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The left needs to be more attuned to fraud that targets empathy, and the right needs to stop using the risk of fraud as an excuse to do nothing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37209769

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn't they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?

I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system.

Charles Bukowski

letter to John Martin

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

Elie Wiesel

In a slight stroke of your hands,
it is the whole world that I comprehend.
In the mere thought of you,
it is the entirety of eternity that I attend:
flowing, nude, content.

I stream, I shine, I rain.
I am the heavens;
I am all the stars;
I am this Earth.
I am also that golden thicket of wheat,
expecting the clusters of scented seed,
in the green lake of  its joyous dance.

I traverse you,
like a lightening crossing the night.
I blaze.
And I then melt.

Ahmad Shamlu

"In An Instant"

Sie werfen die Bomben ganz in der Nähe ab, das dröhnt, verbreitet Schrecken. Wir fühlen uns nicht mehr so verlassen. Sie sind da, das Geräusch dauert fort, wir richten uns auf, wir lauschen; sie sind mächtig, unangreifbar. Die SS zittert. Wir haben keine Angst, und wenn wir Angst haben, ist es eine Angst, die gleichzeitig auch lachen macht. Sie sitzen in ihrer kleinen Kabine, sie sind gekommen, um eine Stunde über Deutschland zu verbringen, sie werden nie wissen, wer wir sind, doch die Bombardierung buchen wir für uns. Wir kosten die Angst der SS ganz aus.

Robert Antelme

"Das Menschengeschlecht"

Prejudice is an emotional commitment to ignorance.

Nathan Rutstein

Es gibt Reichtümer, an denen man zugrunde geht, wenn man sie nicht mit anderen teilen kann.

Michael Ende

"Momo"

Yes, we have had disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences. They don't mean a thing. One has just failed; the results of another have been nullified. We send our professional soldiers and our sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences. And what happens?

The professional soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments.

Smedley Butler

"War Is A Racket" (1935)

Man kann sich mit dem Nationalsozialismus geistig nicht auseinandersetzen, weil er ungeistig ist. Es ist falsch, wenn man von einer nationalsozialistischen Weltanschauung spricht, denn wenn es diese gäbe, müßte man versuchen, sie mit geistigen Mitteln zu beweisen oder zu bekämpfen - die Wirklichkeit aber bietet uns ein völlig anderes Bild: schon in ihrem ersten Keim war diese Bewegung auf den Betrug des Mitmenschen angewiesen, schon damals war sie im Innersten verfault und konnte sich nur durch die stete Lüge retten.

Schreibt doch Hitler selbst in einer frühen Auflage "seines" Buches (ein Buch, das in dem übelsten Deutsch geschrieben worden ist, das ich je gelesen habe; dennoch ist es von dem Volke der Dichter und Denker zur Bibel erhoben worden): "Man glaubt nicht, wie man ein Volk betrügen muß, um es zu regieren." Wenn sich nun am Anfang dieses Krebsgeschwür des deutschen Volkes noch nicht allzusehr bemerkbar gemacht hatte, so nur deshalb, weil noch gute Kräfte genug am Werk waren, es zurückzuhalten.

Wie es aber größer und größer wurde und schließlich mittels einer letzten gemeinen Korruption zur Macht kam, das Geschwür gleichsam aufbrach und den ganzen Körper besudelte, versteckte sich die Mehrzahl der früheren Gegner, flüchtete die deutsche Intelligenz in ein Kellerloch, um dort als Nachtschattengewächs, dem Licht und der Sonne verborgen, allmählich zu ersticken. Jetzt stehen wir vor dem Ende. Jetzt kommt es darauf an, sich gegenseitig wiederzufinden, aufzuklären von Mensch zu Mensch, immer daran zu denken und sich keine Ruhe zu geben, bis auch der Letzte von der äußersten Notwendigkeit seines Kämpfens wider dieses System überzeugt ist. Wenn so eine Welle des Aufruhrs durch das Land geht, wenn "es in der Luft liegt", wenn viele mitmachen, dann kann in einer letzten, gewaltigen Anstrengung dieses System abgeschüttelt werden. Ein Ende mit Schrecken ist immer noch besser als ein Schrecken ohne Ende.

Weiße Rose

Flugblatt #2 der Weißen Rose

In the United States, we have 260,000 billboards; 11,250 newspapers; 11,556 periodicals; 27,000 video outlets for renting video tapes; more than 500 million radios; and more than 100 million computers. Ninety-eight percent of American homes have a television set; more than half our homes have more than one. There are 40,000 new book titles published every year (300,000 worldwide), and every day in America 41 million photographs are taken. And if this is not enough, more than 60 billion pieces of junk mail (thanks to computer technology) find their way into our mail-boxes every year.

From millions of sources all over the globe, through every possible channel and medium — light waves, airwaves, ticker tapes, computer banks, telephone wires, television cables, satellites, printing presses — information pours in. Behind it, in every imaginable form of storage — on paper, on video and audio tape, on discs, film, and silicon chips — is an ever greater volume of information waiting to be retrieved. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we are awash in information. And all the sorcerer has left us is a broom.

Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems. To say it still another way: The milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.

All of this has called into being a new world. I have referred to it elsewhere as a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress. The aim is not to reduce ignorance, superstition, and suffering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies. We tell ourselves, of course, that such accomodations will lead to a better life, but that is only the rhetorical residue of a vanishing technocracy.

We are a culture consuming itself with information, and many of us do not even wonder how to control the process. We proceed under the assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms.

Neil Postman

"Technopoly"

Be one with the dust of the way, 
Then you can't be controlled by love or by rejection. 
You can't be controlled by profit or by loss. 
You can't be controlled by praise or by humiliation.

Laozi

Predige nicht den schmalen Pfad, während du fröhlich auf dem weiten gehst. Predige den weiten Pfad, oder predige gar nicht; aber halte dich nicht selbst zum Narren, indem du sagst, du würdest gerne helfen, eine freie Gesellschaft einzuleiten, aber du kannst dafür keinen Lehnstuhl opfern. Sage ehrlich, "Ich liebe Lehnstühle mehr als freie Menschen, und wähle es nach ihnen zu streben; nicht, weil der Umstand mich dazu zwingt. Ich liebe Hüte, große, große Hüte, mit vielen Federn und grossen Bögen; und ich möchte lieber diese Hüte haben, als mich mit sozialen Träumen zu sorgen, die zu meinen Lebzeiten nie verwirklicht sein werden. Die Welt betet Hüte an, und ich möchte mit ihnen beten."

Solltest du aber die Freiheit und den Stolz und die Stärke der einzelnen Seele suchen, und die freie Brüderlichkeit der Menschen, als den Zweck, den dein Leben manifestieren soll, dann verkaufe es nicht für Krimskrams. Glaube, dass deine Seele stark ist und den Weg beibehalten kann; und langsam, durch erbittertes Ringen, wird vielleicht die Stärke wachsen. Und der Verzicht auf Besitztümer, für die andere die letzte Möglichkeit der Freiheit eintauschen, wird einfach werden.

Am Ende deines Lebens kannst du deine Augen schließen und sagen: "Ich wurde nicht dominiert von der dominanten Idee meines Zeitalters; Ich habe meine Loyalität selbst ausgesucht, und habe ihr gedient. Ich habe durch eine Lebenszeit bewiesen, dass es etwas im Menschen gibt, das ihn vor absoluter Tyrannei der Umstände rettet, und letztlich die Umstände erobert und umformt; das unsterbliche Feuer des einzelnen Willen, welches die Erlösung der Zukunft ist.

Voltairine de Cleyre

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

Galileo Galilei

Tyranny is content with lawlessness; total terror replaces the fences of law and the lawfully established and orderly channels of human communication with its iron ring, which links everybody so tightly to everybody else that not only the space of freedom, as it exists in constitutional states between citizens, but even the desert of neighbourlessness and mutual suspicion disappears, so that it is as if everybody melted together into a giant being of enormous proportions. This too does the for a totalitarian environment so well prepared vernacular express in its own way when it no longer speaks of "the" Russians or "the" French, but tells us what "the" Russian or "the" Frenchman wants.

Hannah Arendt

"Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft" p. 682

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.

Hannah Arendt

"The Origins of Totalitarianism"

Our evolution within terrestrial physical reality "forced" us to participate in well-calibrated local marketplaces of ideas, and our psychology evolved specifically so that we had a fine-tuned balance of what we subjectively "wanted" and what we found ourselves coming to believe, despite that initial-condition "want" -- dissenting views in a room have both a repulsion but also a very specific gravity -- a closeness that emerges amongst holders of opposing ideas, when these ideas have manifested and are walking around in human bodies within shared meatspace -- we start to empathize with holders of countering views that we're forced to share physical space with. We talk about empathy like it's feelings for the other pieces of meat, but it's perhaps better conceived as a kinship of one tight bundle of ideas for another. It's evolved and it's ancient and it's a very specific foraging strategy for 2D terrestrial creatures finding information/food under those constraints.

And now, we've designed systems that aren't nearly as clever and well-calibrated as our meatspace selves evolved to be. In the purely physical space we evolved for, we had to share space with people we probably disagreed with, and we developed unique tendencies based on the nature of living on a 2D terrestrial plane. Heck, we'd have different psychology favoured if we made it to this level of the great filter, but happened to evolve in the air (3D grid) or within a more one-dimensional environment or some hyperdimensional space.

Speaking of high-dimensional space: enter the internet. Might our prior foraging strategies and adaptations stacked onto our prior foraging strategies... might they fail now? Foraging strategies are informed by the math of the landscape. [..] Our psychology is tailored to adapting to physical reality on a plane, and the internet might totally fuck that up. (What is an internet bubble? Maybe it's just my stepping out of the 2D terrestrial grid and engaging through a hidden, non-spatial dimension with some foraging target I can sense near me?) It's like all places are piped into one another, outside physical reality. This isn't Kansas. It's the formation of a hyperdimensional object. It's no longer a 2D grid, and our predispositions and adaptations for navigating such a grid might drive us to extinction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22745052

.. it's why I don't go on Fox news. I don't go on CNN either, because the most you're ever gonna get is 4 to 6 minutes. And so you have to use the language of easily identifiable clichés in order for the audience to resonate. And if what you're thinking doesn't fit within those clichés, then you become unintelligible. And that of course has now been carried out through the wider culture.

Chris Hedges

https://www.youtube.com/w ... tch?v=KAhq-l0LUio&t=4m44s

All real living is meeting.

Martin Buber

Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.

George Orwell