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"Having a phone in your pocket is like always carrying around a glazed donut that constantly tempts you to snack on it—but if you do, you know it will ruin your appetite. Sure, the phone is a good way for people to get hold of you—just like smearing yourself with blood before you go swimming in shark-infested waters is a good way for sharks to reach you."
- Ruby LaRocca
"We don’t evaluate information as information; we evaluate information as tribal signals and status symbols. [...] We don’t ask ourselves, is this true or false; we say to ourselves, what is the position I should take on this question to assure that I maintain my status?"
- Chris Bray
My hips are moving on their own
"Thomas Sowell is a national treasure, and is not allowed to die."
-- Nicholas J. Freitas, Virginia House of Delegates, Culpeper
"It looks like a baby crossed with a garage door opener."
- Rich Evans, Best of the Worst: Wheel of the Worst #26
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"What I criticize under the name Utopian engineering recommends the reconstruction of society as a whole, i.e. very sweeping changes whose practical consequences are hard to calculate, owing to our limited experiences. It claims to plan rationally for the whole of society, although we do not possess anything like the factual knowledge which would be necessary to make good such an ambitious claim."
- Karl Popper
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“'You’ve gotta respect everyone’s beliefs.' No, you don’t. That’s what gets us in trouble. Look, you have to acknowledge everyone’s beliefs, and then you have to reserve the right to go: 'That is f~*&ing stupid. Are you kidding me?' I acknowledge that you believe that, that’s great, but I’m not going to respect it. I have an uncle that believes he saw Sasquatch. We do not believe him, nor do we respect him!”
― Patton Oswalt
"Instead of this lateral relationship with our community and our neighbors and our family, what’s being proposed is that everyone triangulate their relationships through an authority center. Whether the method of that triangulation involves having talking points for Thanksgiving dinner or just going on social media to find out what good people think and then repeating it, the trend seems to be toward the outsourcing of all responses, thoughts, and reactions."
"[P]ropaganda is almost a simple and innocent version of behavioral pressure. This is something else. This is a world-concealing layer of diversionary and illogical and internally inconsistent noise, under which the world exists somewhere."
- Walter Kirn
"Instead of this lateral relationship with our community and our neighbors and our family, what’s being proposed is that everyone triangulate their relationships through an authority center. Whether the method of that triangulation involves having talking points for Thanksgiving dinner or just going on social media to find out what good people think and then repeating it, the trend seems to be toward the outsourcing of all responses, thoughts, and reactions."
"[P]ropaganda is almost a simple and innocent version of behavioral pressure. This is something else. This is a world-concealing layer of diversionary and illogical and internally inconsistent noise, under which the world exists somewhere."
- Walter Kirn
I'll admit it: Maybe it's because I don't do social media, but I don't understand this one. People are using the web to look up what to talk about? If so, that is indeed disturbing...
...though even back before the Fairness Doctrine was revoked, my father-in-law put it beautifully: "The news doesn't tell you what to think. It tells you what to think about."| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'll admit it: Maybe it's because I don't do social media, but I don't understand this one. People are using the web to look up what to talk about? If so, that is indeed disturbing...
I've experienced it, though not quite like how you describe it. Many people I've run into are just on social media constantly--it's not that they're actively looking things up, but that there's a steady drip-feed of stuff going directly from phone screen to unconscious mind. Here's the source article, if you want some more context.
I'll admit it: Maybe it's because I don't do social media, but I don't understand this one. People are using the web to look up what to talk about? If so, that is indeed disturbing...I've experienced it, though not quite like how you describe it. Many people I've run into are just on social media constantly--it's not that they're actively looking things up, but that there's a steady drip-feed of stuff going directly from phone screen to unconscious mind. Here's the source article, if you want some more context.
That was an immense read, but it was well worth it. Thank you!
"'Romanticizing the past' is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future."
- Paul Kingsnorth
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"The ability to understand what was needed now and what could wait was both a culturally and religiously ritualized knowledge, and was taught from parent to child and from myth and festival to people. We have nothing of the sort now because alienation from labor also required alienation from community and alienation from embodied forms of wisdom and teaching.
That alienation has left us moderns as shambling wrecks of humans, desperately trying to force ourselves to become more focused in a world of technology constantly trying to steal our focus. We berate ourselves for being undisciplined with our time and impulses in a hyper-mediated economy which needs us to overspend and impulse buy in order to keep profits growing. And we then look for identity formations and pop-diagnoses to explain for us why we’re not doing any of this very well while we imagine others are."
- Rhyd Wildermuth
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"The perfect and balanced life of the Instagram influencer is an illusion: if it were perfect and balanced, they wouldn’t need to keep posting images to prove that it is. The activist tweeting ten times a day about fighting injustice isn’t fighting anything at all except for his social media addiction, and he’s losing."
- Rhyd Wildermuth
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"Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth."
— Kahlil Gibran
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
— Oscar Wilde
“The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.”
— Lao Tzu
“Truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”
— Nadine Gordimer
“A lie is like a snowball; it starts off small and then grows and grows until a point where it gets so big it falls apart and then the truth is discovered.”
— Chris Hughes
“The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.”
— Winston Churchill
“Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.”
— Thomas Mann
“Learn what is true in order to do what is right.”
— Thomas Huxley
"Standing courageously for an unpopular opinion isn’t easy, but the rewards of standing courageously for the truth will last forever.”
— Rick Warren
“You can’t outrun a lie forever. Eventually, you just end up hurting the people you care about. Sometimes it’s easier to just face the music and accept the fact that you made a mistake.”
— Nate "Commander Steel" Heywood
"Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold."
— Leo Tolstoy
“Truth is the torch that gleams through the fog without dispelling it.”
— Claude Adrien Helvétius
“Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.”
— M. K. Gandhi
“A lie is like a snowball; it starts off small and then grows and grows until a point where it gets so big it falls apart and then the truth is discovered.”
— Chris Hughes“You can’t outrun a lie forever. Eventually, you just end up hurting the people you care about. Sometimes it’s easier to just face the music and accept the fact that you made a mistake.”
— Nate "Commander Steel" Heywood
I used to believe in all the quotes you listed. Modern times have made me sadly question these two.
"The truth ain't nothin' but the truth, so help me."
- Henry Rollins
"I'll lie again and again, and I'll keep lying, I promise."
- also Henry Rollins
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"I've said "jiminy jillikers" so many times, the words have lost all meaning!"
- Milhouse Van Houten
Hey! I’m watching you!
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"I’m glad the Pentagon is arguably more diverse and tolerant now than when I served in the Air Force beginning in the early 1980s. Yet, as a popular meme has it, painting “Black Lives Matter” and rainbow flags on B-52 bombers doesn’t make the bombs dropped any less destructive. To be specific: Was it really a progressive milestone that the combat aircraft in last year’s Super Bowl flyover were operated and maintained entirely by female crews? Put differently, are the bullets and bombs of trans Black G.I. Jane somehow more tolerant and less deadly than cis White G.I. Joe’s?
A progressive military shouldn’t stop with “more Black faces in high places,” more female generals “leaning in” around conference tables, and similar so-called triumphs for diversity. Consider Lloyd Austin, the first Black secretary of defense, whose views and actions have been little different from those of former Defense Secretaries James Mattis or Donald Rumsfeld, and whose background as a retired Army four-star general and well-paid former board member of Raytheon makes him the very stereotype of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex.
No, all-female air crews aren’t nearly enough. Indeed, they are, I’d argue, a form of “woke” camouflage for a predatory military leopard that refuses to change its spots — or curb its appetite."
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I used to believe in all the quotes you listed. Modern times have made me sadly question these two.“A lie is like a snowball; it starts off small and then grows and grows until a point where it gets so big it falls apart and then the truth is discovered.”
— Chris Hughes“You can’t outrun a lie forever. Eventually, you just end up hurting the people you care about. Sometimes it’s easier to just face the music and accept the fact that you made a mistake.”
— Nate "Commander Steel" Heywood
"In Greek [Orthodox] popular culture... excommunicates were considered incapable of normal mortal decay at death. Instead, they became an undead creature called a tympanianos, because the undecayed body of one of these unfortunates was said to become swollen until it was taut as a drum.”
-Diarmaid MacCollough, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years
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*debeverages*
"Gather round, children, and let me read you the tale of Tim Panianos, the Bloated Heretic..."
I can't see how that could possibly go wrong.
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"You have to have some semblance of a marketplace of ideas if you want to have smart policies, because the fact is that governments often times do stupid things, or they pursue policies that look like they’re correct at the time but prove to be disastrous, and you want to have lots of people who disagree with those policies having an opportunity to voice their opinions before the policy is launched and after the policy is launched. But in this day and age, that’s very difficult to do, and that’s very depressing and distressing."
- John Mearsheimer
"You have to have some semblance of a marketplace of ideas if you want to have smart policies, because the fact is that governments often times do stupid things, or they pursue policies that look like they’re correct at the time but prove to be disastrous, and you want to have lots of people who disagree with those policies having an opportunity to voice their opinions before the policy is launched and after the policy is launched. But in this day and age, that’s very difficult to do, and that’s very depressing and distressing."
- John Mearsheimer
Shiro's solution is to require that every new law or policy be vetted by gamers actively gaming and trying to out-compete each other.
There is no quicker way to find the exploits and failures in your policy.
"What, then, is a human? A human is dust plus the breath of God. Humans are made to be gardeners but make themselves city-dwellers. They are made to be stewards of nature but they end up at war with it. They are made to walk with God and His creation, but they end up ashamed of how they were made. They are made to be co-creators, but they choose to go it alone. They choose their own small wills over the great will of God, which flows through all creation like a river through a plain."
- Paul Kingsnorth
"Do you know there is an eleventh commandment not recorded in the Bible, and it says, 'Love the trees.' Those who do not love trees do not love Christ."
- St. Amphilochios of Patmos
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"What, then, is a human? A human is dust plus the breath of God. Humans are made to be gardeners but make themselves city-dwellers. They are made to be stewards of nature but they end up at war with it. They are made to walk with God and His creation, but they end up ashamed of how they were made. They are made to be co-creators, but they choose to go it alone. They choose their own small wills over the great will of God, which flows through all creation like a river through a plain."
- Paul Kingsnorth"Do you know there is an eleventh commandment not recorded in the Bible, and it says, 'Love the trees.' Those who do not love trees do not love Christ."
- St. Amphilochios of Patmos
A miserable pile of secrets!
"What, then, is a human?A miserable pile of secrets!
...
The Big Lebowski (David Huddleston): "What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?"
The Dude (Jeff Briges): "Dude."
The Big Lebowski: "Huh?"
The Dude: "Uhh... I don't know, sir."
The Big Lebowski: "Is it being prepared to do the right thing, whatever the cost? Isn't that what makes a man?"
The Dude: "Sure, that and a pair of testicles."
- The Big Lebowski (1998)
"When I grow up, I want to be a principal or a caterpillar."
- Ralph Wiggum
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"In Greek [Orthodox] popular culture... excommunicates were considered incapable of normal mortal decay at death. Instead, they became an undead creature called a tympanianos, because the undecayed body of one of these unfortunates was said to become swollen until it was taut as a drum.”
-Diarmaid MacCollough, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years
"The governing class, around the world, is made up largely of debate club kids who went from high school to college to government, with little side trips into non-profit activist jobs. Their training and enculturation has prepared them to go to meetings and give speeches with an eye toward the optics of the performance, end of statement."
- Chris Bray
it's a true shame that we can't downvote horrible things on these forums.
-- me, just now
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"There's something entertaining about a generation lambasting previous authors and creators when they live in an entire generation of stagnation and propaganda, where originality is stifled if not outright lambasted in favor of mass appeal."
― "Corporate Dog", City of Heroes player
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"A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age."
- C.S. Lewis
"Yip,yip yip! Brinnnggggg!:
Things are gonna slide in all directions / Won't be nothing nothing you can't measure anymore / The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold / And it has overturned the order of the soul
- Leonard Cohen, "The Future"
"Be brave, you can do it! Make your own pie crust!"
- Jon Townsend
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"The momentum of a state is always towards the centre; always towards the agglomeration of more power. No ‘conspiracy theory’ is necessary for any of this to be true, and neither do the people running the state need to be evil. It is simply the logic of the thing."
- Paul Kingsnorth