| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."
- attributed to Kurt Vonnegut
"I [have] suggested that if we view the digital revolution in spiritual rather than materialist terms, we will have a better chance of seeing it for what it is. See the Internet as the inevitable result of eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, rather than the fruit of the tree of life - see technological ‘progress’ as a result of choosing information over communion - and the story that emerges is the Faustlike summoning of something we are not nearly big enough to be playing with."
- Paul Kingsnorth
"To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow."
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
"I haven’t seen an online sports betting ad in almost 7 minutes. Am I dead?"
- Conan O'Brien
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilisation."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings."
- Joseph Conrad
"[H]uman civilisation is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future. Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable. That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning."
- Dougald Hine
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
"But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."
- Publius (either Alexander Hamilton or James Madison, "Federalist Paper #51")
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
"Accustomed as we are now to ‘work’ and ‘home’ and ‘consumption’ and ‘production’, it can be hard for us to understand that for most people in pre-modern times these amounted to the same thing. [...] The process of breaking this apart into small segments – turning the home into a dormitory, its adult inhabitants into both ‘workers’ and ‘consumers’ elsewhere, its children into pupils at a distant school, its parlour into a show-room for TV, tablet and gaming console, its kitchen into a store-room of shop-bought processed ‘food’ – this was the work of the Machine."
- Paul Kingsnorth
|
|
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
"Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have
a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor.
The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at
some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is going
wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who
mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for
the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he
torments us with the approval of his own conscience and
his better impulses appear to him as temptations.
And since theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government
approaches to theocracy, the worse it will be.”
― C. S. Lewis
|
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
"Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have
a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor.
The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at
some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is going
wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who
mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for
the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he
torments us with the approval of his own conscience and
his better impulses appear to him as temptations.
And since theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government
approaches to theocracy, the worse it will be.”― C. S. Lewis
"It's as if they came back from twenty years of fighting the Taliban and said, 'You know, those people had some pretty good ideas.' "
- Trevor Noah|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
"Have but one God: thy knees were sore
If bent in prayer to three or four.
Adore no images save those
The coinage of thy country shows.
Take not the Name in vain. Direct
Thy swearing unto some effect.
Thy hand from Sunday work be held—
Work not at all unless compelled.
Honor thy parents, and perchance
Their wills thy fortunes may advance.
Kill not—death liberates thy foe
From persecution’s constant woe.
Kiss not thy neighbor’s wife. Of course
There’s no objection to divorce.
To steal were folly, for ’tis plain
In cheating there is greater gain.
Bear not false witness. Shake your head
And say that you have “heard it said.”
Who stays to covet ne’er will catch
An opportunity to snatch."
- Ambrose Bierce ("The New Decalogue")
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
“I saw a 'degrowth' speech this afternoon. Something made me do a mental spit take. Among a laundry list of woke buzzwords: 'Colonialism is oppression'. 'We must stop extraction'. 'Pass a Universal Basic Income'. What? We must extract less, consume less, but give away vaporware money to people so they can continue to consume mindlessly?
Economies around the world are collapsing. The math is simple - high profits, low wages, massive unemployment. We can fix that, but that would require lowering profits and promoting jobs, but the donor class won't allow it. So instead we print money and pretend the unemployed don't exist."
"Ultimately I think that social movements – Ecology, Identity Politics, Social Justice - have been hijacked for the purpose of sabotaging them. Life is like being a target in whack-a-mole – your head will pop up and someone will try to hit you with a mallet for not conforming to the moral requirement of this hour. SJWs are not insane zealots, they know exactly what they're doing: Establishing a world where no one can be accepted, therefore no one is worthy of being helped, even you.”
― “doh1304”, poster on another site
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
"Corrupted by wealth and power, your government is like a restaurant with only one dish. They’ve got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen."
― Huey Long (1893-1935)
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
"I see the Machine, humming gently to itself as it binds us with its offerings, as it dangles its promises before us and slowly, slowly, slowly reels us in. I think of the part of it we interact with daily, the glowing white interface through which we volunteer every detail of our lives in exchange for information or pleasure or stories told by global entertainment corporations who commodify our culture and sell it back to us. I think of the words we use to describe this interface, which we carry with us in our pockets wherever we go, as we are tracked down every street and into every forest that remains: the web; the net. I think: these are things designed to trap prey."
- Paul Kingsnorth
“Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops — but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds — but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.”
- E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops (1909)
"Ideal societies have a nasty habit of turning into mirrors of the things they set out to replace."
- Paul Kingsnorth
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
"Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act."
― George Orwell (1903-1950)
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
"Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks."
- Ian Hamilton Finlay
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
"Since they first started falling victim to mobs of activists outside their conference centres in the late nineties, the captains of the Black Ships of global capitalism have been careful to disguise their piratical raids as charity projects[.]"
- Paul Kingsnorth
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
"Call it the Anthill State, the Beehive Society, a technocratic despotism — perhaps benevolent, perhaps not, but in either case the enemy of personal liberty, family independence, and community sovereignty, shutting off for a long time to come the freedom to choose among alternate ways of living. The domination of nature made possible by misapplied science leads to the domination of people; to a dreary and totalitarian uniformity."
- Edward Abbey
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
All dwarves are beer-soaked beards on legs who stop mining only to fight, drink heavily and/or sing about mining. They consider everything they say and do to be SRS BZNZ and nurse a grudge like a Bretonnian nurtures a fine vintage wine. All perceived similarities between Dwarves and Yorkshiremen are coincidental.
There’s a 10% chance that any dwarf character created is a Troll Slayer, a kamikaze no-pants dwarf with a big orange mohawk, prison tats, a two-handed axe and a burning desire to ragequit life as violently as possible.
Part of the rpg 'Small But Vicous Dog'
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
All perceived similarities between Dwarves and Yorkshiremen are coincidental.
All I know is the dwarves in my setting have to get up out of their shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, lick the road clean with their tongues, then eat half a handful of freezing cold gravel, work twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when they get home, their dads slice them in two with a bread knife.
"At the inception of every war I covered, most people were unable to cope with the nightmare that was about to engulf them. Signs of disintegration surrounded them. Shootings. Kidnappings. The bifurcation of polarized extremes into antagonistic armed groups or militias. Hate speech. Political paralysis. Apocalyptic rhetoric. The breakdown of social services. Food shortages. Circumscribed daily existence. But the fragility of society is too emotionally fraught for most of us to accept. We endow the institutions and structures around us with an eternal permanence."
- Chris Hedges
"I believe creativity isn't just valuable, it's essential. It's how we grow and connect. And this sort of technology in the hands of corporations could strangle that cultural exchange if we aren't careful. I feel like I grew up on all of these dystopian novels that said 'Art became just an endless stream of dopamine hits,' and now people are like, 'Finally! An endless stream of dopamine hits!'"
- Tim Hickson
"Opposition makes humanitarians forget the liberal virtues they claim to uphold. They become petulant, self-righteous, intolerant. In the heat of political controversy, they find it impossible to conceal their contempt for those who stubbornly refuse to see the light - those who ‘just don’t get it’, in the self-satisfied jargon of political rectitude."
- Christopher Lasch
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
"Why Did God Create Atheists?
There is a famous story told in Chassidic literature that addresses this very question. The Master teaches the student that God created everything in the world to be appreciated, since everything is here to teach us a lesson.
One clever student asks “What lesson can we learn from atheists? Why did God create them?”
The Master responds “God created atheists to teach us the most important lesson of them all — the lesson of true compassion. You see, when an atheist performs an act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that God commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality. And look at the kindness he can bestow upon others simply because he feels it to be right.”
“This means,” the Master continued “that when someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say ‘I pray that God will help you.’ Instead for the moment, you should become an atheist, imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ‘I will help you.’”"
—Martin Buber, Tales of Hasidim Vol. 2 (1991)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
As long as people have their physical and mental health, they should forgoe retirement so they can pass along their skills to the next generation.
As long as people have their physical and mental health, they should forgoe retirement so they can pass along their skills to the next generation.
we should prepare for folks' retirement well enough that they can do so on their own terms. it's not like we can't see imminent departures approaching.
"[In the view of neo-liberal capitalism], living in one place and having one job your entire life sounds like an awful, boring, and vapid existence, despite the fact that in much of the rest of the world it’s viewed as core prerequisites of a good life. The American “dream” was once having a good paying job and owning a house that you could live in the rest of your life and pass on to your children. Now, it’s owning nothing and living as a “digital nomad” where community means whichever tiny subset of the internet follows your social media profile."
- Rhyd Wildermuth
"I had hopes for Ironheart. It did not meet them. You can understand the plot very easily because it's pointed out first thing, but also pointed out is that the main character doesn't care about the plot. So that's the movie in a nutshell."
"[O]h man when they made Red Skull quote Jordan Peterson I was like 'What the hell - is that where we are now, Marvel? Kermit the History Prof is now your punching bag?'"
― "Gemknight Kyber", City of Heroes player/movie critic
"I had hopes for Ironheart. It did not meet them. You can understand the plot very easily because it's pointed out first thing, but also pointed out is that the main character doesn't care about the plot. So that's the movie in a nutshell."
Whenever someone mentions Ironheart, this is all I can think of...
Whenever someone mentions Ironheart, this is all I can think of...
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
"If you have to ask what an author is trying to say, it seems clear he or she is not saying it well. But instructors insisted a good book was something not immediately enjoyable to read, containing an Important Message written in oblique language so its meaning could be divined via an ennobling ritual of painstaking research and group analysis."
- Matt Taibbi
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
"If you have to ask what an author is trying to say, it seems clear he or she is not saying it well. But instructors insisted a good book was something not immediately enjoyable to read, containing an Important Message written in oblique language so its meaning could be divined via an ennobling ritual of painstaking research and group analysis."
- Matt Taibbi
True story: The first research paper my father submitted was rejected due to its "casual, conversational" style. As he puts it, "I deleted every third word and re-submitted it. They immediately accepted it."