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16 years Ago

Believing in Communism

Published by marco on

“Yes I called Marxism ‘the sweetest dream’ in one of my books. Then I discovered it was all a load of old socks. It seems incredible now that quite intelligent people believed in it all. What doubts there were were expressed in sly jokes. The jokes contradicted everything we believed in. We used to joke about how we were wrong about everything.”

The 51st State

Published by marco on

“I wish they’d just get it over with and make [Iraq] the 51st state, because I think it’s the perfect red state: religious fundamentalists, lots of weaponry. How could you go wrong? We’re already spending a significant fraction of our gross national product on the infrastructure, such as it is, on Iraq. Make it the 51st state and get it over with. [Laughs.]”


From an interview with the Oscar-winning director of Fog of War (IMDb) and the new Standard Operating Procedure (IMDb).

Poverty

Published by marco on

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty. […] The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and... [More]”
Final Words of Advice by Martin Luther King (Progress.org)

Wasted Talent

Published by marco on

“And you know what? There is something really evil about taking thousands of the world’s smartest young people and using them to sell online text ads more efficiently. Really. Think of all the really interesting and important things that this pool of brainpower could be addressing.”


The whole post is one of his best—on par with this classic about Hill & Bill aka “the Clintstones”: The big secret meeting, complete waste of time by FSJ (The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs).

Being Black

Published by marco on

“And I think that you have to cut some slack – and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you – we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the... [More]”

Soldiers

Published by marco on

“My objective [as a photographer] was not to allow my positive feelings toward [the soldiers] as individuals to cloud the fact that they were prosecuting a genocidal war.”


The author of the article—John Pilger—met Griffiths in Vietnam and continued to work with him through Iraq until Griffiths’ death in March of 2008.

Not Qualified

Published by marco on

“Bottom line, if you are so ignorant or confused that you think Shiite ayatollahs in Tehran are training and arming radical Salafi Sunnis to blow up Shiites in Iraq, you really should not be president.”

Reading the Economist

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“The Economist flatters readers who aren’t quite intelligent enough to realize how shallow it is into thinking that they are more intelligent than they are because they read it.”

Nail. On. The. Head.

On Multiculturalism

Published by marco on

“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”
General Sir Charles Napier


[1] On the practice of “suttee”—the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands.

History History

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“History doesn’t repeat itself—at best, it sometimes rhymes.”
Mark Twain

The Right to Use Force

Published by marco on

“A distinguishing feature of the modern state is that it claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory … the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence.”
Max Weber


Citation found in the article Weber and Legitimate Violence (Crooked Timber).

Spot the Difference

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“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
Mahatma Ghandi

Choose

Published by marco on

“Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday... [More]”

Success

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“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
Winston Churchill

Nuanced Thinking

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“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Aristotle

Get Off Your Ass

Published by marco on

“Warning: If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life. Don’t you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can’t think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all that claim it? Do you read everything you’re supposed to read? Do you think every thing you’re supposed to think? Buy what you’re told to want? Get... [More]”

Arrogance

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“Arrogance must be earned.”
Dr. Gregory House

Voting

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“If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal.”
Emma Goldman

Design Tip

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“To clarify, add detail. And, clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design. Don’t start to throw out information—instead, fix the design.”

Economics

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“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”
Murray Rothbard


Now replace the word “economics” with any other discipline and you have yourself a pretty good rule-of-thumb.

17 years Ago

Writer’s Strike

Published by marco on

“We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence.”

Hitchens on Huckabee

Published by marco on

“However, what Article VI[1] does not do, and was never intended to do, is deny me the right to say, as loudly as I may choose, that I will on no account vote for a smirking hick like Mike Huckabee, who is an unusually stupid primate but who does not have the elementary intelligence to recognize the fact that this is what he is. My right to say and believe that is already guaranteed to me by the First Amendment. And the right of Huckabee to win the election and fill the White House with morons like... [More]”

Joy

Published by marco on

“I wish I liked anything as much as my kids like bubbles…their smiling faces just point out your inability to enjoy anything.”

The Pursuit of Happiness

Published by marco on

“The great source of both misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Some of those situations may no doubt deserve to be prefered to others but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly or by remorse from the horror... [More]”
Adam Smith

That Awful Sucking Sound

Published by marco on

“We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers. … How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked,... [More]”
A Hunger for Books by Doris Lessing (Guardian)

Savage Relationship Advice

Published by marco on

“Again, the passage of time destroys us all. But you can’t sit on the couch stuffing Twinkies in your mouth and bitch about how shallow your partner is for not finding you attractive anymore because some people get cancer. Please.”


Dan Savage is an advice columnist focusing on questions about sex and relationships. When pushed, he knows how to throw down with the best of them.

Bastards

Published by marco on

“Lady, people aren’t chocolates. Do you know what they are, mostly? Bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling; but I don’t find them half as annoying as I find naïve, bubble-headed optimists who walk around vomiting sunshine.”

Revolution

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“The first step to making a difference is to get pissed off.”
Penn Jillette

The Ethics of Being Carnivorous

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“Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way as we now view Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme – and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human beings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious... [More]”
Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (Kottke.org)

The Matrix

Published by marco on

“People who have realized that this is a dream, imagine that it is easy to wake up, and are angry with those who continue sleeping, not considering that the whole world that environs them does not permit them to wake. Life proceeds as a series of optical illusions, artificial needs and imaginary sensations.”