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The whole world is shit, everything is shit, people are shit. Choosing to be positive and present is a coping strategy. It's definitely against my nature.
Compliments and other acts of kindness help. Just a little. Worth it.
Q: Why do the police always travel in threes?
A: One to do the reading, one to do the writing, and the other keeps an eye on the two intellectuals.
If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the "loved" person. [..] Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object - and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of the man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he just has to wait for the right object - and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it."The Art of Loving" (1956)
The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality."The Origins of Totalitarianism"
Once the door is fully opened, everybody rushes through. Once more-or-less targeted assassinations have been normalized by a government, you can be sure that it will be used by every government following them, and ultimately by every other government on the planet. Effective tools will always be used.
Be that mass surveillance, drone strikes, offensive cyber warfare or kidnapping people on foreign soil to fly them to torture camps.
I would never call the existence of bloated software a consequence of progress, but rather a sign of decadence.
Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.
A world without borders has become the panopticon, a jail where we are bound by ever-peering eyes of our peers.
Let's take robots on assembly lines: If it's used to free up the workforce for more creative work, say, controlling production, making decisions about it, finding creative ways to act and so on, then it's to the good. If it's used as a device to maximize profit and throw people into the trashcan, then it's not good.
But our present State is a dictatorship of Evil. âWeâve known that for a long time,â I can hear you say, âand it is not necessary for you to remind us of it once again.â So I ask you: If you are aware of this, why do you not stir yourselves? Why do you permit this autocrat to rob you of one sphere of your rights after another, little by little, both overtly and in secret? One day there will be nothing left, nothing at all, except for a mechanized national engine that has been commandeered by criminals and drunks. Has your spirit been so devastated by rape that you forget that it is not only your right, but your moral duty to put an end to this system?
If a person cannot even summon the strength to demand his rights, then there is nothing left for him but destruction. We will have deserved to be scattered to all corners of the globe, as dust before the wind, if we do not pull ourselves together in this eleventh hour and finally summon the courage that we have been lacking till now. Do not hide your cowardice under the cloak of cleverness! Because every day that you delay, every day that you do not resist this spawn of hell, your guilt is steadily increasing, like a parabolic curve.
The last few evenings I've coded a CMS so I can write some coding articles when the fancy strikes me.
To them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost their place in the universe and were much too proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back and reintegrate them into the world. They were satisfied with blind partisanship in anything that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content, and they elevated cruelty to a major virtue because it contradicted societyâs humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy."The Origins of Totalitarianism"
1. Start with the set of all potentially serious journalists.
2. Filter out the ones who put forth arguments which downplay the dangers to the press of prosecuting Assange.
3. Filter out the ones who don't explicitly argue against prosecuting Assange on 1st Amendment grounds.
Follow the small group that survives #3 to get a variety of (probably) high-quality perspectives from serious journalists.
Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people that were oppressing them.
Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.
We don't hate; we're just indifferent. Same result, less effort.
Hitler himself wrote in an early edition of âhisâ book â a book that is written in the most awful German I have ever read, despite which the nation of poets and thinkers have elevated it to the status of the Bible: âYou would not believe how one must deceive a nation in order to rule it.â If this cancerous growth in the German nation was not too noticeable in the early phases, then that is because there were enough forces for good at work to try to slow its growth. But as it grew larger and larger and finally ascended to power by means of one last vulgar corruption, the abscess erupted and defiled the whole body.
This caused the majority of its previous opponents to hide themselves. German intelligentsia took refuge in holes in the cellar like Solanaceae, hiding from light and the sun, gradually suffocating. And now we are facing the end. Now it is a question of mutually coming to our senses, of mutually keeping one another informed. We must always keep these things in mind and allow ourselves no rest until the last man is convinced of the utmost necessity of his battle against this system. If a wave of insurrection surges through the country, if âit is in the air,â if many join us, then this system can be cast aside with one last mighty effort. An end with terror is always better than terror without end.
Nothing perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than this vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything, without a focus for its passionate attention, with nobody to make responsible for the state of affairs â neither the government nor the bourgeoisie nor an outside power. It consequently turned in all directions, haphazardly and unpredictably, incapable of assuming an air of healthy indifference toward anything under the sun."The Origins of Totalitarianism"
"You canât be neutral on a moving train," I would tell them. Some were baffled by the metaphor, especially if they took it literally and tried to dissect its meaning. Others immediately saw what I meant: that events are already moving in certain deadly directions, and to be neutral means to accept that."You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times"
If enough of us had worked like Noam to try to force American leaders to stop killing and exploiting the innocent these past 40 years, after all, countless people would have been saved, and America and the world would not only be far richer, more peaceful and more just. It would not be presently heading toward the collapse of civilization as we know it from climate change. Noam believes the major responsibility for this lies with a short-term driven corporate system that regards climate change as an "externality," i.e., a problem for someone else to worry about. But it is also clear that the fact that not enough of the rest of us, certainly including myself, respond appropriately to civilization's looming death is a major part of the problem as well.
And, I thus finally realized, the important question was not why Noam responds the way he does to the suffering of the innocent around the planet.
It was why so many of the rest of us do not.
People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is a normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.
Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
Now this doesn't exactly answer why people tolerate this shillery. Probably because people genuinely aren't bothered by being nothing more than walking cash reserves for corporate entities, which makes sense, at least in America, seeing as we now seem to be breeding our kids to be cool with this from birth.
It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past. No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes."Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil"
If this is where smartphones peak - usable for two and a bit years - we need to take ourselves out to the car park for a strong conversation.
Centralized communications are, on a long enough timescale, an existential threat to a free society.
the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently."The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"
Freedom is the right to grow, itâs the right to blossom, Freedom is the right to be yourself.
Man always dies before he is fully born.
He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount.
Since no one is capable of forming his own opinion without the benefit of a multitude of opinions held by others, the rule of public opinion endangers even the opinion of those few who may have the strength not to share it. This is one of the reasons for the curiously sterile negativism of all opinions which oppose a popularly acclaimed tyranny. [...] public opinion, by virtue of its unanimity, provokes a unanimous opposition and thus kills true opinions everywhere.
Look, Iâm stupid, all right? Iâm not some brilliant person. Iâm a little child. You know the emperorâs new clothes? I can see the naked emperor, just because Iâm a little child-minded person. Iâm not smart. I mean, good scientists are like that. They have the minds of children, to see through all this façade of all this other stuff that they know is stupid nonsense. They just donât see it the way other people see it.interview by Shirley K. Cohen (1995)
Few people talk about it but itâs actually extremely weird to have celebrities at all. Itâs a cultural and economic phenomenon that works to hijack our tendency to form relationships and identify with people we find attractive. It takes a mechanism thatâs supposed to help us bond with our family members and leverages it for profit. The fact that some people canât handle this gets overlooked. All blame is placed on the individual, allowing the rest of us to absolve ourselves of guilt and responsibility.
the hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesnât just happen. It isnât a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it isâit exists because we all collectively produce it."The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"
In those who have suffered too many blows, in slaves for example, that place in the heart from which the infliction of evil evokes a cry of surprise may seem to be dead. But it is never quite dead; it is simply unable to cry out anymore.
No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
[The method of infallible prediction] is foolproof only after the movements have seized power. Then all debate about the truth or falsity of a totalitarian dictatorâs prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive â since by killing the person in question the murderer can promptly provide proof of the correctness of his statement. The only valid argument under such conditions is promptly to rescue the person whose death is predicted. Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. The assertion that the Moscow subway is the only one in the world is a lie only so long as the Bolsheviks have not the power to destroy all the others. In other words, the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalitarian propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since only in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies."The Origins of Totalitarianism"
Women everywhere are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to any suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were itself an act of violence."The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"
When the facts come home to us, let us try at least to make them welcome. Let us try not to escape into utopiasâimages, theories, or sheer follies.
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.
Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomenaâhomelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth."The Origins of Totalitarianism"
There was a time when academia was societyâs refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all."The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"
We all grow up and inherit a certain vocabulary. We then have got to examine this vocabulary.
A revolutionary woman can't have no reactionary man.
The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.
How odd I can have all this inside me and to you itâs just words.
The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one's own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others."The Origins of Totalitarianism"
Having known so many people involved with Facebook for so long, I have come up with a phrase to describe the cultural phenomenon Iâve witnessed among them â ladder kicking. Basically, people who get a leg up from others, and then do everything in their power to ensure nobody else manages to get there. No, itâs not âhuman natureâ or âhow it works.â Silicon Valley and the tech industry at large werenât built by these sorts of people, and we need to be more active in preventing this mind-virus from spreading.