. That is not... [More]”

The old switcheroo

Published by marco on

“We are cheating our children, handing them tawdry luxuries and addictive gadgets while we take away what’s left of the wealth, wonder and possibility of the pristine Earth.”

Enjoying the view from a local maximum

Published by marco on

“Irony [is] the song of a bird that has come to love its cage.”
Unedited interview (2003) by David Foster Wallace (YouTube)


Overheard in the excellent video essay,

Multiverses, Nihilism, and How it Feels to be Alive Right Now by Like Stories of Old (YouTube)

At 21:30,

“The point is to reflect on the way we generally regard the cosmos and the fundamental forces that are at play there. And to question that, which we so often deem to be the realistic or the rational view of our universe. Because when the void at the end of all things is no longer a given, when the nature of our cosmos is vastly more complicated than we assumed, the supposedly... [More]”

Can it be both?

Published by marco on

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
Laurence J. Peter in 1969 (The Peter Principle)

Carl Sagan predicts the Idiocracy

Published by marco on

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our... [More]”
Carl Sagan in 1995 (The Demon-Haunted World)

Aggressively Defensive

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“War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.”
Don DeLillo (White Noise)

Running Society Sensibly

Published by marco on

“Absolutely nothing should be sold for a profit if its absence could kill you. Any modern system where people still die from lack of these resources should be dismantled.”

As went Britain, so goes the U.S.

Published by marco on

“God save the Queen and a fascist regime … a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire.”

Even you don’t believe that…

Published by marco on

I thought this was a nice way to express disagreement,

“I am offended that you think we’re dumb enough to believe that you’re dumb enough to believe that.”

Message sent

Published by marco on

“The greatest barrier to communication is the illusion of it in the mind of the sender.”


This quote has quote a storied history, as documented in The Biggest Problem in Communication Is the Illusion That It Has Taken Place (Quote Investigator). Alternatives are,

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
“The greatest problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.”
“The most serious danger in communication is the illusion of having achieved it.”
“The... [More]”

Keep Fighting

Published by marco on

“And that’s why we have to be committed to being certain kinds of persons, no matter what the possibilities are for triumph. We have a chance of a snowball in Hell of fighting for freedom. We fight anyway, because it’s right and because it’s just. And we just get crushed when we get crushed, but we get crushed with a smile.”
“I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.”
Chris Hedges (Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt)
“Keep Fighting.”
Tagline for Redacted Tonight by Lee Camp

Schrödinger’s Thought

Published by marco on

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… To forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again… that was the ultimate subtlety.”
Definition of Doublethink by George Orwell (1984)

The Tin Man and the Scarecrow

Published by marco on

“[…] the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. […] Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.”

Consumption trumps Creation

Published by marco on

What do we do when everyone’s consuming content and no-one’s producing it? The quality drops precipitously.

“It is only through difference that progress can be made. What threatens us right now is probably what we may call over-communication–that is, the tendency to know exactly in one point of the world what is going on in all other parts of the world. In order for a culture to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality and... [More]”
Claude Lévi-Strauss

The Hidden Violence

Published by marco on

“Because they claim to be concerned with the welfare of whole societies, governments arrogate to themselves the right to pass off as mere abstract profit or loss the human unhappiness that their decisions provoke or their negligence permits. It is a duty of an international citizenship to always bring the testimony of people’s suffering to the eyes and ears of governments, sufferings for which it’s untrue that they are not responsible. The suffering of men must never be a mere silent residue... [More]”

Truth is a bitter pill

Published by marco on

“The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off”

The Show

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“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
Frank Zappa

A matter of scale

Published by marco on

“Kill one man, and you are a murderer.
Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror.
Kill them all, and you are a god.”


I actually heard this quote initially as “Kill one man, and you’re a murderer; kill them all, and. you. are. a. god.”, delivered from the maw of “featuring ludacris”, Jay Balzarian’s dog on the TV Show Big Mouth. It was in S05E08, which was a Christmas show and the dog was playing a John Wick character and had just finished eliminating an entire Russian gang, triumphing at the... [More]

Sleep Cold

Published by marco on

“To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have... [More]”

3 years Ago

Violence is violence

Published by marco on

“Liberalism considered it proper for a capitalist to say to a worker, ‘You shall die of hunger,’ but improper for a worker to retort, ‘You shall die first, of a bullet. […] It is ridiculous to make a distinction between these two threats.”

When two is equivalent to one

Published by marco on

“The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”
Julius Nyerere
“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party…and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt − until recently… and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black,... [More]”
Gore Vidal in the 1970s

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.”
Howard Zinn (You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train)

Revolution is not safe

Published by marco on

“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.”
James Baldwin

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.”
Gil Scott-Heron