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So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth; in one generation all the Napoleons and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and the simple politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or ignorant or afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, manâs fear and greed for manâs enslavement, will have vanished from the face of it.address to the the graduating class at University High School, Oxford, Mississippi on May 28, 1951
It would not be much of a universe if it wasn't home to the people you love.
A world without borders has become the panopticon, a jail where we are bound by ever-peering eyes of our peers.
Lack of respect for the human right to privacy by governments and corporations will lead to mass surveillance, gamified control and microtargeted propaganda.
Every one of these is dangerous, but gamified control is by far the worst of these, as it directly attacks the concept of equality which many human rights are fundamentally based on. "Equal access to public service"? Well sure you had the chance to have a good enough score to be allowed in this part of town. It is your own fault that you are a bad human. Giving up privacy will place governance in the hand of unthinking uncaring algorithms. If you the think the human bureaucrats were bad, wait until you experience the automated ones. But even worse: these three mechanisms empower authoritarianism and are easily abused to reinforce power of a ruling caste.
Modern technology makes it easier to ignore the basic human right to privacy than to respect it. I therefor would not compare privacy to free speech, like Snowden does. Free speech is easy. In my opinion it is far more reasonable to compare privacy to the right to a fair trial: having fair trials is significantly harder than despotism. And in a similar way, most people care very little about fairness in court, unless they are directly impaired, and many are willing to throw it away if they believe some evil is using it to hide from justice.
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 crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark"
Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.
Do you use a search engine? Social media? Any modern online game? A connected smart home? A smart phone without its privacy settings altered? A modern flat screen tv? A modern car? All of them do behavioral extraction in one form of another. Often under the guise of entertainment.
The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
They [governments and corporations] take whatever is available, and in no time it is being used against us, the population. Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.
When did mediocrity and banality become a good image for your children? I want my children to listen to people who fuckin' ROCKED! I don't care if they died in a puddle of their own VOMIT, I WANT SOMEONE WHO PLAYS FROM HIS FUCKIN' HEART! "Mommy! Mommy! The man Bill told me to listen to has a blood bubble on his nose" SHUT UP AND LISTEN TO HIM PLAY.
Lies by their very nature have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history.
Show me a people unwilling to be vigilant about their liberty 24/7, and I'll show you a government happy to lord over them with absolute power.
I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 A. M. until 8 P. M. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.
A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.
Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
Itâs Facebook. Youâre the product, not the customer. The hot dog rolls at the supermarket donât get a complaint button either.
I'm rapidly becoming anti-tech, and I live and breathe tech. People no longer seem to know how to actually talk to each other, unless they already agree 100% with each others positions on any given subject. I don't see all of this heading in a positive direction for humanity, and I think we see that unfolding all around us, every day.
Sexual assault and domestic violence are difficult things to talk about. Talk about them anyway.
Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear â kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor â with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.Address to the Annual Stockholders Sperry Rand Corporation (30 July 1957)
In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party, the Business Party. Both represent some range of business interests. In fact, they can change their positions 180 degrees, and nobody even notices.Interview by Adam Jones, February 20 (1990)
My dear,
Have you noticed how those who move, move fast? And those who donât, just stand still; motionless?
Yes, you can go ahead and rant to me about how an object in motion stays in motion, and how an object at rest stays at rest. But, I think thereâs more to this than physics.
I think those in motion have seen something the others have not; their imprisonment.
While those who do not move, do not notice their chains.
Truly yours,
Rosa Luxemburg
I could not find a source for this (yet)
Your heart breaks at least three or four times a month when you are caring for your parents, if you are doing it right.
There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as âthe artâ. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Shaman.
I believe that all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally, all of the facets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or sciences were the province of the Shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy. At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment.
In all of magic there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. Then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity. Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. Theyâre not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while weâre waiting to die. Itâs not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldnât be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.
Globalization is the result of powerful governments, especially that of the United States, pushing trade deals and other accords down the throats of the worldâs people to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate the economies of nations around the world without having obligations to the peoples of those nations."Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and the Global Order" (1998)
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
[..] it's sort of transparent to me that postmodern psychobabble is a similar sort of impostiture to hide the fact that the people in question are supposed to be cultural vanguards but in reality have less to say than the street graffiti artists who tag up their buildings at night.
It is only after one is in trouble that one realizes how little sympathy and kindness there are in the world.
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.
It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany/Traditional values are to be `debunkedâ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent `ideologiesâ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere Ï Î»Î·, specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are `potential officer materialâ. Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of ordinary intelligence, are sales-resistance.
The true significance of what is going on has been concealed by the use of the abstraction Man.
[..]
What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F. [Highest Common Factor], and Manâs conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.
[..]
The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation.
[..]
Perhaps I am asking impossibilities. Perhaps, in the nature of things, analytical understanding must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing. But if the scientists themselves cannot arrest this process before it reaches the common Reason and kills that too, then someone else must arrest it. What I most fear is the reply that I am `only one moreâ obscurantist, that this barrier, like all previous barriers set up against the advance of science, can be safely passed. Such a reply springs from the fatal serialism of the modern imaginationâthe image of infinite unilinear progression which so haunts our minds. Because we have to use numbers so much we tend to think of every process as if it must be like the numeral series, where every step, to all eternity, is the same kind of step as the one before.
[..]
But you cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.
There is, simply, no way, to ignore privacy. Because a citizenryâs freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyoneâs. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you donât need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have to hide anything â including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. Youâre assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences.
Ultimately, saying that you donât care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you donât care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you donât care about freedom of the press because you donât like to read. Or that you donât care about freedom of religion because you donât believe in God. Or that you donât care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because youâre a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesnât mean that that it doesnât or wonât have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor â or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling."Permanent Record"
Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is a beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality.âUnderstanding and Politicsâ
The printer industry leads the world when it comes to using technology to confiscate value from the public, and HP leads the printer industry.
But these are infectious grifts. For would-be robber-barons, "smart" gadgets are a moral hazard, an irresistible temptation to use those smarts to reconfigure the very nature of private property, such that only companies can truly own things, and the rest of us are mere licensors, whose use of the devices we purchase is bound by the ever-shifting terms and conditions set in distant boardrooms.
From Apple to John Deere to GM to Tesla to Medtronic, the legal fiction that you don't own anything is used to force you to arrange your affairs to benefit corporate shareholders at your own expense.
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."Nineteen Eighty-Four"
It's the standard tech company mentality: Deliberately make your product different and incompatible with everyone else and compete instead of cooperate. Best case outcome is monopoly and customer lock-in. Most likely case is no one solution gains enough traction and you end up with 15 incompatible chat apps.
What you can't see from this picture is the room full of people staring at this with one hand on their chins and super serious expressions. One girl was even taking notes! Sometimes I wish I possessed the requisite attention span to absorb endless amounts of totally pointless bullshit.
Donât ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
My departure from the volumes of science was a sin far less serious than that which consisted in having neglected to cast his eyes on the book of life.
Still the element of criminals must not be missing from any concentration camp. [..] the fact that nearly without exception they compromise the aristocracy of the camps and fulfill administrative duties, shows clearly that it is much harder to kill the juridical person of a human who is guilty of someone, than of someone who is innocent. The rise of criminals into the aristocracy of the camps is similar to the improvement that happens in the juridical situation of the stateless, who also lost their rights as citizens, when they resolve to commit a theft."Elemente und UrsprĂŒnge totaler Herrschaft", S. 656
Because we are lied to all the time, in ways so routine they are beneath conscious notice, even the most direct lies are losing their power to shock us.
Tell me, and Iâll forget Show me, and Iâll remember Involve me, and Iâll understand
I've been thinking of a story from the Old Testament: Moses stood all day and all night with outstretched arms, praying to God for victory. And whenever he let down his arms, the enemy prevailed over the children of Israel. Are there still people today who never weary of directing all their thinking and all their energy, single-heartedly, to one cause?
In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding â symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation of those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power."Children of Dune"
I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.
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"