Quotes
It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society -- Jiddu Krishnamurti
🤔 “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” -- Winston Churchill
🤔 "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed things up and creatures and then retreated back into their money, or their vast carelessness... and let other people clean up the mess." -- Scott Fitzgerald "The Great Gatsby".
- As quoted in a apologetic article of American Imperialism in October, 2001: The Politics of Rage: Why Do ?
https://www.newsweek.com/politics-rage-why-do-they-hate-us-154345
My critique of this article in 2004: https://bailey83221.livejournal.com/716.html
File:Careless people great gatsby reckless americans.jpg
Collective Guilt
To ignore evil is to become accomplice to it -- Martin Luther King
The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything. -- Albert Einstein
“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.” — Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
If you are neutral on situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor - Desmond Tutu
Valor and Bravery - Hope in the face of conflict
"There are moments in life when you must act even though you cannot carry your best friends with you. The still small voice within you must always be the final arbiter when there is a conflict of duty." -- Mahatma Gandhi
Be strong enough to stand alone, be yourself enough to stand apart, but be wise enough to stand together when the time comes.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. -- Margaret Mead
There are moments in life when you must act even though you cannot carry your best friends with you. The still small voice within you must always be the final arbiter when there is a conflict of duty. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter -- Martin Luther King
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950) , Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
кто не рискует, тот не пьет шампанского - There is no champagne without risk.[1]
"Jump and the net will appear"
Be the change you want to see in the World -- Mahatma Gandhi
Death
After the age of 50 we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others. -- Julio Cortazar
File:303659-Julio-Cort-zar-Quote-After-the-age-of-50-we-begin-to-die-little-by.jpg
Nature knows neither creation nor destruction. Nature knows only transformation.
-- Verner Von Braun
To sort
“To know one country is to know none" - Seymour Martin Lipset, Sociologist
The French have a saying, “Quand on connait sa maladie, on est à moitié guéri”—“When you know your sickness, you are halfway cured.”
"No, I'm not a pessimist. At some point the world shits on everybody. Pretending it ain't shit makes you an idiot, not an optimist." Reference:http://shitmydadsays.com/
Some thoughts should never be conceived. Some questions should never be asked, because they have no answer, and the questions themselves serve only to haunt with grinding guilt and second-guessing. -- Slow Burn, Dead Fire (Zombie Book)
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.-- Maya Angelou
Hate is like drinking poison, and hoping the other guy dies -- St.Augustine
"An opinion can be argued with; a conviction is best shot." - Lawrence of Arabia - http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0918-04.htm
Wikipedia
"Wikipedia is a kind of truly collaborative and social platform [which] provides a good opportunity for sociologist...to better understand the evolution of social cognition - that is, the ability of a group of people to remember, think, and reason." -- Social Knowledge Dynamics: A Case Study on Modeling Wikipedia Benyun Shi doi=10.1.1.590.7210 https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.590.7210&rep=rep1&type=pdf
"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society" -- Jiddu Krishnamurti
New to sort
What I don't like about Washington is people do not let you know how they feel. They're very nice to your face and then they take a shiv or a machete and they stab it in your back. I don't like it. I'm a Wall Street guy and I’m more of a front-stabbing person, and I would rather people tell directly how I feel about them than this sort of nonsense. - Scaramucci [2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_(slang) in colleges:June 12, 2017
- "But there is another view (about safe spaces) that is now ascendant … It’s a horrible view, which is that ‘I need to be safe ideologically, I need to be safe emotionally, I just need to feel good all the time. And if someone else says something that I don’t like, that is a problem for everyone else, including the administration.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/safe-spaces-college-intolerant_b_58d957a6e4b02a2eaab66ccf
Williamson articulated the level of courage it can take to overcome the fear of allowing our outer life to reflect the power of which our inner life is aware:
- Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. (p. 190–191)
One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. — Martin Luther King (1963)
- In loving memory of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz and in deep appreciation of the trailblazer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
Be the change you want to see in the World -- Mahatma Gandhi
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter -- Martin Luther King
Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment; and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. -- George Bernard Shaw
I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.-- Helen Keller
A person begins to live only when he manages to surpass himself. -- Albert Einstein Russian: Человек начинает жить лишь тогда, когда ему удается превзойти самого себя. --Альберт Эйнштейн
When I was 5 years old, my mom always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy.” They told me I didn’t understand the assignment and I told them they didn’t understand life. -- John Lennon
A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog. -- Jack London
The only constant in life is change
The greatest enemy to prejudice is travel - Mark Twain
Ideologies
"If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself." - Rollo May
"A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still." -- Benjamin Franklin.
Cognitive dissonance
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
A person who finds a topic very confusing will often suspend judgment and keep right on believing in whatever he hopes is true. Over time, his questions lose urgency, and though not resolved, cease to become bothersome. Trust in a system will also help sustain a person through confusion until he reaches the point of no longer caring whether an answer is reasonable or not, or indeed, whether an answer even exists.
"When adults first become conscious of something new, they usually either attack or try to escape from it... Attack includes such mild forms as ridicule, and escape includes merely putting out of mind."
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity (clamness) opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
"In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either." --Mark Twain
Political repression in America…is American as apple pie
--American Inquisition: The Era of McCarthyism, Tape 9: Joe McCarthy and the Loss of China. Ellen Schrecker
"The lust for money may be distasteful, the desire for power ignoble, but neither will drive its devotees to the criminal excess of an idea on the march. Whether the idea is the triumph of the working class or of a master race, ideology leads to the graveyard." Corey Robin in the London Review of Books quoted here http://hnn.us/articles/24482.html
"Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, in what he called the law of the infinite cornucopia, stated that there was never a shortage of arguments to support any doctrine one wanted to believe in for whatever reasons."MICHAEL COOPER Parsing the Myths of the Midterm Election November 5, 2010
Beliefs never change
| Adam Ruins Everything - Why Proving Someone Wrong Often Backfires
Your entire show's built around the idea that if you prevent someone with better information you can change their mind. But the surprising truth is disproving a misconception can actually strengthen a person's belief in that misconception. It's called the backfire effect. The More you prove someone wrong the more they think they're right. That can't be true I change people's minds every day. You just proved my point I presented you with information that goes against you thinking and you just dug right into your beliefs. one study found that when people concerned about side effects with a flu shot were informed it was safe they actually became less willing to get it but those so illogical how is it possible? Because when you try to change someone’s mind the other person often feels attacked. Being proven wrong actually activates the same area of the brain as real physical paint [Music] World star stay ?? you can. A right hook will hurt ya. But her right facts will too. Being proven wrong hurts so much it often causes a fight-or-flight response I gotta get out of here. Nope you need to hear this Why am i reacting like this? Normally I love learning new things Simple you're protecting your identity. It’s called identity protective cognition [Music]
http://www.trutv.com/shows/adam-ruins-everything/blog/adams-sources/emily-ruins-adam.html
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- Wikipedia: Confirmation bias - Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.
- Wikipedia: Backfire Effect
Bible versus
John 4:18: There is no fear in love, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love.
2 Timothy 1:7 For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.
- About hope in the face of conflict, overwhelming odds, and almost universal disdain, quotes
FIRST QUOTE: journalist I. F. Stone once wrote, "The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing - for the sheer fun and joy of it-to go right ahead and fight, knowing you're going to lose. You mustn't feel like a martyr. You've got to enjoy it."
SECOND QUOUTE: Los Angeles Times:The Idea That Brought Slavery to Its Knees "...The reverberations from what happened on this spot, on the late afternoon of May 22, 1787, eventually caught the attention of millions of people around the world, including the first and greatest student of what today we call civil society. The result of the series of events begun that afternoon in London, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville decades later, was "absolutely without precedent…. If you pore over the histories of all peoples, I doubt that you will find anything more extraordinary." The building that once stood at 2 George Yard was a bookstore and printing shop. The proprietor was James Phillips, publisher and printer for Britain's small community of Quakers. On that May afternoon, after the pressmen and typesetters had gone home for the day, 12 men filed through his doors. They formed themselves into a committee with what seemed to their fellow Londoners a hopelessly idealistic and impractical aim: ending first the slave trade and then slavery itself in the most powerful empire on Earth."
THIRD QUOTE: Zinn recently said: "My hope is that whatever you do to make a good life for yourself -- whether you become a teacher, or social worker, or business person, or lawyer, or poet, or scientist -- you will devote part of your life to making this a better world for your children, for all children. My hope is that your generation will demand an end to war, that your generation will do something that has not yet been done in history and wipe out the national boundaries that separate us from other human beings on this earth."
FOURTH QUOTE: The struggle for justice should never be abandoned on the ground that it is hopeless, because of the apparent overwhelming power of those in the world who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to their power. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, and patience—whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa; peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam; or workers and intellectuals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. No cold calculation of the balance of power should deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.
FIFTH QUOTE: “As Adam Hochschild points out, from the time the English Quakers first took on the issue of slavery, three quarters of a century passed before it was abolished it in Europe and America. Few if any working on the issue at the beginning lived to see its conclusion, when what had once seemed impossible suddenly began to look, in retrospect, inevitable.” “The African writer Laurens Van Der Post once said that no great new leaders were emerging because it was time for us to cease to be followers.”
Another quote: “a number of famous mainland Chinese dissidents find themselves in the paradoxical position of a backyard bush that blooms on the neighbour’s side of the wall: enjoying great international fame but not recognised by the general public in their own country, known only within a small circle of people”.[2]
Alexis de Tocqueville
Also see: Tocqueville
I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. The Americans, in their intercourse with strangers, appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise...They unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their entreaties they fall to praising themselves. It would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes. It seems, at first sight, as if all the minds of the Americans were formed upon one model, so accurately do they correspond in their manner of judging. A stranger does, indeed, sometimes meet with Americans who dissent from these rigorous formularies; with men who deplore the defects of the laws, the mutability and the ignorance of democracy; who even go so far as to observe the evil tendencies which impair the national character, and to point out such remedies as it might be possible to apply; but no one is there to hear these things besides yourself, and you, to whom these secret reflections are confided, are a stranger and a bird of passage. They are very ready to communicate truths which are useless to you, but they continue to hold a different language in public. In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own. Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom. The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through. An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting... As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?
Biography of Alexis de Tocqueville Download Tocqueville's three books for free: Democracy in America — Volume 1 Democracy in America — Volume 2American Institutions and Their Influence
Albert Einstein
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
I MADE ONE great mistake in my life, Albert Einstein admitted, when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made...
Zinn
Zinn quotes Kissinger in his first chapter, on page 9: ""History is the memory of states," wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen's policies. From his standpoint, the "peace" that Europe had before the French Revolution was "restored" by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere, except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation -- a world not restored but disintegrated."
- Seed of peace planted in Zinn
In World War 2, a passing conversation with an warplane gunner changed Howard Zinn's life forever. Zinn argued that America was not imperialist and went away troubles with what this stranger said. Two weeks later this warplane gunner was shot down and killed. Decades later Zinn became an anti-war activist and author of the seminal "A People's History of the United States" This bombardier never truly knew the last legacy of love and peace he created in this world.
Just and Unjust War excerpt:
[Zinn] flew the last bombing missions of the war, got my Air Medal and my battle stars. I was quietly proud of my participation in the great war to defeat fascism. But when I packed up my things at the end of the war and put my old navigation logs and snapshots and other mementos in a folder, I marked that folder, almost without thinking, "Never Again."
I'm still not sure why I did that, because it was not until years later that I began consciously to question the motives, the conduct, and the consequences of that crusade against fascism. The point was not that my abhorrence of fascism was in any way diminished. I still believed something had to be done to stop fascism. But that clear certainty of moral rightness that propelled me into the Air Force as an enthusiastic bombardier was now clouded over by many thoughts.
Perhaps my conversations with that gunner on the other crew, the one who loaned me The Yogi and the Commisar, gave me the first flickers of doubt. He spoke of the war as "an imperialist war," fought on both sides for national power. Britain and the United States opposed fascism only because it threatened their own control over resources and people. Yes, Hitler was a maniacal dictator and invader of other countries. But what of the British Empire and its long history of wars against native peoples to subdue them for the profit and glory of the empire? And the Soviet Union--was it not also a brutal dictatorship, concerned not with the working classes of the world but with its own national power?
I was puzzled. "Why," I asked my friend, "are you flying missions, risking your life, in a war you don't believe in?" His answer astonished me. "I'm here to speak to people like you."
I found out later he was a member of the Socialist Workers party; they opposed the war but believed that instead of evading military service they should enter it and propagandize against the war every moment they could. I couldn't understand this, but I was impressed by it. Two weeks after that conversation with him, he was killed on a mission over Germany.
https://quaker.org/legacy/co/Writings/JustAndUnjustWar.htm
Chomsky
"Cuba has probably been the target of more international terrorism than the rest of the world combined and, therefore, in the American ideological system it is regarded as the source of international terrorism, exactly as Orwell would have predicted."
"No less insidious is the cry for 'revolution,' at a time when not even the germs of new institutions exist, let alone the moral and political consciousness that could lead to a basic modification of social life. If there will be a 'revolution' in America today, it will no doubt be a move towards some variety of fascism. We must guard against the kind of revolutionary rhetoric that would have had Karl Marx burn down the British Museum because it was merely part of a repressive society. It would be criminal to overlook the serious flaws and inadequacies in our institutions, or to fail to utilize the substantial degree of freedom that most of us enjoy, within the framework of these flawed institutions, to modify them or even replace them by a better social order. One who pays some attention to history will not be surprised if those who cry most loudly that we must smash and destroy are later found among the administrators of some new system of repression."
Wikiquote on Chomsky http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/N
oam_Chomsky Wikipedia on Chomsky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N
20th century bogymen
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power."---Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Fascist Dictator of Italy
"Why of course the people don't want war ... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
In a memorable insight, Rebecca Solnit has suggested that the successes of social movements should often be measured not by their accomplishments, but by the disasters they prevent:
"What the larger movements have achieved is largely one of careers undestroyed, ideas uncensored, violence and intimidation uncommitted, injustices unperpetrated, rivers unpoisoned and undammed, bombs undropped, radiation unleaked, poisons unsprayed, wildernesses unviolated, countryside undeveloped, resources unextracted, species unexterminated."
The Iraqi resistance, one of the least expected and most powerful social movements of recent times, can lay claim to few positive results. In two years of excruciating (if escalating) fighting, the insurgents have seen their country progressively reduced to an ungovernable jungle of violence, disease, and hunger. But maybe, as Solnit suggests, their real achievement lies in what didn't happen. Despite the deepest desires of the Bush administration, to this day Iran remains uninvaded -- the horrors of devolving Iraq have, so far, prevented the unleashing of the plagues of war on its neighbor
American Sociology
As Ed the Sock said last night, politicians are just a reflection of society. We don't want unpleasant truths, and demand to be lied to so as to feel better, and then complain when things don't work out perfectly. George Carlin also blames the American people for the problems with politicians, as they all come from American schools, churches, families, exposed to the same media and then voted on by their peers. Society creates the hated politician, who then pretends to be liked to sell you a product, just like cat food or laundry detergent. (http://www.thecommentary.ca/a
"What should one write to ruin an adversary? The best thing is to prove that he is not one of us -- the stranger, alien, foreigner. To this end we create the category of the true family. We here, you and I, the authorities, are a true family. We live in unity, among our own kind. We have the same roof over our heads, we sit at the same table, we know how to get along with each other, how to help each other out. Unfortunately, we are not alone."
--Ryszard Kapuscinski in Shah of Shahs
“…in Britain, empire was justified as a benevolent "white man's burden." And in the United States, empire does not even exist; "we" are merely protecting the causes of freedom, democracy, and justice worldwide.”
--The Editors, "After the attacks…the war on terrorism", Monthly Review, 53, 6, Nov., 2001. P 7
"Explanation is not a justification for murder, criticism is not equivalent to treason, and offering a historical analysis of evil is not the same thing as consorting with evil."
--Eric Foner rejecting the arguments that "Trying to understand the 9/11 terrorists grievances is treasonous"
“When we are reduced to insisting that our depravity isn't as bad as the other guy's, we have fallen deep into a pit of moral equivalence that reveals what we have lost."
"Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy."
"ALL empires die of indigestion," said Napoleon. They do. They bite off more than they can chew, swallow territories their colonial systems can't digest, and die. --The empire that is dead The Herald (Glasgow) August 1, 1996
Kerry will change his views to fit the facts; Bush will change the facts to fit his views
Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism...Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves nobler, better, grander, more intelligent than those living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.
"The loud little handful will shout for war. The pulpit will warily and cautiously protest at first…The great mass of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes, and will try to make out why there should be a war, and they will say earnestly and indignantly: ‘It is unjust and dishonorable and there is no need for war.' Then the few will shout even louder…Before long you will see a curious thing: anti-war speakers will be stoned from the platform, and free speech will be strangled by hordes of furious men who still agree with the speakers but dare not admit it...Next, statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
"...people believe that "imperialism" won out for military reasons. Osborne shows convincingly that commerce won out instead. America...seen as an "economic imperialist nation."
Tens of millions of Americans, who neither know nor understand [their own country’s bloody historical struggle for the material benefits they all enjoy today], march in the army of the night with their Bibles held high. And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of mere reason.
43% of Americans have not read a book in the last year.
More American teenagers can name three of the Three Stooges than can name the three branches of government (59% to 41%)
The greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government.
Pentagon briefers told President Johnson that the true U.S. goals in Vietnam were, “70% to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat; 20% to keep South Vietnam (and adjacent territories) from Chinese hands; 10% to permit the people of Vietnam a better, freer way of life.”
My kind of loyalty is loyalty to one's country and not to one's institutions or officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing to watch over. Its institutions and clothing can wear out and become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags, that is a loyalty of unreason.' This is important because in the present discussion boundaries have been set, lines have been drawn. Those who go outside those boundaries and criticize official policy are called unpatriotic and disloyal. When they accuse dissenters of that they have forgotten the meaning of loyalty and patriotism. Patriotism does not mean support for your government. It means, as Mark Twain said, support for your country. --Howard Zinn, from the Artists in a Time of War CD
Where the "Disneyland" Quote comes from:
- Leftists like to explain the disaffection of working-class people with public education as a natural reaction to the patriotism, conformity, and civility pushed by what they call the “ideological state apparatus.” The object of education, according to this view, is to police class boundaries by transforming most kids into a unquestioning drones while selecting a small number of others for management positions. Kids from blue-collar homes are supposed to know intuitively that this is the case, and they respond accordingly, cutting class and getting high and listening to The Wall over and over again. A more nuanced version of this critique, the 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me, points out that high school American history textbooks give ”a Disney version of history”: heroic, egalitarian, jam-packed with progress, and almost entirely free of class conflict. Teaching such an “Officer Friendly” account of reality, the author concludes, is merely to “make school irrelevant to the major issues of the day.” The kids know bullshit when they see it.
- The disaffection of the Kansas conservatives with public education is almost precisely the opposite. They do not have a problem with the idea that schools should be designed to churn out low-wage workers; indeed, Kay O’Connor (A conservative Kansas state senator) told me that was a worthy goal. The Cons (conservative wing of the Republican party) are pissed off because they think the schools don’t provide enough Disney, enough Officer Friendly. --What's the Matter with Kansas?
copyright: piracy is not theft
Dataclysm: Repelling some people draws others all the closer
🙶Repelling some people draws others all the closer... “Beauty is looks you can never forget. A face should jolt, not soothe.” For as with music, as with movies, and as with a wide variety of human phenomena: a flaw is a powerful thing. Even at the person-to-person level, to be universally liked is to be relatively ignored. To be disliked by some is to be loved all the more by others. And, specifically, a woman’s overall sex appeal is enhanced when some men find her ugly.🙷
🙶Given that everyone on Earth has some kind of flaw, the real moral here is: be yourself and be brave about it.🙷
🙶Repelling some people draws others all the closer.🙷
🙶In any group of women who are all equally good-looking, the number of (online dating app) messages they get is highly correlated to the variance: from the pageant queens to the most homely women to the people right in between, the individuals who get the most affection will be the polarizing ones. And the effect isn’t small—being highly polarizing will in fact get you about 70 percent more messages. That means variance allows you to effectively jump several “leagues” up in the dating pecking order—for example, a very low-rated woman (20th percentile) with high variance in her votes gets hit on about as much as a typical woman in the 70th percentile. Part of that is because variance means, by definition, that more people like you a lot (as well as dislike you a lot).🙷
-- Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves, from the founder of the American dating App, OKCupid.
Media
“Walter Lippmann painstakingly demonstrated why no individual, however intelligent, educated, and motivated, was capable of becoming an expert, let alone being an "insider," on all the important issues of the day.
--Ignorance of the world has deep historical and cultural roots in the US
The media makes politics out to be "liberal" vs. "conservative" when in fact the real model is Corporate America vs. Everyone Else.
The media do not necessarily tell your what to think, but they tell you what to think about, and how to think about it.
--The Rise and Fall of Professional Journalism Robert McChesney
It is often noted that democracy requires journalism; what is less frequently emphasized is that journalism requires democracy. Unless there is strong political culture there will be little demand for excellent journalism.
--The Rise and Fall of Professional Journalism Robert McChesney
A politician stands a far greater chance to become the object of news media scrutiny if she or he is rumored to have not paid 10 parking tickets or if they failed to pay a bar bill than if they used their power to quietly funnel billions of public dollars to powerful special interests.
--The Rise and Fall of Professional Journalism Robert McChesney
A five year study of investigative journalism on TV news completed in 2002 determined that investigative journalism has all but disappeared on the nation’s commercial airwaves.
--The Rise and Fall of Professional Journalism Robert McChesney
In view of the fact that legitimate sources tend to be restricted to political and economic elites, this bias sometimes makes journalists appear to be stenographers to those in power; i.e. exactly what one would expect in an authoritarian society with little or no formal press freedom.
--The Rise and Fall of Professional Journalism Robert McChesney
This focus on government malfeasance and neglect of corporate misdeeds plays directly into the hands of those who wished to give more power and privileges to corporations, and undermine the ability of government to regulate in the public interest. As Ed Baker observes, professional practices, along with libel laws, “favor exposing governmental rather than private (corporate) wrongdoing”
--The Rise and Fall of Professional Journalism Robert McChesney
If the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped steadily for twenty years it would be front page and leading broadcast news day after day until the government took action. That 32 million of our population have their housing, food, and clothing “index” drop steadily for more than 30 years is worth only an occasional feature story about an individual or statistical fragments in the back pages of our most influential news organizations.
--Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly
"How many times does the end of the world as we know it need to arrive before we realise that it's not the end of the world as we know it?"
- --Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity Edited by Michael Lewis
American economy
we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3 of its population. Our real task...is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.... -- George F. Kennan
Miscellaneous quotes
If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us" --"The latern on the stern" The Economist, January 3, 2009, p 65. From On the Constitution of the Church and State By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Tact is for people who aren't witty enough to be sarcastic."
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
"It used to be believed that every event in the world-the opening of a morning glory...was due to direct microintervention by the Deity. The flower was unable to open by itself.God had to say “Hey, flower, open.” [Today]...because we know something about phototropism and plant hormones, we can understand the opening of the morning glory independent of divine mícrointervention...As we learn more and more about the universe, there seems less and less for God to do."
"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis"
"A man in life has many disciples, but it is always Judas who writes the biography."
"In our time, political speech and writing is largely the defense of the indefensible."
“Those looking for ideology in the White House should consider this: for the men who rule our world, rules are for other people. The powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on that most rarefied delicacy: impunity.”
"The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes." --Justice Felix Frankfurter [3]
"So long to the dreams that make men free." -James Miska, Pendleton Revisited
Pride
"Pride is a form of selfishness." -David Lawrence
US in Central America
What we see in Central America today would not be much different if Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union did not exist
--US Ambassador to Panama Ambler Moss, 1980
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - John F. Kennedy
The US became staunchly anti-revolutionary after its own revolution The United States has countered [Central American] revolutions with its military power. Washington's recent policy, this book argues, is historically consistent for two reasons: first, for more than a century (if not since 1790), North Americans have been staunchly antirevolutionary; and second, U.S. power has been the dominant power outside (and often inside) force shaping the societies against with Central Americans have rebelled. ... Washington officials have opposed radical change not because of pressure from public opinion. Throughout the twentieth century, the overwhelming number of North Americans could not have identified each of the five Central American nations on a map, let alone ticked off the region's sins that called for an application of U.S. force. The United States consistently feared and fought such change because it was a status quo power. It wanted stability, benefited from the ongoing system, and was therefore content to work with the military oligarchy complex that ruled most of Central America from the 1820ss to the 1980s. The world's leading revolutionary nation in the eighteenth century became the leading protector of the status quo in the twentieth century. Such protection was defensible when it meant protecting the more equitable societies of Western Europe and Japan, but became questionable when it meant bolstering poverty and inequality in Central America.
--Page 12, 13, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (The footnote states: This is argued in Eldon Kenworthy, “Reagan Rediscovers Monroe”, democracy 2 (July 1982): 80-90
US president’s racism and lust for empire Thomas Jefferson…interest in Latin America was extraordinary (he once remarked that young empire-builders should first study Spanish) Thomas Jefferson…concern about expanding U.S. power even led him in the 1780s to decide that it would be better if the Spanish held on to their territory “till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain if from them piece by piece”…His [belief in] Manifest Destiny…was shared by most of the other Founders, including Jefferson’s great political rival, Alexander Hamilton.
--Page 19 Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America
Theodore Roosevelt…the famed Rough Rider, who fought publicly…in Cuba during the 1898 war…called Latin Americans “Dagoes” because they were incapable of either governing themselves or—most important in Roosevelt’s hierarchy of values—maintaining order.
--Page 34 Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America
The US intervenes in Central America to bestow the blessings of stability myth That the United States intervened in Central America simply to stop revolutions and bestow the blessings of stability tells too little too simply. The motive for Washington’s policy in Central America was not to stop upheavals, but to promote U.S. interests. In El Salvador, for example, North Americans—both in the business and the diplomatic community—continually encouraged a revolutionary faction between 1906 and 1913 because they knew the faction was more pro-United States (and anti-European capital) than the actual, legitimate government. Interests and imperial rivalry, not morality and consistency, drove U.S. policies.
--Page 39 Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America
The 1907 Central American Court The 1907 Washington conference spun a web of agreements that were to make Central Americans more interdependent and—as the North American Progressives theorists of the time believed—more peaceful and cooperative. The meetings established a Central American Court of Justice…Future disputes were to go not to the battlefield, but the Court. The Central American Court quickly became the global symbol for the Progressives’ growing faith in legal arbitration for the settlement of disputes. One North American proudly wrote, “To the powers of Europe, to the great powers of the world who struggled with partial success…to establish a court of arbitral justice, the young republics of Central America may recall the scriptural phrase, ‘A little child shall led them.’” Retired steel billionaire Andrew Carnegie happily gave $100,000 for a building to house the Court. It turned out to be one of Carnegie’s few bad investments. Within nine years the institution was hollow because twice—in 1912 and 1916—the United states refused to recognize Court decisions that went against its interests in Nicaragua. The North Americans destroyed the Court they had helped to create, and in doing so vividly demonstrated how the Progressive faith in legal remedies was worthless when the dominant power in the area paced its own national interest over international legal institutions.
--Page 41-42 Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America
Reagan
El Salvador...is nearer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts. Central America is simply too close, and the strategic stakes are too high, for us to ignore the danger of governments seizing power there with ideological and military ties to the Soviet Union. -- American President Ronald Reaga Reference:http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=41034
The United States, said Ronald Reagan, "is engaged in a war on terrorism, a war for freedom" How familiar it all sounds. Merely replace Soviet Union and communism with al-Qaeda, and you are up to date. And it was all a fantasy. Reference: The Real Ronald Reagan, personal website
My quotes
The stark difference between two of the three boogeymen of the twentieth century, Moa and Stalin and the United States is that we don't kill our own populations, we just kill everyone else's. From here
Need to work on:
- In the marketplace of ideas some people are pickpockets. (basically some people have nothing to contribute in an argument/debate/conversation)
War
[America] is worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it. - Noam Chomsky
- As for those [who died] in the World Trade Center... they were civilians [which] formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire - the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved - and they did so both willingly and knowingly...To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in - and in many cases excelling at - it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective,...way of visiting some penalty...I'd really be interested in hearing about it. [They were "little Eichmanns"] Ward Churchill
- What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy? - Mahatma Gandhi
- I think the U.S. government enjoys playing with the stomachs of humanity.-- A Nicaraguan Mother
- It takes relatively few people and little support to disrupt the internal peace and economic stability of a small country.-- William Casey, CIA Director (From War Against the Poor: Low-Intensity Conflict and Christian Faith by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer)
- “If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care” Nelson Mandela just before the invasion of Iraq, Columbia Broadcasting System 2003.
- "Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or "disappeared", at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame." Amnesty International, 1996
- "We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth." -- New York Times columnist Sydney Schanberg, during the Gulf War. Beginning of documentary, War Made Easy - How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death. (Sydney Schanberg warned journalists not to forget "our unquestioning chorus of agreeability when Lyndon Johnson bamboozled us with his fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident." Schanberg blamed not only the press but also "the apparent amnesia of the wider American public.")
- Barbra Lee, Sept. 14, 2001: “However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint, Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control. And, she said: “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” The only politician who voted against giving war powers to Bush for invading Afghanistan. (Senate: 98 to 0, House 420 to 1)
Immaculate Genocide
American liberals support immaculate Genocide
The first concentration camps in the world were during the Boar War by the British in South Africa. The second country was America in the Philippine American War. Writing of the holocaust perpetrated by U.S. troops in the Philippines a century ago--an onslaught entailing orders that every male Filipino over the age of ten be slaughtered, and the resulting deaths of one in every six inhabitants on the island of Luzon --historian Stuart Creighton Miller describes "the tendency of highly patriotic Americans...to [vociferously] deny such abuses and even to assert that they could never exist in their country." The pattern is unmistakably similar to that exhibited by severe alcoholics who, despite all evidence of the damage their behavior has caused, chronically insist that "the opposite of everything is true."
More subtle than the characteristic refusal of "conservatives" to allow mere facts to in any way alter their core presumptions was/is the complementary nature of the "alternative" interpretation(s) most often posed by their "progressive" opponents. Noting that the Philippines genocide was a matter of public knowledge by 1901, Creighton Miller goes on to observe that collective "amnesia over the horrors of the war of conquest...set in early, during the summer of 1902." He then concludes by reflecting upon how "anti-imperialists aided the process by insisting that the conflict and its attendant atrocities had been the result of a conspiracy by a handful of leaders who carried out, through deceit and subterfuge, the policy and means of expansion overseas against the will of the majority of their countrymen."
"By refusing to acknowledge that most Americans had been bitten by the same bug that afflicted Roosevelt, Lodge, and Beveridge, anti-imperialists were letting the people off the hook and in their own way preserving the American sense of innocence. Unfortunately, the man in the street shared the dreams of world-power status, martial glory, and future wealth that would follow expansion. When the dream soured, the American people neither reacted with very much indignation, nor did they seem to retreat to their cherished political principles. If anything, they seemed to take their cues from their leader in the White House by first putting out of mind all the sordid episodes in the conquest, and then forgetting the entire war itself."
So it was then, the more so today. Contemporary conservatives, whenever they can be momentarily boxed into conceding one or another unsavory aspect of America's historical record, are forever insisting that whatever they've admitted can be "properly" understood only when viewed as an "exception to the rule," an "aberration," "atypical" to the point of "anamolousness." None have shown a readiness to address the question of exactly how many such "anomalies" might be required before they can be said to comprise "the rule" itself. When pressed, conservatives invariably retreat into a level of diversionary polemic excusable at best on elementary school playgrounds, arguing that anything "we have done is somehow excused by allegations that "they" have done things just as bad."
Progressives, on the other hand, while acknowledging many of America's more reprehensible features, have become far more refined in offering hook-free analyses than they were in 1902. No longer much preoccupied with such crudities as "conspiracy theory," they have become quite monolithic in attributing all things negative to handy abstractions like "capitalism," "the state," "structural oppression," and, yes, "the hierarchy." Hence, they have been able to conjure what might be termed the "miracle of immaculate genocide," a form of genocide, that is, in which--apart from a few amorphous "decision-making elites" --there are no actual perpetrators and no one who might "really" be deemed culpable by reason of complicity. The parallels between this "cutting edge" conception and the defense mounted by postwar Germans--including the nazis at Nuremberg--are as eerie as they are obvious.
Hitler's Willing Executioners - Americans are no different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_Willing_Executioners
Crises are like buses
'Useful metaphor: Crises are like buses
A bus goes to the same destination but it's carrying a bunch of random people who have very different priorities and very different goals. They'll ride this crisis for a while until it is no longer useful to them. It seems to me that this crisis is completely fictitious but that a lot of people including Putin are getting a lot of advantage out of it a lot of mileage out of it certainly people in Washington certainly people in London certainly people in Moscow. So it's if you look at it like that and you realize this crisis has been sort of like pushed along by a wide variety of different people then it starts to make a hell of a lot more sense. Because if you think of it as just like unicausal then it it becomes like just this one thing and you're like wondering well why are these things happening or this over here is happening. But if you realize that many people are on this bus and want it to go a certain way but not too far then it becomes a lot more understandable. I think it's a good useful heuristic for this situation
The Duran: On the ground in Ukraine on 'invasion day'
Family
- Thanksgiving is an emotional holiday. People travel thousands of miles to be with people the only see once a year. And discover once a year is way too often. –Johnny Carson.
External links
Hundreds more liberal quotes:
- Third World Traveler Quotations page
- Tens of thousands of Famous Quotes and Quotations at the site BrainyQuote
- Hundreds of Quotes about US
- OUR EMPIRE: COLLECTED DOCUMENTS
- Quotes for the Open minded Scientist The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit
Two legal systems
Anyone who is poor knows there are two legal systems: A corrupt legal system for the poor and one for everyone else.™
At the Bailey Law Firm justice is not an abstract term.
It's something we create everyday for our clients.
Lawyers suck The law profession should be called the "fear profession".
A person will come to an attorney either with a current legal problem (fear) or a potential legal problem (fear).
Attorneys usually will then create even more fear, then they tell the lay person to "trust me" they alone know what this afraid person can do to stop this fear. It is a wonderful way that attorneys personally enrich themselves. It is yet another example of the corrupting influence of money in American society.
In all of our dealings with other lawyers we have paid, we cannot think of a single time in which an attorney has stepped back and said, this maybe technically illegal, but the chances of you being prosecuted are infinitesimally small.
Again and again, we have paid an attorney to tell us the most expensive options available which would get them the most money. These attorneys will intentionally leave out free or low costs options which don't involve paying them.
There is a good reason why everyone hates lawyers. Attorneys suck.
Is our legal offices any different? We would sure like to think so. Contact us to find out.
Corporations: an era of corruption
[Picture: Presidental prophecy.jpg]
"The money power preys on the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes." --Abraham Lincoln
How we work From 80 to 92 percent of all cases settle.
There are two courts: a court of law and a court of public opinion.
If you can't get justice in traditional court, you can assuredly get justice by publicizing a corporation's bad acts.
Our goal is to get you compensation as quickly and painlessly as possible. We do this by threatening to publish the organizations bad acts on the internet. If they do not settle within two weeks, we viciously destroy their reputation.
[button to email]
[button to call]
How America silents dissent
No man can struggle with advantage against the spirit of his age and country, and however powerful a man may be, it is hard for him to make his contemporaries share feelings and ideas which run counter to the general run of their hopes and desires.
--Alexis de Tocqueville
"In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either." --Mark Twain
- The Overton window
Also known as the window of discourse, is the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
- The Spiral of Silence
File:Public opinion spiral of silence elisabeth noelle neumann.jpg
By Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann
👑 People who see that the dominant social attitudes contradict their own position, “fall silent”, to avoid expressing their point of view, because they are afraid to be in the minority.
👑 The more prevalent the prevailing point of view seems to them, the more they “fall silent”.
Public opinion does not exist
File:Question 24 public opinion pierre Bourdieu.jpg
Pierre Bourdieu "Public Opinion Does Not Exist", for the following reasons:
👑 Firstly, not all people are capable of producing their opinion.
👑 Secondly, not all people's opinions are significant.
👑 Third, asking everyone the same question implies the hypothesis that there is a consensus about the problem, that is, an agreement about which questions are worth asking.
Source:
File:kupdf.net public-opinion-does-not-exist pierre-bourdieu-1972.pdf
The Dunning Kruger effect. The dumber you are the smarter you think you are
- The Dunning Kruger effect. The dumber you are the smarter you think you are. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
Videos
Crimes of Obama and Hillary Clinton by Adam Saleh.
Obama and Hilary dropped 26,000 bombs on Libya, 7 countries in total [Trump is a war criminal too].[3]