unfutz

Goodbye, Yankee Stadium

2008-09-21T20:33:00.004-04:00

Friday Photography: Big City Little League

2008-06-01T23:46:00.004-04:00

Daryl Samuel
Location: Murphy Field,
Manhattan, New York City

Previous:
2006 & 2007 — 2008:
Tulips / Metal Tree / Ferry Terminal / White Rose / Taxi Flower / Child With Teacup / Stone House / Saint George and the Dragon / Fountain of Life / Dormer / Rusty Car / Sailboat

(3089/898) Tolkien on language

2008-04-01T21:40:00.001-04:00

2438) [N]o language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself. [...] For myself I would say that more than the interest and uses of the study of Welsh as an adminicle of English philology, more than the practical linguist's desire to acquire a knowledge of Welsh for the enlargement of his experience, more even than the interest and worth of the literature, older and newer, that is preserved in it, these two things seem important: Welsh is of this soil, this island, the senior language of the men of Britain; and Welsh is beautiful.

I will not attempt to say now what I mean by calling a language as a whole 'beautiful,' nor in what ways Welsh seems to me beautiful; for the mere recording of a person and if you will subjective perception of strong aesthetic pleasure in contact with Welsh, heard or read, is sufficient for my conclusion.

The basic pleasure in the phonetic elements of a language and in the style of their patterns, and then in a higher dimension, pleasure in the association of these word-forms with meanings, is of fundamental importance. This pleasure is quite distinct from the practical knowledge of a language, and not the same as an analytic understanding of its structure. It is simpler, deeper-rooted, and yet more immediate than the enjoyment of literature. Thought it may be allied to some of the elements in the appreciation of verse, it does not need any poets, other than the nameless artists who composed the language. It can be strongly felt in the simple contemplation of vocabulary, or even in a string of names.

[...] Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful,' especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful that, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful, Well then, in Welsh, for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.

The nature of this pleasure is difficult, perhaps impossible, to analyse. It cannot, of course, be discovered by structural analysis. No analysis will make one either like or dislike a language, even if it make more precise some of the features of style that are pleasing or distasteful. The pleasure is possibly felt most strongly in the study of a 'foreign' or second-learned language; but if so that may be attributed to two things: the learner meets in the other language desirable features that his own first-learned speech has denied to him; and in any case he escapes from the dulling of usage, especially inattentive usage.

[...] My cradle-tongue was English (with a dash of Afrikaans). French and Latin together were my first experience of second-learned language. Latin [...] seemed so normal that pleasure or distaste was equally inapplicable. French has given to me less of this pleasure than any other language with which I have sufficient acquaintance for this judgement. The fluidity of Greek, punctuated by hardness, and with its surface glitter, captivated me, even when I met it first only in Greek names, of history or mythology, and I tried to invent a language that would embody the Greekness of Greek (so far as it came through that garbled form); but part of the attraction was antiquity and alien remoteness (from me); it did not touch home. Spanish came my way by chance and greatly attracted me. It gave me strong pleasure, and still does - far more than any other language. [...]

Gothic was the first to take me by storm, to move my heart. It was the first of the old Germanic languages I ever met. [...] I have, in this peculiar sense, studied ('tasted' would be better) other languages since. Of all save one among them the most overwhelming pleasure was provided by Finnish, and I have never quite got over it.

[...] It would not be much use if I tried to illustrate by examples the pleasure that I got [from Medieval Welsh]. For, of course, the pleasure is not solely concerned with any word, any 'sound-pattern + meaning' by itself, but with its fitness also to a whole style. Even single notes of a large music may please in their place, but one cannot illustrate this pleasure (not even to those who have once heard the music) by repeating them in isolation. It is true that language differs from any 'large music' in that its whole is never heard, or at any rate is not heard through in a single period of concentration, but is apprehended from excerpts and examples. But to those who know Welsh at all a selection of words would seem random and absurd; to those who do not it would be inadequate under the lecturer's limitations, and if printed unnecessary.

Perhaps I might say just this - for it is not an analysis of Welsh, or of myself, that I am attempting, but an assertion of a feeling of pleasure, and of satisfaction (as of a want fulfilled) - it is the ordinary words for ordinary things that in Welsh I find so pleasing. [...] A translation is of no avail. For this pleasure is felt most immediately and acutely in the moment of association: that is in the reception (or imagination) of a word-form, which is felt to have a certain style, and the attribution to it of a meaning which is not received through it.
J.R.R. Tolkien
"English and Welsh" (lecture, 10/21/55)
Angles and Britons: O'Donnell Lectures (1963) and
The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (1983)
[Note: In a thread of messages (c.4/1/1997) on the Usenet newsgroup alt.usage.english (AUE), other suggestions were made of words that were considered "pretty" and "ugly":

Pretty: boondoggle, brook, Cambodia, cinnamon, clarity, crystal, crystalline, curmudgeon, ephemeral, floofy, fox, huge, moose, porcine, tequila.

Ugly: amenorrhea, autochthonous, carcass, cunt, diarrhea, doiley, drudge, dungeon, epistle, fungus, garter, Gingrich, kumquat, loquat, moist, mucus, peeve, phlegm, prepubescent, smegma, split, splotch, swing, synecdoche, syzygy, yarn.

As may be apparent from this list, it is very hard to evaluate the sound of a word divorced from its meaning, especially when the connotations are negative. Reference was also made in this thread to the Monty Python sketch in which "good" words were said to be "woody", and "bad" ones "tinny".]
2439) Wars are not favourable to delicate pleasures.
J.R.R. Tolkien
"A Secret Vice" (lecture, 1931)
The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (1983)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 293 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) From the New York Review

2008-04-01T20:50:00.005-04:00

2431) [T]he ability to harbor a certain amount of irony towards one object of study [...] enables you to remain at a critical distance, which is after all the gift of the true scholar.
Umberto Eco
"Murder in Chicago" in
New York Review of Books (4/10/1997)
[review of Eros, Magic and the Murder of
Professor Colianu by Ted Anton]

2432) Without the trust of the people, no government can stand.
Confucius
Analects 12/7
The Analects of Confucius
(trans. Simon Leys, 1996)
quoted by Jonathon Spence in
"What Confucius Said" in
New York Review of Books (4/10/1997)

2433) One may rob an army of its commander-in-chief; one cannot deprive the humblest man of his free will.
Confucius
Analects 9/26
The Analects of Confucius
(trans. Simon Leys, 1996)
quoted by Jonathon Spence in
"What Confucius Said" in
New York Review of Books (4/10/1997)

2434) [Education] is not simply a technical business of well-managed information processing, nor even simply a matter of applying "learning theories" to the classroom or using the results of subject-centered" achievement testing." It is a complex pursuit of fitting culture to the needs of its members and their ways of knowing to the needs of the culture.
Jerome Bruner
The Culture of Education (1997)
quoted by Clifford Geertz in
"Learning With Bruner" in
New York Review of Books (4/10/1997)

2435)
What does labor want?
We want more schoolhouses and less jails,
More books and less guns,
More learning and less vice,
More leisure and less greed,
More justice and less revenge,
We want more opportunities to cultivate our better nature.
Samuel Gompers
excerpt from a speech, inscribed on
a statue in San Antonio, Texas
quoted by Freeman Dyson in
"Can Science Be Ethical" in
New York Review of Books (4/10/1997)

2436) To protect the workers in their inalienable rights to a higher and better life; to protect them, not only as equals before the law, but also in their health, their homes, their firesides, their liberties as men, as workers, as citizens; to overcome and conquer prejudices and antagonism; to secure to them the right to life, and the opportunity to maintain that life; the right to be full sharers in the abundance which is the result of their brain and brawn, and the civilization of which they are the founders and the mainstay [...] The attainment of these is the glorious mission of the trade unions.
Samuel Gompers
speech (1898) [B16]

2437) In public discussions of biotechnology today, the idea of improving the human race by artificial means is widely condemned. The idea is repugnant because it conjures up visions of Nazi doctors sterilizing Jews and killing defective children. There are many good reasons for condemning forced sterilization and euthanasia. But the artificial improvement of human beings will come, one way or another, whether we like it or not, as soon as the progress of biological understanding makes it possible. When people are offered technical means to improve themselves and their children, no matter what they conceive improvement to mean, the offer will be accepted. Improvement may mean better health, longer life, a more cheerful disposition, a stronger heart, a smarter brain, the ability to earn more money as a rock star or baseball player or business executive. The technology of improvement may be hindered or delayed by regulation, but it cannot be permanently suppressed. Human improvement, like abortion today, will be officially disapproved, legally discouraged, or forbidden, but widely practiced. It will be seen by millions of citizens as a liberation from past constraints and injustices. Their freedom to choose cannot be permanently denied.
Freeman Dyson
"Can Science Be Ethical"
New York Review of Books (4/10/1997)

Sources
[B16] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (1993)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 293 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

Friday Photography: Sailboat

2008-03-25T03:54:00.001-04:00

Daryl Samuel
Location: Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands

Previous:
2006 & 2007 — 2008:
Tulips / Metal Tree / Ferry Terminal / White Rose / Taxi Flower / Child With Teacup / Stone House / Saint George and the Dragon / Fountain of Life / Dormer / Rusty Car

(3089/898) Quick takes: Religion

2008-03-24T22:03:00.003-04:00

2411) Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary (1911) [CQ]

2412) All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former – of the corruption of the will.
Alexander Herzen
From the Other Shore (1855) [CQ]

2413) To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
Eric Hoffer
The Passionate State of Mind (1955) [CQ]

2414) You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of religion. [...] Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough.
Aldous Huxley
"Amor Fati" in
Texts and Pretexts (1932) [CQ]

2415) There is noting more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained.
Suzanne Lafolette
"The Beginnings of Emancipation" in
Concerning Women (1926) [CQ]

2416) All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
Thomas Paine
The Age of Reason (1794) [CQ]

2417) The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
Salman Rushdie
"Is Nothing Sacred?" (lecture) (2/6/1990) [CQ]

2418) The main business of religions is to purify, control and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America (1840) [CQ]

2419) I cannot see how any man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious – except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force.
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals (c.1888) [CQ]

2420) Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
Oscar Wilde
"Phrases and Prophecies for the Use of the Young" in
Chameleon (12/1894)
[Note: cf. #1038 Feibleman]
2421) Old religious factions are volcanoes burnt out.
Edmund Burke
"Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians" in
The Works (1812)

2422) If you want to make a million [...] the quickest way is to start your own religion.
L. Ron Hubbard
speech to the Eastern Science Fiction Assoc. (1947)
quoted in L. Ron Hubbard (1987)
by B. Corydon and L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. [ODQ]

2423) To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a cult.
Dean Inge
Outspoken Essays (1920) [WHO]

2424) The religion of one seems madness unto another.
Sir Thomas Browne
Hydriotaphia (1658) [MAC]

2425) There are only two things in which the false professors of all religions have agreed: to persecute all other sects, and to plunder their own.
C.C. Colton
Lacon (1820) [MAC]

2426) A religious system is an assemblage of guesses.
anonymous
Meditations on Wall Street (1940) [MAC]

2427) Religion has brought forth criminal and impious deeds. [...] How many evils has religion caused.
Lucretius
De Rerum Natura (c. 45 BC) [MAC]

2428) Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal
Pensees (c. 1660) [MAC]

2429) The more religious a country is, the more crimes are committed in it.
Napoleon Bonaparte
to Gaspar Gourgaud (1/28/1817) [MAC]

2430) The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.
Voltaire
Philosophical Dictionary (1764) [MAC]

Sources

[CQ] - The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)
[ODQ] - The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 4th edition (1992)
[MAC] - The Macmillan Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Famous Phrases (1948)
[WHO] - Who Said What (1993)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 301 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

Friday Photography: Rusty Car

2008-03-19T21:05:00.003-04:00

Daryl Samuel (1995)
Location: Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu, New Mexico

see also: Photographer at Work
Previous:
2006 & 2007 — 2008:
Tulips / Metal Tree / Ferry Terminal / White Rose / Taxi Flower / Child With Teacup / Stone House / Saint George and the Dragon / Fountain of Life / Dormer

(3089/898) Hughes: The Culture of Complaint (2)

2008-03-16T20:37:00.001-04:00

2398) Much mud has been stirred up by the linkage of multiculturalism with political correctness. This has turned what ought to be a generous recognition of cultural diversity into a worthless symbolic program, clogged with lumpen-radical jargon. Its offshoot is the rhetoric of cultural separatism.

But separatism is not, as some conservatives insist, the inevitable result of multiculturalism. The two are in fact opposites.

Multiculturalism asserts that people with different roots can co-exist, that they can learn to read the image-banks of others, that they can and should look across the frontiers of race, language, gender and age without prejudice or illusion, and learn to think against the background of a hybridized society. It proposes - modestly enough - that some of the most interesting things in history and culture happen at the interface between cultures. It wants to study border situations, not only because they are fascinating in themselves, but because understanding them may bring with it a little hope for the world.

Separatism denies the value, even the possibility, of such a dialogue. It rejects exchange. It is multiculturalism gone sour, fragmented by despair and resentment, and (in America, if not in Bosnia-Herzegovina or the Middle-East) it seems doomed to fail. To use the cultural consequences of American diversity as a tool for breaking the American polity only breaks the tool itself.
Robert Hughes
"Multi-Culti and Its Discontents"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2399) [Y]ou can't see other cultures well until, through knowing your own, you reach a point where inclusiveness means something. Otherwise you're left with mere indecisive mush.
Robert Hughes
"Multi-Culti and Its Discontents"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2400) The future of American [elites], in a globalized economy without a Cold War, will lie with people who can think and act with informed grace across ethnic, cultural, [and] linguistic lines. [...] In the world that is coming, if you can't navigate difference, you've had it.
Robert Hughes
"Multi-Culti and Its Discontents"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2401) [The] clamorous dismissals and swooping assertions [of some historical revisionists] are in fact caricatural reductions of what the great revisionary gestures of feminism, subaltern or black studies, and anti-imperialist resistance originally intended, For such gestures it was never a matter of replacing one set of authorities and dogmas with another, nor of substituting one center for another. It was always a matter of opening and participating in a central strand of intellectual and cultural effort and of showing what had always been, though indiscernable, a part of it, like the work of women, or of blacks [...] but which had been either denied or derogated.
Edward Said
"The Politics of Knowledge" in
Raritan (Summer 1991)
quoted by Robert Hughes in
"Multi-Culti and Its Discontents"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2402) The need for absolute goodies and absolute baddies runs deep in us, but it drags history into propaganda and denies the humanity of the dead: their sins, their virtues, their efforts, their failures. To preserve complexity, and not flatten it under the weight of anachronistic moralizing, is part of the historian's task.
Robert Hughes
"Multi-Culti and Its Discontents"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2403) [T]he [American] West is archetypally the place where Big Government is distrusted, the land of the independent man going it alone. Yet much of it - states like Arizona, for instance - has depended, not marginally or occasionally, but always and totally, on Federal money from Washington for its economic existence. The Southwestern states could never have been settled at their present human density without immense expenditure of government funds on water-engineering. They are less the John Wayne than the Welfare Queen of American development.
Robert Hughes
"Multi-Culti and Its Discontents"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2404) All American migrant groups draw cultural identity, and a measure of spiritual strength, from a sense of their original roots - in Sicily or the Ionian Islands, in Ireland or Cuba, and in Africa. In longing for the womb they also sentimentalize and stereotype their origins; this, as any outsider who has attended a full-blast Irish beano in Boston can testify, is a powerful tribal instinct. But it ought to be recognized that the "Africa," the imagined entity of which Afrocentrists like to speak, is very largely a construction of this kind - a lost maternal paradise.

American blacks, no less than whites, belong to, and are shaped by American culture, to which they have so immensely contributed and into which their own imaginations and deeds are inextricably wound: all they have in common with African blacks is their genes and, in the case of African states that were once English colonies, the English language. To imagine that the cultural experience of an American black resembles that of a citizen of Zanzibar or Uganda or South Africa, beyond the basic fact that both have suffered the corrosive and demeaning effects of white racism, is fanciful.

[...] The idea that African-Americans have a place waiting for them in some generalized "Africa," in any but a vaguely metaphorical sense, is mere cultural demagogy. Neither black nor white can "go home again," except as tourists; their mutual home, with all its ideals, opportunities, conflicts and evils, is America, and they have no other.
Robert Hughes
"Multi-Culti and Its Discontents"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2405) Africa, Islam, and Europe all participated in black slavery, enforced it, profited from its miseries. But in the end, only Europe (including, here, North America) proved itself able to conceive of abolishing it; only the immense moral and intellectual force of the Enlightenment, brought to bear on the hideous oppression that slavery represented, was able - unevenly, and with great difficulty - to bring the trade to an end. That we now have so-called historians who are prepared to glass over this fact strikes me as remarkable. But then, in these latitudes, neither Occam's Razor nor the notion that the burden of proof rests on the person making the assertion has any force.

For here we come up against a cardinal rule of the PC attitude to oppression studies, Whatever a white European male historian or witness had to say must be suspect; the utterances of the oppressed person or group deserve instant credence, even if they're thee merest assertion. Now the claims of the victim do have to be heard, because they may cast new light on history, But they have to pass exactly the same tests as anyone else's, or debate fails and truth suffers. The PC cover for this is the idea that all statements about history are expressions of power: history is only written by the winners and truth is political and unknowable, unless some victim knows it in his or her bones.
Robert Hughes
"Multi-Culti and Its Discontents"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2406) Once law and morality are confused it is easy to arrive at such statements as "whatever is good ought to be legislated." That premise is band enough [but] the mixing up of the realm of law with the realm of morals, is deadly ... Law can tolerate evils that morality condemns [...] We have a good law if it will be obeyed, if it is enforceable, and if it is so prudently drafted that it avoids most of the harmful effects that could flow from it. If the law does none of these things it is a bad law, no matter what the logic or the moral intensity behind it.
Rev. Thomas Healy
President of the New York Public Library
testifying before the House Subcommittee
on Postsecondary Education (11/1989),
from Culture Wars: Documents from the
Recent Controversies in the Arts (1992)
quoted by Robert Hughes in
"Moral in Itself: Art and the Therapeutic Fallacy"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2407) [N]ature films [are] electronic wallpaper for the ecologically concerned, known to skeptics in the [television] trade as "bugs fucking to Mozart."
Robert Hughes
"Moral in Itself: Art and the Therapeutic Fallacy"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2408) Americans, though among the lightest taxed people on earth, are notoriously resistant to the adage that there is no civilization without taxation.
Robert Hughes
"Moral in Itself: Art and the Therapeutic Fallacy"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2409) Democracy's task in the field of art is to make the world safe for elitism. Not an elitism based on race or money or social position, but on skill and imagination. The embodiment of high ability and intense vision is the only thing that makes art popular. [...] The greatest spectacles in America are elitist to the core: football games, baseball games, basketball, and professional tennis. [...] Like sport, art is an arena in which elitism can display itself at a negligible cost in social harm.
Robert Hughes
"Moral in Itself: Art and the Therapeutic Fallacy"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2410) It is in the nature of human beings to discriminate, We make choices and judgments every day. These choices are part of real experience. They are influenced by others, of course, but they are fundamentally the result of a passive reaction to authority. And we know that one of the realest experiences in cultural life is that of inequality between books and musical performances and paintings and other works of art. Some things do strike us as better than others - more articulate, more radiant with consciousness. We may have difficulty saying why, but the experience remains. The pleasure principle is enormous in art, and those who would like to see it downgraded in favor of ideological utterance remind one of the English Puritans who opposed bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
Robert Hughes
"Moral in Itself: Art and the Therapeutic Fallacy"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 309 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

Friday Photography: Dormer on a Little House

2008-03-11T00:25:00.005-04:00

Daryl Samuel

Location: Philadelphia
Previous:
2006 & 2007 — 2008:
Tulips / Metal Tree / Ferry Terminal / White Rose / Taxi Flower / Child With Teacup / Stone House / Saint George and the Dragon / Fountain of Life

(3089/898) Hughes: The Culture of Complaint (1)

2008-03-10T23:29:00.004-04:00

2381) The all-pervasive claim to victimhood tops off America's long-cherished culture of therapeutics. To seem strong may only conceal a rickety scaffolding of denial, but to be vulnerable is to be invincible. Complaint gives you power - even when it's only the power of emotional bribery, of creating previously unnoticed levels of social guilt. Plead not guilty, and it's off with your head. The shifts this has produced may be seen everywhere, and their curious tendency is to make the "right" and the "left" converge. Consider the recent form of discussion of sexual issues, which revolve more and more around victimization.
Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2382) [I]t is worth remembering that although we tend to think of America as perpetually new, the fall of despotisms leave its form of government older and more continuous that any in Europe, older than the French revolution [...]
Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2383) The fundamental temper of America tends towards an existential ideal which can probably never be reached, but can never be discarded: equal rights to variety, to construct your life as you see fit, to choose your traveling companions. This has always been a heterogeneous country, and its cohesion, whatever cohesion it has, can only be based on mutual respect. There never was a core America in which everyone looked the same, spoke the same language, worshiped the same gods and believed the same things. [...] America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory.
Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2384) It is too simple to say that America is, or ever was, a melting pot. But it is also too simple to say none of it contents ever melted. No single metaphor can do justice to the complexity of cultural crossing and perfusion in America. American mutuality has no choice but to live in recognition of difference. But it is destroyed when those differences get raised into cultural ramparts. People once uses a dead metaphor - "balkanization" - to evoke the splitting of a field into sects, groups, little nodes of power. Now, on the dismembered corpse of Yugoslavia, whose "cultural differences" (or, to put it plainly, archaic religious and racial lunacies) have been set free by the death of Communism, we see what that stale figure of speech once meant and now means again. A Hobbesian world: the war of all on all, locked in blood-feud and theocratic hatred, the reduction ad insanitatem of America's mild and milky multiculturalism. What imperial rule, what Hapsburg tyranny or slothful dominion of Muscovite appartchiks, would not be preferable to this? Against this ghastly background, so remote from American experience since the Civil War, we now have our own conservatives promising a "culture war," while ignorant radicals orate about "separatism." They cannot know what demons they are frivolously invoking. If they did, they would fall silent in shame.

[...] The fact remains that America is a collective work of the imagination whose making never ends, and once that sense of collectivity and mutual respect is broken the possibilities of Americanness begin to unravel. If they are fraying now, it is because the politics of ideology has for the last twenty years weakened and in some areas broken the traditional American genius for consensus, for getting along by making up practical compromises to meet real social needs. [...]

In society as well as in farming, monoculture works poorly. It exhausts the soil. The social richness of America, so striking to the foreigner, comes from the diversity of its tribes. Its capacity for cohesion, for some spirit of common agreement on what is to be done, comes from the willingness of those tribes not to elevate their cultural differences into impassable barriers and ramparts, not to fetishize their "African-ness" or Italianita, which makes them distinct, as the expense of the Americanness, which gives them a vast common ground. Reading America is like a scanning a mosaic. If you look only at the big picture, you do not see its parts - the distinct glass tiles, each a different color. If you concentrate only on the tiles, you cannot see the picture.
Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2385) We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism. This conjunction fosters events that go beyond the wildest dream of satire - if satire existed in America anymore; perhaps the reason for its weakness is that reality has superseded it.
Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2386) If the first law of American corporate like is that deadwood floats, the corresponding rule of liberation-talk is that air expands.
Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2387) America has been lately full of occasions when someone prevents someone else from saying something and then denies it's a free speech issue.
Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2388) If [euphemisms] actual made people treat one another with more civility and understanding, there might be an argument for them. But they do no such thing. Seventy years ago, in polite white usage, blacks were called "colored people." Then they became "negroes." Then "blacks." Now, "African-Americans" or "persons of color" again. But for millions of white Americans, from the time of George Wallace to that of David Duke, they stayed niggers, and the shift of names has not altered the facts of racism, any more than the ritual announcement of Five-Year Plans and Great Leaps Forward turned the social disasters of Stalinism and Maoism into triumphs. The notion that you can change a situation by finding a newer and nicer word for it emerges from the old American habit of euphemism, circumlocution, and desperate confusion about etiquette, produced by the fear that the concrete will give offense. And it is a peculiarly American habit. [...]

No shifting of words is going to reduce the amount of bigotry in this or any society. But it does increase what the military mind so lucidly calls collateral damage in a target-rich environment - namely, the wounding of innocent language.
Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2389) Polarization is addictive. It is the crack of politics - a short intense rush that the system craves again and again, until it begins to collapse.
Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2390) If someone agrees with us on the aims and uses of culture, we think him objective; if not, we accuse him of politicizing the debate.
Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2391) The proper objection to left-wing argument at American universities is not that it exists, for it ought to exist and prosper freely - it's that so much of it is opaque, filled with jargon and devoted to marginal issues.
Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2392) A college degree is not necessary for most jobs that people do in the world, whereas literacy, numeracy and basic skills at interpreting information are absolutely so.
Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2393) Untrained in logical analysis, ill-equipped to develop and construct formal arguments about issues, unused to mining texts for deposits of factual material, [...] students fell back to the only position they could truly call their own: what they felt about things. When feelings and attitudes are the main referents of argument, to attack any position is automatically to insult its holder, or even assail his or her perceived "rights", every argumentum becomes ad hominem, approaching the condition of harassment, if not quite rape.
Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2394) [T]he appreciation of art and literature has no scientific basis whatever: one is dealing with the unquantifiable coin of feeling, intuition and (from time to time) moral judgment, and there is no objective "truth" to which criticism can lay "scientific" claim.
Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2395) Obsession with theory, combined with a complete lack of writing talent, creates the awful prose of academic lit-crit.
Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2396) In cultural matters the old division of right and left has come to look more like two Puritan sects, one plaintively conservative, the other posing as revolutionary but using academic complaint as a way of evading engagement in the real world. [...] One side needs the other, so that each can inflate its agenda into a chiliastic battle for the soul of America. Radical academic and cultural conservatives are now locked in a full-blown, mutually sustaining folie a deux, and the only person each dislikes more than the other is the one who tells both to lighten up. Such is the last mutation of America's Puritan heritage.
Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2397)
What does this sudden uneasiness mean,
and this confusion? (How grave their faces have become!)
Why are the streets and squares rapidly emptying.
and why is everyone going back home, so lost in thought?
    Because it is night and the barbarians have not come;
    and some men have arrived from the frontiers
    and they say that barbarians don't exist any longer.
And now what will become of us without barbarians?
    They were a kind of solution.
Constantine Cavafy
"Waiting for the Barbarians" (1904) [ODQ]
quoted by Robert Hughes in
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

Sources

[ODQ] - The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 4th edition (1992)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 315 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

Friday Photography: Fountain of Life

2008-03-01T20:45:00.002-05:00

Daryl Samuel
"Fountain of Life"
by Carl E. Teff
(1905)

Location: Mertz Library
New York Botanical Garden
Bronx, New York

Previous:
2006 & 2007 — 2008:
Tulips / Metal Tree / Ferry Terminal / White Rose / Taxi Flower / Child With Teacup / Stone House / Saint George and the Dragon

Nothing to see here, move along

2008-03-01T13:23:00.002-05:00

NY Times:

LAS VEGAS — A man who stayed in a Las Vegas hotel room where ricin was discovered on Thursday has been hospitalized in critical condition since Feb. 14 with symptoms consistent with exposure to the deadly toxin, Las Vegas police said Friday.

The man’s identity, age and hometown were being withheld on Friday as investigators tried to determine why ricin, as well as castor beans from which is it derived, were found in a room at an Extended Stay America hotel one mile west of the Las Vegas Strip.

Deputy Chief Kathleen Suey said the man had been staying in the room where the ricin was found for an unknown length of time and was leasing the room when the substance was discovered. A man, said to be a relative or friend of the sick man, had gone into the room to retrieve the patient’s belongings when he found the vials of white powder and showed it to the hotel’s manager, Deputy Chief Suey said.

Police were called by the hotel. The man had been hospitalized on Feb. 14 with respiratory distress but did not indicate to doctors that he may have been exposed to ricin, so the health district and police were not notified of the prospect, she said.

An evacuation ensued and seven people were taken to local hospitals for treatment, though they were released when they showed no signs of exposure, Deputy Chief Suey said. The hotel was reopened early Friday after public health officials determined they had found and removed all the ricin.

The patient has not yet been questioned and is believed to be unconscious, she said.

F.B.I. national spokesman Richard Kolko said the incident did not appear to be related to terrorism “based on the information gathered so far.” [Emphasis added]

This has become a knee-jerk hiccup on the part of authorities "No terrorism here, move along." One speck of ricin is sufficient to kill, and it has no other purpose whatsoever, so, please, don't tell me there's no terrorism here - it's the most reasonable explanation, and should be the default position until proven otherwise. I'm sure that's exactly how they're treating it, and they're just trying to keep us all calm by lying to us, but it's an insult to our intelligence.

(3089/898) Katz: Virtuous Reality

2008-02-29T20:30:00.002-05:00

2371) Americans have an extraordinary love-hate relationship with the rich culture they've created. They buy, watch and read it even as they ban, block and condemn it.
Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2372) THE MEDIA MANTRA: It's not that complicated. I can figure this out. I can make my own decisions about media, values and morality, I don't have to choose between traditional culture and the new media. I can live a happy and fulfilling life even if I never see the World Wide Web.

Whatever they should or shouldn't watch, however much time they spend online, my children are not dumb and they're not in danger from movies TV shows, music or computers. Many children - especially underclass children, really are suffering from horrific violence, and they need more and better parenting, better schools, fewer guns and drugs, and lots of job opportunities. If I'm so worried about kids, I will help them.

If I really want to protect my own children, I will make sure they have more, not less, access to this new cultural and technological world. I won't ever call them stupid for watching things I don't like. I don't have to be at war with them. I can work out a social contract with my children that protects them, guides them through their culture and brings peace and rationality to our house.
Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2373) Modern media companies are no longer run by powerful individuals willing to take the heat for their decisions, but by conglomerates of corporate lawyers, Wall Street analysts, directors and powerful stockholders - all of whom dread controversy and legal difficulties because negative publicity can adversely affect stock prices and mergers, or even call down federal regulation.
Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2374) It sometimes happens, that men who preach most vehemently about evil and the punishment of evil, so that they seem to have practically nothing else on their minds except sin, are really unconscious haters of other men. They think the world does not appreciate them, and this is their way of getting even.
Thomas Merton
Seeds of Reflection (1949)
quoted by Jon Katz in
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2375) Th[e] ancient conflict [between the forces of "good" and the forces of "evil"] echoes through the language, imagery and passion surrounding children and media. One brand of culture is good, the other satanic; one medium safe, another dangerous. The Mediaphobe continuously evokes evil in his battle to beat back the forces surrounding him - perversion, corruption, ignorance, debasement. But unthinking, centuries-old notions of good and evil bear little relevance to the cultural choices of the young. Nor do the prejudices and phobias of their parents.

Change is inevitable and pervasive. Short of the most Draconian kinds of censorship and Luddism, there is no stopping the new media and their young consumers. Perhaps it's time to start teaching children how to cope with sexually explicit imagery rather than persisting in the fiction that we can make it evaporate.
Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2376) A central tenet of the Mediaphobe is that guns don't kill people; unwholesome movies, tabloid telecasts, video games and rap music do. That new media are not only corrosive and decivilizing but literally dangerous.
Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2377) When someone offers a study purporting to show that the online culture is riddled with pornography and is dangerous to children, they are as happy to believe it and spread the message as they were to report that comic books threatened decency (in the forties), that rock and roll was dangerous (in the fifties), that video games turned kids violent (in the eighties).
Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2378) [G]rown-ups all seem to lose the neurological chip that enables them to call up their own youth. The point of much of adolescent culture is to be offensive, to individuate kids from their parents, to help define their own idea and values. Popular culture has been helping them to do that for a good half-century now.

Adult America - astonishingly, including the very baby boomers who, helped midwife rock and roll - takes pop culture literally, which is the worst and \more useless way to approach it. Beavis and Butt-head are not advocates of \stupidity but ironic commentators on it. The rhetorical style of many rap artists are absorbed by listeners not as literal advisories but as more complex expressions of attitude, values and group identity. [...]

The problem isn't that popular culture is eroding our civic and moral fabric, but that we take it far more seriously than its creators or consumers do; we give it more weight than it deserves

Concerns about how much time children spend unattended in front of screens or locked in their bedrooms with computers, are perfectly valid. Good parents always curb their children's unhealthy excesses, from overindulging in Chee-tos to joining a pack of neighborhood vandals. But the notion that exposure to pop culture is inherently dangerous is unsupported by research, statistics or common sense. We lose credibility with kids by giving it such weight. Most MTV watchers are safe, law-abiding, middle-class children; they know quite well that exposure to vulgar videos won't send them out into the streets packing guns or into their bedrooms wearing leather bustiers.

Years of battles over comics, rock and other forms of youth culture seem to have left us none the wiser. We tale the bait every time. Rather than engage our children in intelligent dialogue, we simply come across as the pompous out-to-lunch windbags many of us have become.
Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2379) Conscience is a conditioned reflex, psychological researcher Hans J. Eyseneck believes. Like Pavlov's salivating dogs, people develop automatic, unthinking reactions. Punished consistently by a beloved parent for telling a lie or stealing a cookie, we become nervous when lying or stealing, even if there is no chance of being caught.

So if parents teach morals, live moral lives, discourage and punish immoral behavior and treat their children in amoral way, the children are much more likely to act morally as adults. If the children are left to fend for themselves, are given no such encouragement, they may grow up without a strong moral sense. A child watches the moral judgments and decisions of his parents, his siblings and his peers, and factors in the degree of rationality and respect with which he is treated, in forming his own value system.

The idea that a TV show or a song lyric can transform a healthy, connected, grounded child into a dangerous monster is absurd, an irrational affront not only to science but to common sense, to what we know about the children in our lives. It is primarily the invention of politicians (who use it to frighten or rally supporters), of enduringly powerful religious groups (which can't teach the young doctrine and dogma without control), and of traditional journalism (which sees new media and new culture as menaces to its own once-powerful and highly profitable position in American society).
Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2380) In the end, America's cultural wars are as pointless as they are unwinnable. We have created the richest cultural life in the world. Some of the things our culture creates are garish and awful, some spectacular and brilliant. We get to decide which varieties we use. We get to introduce our children, carefully and thoughtfully, to a world of one-unimaginable variety, creativity and stimulation.

This seems cause for celebration, not alarm.
Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 325 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

This is encouraging

2008-02-28T16:49:00.002-05:00

FBI opens inquiry into whether Clemens lied to Congress about steroid use

I sure am glad the FBI has its priorities straight. After all, I wouldn't want them using their resources to catch criminals, break up organized crime, or figure out who sent anthrax through the mail and killed some people. Better they figure out if some over-the-hill asshole lied to Congress about cheating at playing a game.

(3089/898) The Internet Revolution

2008-02-28T02:29:00.001-05:00

2368) Like many European capitals, Belgrade is a delight for revolutionaries because of the concentration of government buildings all within walking distance. Unlike, say, Los Angeles, which sprawls willy-nilly, Belgrade seems designed to be shut down.
David S. Bennahum
"The Internet Revolution"
Wired (4/1997)

2369) The phrase tipping point comes from the study of how disease spreads through populations. Epidemiologists have long known that a disease can hover in a population for a long time at a stable rate of infection, then suddenly leap into an epidemic, spreading exponentially. This is the point where the disease "tips" from one state to another, and if you can define what triggers this point, reducing the disease becomes much easier.

[...] Malcolm Gladwell, a journalist with The New Yorker, told me how tipping-point theory had been successfully applied to social behavior, especially crime. Criminologists have speculated that crime is like a disease: a gradual escalation in petty crime can act as a tipping point, leading to an outbreak of violent crime. What they're really focusing on in the idea of crime - more specifically, fighting the spread of the idea that getting away with a small crime means you can get away with a serious crime. Or you could look at tipping points in fields such as advertising or politics. What crime, ads, and revolutions have in common is that they are predicated on the spread of ideas, ideas that travel along slowly through populations and then suddenly break out - spreading exponentially. What is the tipping point where criminals think they can get away with murder? Or shoppers decide new sneakers are worth a hundred dollars? Or citizens believe that a regime can be overthrown? Each of these systems has a tipping point, and clever people - be they police, ad executives, or revolutionaries - have an instinct for finding that putative sweet spot, using whatever means at their disposal to manipulate it, gain leverage, and tip the system.
David S. Bennahum
"The Internet Revolution"
Wired (4/1997)

2370) There is something about computers that seems to promote a certain culture, wherever in the world you may be. Some call this a hacker culture, others simply the computer culture. It is an eerie phenomenon to witness, because it implies that people react to technology in a similar way, whatever their environment may be. The cardinal ethic that binds the users of Sezam Pro [(an online community in Belgrade)] with, for instance, users of The Well or other homegrown BBS and Internet providers is the virtue of information transparency. The idea is that a system - whatever it may be - should be transparent, its topology visible to the uninitiated. In the case of software, this means supporting the continuing role of freeware and shareware, Unix and [the Internet protocols] TCP/IP - systems whose source code remains visible, uncompiled. In the case of politics, it means supporting systems where what you choose is what you get, according to a clear, transparent process.

The antithesis of information transparency is information opacity - the inability to distinguish the constituent parts of a system and how they interplay. Opacity is the absolute prerequisite for successful thought control [...]

[T]he experience of using the Internet bolsters the idea that people can be trusted to mind their own affairs and govern themselves. It is this idea - that there is something inherent about the Net that supports democracy - that the Data Conflicts conference ["Data Conflicts: Cyberspace and the Geo-Politics of Eastern Europe", held in Berlin in the winter of 1996] had attempted to answer, an idea I had found specious until I visited Serbia. Now, with a real case study at hand, it appears clear that access to the Internet is incompatible with authoritarianism, that regimes around the world that want the benefits of the information age while maintaining a lock on information transparency are facing a paradox. Like matter and antimatter, information transparency and information opacity cannot coexist for long. They come from different universes.

[...] The question, which remains unanswered, is what percentage of a population, once wired, marks the tipping point of no return to authoritarianism. Is it 1 percent, 2 percent, or 50 percent? Do these numbers hold true, like some constant, across cultures, or do they vary, requiring a different threshold in, say, China, than in Serbia?
David S. Bennahum
"The Internet Revolution"
Wired (4/1997)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 326 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) A more civil society?

2008-02-28T02:16:00.002-05:00

2367) Although online culture is widely perceived as hostile and chaotic, the stereotype is superficial. Writing for The Netizen, I noticed a recurring phenomenon that speaks both to [the contemporary] sense of alienation and to the potential for community.

As anyone who writes on the Web knows, criticism comes fast and furious. Some of it is cruel - even vicious. But as an experiment, I began responding to angry email as if it were civil, addressing the point being made instead of the tone of the message. The pattern was clear: at least three-quarters of the time, the most hostile emailers responded with apologies, often picking up the discussion as if it had been perfectly polite. In hundreds of instances, flamers said things like, "Sorry, but I had no idea you would actually read this," or "I never expected to get a reply."

Months of these exchanges have convinced me that alienation online - and perhaps offline as well - is not ingrained, that it comes from a reflexive assumption that powerful political and media institutions don't care, won't listen, and will not respond. Proven wrong, many of the most hostile flamers become faithful correspondents, often continuing to disagree - but in a civil way. I found myself listening more to them as well.

We were forming a new sort of media culture. In small ways, over time, we were moving beyond the head-butting that characterizes too many online discussions (offline ones, too) and engaging in actual dialog, the cornerstone of any real political political entity. We were finding that interactivity could bring a new kind of community, new ways of building political conversations.

Of all the prospects raised by the evolution of digital culture, the most tantalizing is the possibility that technology could fuse with politics to create a more civil society. It's the possibility that we could end up with a media and political culture in which people could amass factual material, voice their perspectives, confront other points of view, and discuss issues in a rational way.
Jon Katz
"Netizen: Birth of a Digital Nation"
Wired (4/1997)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 326 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

Friday Photography: Saint George and the Dragon

2008-02-25T22:15:00.008-05:00

Daryl Samuel
Ice sulpture by Eric Fontecchio and Alfred Georgs
(1999)

Location: Boston Common
Boston, Massachusetts

Previous:
2006 & 2007 — 2008:
Tulips / Metal Tree / Ferry Terminal / White Rose / Taxi Flower / Child With Teacup / Stone House

(3089/898) Why we need government

2008-02-25T21:45:00.001-05:00

2364) The policy debate in Washington DC has been framed in extremely simplistic terms for the last two years: excessive government regulation versus our brave private sector. But government regulation doesn't have to be restrictive, and our private sector sometimes needs help to do the right thing. Government has many tools, including eminent domain, taxing, licensing, public works, antitrust laws, and codes of conduct. These tolls can ensure that individuals get rights: parks to walk in, roads that are open to all, jobs that are available on a nondiscriminatory basis - and privacy in cyberspace.
Carl Malamud
"Building a Park on RSA"
in the "Idees Fortes" section of
Wired (10/1996)

2365) The government is exactly what makes capitalism and democracy able to coexist. Capital is not democratic. Capital and its organ-grinder's monkey, advertising, are coercive, manipulative, and solely self-interested. The government [...] is at least elected democratically. [...] History has shown repeatedly that wide gaps between rich and poor lead to instability - exactly the conditions in which capitalism suffers the most. Capitalism needs stability. In the 1890s and 1930s when this country became dangerously unstable, it was the government that stepped in and restored stability. [...] Capitalism and markets do not provide for all human needs.
Bob Klein
letter to the editor
Wired (2/1997)
[in response to the article
"Wealth If You Want It"
by W. Michael Cox in
Wired (11/1996)]

2366) When [...] engineers [...] looked at the way society worked, sometimes all they could see was infinite loops. Just open the newspaper. Politicians ensure that taxes are always high enough to campaign for re-election on the pledge to cut taxes. Meanwhile, the public complains that it wants its politicians to "discuss the real issues," which the politicians would be perfectly willing to do as soon as the public would stop caring about the first lady's haircut. The cure for this loop is the educational system, but that happens to be caught in its own loop. Our failed educational systems guarantee that students will graduate uneducated, thereby creating an even greater demand for more failed educational systems. Education could get out of its rut if the entertainment industry would just clean up its act, and the entertainment executives would happily clean up their act if the public would just stop clamoring for more flesh'n'blood. But flesh'n'blood was the great pacifier, and we needed it, particularly in hard times like these when taxes are so high. From the engineer's point of view [...] - a vantage point that they considered, without question, to be outside the "system" - society had somehow entered into an infinite loop and stopped responding.
Po Bronson
"Building the VW of PCs"
Wired (3/1997)
[excerpt from The First $20 Million
is Always the Hardest (1997)]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 329 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Information and data

2008-02-25T21:26:00.002-05:00

2360) Information isn't always power - just ask a librarian.
David Brake (attributed)
quoted in the "Idees Fortes" section of
Wired (2/1997)

2361) In a world glutted with information, constant updates are not only a diminishing asset, they are becoming a dangerous distraction. Watching could be hazardous to our health. [...] Since the dawn of time, humans have constructed a quilt of community understanding out of new information. In a world of information scarcity, messenger-journalists performed the vital service of acquiring and transmitting fresh data. [...] Then information came into abundance. Data is now so plentiful that consumers face the curious hazard of an information glut. We cannot keep up with the information we produce. [...] Today's challenge is to manage the vast quantity of information we already have stored up [...] to share this information with each other, to manage it thoughtfully, and to transform it into knowledge inside millions of individual brains. This is not so much fact-hunting as it is data-gardening. [...] Journalists who limit their role to news flashes are absolving themselves of their overarching obligation to the audience. In our new world, reporters must become more like teachers, and we all must learn the skills of the librarian. Information management is the fuel for our thriving civilization.
David Shenk
"More Is Less"
"Idees Fortes" section of
Wired (2/1997)

2362) I'm convinced a new kind of social responsibility is emerging - an imperative to be succinct. Just as we've had to curtail our gaseous emissions in an increasingly smoggy world, the information glut demands that we be more economical about what we say, write, and post online. With time an ever more valuable commodity, the long-winded are beginning to resemble people who open their door at a stoplight to dump trash onto the street.

We now have the means to publish anything we wish. If we don't respect our new information ecology, we will increasingly suffer from data anarchy and social dissolution. Technically, we'll have access to a phenomenal vat of information, but in practical terms, we'll become so specialized and distracted that we'll share less and less with our fellow citizens. Give a hoot, don't info-pollute.
David Shenk
"A New Brevity" in
the "Idees Fortes" section of
Wired (7/1996)

2363) The twilight zone between living memory and written history is one of the favorite breeding places of mythology.
C. Vann Woodward
The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955)
quoted in the "Idees Fortes" section of
Wired (2/1997)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 329 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Observations, big and little

2008-02-22T11:09:00.001-05:00

2356) Scientific research has its own geography, with well-explored continents and treacherous peaks. Although individuals are familiar with their own fields, no one can fit it all together.

That's why a technique for visualizing such research holds such promise. Developed at Sandia National Laboratories, the algorithms will soon analyze connections between three million papers. The data is them represented as a three-dimensional landscape, where a mountain range signifying hot research issues in biology may connect to an area in physics by a narrow ridge.

What might we learn from such a map? "Connections that were previously hidden," suggests Chuck Meyers, project manager at Sandia. At the very least, a map of all research would function like a world map: it would give us a sense of perspective.
Steve G. Steinberg
"Mapping Science" in the
"Electric World" section of
Wired (1/1997)

2357) Imagine having to publish a story the way films are made. The publisher does the outline, then turns it over to you, the "writer," and says, "OK, write the story." You write it, but once you've written [it] there's no such thing as being able to take words out and change them around. Then you turn it over to me, the editor. The editor says, "Now, I'm going to put it in my word processor. I'm going to move everything around.," and he does. You get to check in once in a while and say, "No, no, that's not what I meant. I meant this." "Oh, really, I had no idea that's what you were talking about. OK, I'll put that." And then you turn it over to the printer, the printer retypes it however he wants, and then prints it that way. Then you say, "But you can't do that!" That is the way it's done in movies. [...]

The film business is designed in a kind of industrial way, vaguely the way buildings are built. The architect does the blueprint and turns it over to the contractor. The contractor then follows the instructions, and if nobody is there to say. "wait, wait, wait," and if nobody goes in and makes those change orders - which, of course, nobody wants to do because it's very expensive - you end up with a building that's only sort of interesting. I'm of a carpenter mentality. I have a rough idea of what I want to do, but I'm going to start hammering, and then when I get along here, I'll take a look at it and say, "We should move this wall here, and it would be even better." A lot of Victorian houses were built that way.... If you are a good craftsman, you really know what to do, and you understand the structure, you can build a very nice building, but it's very organic. It feels better than something that someone who had a set of plans bolted together.
George Lucas
interviewed by Kevin Kelly and Paula Parisi in
"Beyond Star Wars: What's Next for George Lucas" in
Wired (2/1997)

2358) I am an ardent subscriber to the belief that people should own their own image, that you shouldn't be allowed to take anybody's picture without their permission. In the film business, that's the way it is. If I come here with my Panavision camera, and I take pictures of you guys and then put it in my movie without getting your permission, it's against the law. Now ABC News isn't any more or less commercial than a Paramount picture, but if I come in here with the same camera, do the same thing, and give it to ABC News, I can do it. My feeling is that we should simply make it all the same: nobody is allowed to use anybody's image unless they give them permission. It's not a matter of freedom of the press, because you can still write about people. You can still tell stories. It just means you can't use their image, and if they want you to use their image, then they'll give you permission. [...] That people should own their own images, which is true in primitive cultures, is something we've given away. It's become a cultural
thing.
George Lucas
interviewed by Kevin Kelly and Paula Parisi in
"Beyond Star Wars: What's Next for George Lucas" in
Wired (2/1997)

2359) Almost every religion has a faction that leans toward the baroque. Whether Jewish Cabalism or Tantric Hinduism, these groups share an affection for complex explanations, the supernatural, and arcane rituals. This same pattern exists in pop music. Almost every pop genre periodically turns to the over orchestrated sounds and pretentious lyrics of progressive rock. Currently there is a full-scale revival. The Orb sound like Pink Floyd, while Smashing Pumpkins imitates King Crimson. A sign of fin de millenium, or just bad taste?
Steve Steinberg
"Hype List" column in
Wired (3/1997)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 332 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

Friday Photography: Stone House

2008-02-16T13:59:00.005-05:00

Daryl Samuel
Location: Irvington, NY

Previous:
Photos posted in 2006 & 2007 / 2008: Tulips / Metal Tree / Ferry Terminal / White Rose / Taxi Flower / Child With Teacup

Did you know...

2008-02-13T03:11:00.004-05:00

Here's something interesting. I've just spent a half hour or so crunching some numbers, and I've determined that in the 23 primaries held so far (not counting caucuses), Obama has outpolled Clinton by 81,476 votes, but his edge has come entirely in primaries that are open -- that is, where any registered voter, of either party can participate in the primary of either party (but only one party). In open primaries, he leads Clinton by 1,222,739. In semi-open primaries, where only independents can chose one primary or the other but not Republicans, he falls behind Clinton by 657,157 votes, and in closed primaries, where only Democrats can vote, he's behind by 464,106.

So, once again, Obama's lead in accumulated votes has come from states in which Republicans are allowed to vote in Democratic primaries.

           CLINTON      OBAMA    OBAMA LEAD 
OPEN      2,969,579   4,192,318   1,222,739 
SEMI-OPEN 3,582,388   2,925,231    -657,157 
CLOSED    2,838,742   2,354,636    -484,106 
    
TOTAL     9,390,709   9,472,185      81,476

[Numbers from CNN]

Now, that's interesting, but it's not definitive. I'd like to have some figures on how those Republican voted, but I'm not sure those are available except maybe in some of the exit poll data. Also, I'd want to know what part of the estimated 1,215 delegates Obama has (to Clinton's 1,190) were awarded to him on the basis of those open primaries, but I haven't researched those numbers yet.

Addendum: It's been suggested that a more innocuous, indeed positive, explanation of Obama's popularity in open primaries is simply that his appeal is not restricted to Democrats, but is wider than that. But, if that was the case, wouldn't he have done better in semi-open primaries, where only independents can "cross-over"? It's the combination of the two factors which is so suggestive.

(3089/898) Quickly quickly...

2008-02-13T01:27:00.002-05:00

2350) Zen Mail: Email messages that arrive with no text in the message body.
Gareth Branwyn (editor)
"Jargon Watch"
Wired (10/1996)

2351) Accounts of alien abductions have become as stylized as Kabuki dramas.
Dennis Overbye
"On the Trail of SETI" in
Wired magazine (1/1997)

2352) On [the] question of human freedom, if you assume there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, etc., there's a chance you may contribute to making a better world. That's your choice.
Noam Chomsky
quoted by David Barsamian in
Noam Chomsky: Chronicles of Dissent (1992)
quoted in the "Idees Fortes" section of
Wired (1/1997)

2353) [T]he paranoid style in American politics [...] [is] [...] the sense that all our ills can be traced to a single center and hence can be eliminated by some kind of final act of victory over the evil source.

Richard Hofstadter
(c.1967)
quoted by Tom Dowe in
"Netizen: News You Can Abuse" in
Wired (1/1997)

2354) The confusion of style with substance is fostered by any situation that allows advertising to be integrated into its fabric and format.
Martha Rosler
"Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations: Some Consideration" (1994)
Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001 (2004)
quoted in the "Idees Fortes" section of
Wired (3/1997)

2355) Say you're a spoon-hater: you're the Unabomber of spoons - you must eliminate them all and everyone who's ever used then until you have a spoon-free universe. It's not going to happen; when something's been invented, it's not going away.
Douglas Coupland (attributed)
quoted in the "Idees Fortes" section of
Wired (3/1997)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 341 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

Friday Photography: Child with Teacup

2008-02-10T13:51:00.000-05:00

Daryl Samuel

Previous:

Photos posted in 2006 & 2007

2008: Tulips / Metal Tree / Ferry Terminal / White Rose / Taxi Flower

(3089/898) Barlow: The Powers That Were

2008-02-06T01:00:00.002-05:00

2347) In a democratic society, it's dangerous for elected officials to ignore the body politic. But what if it has been driven mad by television? What if the duties of the citizenry have been abandoned by most of those that are still sane? Thomas Jefferson never imagined the conduct of democracy in the thrall of a mass medium.
John Perry Barlow
"The Netizen: The Powers That Were"
Wired (9/1996)

2348) That subset of Americans who still exercise their [voting] franchise -The Market, if you will - tend to be much older, whiter, and more socially conservative than the population in general. The live mostly in suburbs, shop in malls, work for large organizations, and go to church on Sunday. Creatures of a mass society, living in a culture created by mass media. Genericans. Not a bad lot, really. Decent people, most of them, with good judgment - if that judgment were well informed.

And that's the problem. For most of The Market, reality is, as I say, almost entirely based on The World According to Television. This has been the case since the Kennedy-Nixon debates and will continue to be the case for some time. The World According to Television is not a reality that arises from direct experience with events or phenomena. It is a processed world, both eviscerated of context and artifically fortified toward no greater purpose than entrancing the audience.

[... Television has] learned that fear, violence,and sex all fertilize attention marvelously, so it continually churns up virtual demons and scandals that not only jolt the audience into paying attention, but completely transform the political debate. Voters are now more concerned with imaginary threats than with real ones, and so they elect representatives who will address these "problems" without regard to their existence.

It's become a hung loop. Consider the process behind the following familiar example. Looking to raise share and beat back the future, the media raise an imaginary problem, say, a cyber-tsunami of online kiddie-porn. Out in Televisionland, parents who have already been driven into a state of omniphobia by TV depictions of kidnappers, child molesters, and Calvin Klein commercials, freak out and call their congressperson.

Of course, the congressperson doesn't actually know whether or not there's a flood of kiddie porn online. He (or she) has never been online and isn't about to go there. But he does know that his constituents have seized upon An Issue that they are truly passionate about. Under such circumstances, it takes a brave man to do nothing. So he gets together with his colleagues and passes a law that effectively addresses a problem almost no one has ever experienced, while issue forth a whole new set of real ones.

The is democracy in the Television Age, working with hideous efficiency. It is [...] Government by Hallucinating Mob. A push-me, pull-you that is self-contained and almost completely detached from anything that I would call "real." The US government has broken, the victim of television and of connection crash in general.
John Perry Barlow
"The Netizen: The Powers That Were"
Wired (9/1996)

2349) Stuart Kauffman at the Santa Fe Institute has studied "complexity catastrophe," in which an organism or natural system is forced by its context to process more information than it can. A frequent symptom of this kind of connection crash is fibrillation - a purposeless, resource-expensive quivering that usually culminates in system collapse. It could easily be said that Congress, indeed the entire government of the United States of America, has already reached this state. But however useless and wasteful I think it has become, there are enough Americans who believe in the comforting myth that their government still works, that its continued institutional existence probably contributes to a calm, however delusionary, among the People.
John Perry Barlow
"The Netizen: The Powers That Were"
Wired (9/1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 348 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) The Contrarian looks at Big Business

2008-02-05T23:56:00.000-05:00

2344) By and large, there are no more advantages to big business. There are only disadvantages. [...] Big companies had three advantages, and they are all gone. The first was that they could get transnational or international money that a medium-sized company could not. Now everyone can.

Number Two is information. It used to be that nobody had any information. But as you go more international, as the economy becomes more global, the access to good information becomes crucial. If you are a medium-sized company, then the CEO still knows every customer and still knows the industry. You can;t get that in the US$10 billion company; you get reports. Reports tell you what your subordinates want you to know.

The last and most important factor is that young, educated people do not want to work for the big institutions. That's true even in Japan today. [...]

[People who have chosen medium companies over big ones] often say, We would really like some security, but there ain't no such thing. All of them know those days are gone. So they say: If there's no security in the big companies, then why should I be bored to death? In that medium-sized company, I don't have the big job, but when somebody has to go to Shanghai to straighten out the distributor, I go. And I have fun.
Peter Drucker
interviewed by Peter Schwartz and Kevin Kelly in
"The Relentless Contrarian" in
Wired (8/1996)

2345) The model for management that we have right now is the opera. The conductor of the opera has a very large number of different groups that he has to pull together. The soloists, the chorus, the ballet, the orchestra, all have tocome together - but they have a common score. What we are increasingly talking about today are diversified groups that have to write the score while they perform.

What you need now is a good jazz group. And if you want to have a really good jazz group, how large can it be? How large can it be when you have people who improvise on their own and the group realizes that the trumpet player is now playing his solo and everybody needs to stop and support him? You can use seven to nine people - maximum. If you get more, you have to score.

So how can you have a big company or a very big organization when you have to develop the store as you go along? Today, you build different teams. Sounds beautiful. But nobody has found a way to do it.
Peter Drucker
interviewed by Peter Schwartz and Kevin Kelly in
"The Relentless Contrarian" in
Wired (8/1996)

2346) A lot of top [corporate] managers enjoy cruelty. There is no doubt that we are in a period in which you are a hero if you are cruel. In addition, what's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There's no excuse for it, no justification. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we'll pay a very nasty price.

J.P. Morgan, who certainly cannot be accused of not liking money, gave an order to his investment people never to invest in a company in which the CEO earned more than 30 percent more than the next layer. That CEO, he said, can't build a team, and the company is mismanaged. He also said once that the proper ratio for salaries for employed people, between the top people and the rank and file should be twentyfold, posttax. That's the highest. Beyond that, you create social tension.
Peter Drucker
interviewed by Peter Schwartz and Kevin Kelly in
"The Relentless Contrarian" in
Wired (8/1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 349 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) TV ... robots ... computers

2008-02-05T23:22:00.000-05:00

2339) Television is a medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well done.
Ernie Kovacs (widely attributed)
quoted in the "Idees Fortes" section of
Wired (7/1996)
[Note: Occasionally attributed to Fred Allen. Kovacs is credited with it, without citation, in The Filmgoer's Book of Quotes (1973) L. Halliwell, ed.]
2340) Television, huh? TV coverage absolves absolutely anything in America. If these guys [the Survival Research Laboratories] have been on 20/20, then they must know what they're doing, right?
Bruce Sterling
"Is Phoenix Burning?"
Wired (7/1996)

2341) A Calculated Forecast of Ultimate Doom - Sickening Episodes of Widespread Devastation Accompanied by Sensations of Pleasurable Excitement
Mark Pauline
title of a Survival Research Laboratories performance
quoted by Bruce Sterling in
"Is Phoenix Burning" in
Wired (7/1996)

2342) [T]he whole deadly clutter of postmodern tech is inherently fascinating in a particularly sickening and dangerous way that most of us cannot rationally sense. It's fascinating and evil, with the same imp-of-the-perverse element that makes humanity's automatic rifles look as lovely as a sonnet while the homes and buildings and cities where we work and live look like the crappy cartons those rifles came in.
Bruce Sterling
"Is Phoenix Burning?"
Wired (7/1996)

2343) People talk about making computers easier to use, but it usually ends up that humans are made easier for computers to use.
Jesse Freund
"Natural Correction" in
the "Idees Fortes" section of
Wired (9/1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 349 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Not optional

2008-02-04T05:30:00.000-05:00

2338) Reality is not optional.
Thomas Sowell
(widely attributed - see note)
quoted in the "Idees Fortes" section of
Wired (7/1996)
[Note: The only citation for Sowell originating this quotes is a column "Riots in France: The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris" published in November 2005, well after the present instance of the quotation. Since many attributions refer to "paraphrasing" Sowell, this might be something he wrote elsewhere in somewhat different form. See #286 Dick, #739 Huxley and #770 Huxley]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 350 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Metaworlds

2008-02-04T04:48:00.000-05:00

2333) The places I've seen online that flourish do so when people bring themselves to the table, contributing their own ingredients to a communal stew of ideas, opinions, and metaphors. Where you find people building relationships, sharing day-to-day experiences, teaching each other what they've learned about the world, and figuring out together how they're going to face the coming day - those are the places that thrive. Those are the places that people live in.

And they're never chat rooms. Everything in the chat room experience fights against depth and continuity. Chat room conversations always start from scratch; maintaining context from day to day is impossible. And chat is structured against thoughtfulness: if you don't say what's on your mind right now - you don't exist.
Robert Rossney
"Metaworlds" in
Wired (6/1996)

2334) Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun [...] I take culture to be those webs [...]
Clifford Geertz
The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
quoted by Robert Rossney in
"Metaworlds" in
Wired (6/1996)

2335) Hang out in one place online - whether it's a BBS, a chat room, or a newsgroup - and eventually you'll recognize people by the personas they've created. The blustering libertarian loony or the impossibly erudite Janacek aficionado are typical personas you might encounter online, These aren't people but personas: versions of these people's real-world selves that, mediated by their words, have been projected into the discussion space.
Robert Rossney
"Metaworlds" in
Wired (6/1996)

2336) [I]n today's online world, people seem like lions pacing in a zoo: they're dying to break out of the cage that text-only discourse puts them in. The smileys, ASCII graphics, strange spellings, and acronyms that you see everywhere online are all ways of rushing at the bars.

We need to communicate with more than words. Conversation in real life often consists more of hand-waving, facial expressions, raspberries, yawns, murmurs, and weird non-verbal vocalizations than of words strung together in a coherent fashion. [...] The ability to gesture, if we can figure out how to do it naturally, will allow us to construct entire visual languages that we can use in conjunction with textual utterances to add layers of nuance and subtlety to our verbal communications.
Robert Rossney
"Metaworlds" in
Wired (6/1996)

2337) The online world is full of things that are just like real life - but not quite. Email is not mail. A conference online is not the same thing as a conference in real life. Virtual communities share many attributes with real-world communities, but they differ in many ways.
Robert Rossney
"Metaworlds" in
Wired (6/1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 350 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) That economy stuff - and chaser

2008-02-04T04:22:00.000-05:00

2330) [T]he problem with the corporate control of America is that it is so completely undemocratic. [...] Why on earth should Americans be willing to allow the same people who have brought us rampant downsizing, widespread union-busting, wholesale exportation of industrial jobs to sweatshops, and the greatest division between wealth and poverty in the nation's history to increase their presence in our lives? [...] Our political system is based on the concept of one person/one vote, but our capitalist economy is strictly and clearly dedicated to the concept of one dollar/one vote. [...] To turn over public policy issues to private decision making is not merely a question of efficiency or economics. It is a profound choice about how decisions are made, who makes them, and what kind of society we live in.
Raven B. Earlygrow
letter to the editor
Wired (4/1996)
[response to "Is Government Obsolete"
by David Kline and Daniel Burstein in
Wired (1/1996)]

2331) The key to economic renewal lies not just in increased public sector investment in education and infrastructure. We also need collective action to ensure that a fair share of the wealth created by the new economy makes its way down to workers. Wages and benefits do not rise just because the government wants then too, they rise when people demand it. Maybe people can address these problems through traditional unions. Maybe people need a hybrid organization - a cross between a professional association and a traditional trade union. Or maybe people can come together and organize through cyberspace. But without collective action, we are all at the mercy of the new economy. This may come as anathema to Wired readers who promote the independent / entrepreneurial / libertarian values of high-tech culture. Yet, this much is certainly true - as long as we remain isolated in our cubicles we are going to get stomped like geeks at a grunge show.
Chris Benner
letter to the editor
Wired (6/1996)
[response to "It's the New Economy, Stupid"
by John Heilemann in
Wired (3/1996)]

2332) We can do anything we like as long as it is unimportant.
Theodore Kaczynski aka "The Unabomber"
"Industrial Society and Its Future" (aka "The Unabomber Manifesto")
(mis)quoted by Rolf von Richter in
letter to the editor in Wired (7/1996)
[response to "Americans Are Not As Free
As We Think We Are" by Charles Platt
in Wired (4/1996)]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 350 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

Friday Photography: Taxi Flower

2008-02-02T16:46:00.000-05:00

Daryl Samuel
Location: Manhattan, New York City

Previous:

Photos posted in 2006 & 2007

2008: Tulips / Metal Tree / Ferry Terminal / White Rose

(3089/898) Communication

2008-02-01T01:14:00.000-05:00

2326) The oldest pathway for which the brain is hard-wired is the narrative.
John Seely Brown (attributed)
quoted in the "Idees Fortes" section of
Wired (3/1996)

2327) Emotional communication usually relies on tone of voice, facial expression, and body language. How many hours (days?) have you lost trying to straighten out a miscommunication that occurred via email? Of course, you didn't mean it the way it "sounded." Your tone was misunderstood. We might say email is affect-limited. [...] Affect is important; if it's missing, people tend to fill it in and often wrongly.
Nicholas Negroponte
"Affective Computing" in
Wired (4/1996)

2328) ASCII [text] is humbling and exasperating - it's like trying to squeeze our pulpy, broadband fruitshake thoughts through a coffee straw. Without tonal cues, a piece of harmless sarcasm can turn into a two-week flame war. [...] And yet, ASCII is our United Nations, working against the overwhelming trend of cultural fragmentation. [...] With ASCII, we drop many of the nuanced signals from our ethnic, cultural, and professional tribes. We're forced to clarify our meaning so that anyone in any tribe can understand what we really mean.
David Shenk
"In Praise of ASCII" in the
"Idees Fortes" section of
Wired (4/1996)

2329) [The meme of subliminal advertising] is probably propagated by the same people who are too dense to realize that drinking a particular brand of beer won't transport you into a world of fawning robobabes.
Cathy Taylor
senior editor of new media, Adweek Magazine
quoted by David Pescovitz in
"Reality Check: The Future of Advertising" in
Wired (4/1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 353 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Luce and taxes and Marx (Oh, my!)

2008-01-29T23:02:00.000-05:00

2321) At a time when people are being bombarded daily with more and more headlines and more and more information, they are, ironically, becoming less informed.
Henry Luce
prospectus for the creation of Time magazine
quoted by Walter Isaacson,
incoming managing editor of Time
interviewed by Evan I. Schwartz
"Time's Pathfinder" in
Wired (3/1996)

2322) Beyond the sweet sound of the words "abolish the IRS", the Republican case for cutting taxes rests on a theory and a reading of history. The history lesson, summed up nicely by [Republican Senator from Texas Phil] Gramm, is that "since the 1950s, the rapidly rising tax burden, together with new competition in world markets, has stifled growth in the economy and produced this stagnant income problem." The theory is that slashing taxes will reignite vigorous growth, both by leaving consumers with more money to save or spend and, most important, by increasing the supply of capital available for businesses to invest in ways that make the economy more productive.

Saying the Republicans' history is skewed would be like saying Ronald Reagan is getting on in years. America's tax burden - federal, state, and local, as a proportion of GNP - did rise in the 1950s and 1960s, but since 1970 it has stayed roughly the same. "You put the numbers down on paper," [Brookings Institution economist Gary] Burtless says, "and what you have is the most remarkable period of growth, the best productive performance in the history of the US, occurring when the tax burden was going up. The most it's ever gone up in history. Then the tax burden stops going up and [...] well, the last 20 years have been pretty shabby. Now, I would never argue that the rising tax burden caused the growth of the '50s and '60s, or vice versa since then. But, unfortunately for the Republicans, the correlation goes in exactly the reverse direction of their theory."
John Heilemann
"The Netizen: It's The New Economy, Stupid"
Wired (3/1996)

2323) From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Karl Marx
Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) [B16]
[Note: Marx was possibly quoting or paraphrasing Louis Blanc – "Let each produce according to his aptitudes and his force; let each consume according to his need." Organisation du Travail (1840) – or Morelly – "Nothing in society will belong to anyone, either as personal possiession or as capital goods, except the things for which the person has immediate use, for either his needs, his pleasures, or his daily work. Every citizen will make his particular contribution to the activities of the community according to his capacity, his talent, and his age; it is on this basis that his duties will be determined, in conformity with the distributive laws." Le Code de la Nature (1755)). [B16]]
2324) Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, and the soul of souless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx
A Contribution to the Critique of
Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1844) [CQ]
[Note: Variations cited in [CQ]&[WQ]: "Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals" (Raymond Aron, aphorism from the title of his book The Opium of the Intellectuals, 1955); "In the United States today, opiates are the religion of the people." (Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin, 1973) Also:

Marxism is undoubtedy a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. Like every inferior form of the religious life it has been continually used, to borrow the apt phrase of Marx himself, as an opiate for the people.

Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty (1955) quoted by Aron.]
2325) The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
Karl Marx and Frederich Engels
The Communist Manifesto (1848) [B16]

Sources

[B16] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (1993)
[CQ] - The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)
[WQ] - Wikiquote

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 356 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Anderson: Age of Unreason

2008-01-29T22:11:00.000-05:00

2317) Where there's a fact vacuum, pseudo facts, opinion, and outright fantasy come rushing in.
Kurt Anderson
"The Age of Unreason" in
The New Yorker (3/3/1997)

2318) What did he know and when did he know it? During the late-modern era of journalism and popular thought, which achieved it apotheosis in Watergate, those were the salient questions. A consensus about facts prevailed, along with a kind of common-sense faith that the accumulation of facts would yield something like truth. The postmodern period began in the eighties, with the American religious deliriums, in both fundamentalist-Christian and New Age forms, and with the indulgence of the imaginary anecdotes of Ronald Reagan and Tawana Brawley; it achieved its apotheosis in O.J. Simpson's acquittal. The salient questions in this new era tend to be epistemological: What do you think you know, and why do you think you know it?
Kurt Anderson
"The Age of Unreason" in
The New Yorker (3/3/1997)

2319) Americans are supposed to distrust elite authority and to believe that every citizen is entitled, above all, to his own opinion. [... this]native antipathy toward elite authority [...] is driving today's trans-ideological, my-facts-are-as-good-as-your-facts skepticism.
Kurt Anderson
"The Age of Unreason" in
The New Yorker (3/3/1997)

2320) We're perpetually warned about the contemporary rise of cynicism, but a parallel American contagion, often affecting the same citizens, is credulity. The postmodern cynic cum naif mistrusts the government, the media, and the other elites even as he recklessly embraces this or that line of grassroots make-believe. You believe that a majority of women were sexually abused as children? You believe that Ben Franklin was an anti-Semitic propagandist? You believe that you have seen a documentary videotape of government doctors performing an autopsy on a captured extraterrestrial? Whatever.

This laissez-faire ultra-populism finds its perfect medium in the Internet. Not only is every citizen entitled to his or her own opinion but he or she is entitled to deliver it instantaneously, studded with chunks of fake information, to the whole world. With a computer and a phone line, anyone can become his own publisher / commentator / reporter / anchor, dispatching to everyone everywhere credible-looking opinions, facts, and "facts" via the Internet. [...] Thanks to the Web, amateurism and spuriousness no longer need look amateurish or spurious.
Kurt Anderson
"The Age of Unreason" in
The New Yorker (3/3/1997)
[Note: Of course, it turns out that the real danger came not from amateur pundits on the Internet, whose dreck can generally be easily spotted, but from professional media outlets such as Fox News and the Washington Times, which were deliberately set up to purvey skewed and ideologically purified information in the name of being "unbiased." Unlike the work of the Internet amateurs, their output had the look and feel of real news, and was taken by such by multitudes of gullible people, as well as those ideologically inclined to believe it. (Ironically, Fox News started up just 5 months before Anderson's article was published.) That some analysts still haven't realised that this is a primary problem with American journalism today, 12 years afterwards, is disconcerting at best. – Ed Fitzgerald]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 356 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Chandler speaks...

2008-01-29T02:36:00.000-05:00

2316) [As a screenwriter] I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.
Raymond Chandler
"A Qualified Farewell" (1956)
The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler (1976)
quoted by Larry Gelbart in
"A Beginning, A Muddle and an End" in
New York Times Books Review (3/2/1997)
[review of Monster: Living Off The Big Screen
by John Gregory Dunne]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 356 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Liberals all (even the conservatives)

2008-01-29T02:13:00.000-05:00

2313) [There] is a common feature of a certain kind of contemporary conservative thought. Abstract philosophical reasoning is used to establish a set of norms for human life, and it is the discovered that, by some wholly unforeseen coincidence, these norms correspond almost exactly to the way things were in the United States circa 1958. [...] Thus [Charles] Murray doesn't really propose to get rid of any of the functions the federal government has exercised, or the investments it has made, of the human rights it has established - almost always over the fierce and sometimes violent objections of local communities and private interests - since the Great Depression. He wants food and drug regulatory agencies, air traffic control, interstate highways, social insurance, welfare agencies, freedom of expression, environmental protection, universal access to education, and virtually every other benefit of modern life. He wants them all privitized. Having granted every wish, the genie of big government can now return to the bottle.
Louis Menand
"Born Free" in
New York Review of Books (2/20/1997)
[review of What it Means to Be A Libertarian:
A Personal Interpretation by Charles Murray]

2314) If we look at the actual things we call freedoms [...] - the freedom to speak and to believe what we choose, the freedom to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances, the freedom to travel - we find that they have been established only by the exertion of centralized political power against the natural tendency of some groups of human beings to stifle and control other human beings, particularly human beings who look or think differently from themselves. Libertarianism of [Charles] Murray's variety is a philosophy for winners, for the same reason that "born Free" is a song about lions, not about the animals they prey upon. Not many people who feel vulnerable or repressed will find much use for it. What those people want is a public body vigilant in protecting their interests, including their interest in personal freedom, against the tendency of majorities to dominate and exploit them, and they will be willing to abide by the decisions of such a body so long as they are democratically reached. Groups make laws, formally or informally, by consent or by fiat. Democracy is a way of trying to do it by consent. There is a law of the jungle, but it's not particularly big on "liberty," and the animals don't get to vote.
Louis Menand
"Born Free" in
New York Review of Books (2/20/1997)
[review of What it Means to Be A Libertarian:
A Personal Interpretation by Charles Murray]

2315) There is a sense in which all Americans are liberals, not excluding the neocons who use that word as a curse, but this is not the usual journalistic sense of the word. That's to say, Americans believe instinctively in a pluralistic, individualistic, open society. [...] American culture has always stressed individual fulfillment over duty owed to the state; the nation's very founding creed was "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
"The Big Kibbutz" in
New York Times Books Review (3/2/1997)
[review of Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience
in Modern Israel by Yaron Ezrahi]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 356 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Tainter: Collapse of Complex Societies 2

2008-01-28T23:50:00.000-05:00

2309) [F]our concepts [...] lead to an understanding of collapse. These are:
human societies are problem-solving organizations;

sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance;

increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and

investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns.
The first three points may be thought of as the conceptual underpinnings of the fourth, which is the crucial element in the explanation.

A society increasing in complexity does so as a system. That is to say, as some of its interlinked parts are forced in a direction of growth, others must adjust accordingly. For example, if complexity increases to regulate regional subsistence production, investments must be made in hierarchy, in bureaucracy, and in agricultural facilities (such as irrigation networks). The expanding hierarchy requires still further agricultural output for its own needs, as well as increased investment in energy and minerals extraction. An expanded military is needed to protect the assets thus created, requiring in turn is own increased sphere of agricultural and other resources. As more and more resources are drained from the support population to maintain this system, an increased share must be allocated to legitimization or coercion. This increased complexity requires specialized administrators, who consume further shares of subsistence resources and wealth. To maintain the production capacity of the base population, further investment is made in agriculture, and so on.

The illustration could be expanded, tracing still further the interdependencies within such a growing system, but the point has been made: a society grows in complexity as a system. To be sure, there are instances where one sector of a society grows at the expense of others, but to be maintained as a cohesive whole, a social system can tolerate only certain limits to such conditions.

Thus it is possible to speak of sociocultural evolution by the encompassing term "complexity," meaning by this the interlinked growth of the several subsystems that comprise a society. This growth carries an associated energy cost, which before the development of fossil-fuel economies was largely met by human labor. Growth also yields an array of benefits, including administration of resource storage and distribution, investment in agricultural, energy, and mineral production, internal order and external defense defense, information processing, and public works. [...] [but,] at some point in the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem solving strategy yields a declining marginal return. [...]

There are two general factors which combine to make a society vulnerable to collapse when investment in complexity begins to yield a marginal return. First, stress and perturbation are a constant feature of any complex society, always occurring somewhere in its territory. Such a society will have a developed and operating regulatory apparatus that is designed to deal with localized agricultural failures, border conflicts, and unrest. Since such continuous, localized stress can be expected to occur with regularity it can, to a degree, be anticipated and prepared for. Major, unexpected stress surges, however, will also occur given enough time, as such things as major climactic fluctuations and foreign incursions take place. To meet these major stresses the society must have some kind of net reserve. [...] Stress urges of great magnitude cannot be accommodated without such a reserve.

Yet a society experiencing declining marginal returns is investing ever more heavily in a strategy that is yielding proportionally less. Excess productive capacity will at some point be used up, and accumulated surpluses allocated to current operating needs. There is, then, little or no surplus with which to counter major adversities. Unexpected stress must be dealt with out of the current operating budget, often ineffectually, and always to the detriment of the system as a whole. Even if the stress is successfully met, the society is weakened in the process, and made even more vulnerable to the next crisis. Once a complex society develops the vulnerabilities of declining marginal returns, collapse may merely require sufficient passage of time to render probable the occurrence of an insurmountable calamity.

Secondly, declining marginal returns make complexity a less attractive problem-solving strategy. Where marginal returns decline, the advantages to complexity become ultimately no greater (for the society as a whole) than for less costly social forms. The marginal costs of evolution to a higher level of complexity, or of remaining as the present level, is high compared with the alternative of disintegration.

Under such conditions, the option to decompose (that is, to sever the ties that link localized groups to a regional entity) become attractive to certain components of a complex society [...] [which] perceive increased advantage to a strategy of independence, and begin to pursue their own immediate goals rather than the long-term goals of the hierarchy [...] requiring the hierarchy to allocate still more of a shrinking resource base to legitimization and/or control.

Thus [...] productive units across the economic spectrum increase resistance (passive or active) to the demands of the hierarchy, or overtly attempt to break away. Both the lower strata (the peasant producers of agricultural commodities) and upper ranking strata of wealthy merchants and nobility (who are often called upon to subsidize the cost of complexity) are vulnerable to such temptations. [...]

And so, societies faced with declining marginal returns for investment in complexity face a downward spiral from problems that seem insurmountable. Declining resources and rising marginal costs sap economic strength, so that services to the population cannot be sustained. As unrest grows among producers, increased resources from a dwindling supply must be allocated to legitimization and/or control. The economic sustaining base becomes weakened, and its members either actively or passively reduce their support for the polity. Reserve resources to meet unexpected stress surges are consumed for operating expenses. Ultimately, the society either disintegrates as localized entities break away, or is so weakened that is is topples militarily, often with very little resistance. In either case, sociopolitical organization is reduced to the level that can be sustained by local resources.
Joseph A. Tainter
The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988)

2310) We can never do merely one thing.
Garrett Hardin
"The Cybernetics of Competition:
A Biologist's View of Society" in
Modern Systems Research for the Behavioral
Scientist (1968), Walter Buckley , ed.
quoted by Joseph A. Tainter in
The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988)
[Note: Tainter comments: "[Hardin's] point was that good intentions are virtually irrelevant in determining the results of altering a large, complex system. With the feedback relationships inherent in such a system, one can almost never appreciate the full consequences of any alteration. The same principle applies to misbehavior: elite mismanagement can only be partly responsible for the evolution of any complex society."]
2311) [T]here are major differences between the current and the ancient worlds that have important implications for collapse. One of these is that the world today is full. That is to say, it is filled with complex societies; these occupy every sector of the globe, except the most desolate. This is a new factor in human history. Complex societies as a whole are a recent and unusual aspect of human life. The current situation, where all societies are so oddly constituted, is unique. It was shown earlier [...] that ancient collapses occurred, and could only occur, in a power vacuum, where a complex society (or cluster of peer polities) was surrounded by less complex neighbors. There are no power vacuums left today. Every nation is linked to, and influenced by, the major powers, and most are strongly linked with one power bloc or the other. [...]

Collapse today is neither an option of an immediate threat. Any nation vulnerable enough to collapse will have to pursue one of three options: (1) absorption by a neighbor or some larger state; (2) economic support by a larger power, or by an international financing agency; or (3) payment by the support population of whatever costs are needed to continue complexity, however detrimental the marginal return. A nation today can no longer unilaterally collapse, for if any national government disintegrates its population and territory will be absorbed by some other. [...]
Joseph A. Tainter
The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988)

2312) It is difficult to know whether world industrial society has yet reached the point where the marginal return for its overall pattern of investment has begun to decline. [...] Even is the point of diminishing returns to our present form of industrialism has not yet been reached, that point will inevitably arrive. [...] In a sense the lack of a power vacuum, and the resulting competitive spiral [between contemporary peer polities], have given the world a respite from what otherwise might have been an earlier confrontation with collapse. Here indeed is a paradox: a disastrous condition that all decry may force us to tolerate a situation of declining marginal returns long enough to achieve a temporary solution to it. [...] There are then notes of optimism and pessimism in the current situation. We are in a curious position where competitive interactions force a level on investment, and a declining marginal return, that might ultimately lead to collapse except that the competitor who collapses first will simply be dominated or absorbed by the survivor. A respite from the threat of collapse might be granted thereby, although we might find that we will not like to bear its costs. If collapse is not in the immediate future, that is not to say that the industrial standard of living is also reprieved. As marginal returns decline (a process ongoing even now) [...] the standard of living that industrial societies have enjoyed will not grow so rapidly, and for some groups and nations will remain static or decline. The political conflicts that this will cause [...] will create a dangerous world situation in the foreseeable future.
Joseph A. Tainter
The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 357 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Tainter: Collapse of Complex Societies 1

2008-01-28T23:27:00.000-05:00

2305) Collapse [of a complex society] is manifest in such things as:
a lower degree of stratification and social differentiation;

less economic and occupational specialization, of individuals, groups, and territories;

less centralized control; that is, less regulation and integration of diverse economic and political groups by elites;

less behavioral control and regimentation;

less investment in the epiphenomena of complexity those elements that define the concept of "civilization": monumental architecture, artistic and literary achievements, and the like;

less flow of information between individuals, between political and economic groups, and between a center and its periphery;

less sharing, trading, and redistribution of resources;

less overall coordination and organization of individuals and groups;

a smaller territory integrated within a single political unit.
Joseph A. Tainter
The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988)

2306) The Ik are a people of northern Uganda who live at what must surely be the extreme of deprivation and disaster. A largely hunting and gathering people who have in recent times practiced some crop planting, the Ik are not classifiable as a complex society [...] They are, nonetheless, a morbidly fascinating case of a collapse in which a former, low level of social complexity has essentially disappeared.

Due to drought and disruption by national boundaries of the traditional cycle of movement, the Ik live in such a food- and water-scarce environment that there is absolutely no advantage to reciprocity and social sharing. The Ik, in consequence, display almost nothing of what could be called societal organization. They are so highly fragmented that most activities, especially subsistence, are pursued individually. Each Ik will spend days or weeks on his or her own, searching for food and water. Sharing is virtually nonexistent. Two siblings or other kin can live side-by-side, one dying of starvation and the other well nourished, without the latter giving the slightest assistance to the other. The family as a social unit has become dysfunctional. Even conjugal pairs don't form a cooperative unit except for a few specific purposes. Their motivation for marriage or cohabitation is that one person can't build a house alone. The members of a conjugal pair forage alone, and do not share food. Indeed, their foraging is so independent that if both members happen to be at their residence together it is by accident.

Each conjugal compound is stockaded against the others. Several compounds together form a village, but this is a largely meaningless occurrence. Villages have no political functions or organizations, not even a central meeting place.

Children are minimally cared for by their mothers until age three, and then are put out to fend for themselves. This separation is absolute. By age three they are expected to find their own food and shelter, and those that survive do provide for themselves. Children band into age-sets for protection, since adults will steal a child's food whenever possible. No food sharing occurs within an age-set. Groups of children will forage in agricultural fields, which scares off birds and baboons. This is often given as a reason for having children.

Although little is known about how the Ik got to their present situation, there are some indications of former organizational patterns. They possess clan names, although today these have no structural significance. They live in villages, but these no longer have any political meaning. The traditional authority structure of family lineage, and clan leaders has been progressively weakened. It appears that a former level of organization has simply been abandoned by the Ik in their present distress.
Joseph A. Tainter
The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988)
citing "Rethinking the Ik: A Functional
Non-Social System" by Colin M. Turnbull in
Extinction and Survival in Human Populations (1978)
edited by Charles D. Laughling, Jr., and Ivan Brady

2307) [T]he characteristics of societies after collapse may be summarized as follows:

There is, first and foremost, a breakdown of authority and central control. Prior to collapse. revolts and provincial breakaways signal the weakening of the center. Revenues to the government often decline. Foreign challengers become increasingly successful. With lower revenues, the military may also become ineffective. The populace become more and more disaffected as the hierarchy seeks to mobilize resources to meet the challenge.

With disintegration, central direction is no longer possible. The former political center undergoes a significant loss of prominence and power. It is often ransacked and may ultimately be abandoned. Small petty states emerge in the formerly unified territory, of which the previous capital may be one. Quite often these contend for domination, so that a period of perpetual conflict ensues.

The umbrella of law and protection erected over the populace is eliminated. Lawlessness may prevail for a time [...] but order will ultimately be restored. Monumental construction and publicly-supported are largely ceases to exist. Literacy may be lost entirely, and otherwise declines so dramatically that a dark age follows.

What population remains in urban or other political centers reuse existing architecture in a characteristic manner. There is little new construction, and that which is attempted concentrates on adapting existing buildings. Great rooms will be subdivided, flimsy facades are built, and public space will be converted to private. While some attempt may be made to carry on an attentuated version of previous ceremonialism, the former monuments are allowed to fall in decay. People may reside in upper-story rooms as lower ones deteriorate. Monuments are often mined as easy sources of building materials. When a building begins to collapse, the residents simple move to another.

Palaces and central storage facilities may be abandoned, along with centralized redistribution of goods and foodstuffs, or market exchange. Both long distance and local trade may be markedly reduced, and craft specialization end or decline. Subsistence and material needs come to be met largely on the basis of local self-sufficiency. Declining regional interaction leads to the establishment of local styles in items such as pottery that formerly had been widely circulated. Both portable and fixed technology (i.e. hydraulic engineering systems) revert to simpler forms that can be developed and maintained at the local level, without the assistance of a bureaucracy that no longer exists.

Whether as a cause or a consequence, there is typically a marked, rapid reduction in population size and density. Not only to urban populations substantially decline, but so also do the support populations of the countryside. Many settlements are concurrently abandoned. The level of population and settlement may decline to that of centuries or even millennia previously. [...]

In a complex society that has collapsed, it would thus appear, the overarching structure that provides social services to the population loses capability or disappears entirely. No longer can the populace depend upon external defense and internal order, maintenance of public works, or delivery of food and material goods. Organization reduces to the lowest level that is economically sustainable, so that a variety of contending polities exists where there had been peace and unity. Remaining populations must become locally self-sufficient to a degree not seen for several generations. Groups that had formerly been economic or political partners now become strangers, even threatening competitors. The world as seen from any locality perceptibly shrinks, and over the horizon lies the unknown.

Given this pattern, it is small wonder that collapse is feared by so many people today. Even among those who decry the excesses of industrial society, the possible end of that society must surely be seen as catastrophic.
Joseph A. Tainter
The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988)

2308) Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.
Message on a popular sign
quoted by Joseph A. Tainter in
The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 357 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

Friday Photography: White Rose

2008-01-25T23:05:00.000-05:00

Daryl Samuel
Previous:

Photos posted in 2006 & 2007

2008: Tulips / Metal Tree / Ferry Terminal

(3089/898) Media and culture, from A to C

2008-01-25T17:39:00.000-05:00

2300) Much of the information [in the "information age"] is not true. We live in a time besotted with Bad Information.
Joel Achenbach
"Reality Check" in
Washington Post (12/2/1996)
quoted by Kendrick Frasier in
"Articles of Note" in
Skeptical Inquirer (March/April '97)

2301) Why get your news from seasoned professionals when you can get half-witted rumors from random strangers [on the Internet]?
Joel Achenbach
"Reality Check" in
Washington Post (12/2/1996)
quoted by Kendrick Frasier in
"Articles of Note" in
Skeptical Inquirer (March/April '97)
[One reason to get information from the web rather than from the seasoned professionals of journalism is that American journalism is a broken system. Not only is it continually being gamed by people who have discovered its inherent weaknesses, making it more difficult for reporting which intends to be neutral and biased to also be accurate, but at the same time, the continuing concentration of media ownership into the hands of a limited number of corporations makes contemporary journalism more vulnerable to manipulation from the top. This means that in some circumstances better and more accurate information is available from trusted sources on the web than is available from traditional journalism, which is on the one hand inhibited by conventions which are no longer totally relevant, and on the other has been invaded by people, at the top and the bottom, who have an agenda other than unbiased reporting of the news. – Ed Fitzgerald]
2302) What if I had grown up in the past of in a nonmedia culture? Would I still be "me"? Would my "personality" be different?

I think the unspoken agreement between us as a culture is that we're supposed to consider the commercialized memories in our head as real, that real life consists of time spent away from TVs, magazines and theatres. But soon the planet will be inhabited by people who have only known a world with TVs and computers. When this point arrives, will we still continue with pre-TV notions of identity? Probably not. Time continues on: Instead of buying blue Chairman Mao outfits we shop at the Gap. Same thing. Everybody travels everywhere. "Place" is a joke.
Douglas Coupland
"Two Postcards from the Bahamas" in
Polaroids from the Dead (1996)

2303) We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us.
Douglas Coupland
"James Rosenquist's F-111" in
Polaroids from the Dead (1996)
[Coupland is here wittier than he is wise – the theory of the "blank slate" has been thoroughly undermined. See Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate.]
2304) Two identical parties competing against each other with no alternatives – It's like the Disney version of democracy. How do you fight a cartoon?
Douglas Coupland
"Washington, D.C.: Four Microstories,
Super Tuesday 1992"
Polaroids from the Dead (1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 360 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Analyzing science

2008-01-25T15:49:00.000-05:00

2296) It is high time [laymen] recognized [...] the misleading and damaging belief that scientific inquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man [sic] who turns the handle of a machine of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking, and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all else on a sortie into what can be imagines but is not yet known.
Peter Medawar
Times Literary Supplement (10/25/63)
quoted by M.F. Perutz in
"A Passion for Science" in
New York Review of Books (2/20/1997)
[review of Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics
by Ruth Lewin Sime]

2297) Can science be shown to be a superior means of acquiring knowledge? Yes, it can, but only by showing that it is more likely to yield justified beliefs than any other methodology. Thus the real issues is not whether a belief is scientific or pseudoscientific but whether it is justified or unjustified.

We are justified in believing something to be true when it provides the best explanation of the evidence. Science is superior to other methods of inquiry because it usually provides better explanations than they do. The goodness of an explanation is determined by the amount of understanding it produces, and the amount of understanding an explanation produces is determines by how much it systematizes and unifies our knowledge. The extent to which an explanation does this can be determined by appealing to various criteria of adequacy such as simplicity, scope, conservatism and fruitfulness. No one wants to hold unjustified beliefs. The problem is that most people never learn the difference between a good explanation and a bad one.
Theodore Schick Jr.
"The End of Science?" in
Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 1997)

2298) If we believe in science and in its underlying rationality, then we can't stop at some particular place and say, "Beyond this point there be Tygers, paradoxes, the miraculous, the inexplicable." The trouble with science (one of the troubles) is that it isn't divisible; it doesn't take us so far and no farther, where we are forced to disembark and continue the rest of our voyage by miracle and marvel. If we believe in the need for miracles at any point in our journey, then we must give up on science altogether, right from the start. Science is an all-or-nothing thing, like being pregnant. [...] It may, of course, be that our ability to understand the "ultimate nature of things" is limited, but this doesn't mean that there is no ultimate nature of things or that their ultimate nature must be in the realm of miracles. Comprehension does not limit the physical reality of the universe, whatever or however complex (or simple) that underlying reality may be. Once we think comprehension limits physical reality, or even might, we leave science and enter into the gassy regions of metaphysics, the Land of Let's-Pretend.

The Uncertainty of Heisenberg, the Incompleteness of Godel, the wave/particle duality of light and matter, relativity - none of these is paradoxical. The fact that observation and even logic itself are limited, of that the underlying nature of things is merely probabilistic, may be distressing, but there is nothing paradoxical, nothing that contradicts itself. The appearance of a paradox is eventually resolved when better methods and better insights are developed. But the real point is, even if better methods and better insights are never developed, even if we never arrive at the resolution, the ultimate and rational nature of things is there; and it is there even if throughout the universe, in all space and in all time, there is and will be no intellect capable of resolving it. The capacity of minds to comprehend is not what makes reality real.
Ralph Estling
"Two Troubles With Science" in
Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 1997)

2299) [G]ood and kind people tell us that science is inadequate, this because it doggedly refuses to inform us how we should live our lives - by what ethical and moral principles we should live; how, why, and whom we should love; and so on. This complaint is widespread among the righteous.

The trouble here is that science is confused with rationality, as if the two were synonymous, when in fact science is just one subset, one kind of rationality, not the whole shebang. It is a vital part, but still only a part of the whole. As such, it does not deal with all forms of rationality, all logical inquiry and pursuits, such as how we should conduct our lives. That is not its job.

It is not science's job to supply answers to all our questions about why we are here and what to do about it. When it refuses to do so, it is not shirking its responsibility, abdicating its role. It is refusing to usurp the responsibility and role of reason, of which it forms a part, but with which it is not identical.
Ralph Estling
"Two Troubles With Science" in
Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 1997)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 360 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Authentic ain't everything

2008-01-25T03:26:00.000-05:00

2295) [Sometimes] authenticity can be the enemy of creativity.
Phillip Saville
British television director
quoted by Steven Berkoff in
I Am Hamlet (1989)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 360 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Observations

2008-01-25T02:46:00.000-05:00

2292) Students can't write clearly and they in turn can't think clearly, they can't read a challenging text, they can't make a cogent argument, and they can't analyze a political speech. [...] I keep saying to everyone who will listen that you can't run a democracy with people who don't know how to argue, don't know how to think clearly, and don't know how to express themselves.
Cynthia Griffin Wolff
MIT professor of humanities
quoted by Scott Lehigh in
"It's, like, extreme, but not gross" in the
Boston Globe (2/9/1997)

2293) [Y]ou don't pick a fight with some[one] you can't talk to!
C.J. Cherryh
Chanur's Venture (1984)

2294) There was a time and a rhythm in leading the helpless and the morally confused, a moment to snatch up souls before they fell to wrangling or wondering or asking too keen questions.
C.J. Cherryh
Chanur's Homecoming (1986)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 360 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Upstate/downstate

2008-01-25T00:30:00.000-05:00

2290)
Q. A friend is thinking of moving from the city to the suburbs. As someone who grew up in the 'burbs and came to the city, what do you say to that?

A. [from Eric Bogosian] What do you think you're going to do? How do you think you're going to spend your time? How often do you think you'll actually be outside of the car when you're outside of the house? Do you think you'll ever walk again? I walk way more in the city than you ever will - it's no wonder heart disease on such a rise. The only time you'll interact with other people is at the supermarket. You won't have any other human relationships. People who live in the suburbs think the city is a dangerous place, but the city is full of established values about community that don't exist in the suburbs.

Q. So...?

A. Don't do it!
Eric Bogosian
"Questions for: Eric Bogosian"
New York Times Magazine (2/2/1997)

2291) From the time of Tocqueville, foreign-born observers of America have warned against the adulation of state governments. It does no good. Against all the evidence, Americans want to believe that Washington is a hellhole but Albany is not.
Michael Elliot
"The Ties That Band" in
New York Times Book Review (2/23/1997)
[review of The New Golden Rule
by Amitai Etzioni]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 360 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Names, again

2008-01-24T23:36:00.000-05:00

2288) [I]t's silly to worry about a first name without considering what comes after it. Ideally, first and last names should meet and marry to create a strong, supple melodic line. If your last names is a monosyllable like Jones and you can't do anything about it short of changing it, you probably ought to give your child a longer, more fluid first name, like Jeremy for a boy , Margaret or Elizabeth for a girl.
Justin Kaplan and Anne Bernays
The Language of Names (1997)

2289) When I say New York I mean New York City, and when I say New York City I mean Manhattan.
Ed Fitzgerald
(c. 1997, attribution questionable)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 361 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Beak of the Finch

2008-01-24T21:09:00.000-05:00

2284) The closer one looks at these performances of matter in living organisms, the more impressive the show becomes.
Max Delbruck
"A Physicist Looks At Biology" (1949) in
Transactions of the Connecticut Academy
of Arts and Sciences (38:175-90)
quoted by Jonathan Weiner in
The Beak of the Finch (1994)

2285) It is almost a law of science: the more indirect the evidence, the more polarized the debate. [...] Meanwhile, the more direct the evidence, the less the answers look either-or.
Jonathan Weiner
The Beak of the Finch (1994)

2286) John Endler, [who studies evolutionary pressure in guppy populations] does not like talking with Creationists [...] "I avoid it," It's really a waste of time. Not long ago on an airplane I talked for an hour with someone about what I do, and never once mentioned the word evolution. It's very easy to do, you know. Darwin himself doesn't use the word evolution in the whole of the Origin [of Species]. You just talk about what happens, and how you can study what happens: changes over many generations. It might be interesting to write a book that way now: don't use the word evolution until the very last page.

"Anyway, the whole time on the plane, my fellow passenger was growing more and more excited. 'What a neat idea! What a neat idea!" Finally, as the plane was landing, I told him this neat idea is called evolution. He turned purple."

"I've done exactly the same thing - and never let on it was evolution - and got exactly the same response," says Rosemary [Grant, who studies evolution in Darwin's finches in the Galapagos islands]. "I described our work on Daphne [Major] to a Jehovah's Witness. And he followed along, and said, "Oh, how fascinating.'"

"Asked intelligent questions," says Peter [her husband and fellow researcher].

"And I never plucked up enough courage to say, "Well, you know what all this means...'"
Jonathan Weiner
The Beak of the Finch (1994)

2287) [T]he strength and the weakness of science [is] that, without collective trust, it simply could not work. Instead there would be the dismal apparatus of mutual suspicion familiar to any accountant. Checking the scientific books in this way would be a task as joyless as accountancy: and no decent investigator would want to do it. That is why fraud [in the sciences] causes such dismay. [...] [T]he central truth about scientific fraud [...] [is that it] is extraordinarily rare. The reason is simple. Science is a card game against Nature, the ultimate opponent The hope is to deduce the hand she holds from the few clues she is willing to disclose. It is possible to win every time by faking one's own cards, but that removes the whole point of playing the game.

The commonest form of delusion in the sciences is self-delusion, persuading oneself that a result is there when it is not. [...] There is, certainly some dishonesty. Perhaps there is more than there was. It is not gratuitous [...]Instead it can be blamed on the intrusion into the laboratory of the morals of the marketplace.
Steve Jones
"Crooked Bones" in
New York Review of Books (2/6/1997)
[review of Unraveling Piltdown: The Science
Fraud of the Century and Its Solution
by John Evangelist Walsh]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 361 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Cultural imports

2008-01-24T02:41:00.000-05:00

2283) It is easy to forget that "western" conceptions of culture have long allowed for a continuing interest in the non-European world; the debt was acknowledged, and it was quite often suggested that it should be increased. Renaissance scholars struggled to understand and to imitate Egyptian hieroglyphs. The eighteenth-century orientalist craze is familiar history. Learned philologists like Sir William Jones, friend of Dr. Johnson, inventor of the science of comparative philology, and expert in Sanskrit, translated many works from that language, and also from Arabic and Persian, to the considerable enrichment of later literature. In his ethical mode Matthew Arnold, apostle of European culture, extolled the Bhagavad-Gita. More fashionably, Paris in the last years of the nineteenth century was in love with Japanese prints, Balinese dancers, and other oriental manifestations. Gide explored Morocco, and E.M. Forster, along with many others, India. The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was venerated, translated, and awarded the Nobel Prize. T.S. Eliot intoned the Upanishads, Ezra Pound discovered and adopted the Fenellosan Chinese character, and Yeats, who spent a lot of time attending to Tagore and other Indian sages, wrote Noh plays and celebrated the mask, the samurai sword, and the Japanese dancer. The early years of the present century witnessed a revolutionary cult of African sculpture.

Not all such enthusiasms can be dismissed as imperialistic self-indulgences, mere primitivism, "orientalism," chinoserie or japanaiserie; some were taken very seriously and some had a direct impact on Western culture. Indeed one could almost say that it has been in the very nature of Western civilization to study other cultures for its own use and benefit, and to revalue parts that have been obscured by historical accident; hence our interest in lost alphabets, lost languages, mysterious henges and cromlechs, and so on. But it can still be argued that all this archaeology, even at its most disinterested, was nevertheless part of the process of incorporating into the acquisitive European tradition whatever was valuable because exotic. Some cultural goods were brought in like silk from the mysterious East, their success dependent on Western money and Western ideas of luxury and the needs of various avant-gardes. On arrival they were made over into European goods.
Frank Kermode
"The World Turned Upside Down" in
New York Review of Books (2/6/1997)
[review of The Dictionary of Global Culture
edited by Kwama Anthony Appiah and
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 361 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Ghost at the Feast

2008-01-24T00:58:00.000-05:00

2281) [The] marriage of Romanticism and Freud which is film noir [...]
Geoffrey O'Brien
"The Ghost at the Feast" in
New York Review of Books (2/6/1997)

2282) Everyone who subscribes to cable television has had the experience of switching rapidly from channel to channel and hearing at every stop the same tones and inflections, the same vocabulary, the same messages: a language flattened and reduced to a shifting but never very large repertoire of catchphrases and slogans, a language into which advertisers have so successfully insinuated their strategies that the consumers themselves turn into walking commercials. It is a dialect of dead end and perpetual arbitrary switch-overs, intended always to sell but more fundamentally to fill time: a necessary substitute for dead air. Whether in movies or television dramas, talk shows or political speeches or "infotainment" specials hawking hair dyes and exercise machines, the homogenization of speech, the exclusion of anything resembling figurative language or rhetorical complexity or any remotely extravagant eloquence or wordplay or (it goes without saying) historical or literary allusions of any kind whatever, becomes so self-evident that the only defense is that winking tone of faux inanity of which the ineffable "whatever" seems to be an ironic acknowledgment. By contrast the dialogue in the old Hollywood movies unreeling randomly night and day - The Road to Rio or The Falcon in San Francisco or The File on Thelma Jordan - seems already to partake of some quite vanished classical age: how soon before it, too, needs footnotes?

Nothing leads from or to anything: the show rolls on because it isn't time for the next show yet. It is talk without any but the most short-term memory, as if language were not to be permitted its own past, a state of affairs which makes language in some senses impossible. In this context Shakespeare assumes an ever-stranger roles as he becomes the voice of a past increasingly less accessible and less tractable, the ghost at the fast-food feast. If in translation Shakespeare can remain our contemporary, in English he carries his own language with him, a language now almost accusatory in its richness when compared with the weirdly rootless and improvised speech of Medialand. "I learn immediately from any speaker," wrote Emerson, "how much he has already lived, through the poverty or splendor of his speech." But there is no telling what a four-hundred year-old man will be saying; the older he gets, the more it changes, and we no longer know if we really want to hear everything. It is like peering into a flowerpot full of twisted vines and splotched discolored lichen surviving improbably from some ancient plot.

It is absurd that Shakespeare alone should have to bear this burden, as if the whole of the European past rested on him alone, but that's only because nearly everyone else has already been consigned to the oblivion of the archives. We aren't likely to get (speaking only of the English tradition) the Geoffrey Chaucer movie, the Edmund Spencer movie, the John Webster movie, the John Milton movie, the William Congreve movie, the Laurence Stern movie, or even the Herman Melville movie; and the Bible movies, when they appear, owe more these days to the cadences of Xena: Warrior Princess than to those of King James. [...] Shakespeare has to stand, all by himself, for centuries of expressive language erased by common consent from the audio-visual universe which is our theatre and library and public square.
Geoffrey O'Brien
"The Ghost at the Feast" in
New York Review of Books (2/6/1997)
[review of Kenneth Branagh's film Hamlet,
and other Shakespeare films]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 361 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Free markets, predictions and information

2008-01-23T23:55:00.000-05:00

2276) The stock market is s strange and wonderful thing. The immense effort that goes into explaining booms and busts masks their essential irrationality. One day mutual-fund investors are happy to shield their eyes from the wild risks they're taking;the next they're terrified and stuffing cash under mattresses. Everyone pretends to understand the panic; no one really does. Something changes in the collective mind.
Michael Lewis
"The Capitalist: The Silent Boom"
New York Times Magazine (1/12/1997)

2277) There are all sorts of necessary social and economic goods, [Robert] Kuttner says [in Everything For Sale], that markets can't be relied on to provide. Free markets underinvest in pure research, so government needs to finance it, or to structure the economy so that private companies can afford to conduct it. Government made us prosperous by creating the higher education system, railroads, canals, commercial aviation and the Internet. Moreover, markets generate problems - pollution, dangerous products, economic disasters like bank failures - so they need to be regulated. Regulation does not retard growth: "The zenith of the era of regulation - the postwar boom - was the most successful period of American capitalism." Finally, markets fail to provide all citizens with such essentials as health care, physical safety and basic economic security, so these have to come from government.
Nicolas Lemann
"When Markets Fail" in
New York Times Books Review (1/26/1997)
citing and quoting Robert Kuttner
Everything for Sale: The Virtues
and Limits of Markets (1997)

2278) We are endlessly indulgent of prophets and prognosticators, astrologers and nostrodami. They must, after all, know something. They can't be completely wrong, can they?
Julian Barnes
"Back to the Future" in
New York Times Book Review (1/26/1997)
[review of Paris In the Twentieth Century by
Jules Verne and Jules Verne by Herbert R. Lottman]

2279) Most predictions tell us less about the future than about the time at which the prediction was made. "Nineteen Eighty-four" is a surer guide to 1948, when Orwell was writing his novel, than to his dated hell.
Julian Barnes
"Back to the Future" in
New York Times Book Review (1/26/1997)
[review of Paris In the Twentieth Century by
Jules Verne and Jules Verne by Herbert R. Lottman]

2280) The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news can expect to be exploited by demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed.
Walter Cronkite
A Reporter's Life (1997)
quoted by Tom Wicker in
"Broadcast News" in
New York Times Books Review (1/26/1997)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 362 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Times they are a-changin'

2008-01-23T23:26:00.000-05:00

2273) No one who isn't from New York [City] knows how to be a pedestrian. Pedestrians don't mosey. And they don't walk five abreast. I'd like to make New York unsafe for tourists. Why do they come here to stand in line?
Fran Leibowitz
quoted by Bruce Weber in
"Crime Is Down. Streets Are Clean. What's a New York Comedian to Do?" in
New York Times Metro section (1/12/1997)

2274) A conventional [music] video shows a singer strutting around doing his business [...] Making techno [music] is not really that photogenic. Generally, it looks like old people eating food. It's very boring.
Nick Philip
director of the Sun Electric
"Meccano" video
quoted by Neil Strauss in
"A New Spacey Look for MTV" in
New York Times Styles section (1/19/1997)

2275) Like many men who are well read and largely self-taught, [Bruce] Springsteen is attracted to polysyllables and sometimes mispronounces them.
Nicholas Dawidoff
"The Pop Populist" in
New York Times Magazine (1/26/1997)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 362 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Our legal system

2008-01-23T01:08:00.000-05:00

2271) [A] trial is often not so much a dispassionate inquiry as it is a morality play. At best, it is an attempt to recapture events that were ambiguous in the first place; at worst it is a contest between opposing public relations machines, each trying to sell its own stylized version of reality.
Laura Mansnerus
"The Devil Is in the Details"
New York Times Week in Review (1/12/1997)

2272) [In Europe] you're looking at a legal system so much fairer, cheaper and more accurate than ours that they view us the way we view witch doctors.
John H. Langbein
(Yale University Law Professor)
quoted by Laura Mansnerus in
"The Devil Is in the Details"
New York Times Week in Review (1/12/1997)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 362 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Stay out of the bunker

2008-01-22T23:19:00.000-05:00

2270) [W]ithdrawal and emphatic reaffirmation of local habits and customs has always been the first, most elemental and popular reaction to novelties that threaten established verities and routines of life. But throughout human history the occasional efforts made by creative minorities to borrow foreign ideas and practices and adapt them to local use have been far more important; for these efforts, when successful – and they have been successful only occasionally – allowed new skills to spread and evolve. The Moslem mastery and elaboration of Greek mathematical skill and the subsequent borrowing and further elaboration by Europeans after the thirteenth century provide a vivid example of such exchanges. The net effect of successful borrowing and adaptation was to increase human wealth and power by enlarging our niche in the ecosystem. This, in fact, is, and always has been, the central phenomenon of human history.

Retreat into a local cultural past – even when it is a reconstructed past that never existed before – can indeed sustain local morale and cohesion in time of troubles. But when the resulting bunker mentality dictates a systematic disregard of, or deliberate inattention to, the ideas and skills alien peoples and cultures have at their command, the end result is to be disastrously left behind by the rest of the world. [...]

If a nation or bloc of nations is to have long-term success, cultural continuity must somehow be combined with close attention to useful new ideas, practices, and technologies from near and far.
William H. MacNeill
"Decline of the West?"
New York Review of Books (1/9/1997)
[review of The Clash of Civilizations
and the Remaking of the World Order
by Samuel P. Huntington]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 363 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) The techno-gap

2008-01-22T22:57:00.000-05:00

2269) [I]ncreasing access to technology improves overall wealth, but also exacerbates inequality, because access benefits the information-rich the most. More and broader education is the single most effective way of reducing the disparity, but it doesn't work on the kind of time-scale that wins elections.
John Browning
"Cyber View: No More 9 to 5"
Scientific American (1/1997)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 363 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

Propaganda watch

2008-01-22T18:21:00.000-05:00

I'm beginning to see some propaganda around. Here's one example:

And here's another:

Electile Dysfunction: the inability to become aroused over any of the choices for president put forth by either party in the 2008 election year.

Now, note that both of these were sent to a friend of mine from some Republican friends of hers, so in both cases we're looking at Republicans saying that they're unhappy with all the candidates in the current cohort running for President.

What's the meaning of this? Well, either Republicans are actually tired of politics as usual, and are as disenchanted with their own candidates as they are with those of the Democrats, or else they're.... hmmmmmm ... let me think ... Oh, maybe they're trying to poison the wells and drive down Democratic turnout by spreading the idea that all politicians are equally reprehensible?

No, they wouldn't do that, would they?

In Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar Antony says:

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;

In Bush's case, it's hard to come up with any good he's done, except, perhaps, to put the lie to the canard that there's "no difference between the parties", no matter how close they sometimes come to each other on some issues.*

You remember that, right, how Ralph Nader went around telling everyone that Democrats and Republicans were exactly the same, and enough people believed him to help make it just that much easier for Bush to steal the election in Florida in 2000, and we ended up with him instead of Gore – you recall? And that's how we learned (onCe again) that there is a difference between Republicans and Democrats.

So let's not fall for the same old trick wrapped up in new packaging. There is a difference between the parties, and there are politicians who are better than others, and it so happens that many of the bad ones are on their payroll, and many of the good ones are on ours But be that as it may, even if both candidates, Democratic and Republican, turn out to be equally bad, the Democrat will be (as LBJ is said to have said) our son of a bitch, and not theirs, and that makes the Democrat prefereable, because we have some influence then that we wouldn't have otherwise.

Be on the lookout for other instances of this new Republican ploy. And cheer up, folks, we're seeing the end of a very bad time, and we're coming into an election of historic change.

[Thanks to Shirley for passing along the propaganda.]

^* Of course, that's precious little good for the scale of the evil Bush and Cheney have laid on us. We'll be digging out from their blizzard for a long time. Our children's children will still be feeling the effects.

(3089/898) The illusion of consciousness

2008-01-22T16:22:00.000-05:00

2268) Consciousness is an illusion that the brain constructs to simulate the world around us. It does this so seamlessly, that we are convinced we are experiencing reality directly, even though all our information is heavily processed before we become aware of it. Colors, sounds and tastes exist only in our heads, they are the brains coded representations of important physical properties of the outside world, such as the frequencies of light waves, the vibrations of air molecules and the structure of chemicals.
Nicholas Wade
"Software for the Brain"
New York Times Book Review (12/29/1996)
[review of Kinds of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett and
The Conscious Mind by David J. Chalmers]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 363 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

Different strokes in America, buddy

2008-01-22T03:07:00.000-05:00

Here in New York City, when the police come across a nutjob who's got a cache of weapons and bombs in his apartment, they arrest him, and find out that he's linked to a series of hate crimes, and that's because we don't really want people with lots of guns and explosives around us because the odds are pretty good they're going to do something to hurt somebody, and that somebody could be us.

Of course, in some parts of California, they do things differently, and coming across a massive cache of arms, ammunition and bomb-making material is just a ho-hum kinda thing, because we've got to make damn sure we've all got our weapons for when the gummint come to take back our rights.

(News flash, folks: the gummint don't need no guns to take back your rights; please see entries under "Bush Administration" in your local newspaper -- but, wait ... oh, right, you voted for Bush.)

(3089/898) Bernard Wolfe: Limbo

2008-01-22T02:37:00.000-05:00

2262) There was probably a touch of psychic hari-kari in every human community. For every community promulgated some sacred mission or other, dedication was the matrix of every group, its psychic glue - and every communal mission was in the end a bit absurd. Why? Well, simply because it demanded of all men within its pale that they order their psychic economies to conform with the group goal, verticalize their horizontal instincts: this was the meaning of the reality principle as superimposed on the pleasure principle. But the reality created and deified by the community, although it undoubtedly paid some emotional dividends to those who kowtowed to it, never turned out a really adequate substitute for the simpler instinctual pleasures sacrificed at its altar: peace, for example, was a hollow gift when purchased at the price of orgasm, or limbs. So even in the most socialized citizen, the most obedient, there was a festering remnant of discontent. Particularly since, when he looked around, he saw other men in other places devoted to goals quite antithetical to his own - and every bit as solemn about it.

Good enough. It followed, then, that the healthiest society was one which allowed its members ample escape valves for the discontents fomented by civilization and its instinct trampling ends: along with the bread of solemnity, plenty of irrelevant circuses in which clowns rode all the sacred cows. Where there were enough such circuses, little ambivalence remained to poison the more devotional activities. But among people who were discontented enough, and were not provided with enough drainage systems for their malaise, every day was something of a circus, ever solemn undertaking poisoned by a certain tongue-in-cheek attitude - they did obeisance to the community's lofty goals but always with a shrug of the shoulders and sardonic shadows playing around the mouth and the tacit suspicion that "Dolce far niente." ["Doing nothing is sweet."]
Bernard Wolfe
Limbo (1952)

2263) [E]very one of the big salvationist movements in history - from the Ten Commandments all the way down to the Mormons' Latter Day Sainthood and Christian Science and Jehovah's Witnesses and Fletcherism and Bolshevik-Leninism and Dianetics and Orgonotics and Santa Monica Vedanta and Mangunga - every one of them might have started out as a great Swiftean joke. That some humorless man got hold of and took literally.

The jokes got wilder and wilder, people laughed less and less.
Bernard Wolfe
Limbo (1952)

2264) Thing is, man has always been uneasy with the world as it is - its disarray, its slipshoddiness. Can't stand an indefinite turbulence in his affairs. People are too damned neat to live with the world's litter; maybe it come from too much toilet training. Man isn't the tool maker, the speech maker, the concept maker; pre-eminently he's the system maker, the compulsive bringer of order into primordial messiness.
Bernard Wolfe
Limbo (1952)

2265) All along, the philosopher's Holy Grail has been the magical Hyphen, some unified-field theory or another. After the religious short cuts [...] had been tried and failed - the Catholic's hierarchical stepladder to the One, the Protestant's individual pipeline - the philosopher's had a try at patching things up. They were all variations on Descartes, trying to find the missing cosmic link in one pineal gland or another. [...] Often a guy seem to get a hold of some provocative kernel of an idea, some puny lever with which to pry open this or that chunk of reality - but invariably he palmed it off as the Ultimate Lever. Some of these guys, in fact, judging from the grandiosity and fanatical intensity of their writings, were in the strictest sense pathological, determined to find the one key that would open all doors. It never occurred to them that different doors might be fitted with totally different kids of locks. So that anybody rash enough to pose as cosmic locksmith should, in the interest of public safety, himself be locked up. To mix the figure still further, a key which is fobbed off as a cosmic can opener can very easily be turned into a bull whip or truncheon or automatic - or steamroller.
Bernard Wolfe
Limbo (1952)

2266) [W]hat distinguishes man from animal? Not hands, not superego, not logic, not the ability to abstract and make instruments, not his myths and dreams and nightmares - the beginnings of all these things are there in higher animals, it's just a matter of man having more of the same. There's only one thing man can do that's beyond all other animals on earth: he can laugh. [...] Correction. Two things distinguish man from the animal. He laughs - uses throat can vocal cords in a most unfunctional way. Also cries - first time in the animal kingdom the tear ducts were ever put to such fantastic unfunctional uses. And performs both unfunctional activities as one function, when he's fully human. Homo Dei, the weepy titterer: laughs til the tears come.
Bernard Wolfe
Limbo (1952)

2267) Anybody who "paints a picture" of some coming year is kidding - he's only fancying up something in the present or past, not blueprinting the future. All such writing is essentially satiric (today-centered), not utopic (tomorrow-centered). This book, then is a rather bilious rib on 1950 - on what 1950 might have been like if it had been allowed to fulfill itself, if it had gone on being 1950, only more and more so, for four more decades. But no year ever fulfills itself: the cowpath of History is littered with the corpses of years, their silly throats slit from ear to ear by the improbable.

I am writing about the overtone and undertow of now [i.e. 1950] - in the guise of 1990 because it would take decades for a year like 1950 to be milked of its implications. What 1990 will really look like I haven't the slightest idea. Nobody can train his mind to think effectively, without vertigo, in terms of acceleration and accelerated accelerations - and nobody can foretell Clio's pratfalls. On the spurious map of the future presented herein, on the far side of the pinpoint of now, I have to inscribe, as did the medieval cartographers over all the terrifying areas outside their ken: HERE LIVE LIONS. They could, of course, be unicorns, or hippographs, or even giraffes. I don't know if there's going to be a 1990.
Bernard Wolfe
"Author's Notes and Warnings"
Limbo (1952)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 363 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) We contain multitudes

2008-01-22T01:32:00.000-05:00

2258) When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! You can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.
Steve Jobs
interviewed by Gary Wolf in
"Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing" in
Wired (2/1996)

2259) Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.
Mark Twain
Following the Equator (1897) [ODQ]

2260)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes).
Walt Whitman
"Song of Myself" in
Leaves of Grass (1855)

2261) Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
Jules Henri Poincare
quoted by Bertrand Russell in
Science and Method (1913) [B16]

Sources

[B16] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (1993)
[ODQ] - The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 4th edition (1992)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 363 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Gould: Full House

2008-01-22T01:12:00.000-05:00

2248) [P]robably more intellectual energy has been invested in discovering (and exploiting) trends in the stock market than in any other subject - for the obvious reason that the stakes are so high, as measured in the currency of our culture. The fact that no one has ever come close to finding a consistent way to beat they system - despite intense efforts by some of the smartest people in the world - probably indicates that such causal trends do not exist, and that the sequences are effectively random.
Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

2249) In the second most prominent fallacy about trends, people correctly identify a genuine directionality, but then fall into the error of assuming that something else moving in the same direction at the same time must be acting as the cause. This error, the conflation of correlation with causality, arises for the obvious reason (once you think about it) that, at any moment, oodles of things must be moving in the same direction (Halley's comet is receding from earth and my cat is getting more ornery) - and the vast majority of these correlated sequences cannot be causally related. In the classic illustration, a famous statistician once showed a precise correlation between arrests for public drunkenness and the number of Baptist preachers in nineteenth-century America. The correlation is real and intense, but we may assume that the two increases are causally unrelated, and that both arise as consequences of a single different factor: a marked general increase in the American population.
Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

2250) The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomenon of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
T.H. Huxley
A Liberal Education (1868)
quoted by Stephen Jay Gould in
Full House (1996)

2251) Huxley's metaphor fails [...] because we cannot depict the enterprise of science as Us against Them. The adversary at the other side of the board is some complex combination of nature's genuine intractability and our hidebound social and mental habits. We are, in large part, playing against ourselves. Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly - and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individual stupidity.)
Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

2252) We often portray taxonomy as the dullest of all fields, as expressed in a variety of deprecatory metaphors: hanging garments on nature's coatrack; placing items into pigeonholes; or (in an image properly resented by philatelists) sticking stamps into the album of reality. All these images clip the wings of taxonomy and reduce the science of classification to the dullest task of keeping things neat and tidy. But these portrayals [...] reflect a common fallacy: the assumption of a fully objective nature "out there" and visible in the same way to any unprejudiced observer [...] If such a vision could be sustained, I suppose taxonomy would become the most boring of sciences. for nature would then present a set of obvious pigeonholes, and taxonomists would search for occupants and shove them in - an enterprise requiring diligence, perhaps, but not much creativity or imagination.

But classification systems are not passive devices in a world objectively divided into obvious categories. Taxonomies are human decisions imposed upon nature - theories about the causes of nature's order. The chronicle of historical changes in classification provides our finest insight into conceptual revolutions in human thought. Objective nature does exist, but we can converse with her only through the structure of our taxonomic systems.

We may grant this general point, but still hold that certain fundamental categories present so little ambiguity that basic divisions must be invariant across time and culture. Not so - not for these, or any subjects. Categories are human impositions upon nature (though nature's factuality offers hints and suggestions in return).
Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

2253) [T]he three standard measures of central tendency, or "average" value - the mean (or conventional average calculated by adding all the values and dividing by the number of cases), the median (or halfway point), and the mode (or most common value). In symmetrical distributions, all three measures coincide - for the center is, simultaneously, the most common value, the halfway point (with equal number of cases on either side), and the mean. This coincidence, I suspect, has lead most of us to ignore the vital differences among these measures, for we view "normal curves" as, well, normal - and regard skewed distributions (of we grasp the principle at all) as peculiar and probably rare. But measures of central tendency differ in skewed distributions - and a major source of employment for economic and political "spin doctors" lies in knowing which measure to choose as the best propaganda for the honchos who hired your gun. [...]

In general, when a distribution is prominently skewed, mean values will be pulled most strongly in the direction of skew, medians less, and modes not at all. Thus, in right-skewed distributions, means generally have higher values than medians, and medians higher than modes. If we start with a symmetrical distribution (with equal mean, median, and mode), and then pull the variation to form a right-skewed distribution the mean will change most in the direction of skew - for one new millionaire on the right tail can balance hundreds of indigent people on the left tail. The median changes less, for a single pauper will now compensate the millionaire when we are only counting noses on either side of a central tendency. (The median might not move at all if only the wealth, and not the number, of people increases on the right side of the distribution. But if the number of wealthy people at the right tail increases as well, then the median will also shift to the right - but not so far as the mean.) The mode, meanwhile, may well stay put and not vary at all, as mean and median grow in an increasingly right-skewed distribution. Twenty-thousand per year may remain the most common income, even while the number of wealthy people constantly increases.
Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

2254) What are the real success stories of mammalian evolution? We can answer this question without ambiguity, at least in terms of numerous species and vigorous radiation: rats, bats, and antelopes [...] These three groups dominate the world of mammals, both in numbers, and in ecological spread.
Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

2255) The obvious main difference between Darwinian evolution and cultural change clearly lies in the enormous capacity that culture holds - and nature lacks - for explosive rapidity and cumulative directionality. In an unmeasurable blink of a geological eyelash, human cultural change has transformed the surface of our planet as no event of natural evolution could ever accomplish at Darwinian scales of myriad generations. (Natural catastrophes of a physical nature, like the bolide that triggered the great Cretaceous extinction, may wipe out many forms of life in a geological moment, but no known process can produce natural evolutionary change at anything like the speed and extent of human cultural transformation; the impressive and maximal rapidity of the Cambrian explosion lasted some 5 million years.
Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

2256) Cultural change [...] receives a powerful boost from amalgamation and anastomosis of different traditions. A clever traveler may take one look at a foreign wheel, import the invention back home, and change his local culture fundamentally and forever. One brace of guns, one bevy of war chariots, imported with engineers and tradesmen to keep them in working order, can transform a limited and peaceful state into an expanding engine of conquest. The explosively fruitful (or destructive) impact of shared traditions powers human cultural change by a mechanism unknown in the slower world of Darwinian evolution.
Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

2257) [T]he great fuzziness of our age - so-called "political correctness" [...] a doctrine that celebrates all indigenous practice, and therefore permits no distinctions, judgments, or analyses.
Stephen Jay Gould
Full House (1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 363 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

Thanks, Suzanne

2008-01-21T07:38:00.000-05:00

Suzanne Pleshette
January 31, 1937 – January 19, 2008

ONE YEAR TO GO!

2008-01-20T23:29:00.000-05:00

In just 365 days, no more Bush, no more Cheney!

Note to the unduly credulous: No, this is not a photograph from an amazing anti-Bush rally held somewhere today, it's been altered from a photograph taken years ago in connection with another event altogether. Don't believe everything you see.

Friday Photography: Ferry Terminal

2008-01-19T19:27:00.000-05:00

Daryl Samuel
(August 2007)
Location: St. George Ferry Terminal,
Staten Island, New York City

Previous:
Photos posted in 2006 & 2007
2008: Tulips / Metal Tree

(3089/898) Entering Negativland

2008-01-17T01:48:00.000-05:00

2234) Congress shall have the power [...] [t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries [...]
Constitution of the United State
Article I, Section 8 (Powers of the Congress)

2235) One basic failing of the U.S. legal system is that it treats the plaintiff and the defendent [sic] as though they are equally powerful entities, regardless of the actual resources each might have. Further, it disregards the fact that the cost of preparing a legal defense for a trial is prohibitively high - unthinkable for any entity other than a wealthy individual or a good-sized corporation. Thus, when a corporation goes after a small business or low-income individuals, the conflict automatically rolls outside of the court system because of the defendent's [sic] inability to pay the costs of mounting a proper defense. The matter is resolved by the more powerful organization threatening to press the suit back into the courts unless the smaller party agrees to their terms unconditionally. The powerful crush the weak. Note that all of this is purely a power relationship, essentially without regard to the legality of the issue, let alone the morality.
Negativland
(Chris Grigg, Mark Hosler, Don Joyce, David Wills)
"U2 Negativland: The Case from Our Side"
press release (11/10/1991)
Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U
and the Numeral 2 (1994)

2236) True folk music [...] is no longer possible. The original folk process of incorporating previous melodies and lyrics into constantly evolving songs is impossible when melodies and lyrics are privately owned.
Negativland
(Chris Grigg, Mark Hosler, Don Joyce, David Wills)
"Fair Use"
Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U
and the Numeral 2 (1994)

2237) If the amount of control now being exerted over the ownership of our culture had existed from day one of human kind, we wouldn't have art and music the way we know it at all.
Mark Hosler
quoted by Tony Fletcher in
"The Letter U, The Numeral 2, and a Fistful of Lawsuits"
Creem (4/1993)

2238) Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they're born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren't content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend a song of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.

As the couple walked up to their Buick, two mockingbirds flew away from its grill, one of them tweeting in a little-known dialect of goldfinch, the other mixing a catbird with a raspy chord borrowed from a woodpecker. For centuries, mockingbirds had hunted live insects and foraged for seeds, but when motorcars began to appear in numbers on southern roads, they learned that they could dine more easily by simply picking dead bugs off the radiators of parked autos. Mockingbirds. Inventing new tricks to subsidize their own expression. Artists!.
Tom Robbins
Skinny Legs and All (1990)
quoted by Negativland
(Chris Grigg, Mark Hosler, Don Joyce, David Wills)
Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U
and the Numeral 2 (1994)

2239) Private property, including intellectual property, is essential to our way of life. It provides an incentive for investment and innovation; it stimulates the flourishing of our culture; it protects the moral entitlements of people to the fruits of their labors. But reducing too much to private property can be bad medicine. Private land, for instance, is far more useful if separated from other private land by public streets, roads and highways. Public parks, utility rights-of-way and sewers reduce the amount of land in private hands, but vastly enhance the value of the property that remains.

So too with intellectual property. Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture.
Judge Kozinski
dissenting opinion in
Vanna White v. Samsung Electronics
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (3/18/1993)

2240) [A]lmost all popular [music] compositions bear some similarity to prior works. It is often difficult to separate originality from quotation in popular music. A successful pop song typically balances elements of familiarity and novelty. Pop songwriters frequently pay tribute to their peers and predecessors via allusion, pastiche and mimicry, making it difficult to determine exactly which elements in any given pop song are original. Furthermore, most popular music derives from a variety of musical traditions. Rock and roll "borrows" extensively from black music, country music, folk and Tin Pan Alley. Rap music too borrows heavily from funk, soul, free jazz and the avant garde. [...] Throughout history, classical composers drew liberally from folk music, popular music and even directly from their peers. But while musical language has an extensive repertoire of punctuation devices, there does not exist a musical equivalent to literature's use of quotation marks.
Alan Korn
"Renaming That Tune: Audio Collage,
Parody, and Fair Use"
22 Golden Gate University Law Review 321 (1992)

2241) First Amendment protections do not apply only to those who speak clearly, whose jokes are funny and whose parodies succeed.
J. Leval
Yankee Publishing v. News America Publishing
809 F. Supp. 267,280 (SDNY 1992)
quoted by Justice Souter in
Luther R. Campbell AKA Luke Skywalker et al
v. Acuff-Rose Music
Supreme Court of the United States (3/7/1994)

2242) The most influential distinctions in the music world today, after racists and sexist categorization, is between the familiar and the unknown. The common critical declensions of artistic experience are likable (as in "I know what I like"), boring and weird.
John Oswald
interviewed in
"Taking Samples Fifty Times Beyond the Expected" in
Musicwork's Magazine (1990)

2243) If creativity is a field, then copyright is the fence.
John Oswald
quoted by Negativland
(Chris Grigg, Mark Hosler, Don Joyce, David Wills) in
"Copyright, Fair Use, and the Law"
Keyboard (6/1994)

2244) If copyright is a fence, then fair use is the gate.
Negativland
(Chris Grigg, Mark Hosler, Don Joyce, David Wills) in
"Copyright, Fair Use, and the Law"
Keyboard (6/1994)

2245) Whenever there is [...] profound divergence between law and social practice, it is not society that adapts.
John Perry Barlow
"The Economy of Ideas"
Wired (3/19934)

2246) We believe that artistic freedom for all is more important to the health of society than [...] private copyright tariffs which create a cultural climate of art control and Art Police. No matter how valid the original intent of our copyright laws may have been, they are now used to censor resented works, to suppress the public need to reuse and reshape information, and to garner purely opportunistic incomes from any public use of previously released cultural material which is, in fact, already publicly available to anyone. The U.S. Constitution clearly shows that the original intent of copyright law was to promote a public good, not a private one. No one should be allowed to claim a private control over the creative process itself. This struggle is essentially one of art against business, and ultimately about which one must make way for the other.
Negativland
(Chris Grigg, Mark Hosler, Don Joyce, David Wills)
"Negativland's Tenets of Free Appropriation"
Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U
and the Numeral 2 (1994)

2247) I think [copyright] ownership should extend to the entire work only. In other words, copyright and ownership of a song means that no one can use the song, or cover that song, without paying the artist - because that' the artist's work [...] but [...] I would totally eliminate any concept of ownership [for fragments of the whole].
Don Joyce (member of Negativland)
"Negativland Interviews U2's 'The Edge'"
Mondo 2000 (6/1992)
[Note: Some of the above articles can be found on Negativland's web site, which has a large collection of information on copyright and fair use issues. See here for an account of the "U2 incident" which lies behind these quotations.]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 368 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) This and that

2008-01-16T17:21:00.000-05:00

2230) It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
Giordano Bruno
On Heroic Frenzies (1585)
quoted by John Mason in
Great and Mind Liberating Thoughts (1940)
quoted by George Seldes in
The Great Thoughts (1985) [PAQ]
posted by Michael McMullin [ISQ] (12/4/1996)

2231) Action to be effective must be directed to clearly conceived ends.
Jawaharlal Nehru
Autobiography (1936) [WQ]
posted by Michael McMullin [ISQ] (12/7/1996)

2232) [M]usic is noise when those feelings and thoughts [expressed] are either incomprehensible or unpalatable to us, or when the form of communication itself fails to convey those feelings or thoughts.
Zenon M. Feszczak
posted on [AMB] (12/12/1996)

2233) Children's books, like women's lingerie, have to please two audiences at the same time – one element demanding comfort and the other titillation.
Adam Gopnik
"Grim Fairy Tales"
The New Yorker (11/18/1996)
posted by Alan Bostick on alt.folklore.urban (12/3/1996)

Sources

[AMB] - Internet Ambient Music mailing list
[ISQ] - Internet Serial-Quotations mailing list
[PAQ] - Positive Atheism's Big List of Quotes
[WQ] - Wikiquote

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 369 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) The Tragedy of the Commons

2008-01-16T14:02:00.001-05:00

2229) The tragedy of the commons occurs when there is a finite "public" or shared resource that individuals will be selfishly tempted to take more of than their fair share – such as the edible fish in the oceans. Unless very specific and enforceable agreements can be reached, the result will tend to be the destruction of the resource.
Daniel Dennett
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
citing Garrett Hardin
"The Tragedy of the Commons" in
Science (v.162, pp.1243-48)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 369 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Science and scholarship

2008-01-16T14:02:00.000-05:00

2226) Science is about continuity of ideas, a web of connections.
Gregory Benford
"A Scientist's Notebook: Life on Mars?"
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (2/1997)

2227) The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
Robert Heinlein
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long (1978)
posted by philo on alt.folklore.urban (12/11/1996)

2228) [A]ll origin myths and other pieces of religious writings and oral traditions have, as their most important meaning, moral lessons about the relationships between humans, god or gods, and the universe. While they may, like parts of the Bible, reflect some real past events, they are rarely accurate guides to geology or history. Attempts to fit what we know about the past into any of dozens of different religious traditions resembles Cinderella's sisters' trying to wear her shoes: the result is dishonest manipulation of science, degradation and misinterpretation of great literature and moral wisdom, and hurtful bigotry toward other people.
John C. Whittaker
"Red Power Finds Creationism"
Skeptical Inquirer (Jan/Feb 1997)
[review of Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans
and the Myth of Scientific Fact by Vine Deloria Jr.]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 369 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Saroyan: The Time of Your Life

2008-01-16T02:48:00.000-05:00

2223) Living is an art. It's not bookkeeping. It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself.
William Saroyan
The Time of Your Life (play, 1939)
spoken by the character "Joe"

2224) Listen carefully. If anybody's got any money - to hoard or to throw away - you can be sure he stole it from other people. Not from rich people who can spare it, but from poor people who can't. From their lives and from their dreams. I'm no exception. I earned the money I throw away. I stole it like everybody else does. I hurt people to get it. Loafing around this way, I still earn money. The money itself earns more. I still hurt people. I don't know who they are, or where they are. If I did, I'd feel worse than I do. I've got a Christian conscience in a world that's got no conscience at all. The world's trying to get some sort of a social conscience, but it's having a devil of a time trying to do that. I've got money. I'll always have money, as long as this world stays the way it is. I don't work. I don't make anything. [...] I drink. I worked hard when I was a kid. I worked hard. I mean hard [...] People are supposed to enjoy living. I got tired. [...] I decided to get even on the world. Well, you can't enjoy living unless you work. Unless you do something. I don't do anything. I don't want to do anything any more. There isn't anything I can do that won't make me feel embarrassed. Because I can't do simple, good things. I haven't the patience. And I'm too smart. Money is the guiltiest thing in the world. It stinks.
William Saroyan
The Time of Your Life (play, 1939)
spoken by the character "Joe"

2225) Nick, this is a toy. A contraption devised by the cunning of man to drive boredom, or grief, or anger out of children. A noble gadget. A gadget, I might say, infinitely nobler than any other I can think of at this moment.
William Saroyan
The Time of Your Life (play, 1939)
spoken by the character "Joe"

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 369 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) The Net's arrested development (1996)

2008-01-16T00:55:00.000-05:00

2217) Most people I know who have embarked even half-heartedly upon the Net say they have no time anymore to read, watch TV, visit with their friends - no time to do all the things they used to do.
Charles McGrath
"The Internet's Arrested Development"
New York Times Magazine (12/8/1996)

2218) The problem is that the technology [of the Internet] isn't particularly hospitable to reading right now. The typical computer screen doesn't offer anything like the clarity and resolution achieved with ink and paper. Even in the classiest, most sophisticated presentations, type that is on the screen has an undifferentiated, flyspeck quality, and though some of us have taught ourselves how to look at this stuff long enough and carefully enough to make our livings from doing so, few people, I think, would do this for pleasure. [...] And then there's the disorienting business of scrolling, as opposed to simply turning a page. The old technology is still more satisfying [...] Page turning is actually faster and more flexible. By taking away many of the visual and tactile cues we use to measure our progress through a text - by making it harder to find one's place - scrolling helps render these texts shapeless.
Charles McGrath
"The Internet's Arrested Development"
New York Times Magazine (12/8/1996)

2219) Electronic communication prizes content over form, information over style, immediacy over proofreading and fact-checking; it tolerates an ungrammatical, misspelled sentence as happily as a correct one, and, by instantly storing a muddled thought in memory or displaying it on a screen, it can make that thought seem as shapely and permanent as a profound one. [...] What works best in this new writing - or what's more effective, at any rate, and what is imitated most often - is not subtlety but cuteness: emoticons, as those ubiquitous happy and sad faces are called - :) and ;( - and all the in-group acronyms and abbreviations that make up so much of what passes for discourse in the discussion groups: "lol," "f2f: and so on. Loudness works, too - lots of CAPITAL LETTERS, that is - and so does rudeness and incivility.
Charles McGrath
"The Internet's Arrested Development"
New York Times Magazine (12/8/1996)

2220) [T]he hypertext philosophy - and some of the libertarianism on the Net - [...] ignores that at a certain level reading is not about freedom at all, but about submission, about stifling your own voice, stilling your mind and yielding fully to the designs (in every sense) of another. If I'm going to read "Vilette," say, I don't want to choose my own Bruges, I want Charlotte Bronte to do it for me. Similarly, I don't want to tell Conor Cruise O'Brien what I think about Thomas Jefferson, I want him to tell me what to think. I want him, that is, to temporarily take over my mind and make use of it. Ultimately, reading is about what happens between a writer and me; it's not a community activity.
Charles McGrath
"The Internet's Arrested Development"
New York Times Magazine (12/8/1996)

2221) [M]ost of the sexual material on the Internet is not particularly erotic; it's not really concerned with sex at all, in fact, but with sexual imagery, devoid of even that filmy peignoir of narrative or context that usually accompanies the cheesiest of magazine spreads, the most low-budget of videos. Context and narrative, you discover in their absence, are no small part of what makes sex sexy.
Charles McGrath
"The Internet's Arrested Development"
New York Times Magazine (12/8/1996)

2222) Most of us have either sent or received an electronic jolt that would have benefited from the cooling-down period afforded by the traditional drawer-yanking search for an envelope and fumble for a stamp. But these occasional melt-downs are a small price to pay for such as benign and transforming invention [as e-mail], one that, if you allow it to, pleasingly combines the virtues of ease and immediacy. The great advantage the E-mail has over the telephone is not just that the line is seldom tied up, but that it forces you, literally, to compose yourself - to create a text that presents you in your own best version.
Charles McGrath
"The Internet's Arrested Development"
New York Times Magazine (12/8/1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 369 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) No standing O

2008-01-16T00:26:00.000-05:00

2216) [A]n undeserved [standing] ovation serves neither the audience nor the production. It's like heaping praise on a mediocre meal: the chef will serve up the same disappointing dish the next time.
Peter Marks
"Stage View: Standing Room Only (And That's Not Good)"
New York Time Arts & Leisure section (12/8/1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 369 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Silverberg: The World Inside

2008-01-15T23:48:00.000-05:00

2215) Dillon is seventeen [...] He plays vibrastar in a cosmos group. That makes him valuable personnel. "I'm unique, like a flow-sculpture," he sometimes boasts. [...] He enters the sonic center. A fine new auditorium [...] There is no better hall for a cosmos group in the entire urbmon. The other members of the group are here already, tuning in. The comet-harp, the incantator, the orbital diver, the gravity-drinker, the doppler-inverter, the spectrum-rider. Already the room trembles with shimmering plinks of sound and jolly blurts of color, and a shaft of pure no-referent texture, abstract and immanent, is rising from the doppler-inverter's central core. Everyone waves to him [...]

"Tuning in!" he warns the other musicians.

They make feedback adjustments in their own instruments; otherwise the sudden surge of his entrance might damage both instruments and players. One by one they nod their readiness to him, with the gravity-drinker lad chiming in last, and finally Dillon can let out the clutch. Yeah! The hall fills with light. Stars stream from the walls. He coats the ceiling with ripping nebulae. He is the basic instrument of the group, the all-important continuo, providing the foundation against which the others will do their thing. With a practiced eye he checks the focus. Everything sharp. [...]

"Bringing up the sound, now," he says.

The heels of his hand hit the control panel. From the gaping speakers comes a tender blade of white noise. The music of the spheres. He colors it now, bringing up the gain on the galactic side, letting the stellar drift impart plangent hues to the tone. Then, with a quick downward stab on the projectrons, he kicks in the planetary sounds. [...]

After half an hour of preliminary maneuvers Dillon has his primary tuning finished. So far, though, he has only done the solo work. Now to coordinate with the others. [...] Precarious balance, constantly falling off. Up until five years ago, there had been only five instruments in cosmos groups; it was simply too difficult to hold more than that together. Like adding a fourth actor in Greek tragedy: an impossible technical feat, or so it must have seen to Aeschylus. Now they were able to coordinate six instruments reasonably well, and a seventh with some effort, by sending the circuit bouncing up to a computer nexus [...] but it is still a filther to put them all in synch. [...]

He is ready. He brings his hands up for a virtuoso pounce and slams them down on the projectrons. The old headblaster! Moon and sun and planets and stars come roaring out of his instrument. The whole glittering universe erupts in the hall. He doesn't dare look at the audience. Did he rock them? [...] The others, as if sensing that he's into something special, let him take an introductory solo. Furies fly through his brain. [...] Who says you can't start with your climax? [...] And bring up the sound, too, a great heaving pedal-point that sneaks up the webbing at them, a spear of fifty-cycle vibration nailing them in their assholes. Help them digest their dinners. Shake up all the old shit clogging the colon. Dillon laughs. [...] He pulls out all the stops. Fantastic! He's never done things like this before. [...] The whole universe is vibrating around him. A gigantic solo. God himself must have felt this way when he got to work on the first day. Needles of sound descending from the speakers. A mighty crescendo of light and tone. He feels the power surging through him [...] Has anyone ever done something like this before, this improvised symphony for solo vibrastar? Hello, Bach! Hello, Mick! Hello, Wagner! Shoot your skulls! Let it all fly! He is past the crest, starting to come down now, no longer relying on pure energy but dabbling in subtler things, splashing Jupiter with golden splotches, turning the stars into icy white points, bringing up little noodling ostinatos. He makes Saturn trill: a signal to the others. Who ever heard of opening a concert with a cadenza? But they pick up on it.

Ah, now. Here they come. Gently the doppler-inverter noodles in with a theme of his own, catching something of the descending fever of Dillon's stellar patterns. At once the comet-harp overlays this with a more sensational series of twanging tones the immediately transmute themselves in looping blares of green light. These are seized by the spectrum-rider, who climbs on top of them and, grinning broadly, skis off toward the ultraviolet in a shower of hissing crispness. Old Sophro now does his orbital dives, a swoop and a pickup followed by a swoop and a pickup again, playing against the spectrum rider in the kind of cunning way that only someone right inside the meshing group can appreciate. Then the incantator enters, portentous, booming, sending reverberations shivering through the walls, heightening the significance of the tonal and astronomical patters until the convergence becomes almost unbearably beautiful. It is the cue for the gravity-drinker, who disrupts everybody's stability with wonderful, wild liberating bursts of force. By this time Dillon has retreated to his proper place as the coordinator and unifier of the group, tossing a skein on melody to this one, a loop of light to that one, embellishing everything that passes near him. He fades into the undertones. His manic excitement passes; playing in a mechanical way, he is as much listener as performer, quietly appreciating the variations and divagations his partners are producing. He does not need to draw attention now. He can simply go oomp oomp oomp the rest of the night. Not that he will; the construct will tumble if he doesn't feed new data every ten or fifteen minutes. But this is his time to coast. [...]

After its frenzied opening the concert has settled into routine [...] the whole group vamps for perhaps twenty minutes, going through a set of changes that numb the ganglia and abort the soul, until finally Nat spectacularly shrieks through the whole spectrum from someplace south on infared into what, as far as anyone can tell, may be the X-ray frequencies, and this wild takeoff not only stimulates a rebirth of inventiveness, but also signals the end of the show. Everybody picks up on him and they blast free, swirling and floating and coming together, forming one entity with seven heads as the bombard the flaccid data-stoned audience with mountains of overload. [...]

Dillon is at the heart of it, tossing off bright purple sparks, pulling down suns and chewing them up, and he feels even more plugged in than during his big solo, for this is a joint thing, a blending, a merging, and he knows that what he is feeling now explains everything: this is the purpose of life, this is the reason for it all. To tune in on beauty, to plunge right to the hot source of creation, to open your soul and let it all in and let it all out again, to give [...] and it ends. Pull the plug. They let him have their final chord and he cuts off with a skullblower, a five-way planetary conjunction and a triple fugue, the whole showoff burst lasting no more than tens seconds. Then down with the hands and off with the switch and a wall of silence rises ninety kilometers high. This time he's done t. He's emptied everyone's skull. He sits there shivering, biting his lip, dazed by the house lights, wanting to cry. He dares no look at the others in the group. How much time is passing? Five minutes, five months, five centuries, five megayears? And at last the reaction. A stampede of applause. [...] We knocked them out of their miserable soggy skulls.
Robert Silverberg
The World Inside (1971)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 370 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Ambience

2008-01-15T22:50:00.000-05:00

2214) A friend of mine was having a party and they played really really horrible music there. Then a record reached its end and I heard this incredibly soothing ambient sound. I asked my friend if it was Eno. 'What!' he said, there is no music playing now. I said: 'So what is this sound then?' 'Oh THAT sound. It's the fridge!'
Otso Pakarinen
posted on alt.music.techno (12/2/1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 370 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Authority

2008-01-15T22:20:00.000-05:00

2209) The faith that stands on authority is not faith.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The Over-Soul"
Essays (1841) [ODQ]
posted by marlowe [UAQ] (11/29/1996)

2210) Nothing overshadows truth so completely as authority.
Leon Battista Alberti
Momo o del Principe (c.1450)
posted by marlowe [UAQ] (11/29/1996)

2211) The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.
Stanley Milgram
Obediance to Authority; An Experimental View (1974)
posted by marlowe [UAQ] (11/29/1996)

2212) The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism, the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith; and the most ardent votary of science holds his firmest convictions, not because the men he most venerates hold them; not because their verity is testified by portents and wonders; but because his experience teaches him that whenever he chooses to bring these convictions into contact with their primary source, Nature, whenever he thinks fit to test them by appealing to experiment and to observation, Nature will confirm them. The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.
T.H. Huxley
"On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge" (1/7/1866)
posted by marlowe [UAQ] (11/29/1996)

2213)
"...You know how Fair Witnesses behave."

"Well . . . no, I don't. I've never had any dealings with Fair Witnesses."

"So? Perhaps you weren't aware of it. Anne!"

Anne was seated on the springboard; she turned her head. Jubal called out, "That new house on the far hilltop - can you see what color they've painted it?"

Anne looked in the direction in which Jubal was pointing and answered, "It's white on this side." She did not inquire why Jubal had asked not make any comment.

Jubal went on to Jill in normal tones. "You see? Anne is so thoroughly indoctrinated that it doesn't even occur to her to infer that the other side is probably white too. All the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't force her to commit herself as to the far side [...] unless she herself went around to the other side and looked - and even then she wouldn't assume that it stayed whatever color it might be after she left [...] because they might repaint it as soon as she turned her back.

"Anne is a Fair Witness?"

"Graduate, unlimited license, and admitted to testify before the High Court. [...]"
Robert Heinlein
Stranger in a Strange Land
(orig. pub. 1961, uncut ver. pub 1991)

Sources

[ODQ] - The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 4th edition (1992)
[UAQ] - Usenet alt.quotations newsgroup

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 370 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Intellectuals

2008-01-15T19:15:00.000-05:00

2204) In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in extreme boredom [...] Make no mistake; all intellectuals are deviants in the U.S.
William Burroughs
Yage Letters (1963)
posted by marlowe [UAQ] (11/29/1996)

2205) An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
Albert Camus
Notebooks 1935-1942 (1962) [ITQ]
posted by marlowe [UAQ] (11/29/1996)

2206) Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.
Albert Einstein (attributed)
not listed in [QE]
posted by marlowe [UAQ] (11/29/1996)

2207) An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.
Dwight D. Eisenhower (widely attributed)
(1954)
posted by marlowe [UAQ] (11/29/1996)

2208) Intellectual capacity is no guarantee against being dead wrong.
Carl Sagan
Cosmos (1980)
posted by marlowe [UAQ] (11/29/1996)
[Note: A very similar quote

Intellectual brillance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

is often found attributed to David Fasold, but never, as far as I can find, with any kind of citation.]

Sources

[ITQ] - International Theasaurus of Quotations (1970)
[QE] - The New Quotable Einstein (2005)
[UAQ] - Usenet alt.quotations newsgroup

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 370 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Take four

2008-01-15T18:13:00.000-05:00

2200) The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals (1831) [ITQ]
posted by Wayne Aiken [UAQ] (11/19/1996)

2201) It is always difficult for one people to understand the nationalism of another.
Amos Elon
"Israel and the End of Zionism"
New York Review of Books (12/19/1996)

2202) Conduct is more convincing than language.
John Woolman
"Exercise of a Quaker Abolitionist's Mind" (1757)
posted by George Osner [ISQ] (11/29/1996)

2203) It is often asserted that discussion is only possible between people who have a common language and accept common basic assumptions. I think that this is a mistake. All that is needed is a readiness to learn from one's partner in the discussion, which includes a genuine wish to understand what he intends to say. If this readiness is there, the discussion will be the more fruitful the more the partner's backgrounds differ.
Karl Popper
Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (2002)
posted by Michael McMullin [ISQ] (11/29/1996)

Sources

[ISQ] - Internet Serial-Quotations mailing list
[ITQ] - International Theasaurus of Quotations (1970)
[UAQ] - Usenet alt.quotations newsgroup

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 370 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

Friday Photography: Metal Tree

2008-01-11T23:59:00.000-05:00

Daryl Samuel
"Conjoined" (2007) by Roxy Paine
Location: Madison Square Park,
Manhattan, New York City

Previous: Photos posted in 2006 & 2007 / 2008: Tulips

(3089/898) Lawyers and the law

2008-01-11T22:01:00.000-05:00

2194) [For better or worse] the kind of information that is kept out of court is the kind of information we use every day in making our moral judgments.
Carol S. Steiker
teacher of criminal law at Harvard Law
quoted by William Glaberson in
"For Juries, the Truth vs. the Whole Truth" in
New York Times Week in Review (11/17/1996)

2195) The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure it was drawn up by a lawyer. Then if you give it to another lawyer to read and he don't know just what it means, why then you can be sure it was drawn up by a lawyer. If it's in a few words and is plain and understandable only one way, it was written by a non-lawyer.
Will Rogers
"The Lawyers Talking" (7/28/1935)
Willl Roger's Weekly Articles (1982) [ALQ]
posted (in part) by fcbaer [UAQ] (11/16/1996)
[Note: See #1332 Henley.]
2196) Trafficking in the mad wrangles of the noisy court, [the lawyer] lets out for hire his anger and his speech.
Seneca
Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules; c. 60) [MAC]
posted (in part) by fcbaer [UAQ] (11/16/1996)
[Note: The English essayist and poet Joseph Addison in "No. 21: On The Learned Profession", from Selections from Addison's Papers Contributed to The Spectator (1858), ascribed this to Martial. I can find no other source to confirm this attribution.]
2197) All of us here know there's no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of the law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.
Jean Giraudoux
The Trojan War Will Not Take Place
(aka Tiger At The Gate; 1935) [ODQ]
posted by fcbaer [UAQ] (11/16/1996)

2198) Two farmers each claimed to own a certain cow. While one pulled on its head and the other pulled on its tail, meanwhile the cow was milked by lawyer.
Jewish parable
posted by fcbaer [UAQ] (11/16/1996)

2199) L.A. is a musician's town. Nashville is a songwriter's town. New York is a lawyer's town.
Bob McDill (attributed)
posted by fcbaer [UAQ] (11/16/1996)

Sources

[ALQ] – The Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations (1993)
[ODQ] - The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 4th edition (1992)
[MAC] - The Macmillan Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Famous Phrases (1948)
[UAQ] - Usenet alt.quotations newsgroup

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 374 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Tom Wolfe: The Right Stuff

2008-01-11T17:58:00.000-05:00

2190) No, the idea here ... seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment - and then go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite - and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that meant something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God. Nor was there a test to show whether or not a pilot had this righteous quality. There was, instead, a seemingly infinite series of tests. A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzying progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even - ultimately, God willing, one day - that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men's eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.
Tom Wolfe
The Right Stuff (1979)
[ellipses in original]

2191) Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot ... coming over the intercom ... with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless! - it's reassuring) ... the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because "it might get a little choppy" ... the voice that tells you (on a flight from Phoenix preparing for its final approach into Kennedy Airport, New York, just after dawn): "Now, folks, uh ... this is the captain ... ummmm ... We've got a little ol' red light up here on the control panel that's tryin' to tell us that the landin' gears're not ... uh ... lockin' into position when we lower 'em ... Now ... I don't believe that little ol' red light knows what it's talkin' about - I believe it's that little ol' red light that iddn' workin' right" ... faint chuckle, long pause, as if to say, I'm not even sure all this is really worth going into - still, it may amuse you ... "But ... I guess to play it by the rules, we oughta humor that little ol' light ... so we're gonna take her down to about, oh, two or three hundred feet over the runway at Kennedy, and the folks down there on the ground are gonna see if they cain't give us a visual inspection of those ol' landin' gears" - with which he is obviously on intimate ol' buddy terms, as with every other working part of this mighty ship - "and if I'm right ... they're gonna tell us everything in copacetic all the way aroun' and we'll just take her on in ... and, after a couple of low passes over the field, the voice returns: "Well, folks, those folks down there on the ground - it must be too early for 'em or somethin' - I 'spect they still got sleepers in their eyes ... 'cause they say they cain't tell if those ol' landin' gears are all the way down or not ... But, you know, up here in the cockpit we're convinced they're all the way down, so we're just gonna take her on in ... And oh" ... (I almost forgot) ... "while we take a little swing out over the ocean an' empty some of that surplus fuel we're not gonna be needin' anymore - that's what you might be seein' comin' out of the wings - our lovely lovely little ladies ... if they'll be so kind ... they're gonna go up and down the aisles and show you how we do what we call 'assumin' the position'" ... another faint chuckle (We do this so often, and it's so much fun, we even have a funny little name for it) ... and the stewardesses, a bit grimmer, by the looks of them, than that voice, start telling the passengers to take their glasses off, and take the ballpoint pens and other sharp objects out of their pockets, and they show them the position, with the head lowered ... while down on the field at Kennedy the little yellow emergency trucks start roaring across the field - and even though in your pounding heart and your sweating palms and your broiling brainpan you know this is a critical moment in your life, you still can't quite bring yourself to believe it, because if it were ... how could the captain, the man who knows the actual situation more intimately ... how could he keep on drawlin' and chucklin' and driftin' and lollygaggin' in that particular voice of his -

Well! - who doesn't know that voice! And who can forget it! - even after he is proved right and the emergency is over.

That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, "they had to pipe in daylight." In the late 1940's and early 1950's this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots, and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.

[...] Chuck Yeager was at the top of the pyramid, number one among all the True Bothers.

And that voice ... started driftin' down from on high. At first the tower at Edwards [Air Force Base] began to notice that all of a sudden there were an awful lot of test pilots up there with West Virginia drawls. And pretty soon there were an awful lot of fighter pilots up there with West Virginia drawls. The air space over Edward was getting so cain't-hardly supercool day by day, it was terrible. And then that lollygaggin' poker-hollow air space began to spread, because the test pilots and fighter pilots from Edwards were considered the pick of the litter and had a cachet all their own, wherever they went, and other towers and other controllers began to notice it was getting awfully drawly and down-home up there, although they didn't know exactly why. And then, because the military is the training ground for practically all airline pilots, it spread further, until airline passengers all over America began to hear the awshuckin' driftin' gone-fishin' Mud River voice coming from the cockpit ... "Now, folks, uh ... this is the captain ... ummmm ... We've got a little ol' red light up here on the control panel that's tryin' to tell us that the landin' gears're not ... uh ... lockin' into position ..."

But so what! What could possibly go wrong! We've obviously got a man up there in the cockpit who doesn't have a nerve in his body! He's a block of ice! He's made of 100 percent righteous victory-rolling True Brotherly stuff.
Tom Wolfe
The Right Stuff (1979)
[all ellipses except bracketed ones in original]

2192) [I]n the X-1, the X-1A, the X-2, the D-558-1, the horrible XF-92A, the beautiful D-558-2 [...] In those planes, which were like chimneys with little razor-blade wings on them, you had to be "afraid to panic," and that phrase was no joke. In the skids, the tumbles, the spins, there was truly, as [Antoine de] Saint-Exupery had said, only one thing you could let yourself think about: *What do I do next?* Sometimes at Edwards they used to play the tapes of pilots going into the final dive, the one that killed them, and the man would be tumbling, going end over end in a fifteen-ton length of pipe, with all aerodynamics long gone, and not one prayer left, and he knew it, and he would be screaming into microphone, but not for Mother or for God or the nameless spirit of Ahor, but for one last hopeless crumb of information about the loop: "I've tried A! I've tried B! I've tried C! I've tried D! Tell me what else I can try!" And then that truly spooky click on the machine. What do I do next? [...] And everybody around the table would look at one another and nod ever so slightly, and the unspoken message was: Too bad! There was a man with the right stuff.
Tom Wolfe
The Right Stuff (1979)
[all ellipses except bracketed ones in original]

2193) It was John Glenn who realized from the first that Project Mercury was like a new branch of the armed services, despite its civilian coloration. It would have simplified matters tremendously if NASA had given everybody formal rankings and had done with it. That way people such as [NASA Administrator James E.] Webb would have known were they actually stood. The seven Mercury astronauts could have been designated Single-Combat General, a category with the honors and privileges of a five-star general but with none of the duties and obligations of command. After his flight John Glenn, then, would have been promoted to Galactic Single-Combat General, a category ranking slightly above the Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Services and slightly below the Commander-in-Chief. Webb, as NASA administrator, would have been a two-star general and would have known the protocol for dealing with GSC General Glenn.
Tom Wolfe
The Right Stuff (1979)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 374 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Music and art and stuff

2008-01-11T16:16:00.000-05:00

2183) [I]n an ideal world, artists would be compensated in proportion to some combination of the following:
the degree of creative innovation in the work

effort expended in the creative process

aesthetic value of the work (there's a big debate)

social value of the work (another grand debate!)

amount of skin shown in latest video (oh, sorry!)
Zenon M. Feszczak
posted on [AMB] (11/14/1996)

2184) If I'm listening to a jazz solo, I know that it was played by the person listed, and it most likely was improvised by the player. When I'm listening to a remix album, (or an ambient project in general) the lines of musical communication are blurred, and it is impossible for the non-insider to know who gets the credit/blame for the various creative decisions.
Emile Tobenfeld
posted on [AMB] (7/14/1996)

2185)
Information is not knowledge
Knowledge is not wisdom
Wisdom is not truth
Truth is not beauty
Beauty is not love
Love is not music
Music is THE BEST
Frank Zappa
"Packard Goose" (song)
Joe's Garage (LP, 1979)
posted by Alan Blattberg [IDM] (11/14/1996)

2186) The noises must become music.
Robert Bresson
Notes on the Cinematographer (1996)
quoted by Simon Fisher Turner in
liner notes to Shwarma (cd, 1996)
quoted by Rob Young in
"The Soundtrack Syndrome" in
The Wire [UK] (11/1996)

2187) Growing up in the early 70s, I remember having the phantasy that I had a tiny movie camera implanted behind my eyes, and that everything I saw was being transmitted in real time to some distant network, possibly on the other side of the planet. (Subsequent enquiry reveals that others of this generation experienced the same syndrome.)
Rob Young
"The Soundtrack Syndrome"
The Wire [UK] (11/1996)

2188) The Factory was a place where you could let your problems show and nobody would hate your for it. And if you worked your problems up into entertaining routines, people would like you even more for being strong enough to say you were different and actually have fun with it.
Andy Warhol
quoted (in part) by Michiko Kakutani in
"Culture Zone: The United States of Andy" in
New York Times Magazine (11/17/1996)

2189) Media moguls normally resist antitrust policing on the ground that costly cable-laying makes them "natural monopolies." Yet when faced with the regulation that is appropriate for monopolies - regulation bearing on prices and program requirements - they claim the free-speech protection of the First Amendment. The absurdity of the paradox is never argued. It is simply buried beneath tons of campaign contributions and mountains of costly legal arguments.

The best way to resolve the paradox is to separate cable from content, track from freight, to make all media companies (the phones included) choose between owning wires or traveling on them. Those owning a cable can then be regulated, as a monopoly, granted a fair profit on their sizable investments and required to deal fairly with the transmitters of content. Those choosing to be transmitters of information and services can be liberated, to let 500 channels bloom.
Max Frankel
"Word & Image: The Inside Track for Cable" in
New York Times Magazine (11/17/1996)

Sources

[AMB] - Internet Ambient Music mailing list
[IDM] - Internet Intelligent Dance Music mailing list

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 374 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Burn to save

2008-01-09T21:30:00.000-05:00

2182) We all remember how many religious wars were fought for a religion of love and gentleness; how many bodies were burned alive with the genuinely kind intention of saving souls from the eternal fire of hell.
Karl Popper
"Utopia and Violence"
address to Institut des Arts in Brussels, Belgium (1947)
Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963) [WQ]
posted by Michael McMullin [ISQ] (11/13/1996)

Sources

[ISQ] - Internet Serial-Quotations mailing list

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 376 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) I failed ... We won

2008-01-09T20:42:00.000-05:00

2181) After a few hours in a Best Western I find my way to the [Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas], and a helpful curator. He shows me the old Eisenhower campaign posters ("let's clean house with ike and dick!") and the letter imploring Eisenhower to run for president signed by nineteen Republicans, including Gerald Ford of Michigan. It nicely illustrates that the longing in our democracy for The Unpolitical Politician, the man who doesn't seek power but instead has power thrust upon him, has been around awhile: "...if our own country is torn asunder by corruption and greed, by disloyalties and opportunism, by the avarice of selfish men, by the lack of vision of pseudo-statesmen greedy to retain public office, all the good and constructive work you have done will be destroyed."

The curator explains that Eisenhower's presidency had triggered a boom in Abilene much like Dole's might in Russell. By the end of the Second World War Abilene looked to be headed toward extinction. What saved it was first the Eisenhower Museum, created in 1946, and then the Eisenhower Library, which now draws about 125,000 visitors a year. Once tourists began to come, the town built further attractions to divert them: the Greyhound Hall of Fame, the Museum of Independent Telephony, and other places that no one in his right mind would build a vacation around but which perhaps lend dimensions to a visit to Abilene. The people of Russell have Abilene as their model. One of the biggest Dole authorities in Russell even gave me a tour of the site for the Library. It would be shaped like a silo, he said, and built entirely of glass.

It only takes a few minutes to find the exhibit my friend described. Before every major engagement of the war General Eisenhower penned what amounted to a press release in which he took full responsibility for failure. Every time but one he tore up his note and threw it away. But after D-Day an aide with a sense of history fished one of the notes from the trash can. "The thing of it is," my friend had explained, "was that it was all in the first person--I, I, I. Then he wrote another press release in the event of victory in which it is all we, we, we." To my friend this pattern said something not just about Eisenhower but about Dole. It represented an entire way life that has fallen from fashion.

The actual press release sits behind a pane of glass:
Our landings in the Cherbourg and Le Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the Air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.
There is no second note announcing the success of the operation in the first person plural, however. The curator tells me that Eisenhower never bothered to declare D-Day a success, which, when you think about it, makes his personal admission of failure even more striking. My friend in the Dole campaign embellished the story, no doubt unconsciously, so that I might feel what he wished me to feel. Such is the power of stoicism over stoics. Such is the current weakness of the creed that it must be compromised if it is to survive.
Michael Lewis
"Campaign Journal: The End"
The New Republic (11/xx/1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 376 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Over? ... Not over.

2008-01-09T17:30:00.000-05:00

2179) If the left is unable to influence the electorate, it has prevailed in that bloodless crusade known as the Culture War. Of course, this is a Kampf that can never to permanently won. For the culture is constantly changing in response to social reality. But in peacetime, when the economy is robust, the nation's fantasies can lead in a different direction than its politics.
Richard Goldstein
"The Culture War Is Over! We Won! (For Now)"
Village Voice (11/19/1996)

2180) By most accounts, it is more pleasurable to be an out-and-proud homosexual than a closet case; more enjoyable to be a woman with an autonomous consciousness than a helpmeet; more gratifying to pursue love and lust (and to separate when that bond no longer exists) than to remain imbedded in a loveless marriage. [...] It is hard to imagine a society where race mixing is condemned, sexuality is confined, and divorce (along with adultery) is criminalized producing the pleasure we have come to expect from life.
Richard Goldstein
"The Culture War Is Over! We Won! (For Now)"
Village Voice (11/19/1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 376 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Biting back

2008-01-09T17:18:00.000-05:00

2173) Unpredictability in every field is the result of the conquest of the whole world by scientific power. This invasion by active knowledge tends to transform man's environment and man himself - to what extent, and with what risks, what deviations from the basic conditions of existence and of the preservation of life we simply do not know. Life has become, in short, the object of an experiment of which we can say only one thing - that it tends to estrange us more and more from what we were, or what we think we are, and that it is leading us [...] we do not know and can by no means imagine where.
Paul Valery
"Unpredictability" (1944) in
History and Politics (1962)
quoted by Edward Tenner in
Why Things Bite Back (1996)

2174) [Edward] Tenner shows convincingly that unintended and undesired consequences are the norm whenever new technologies are introduced: the revolution that now permits information to be stored and transported electronically has produced a proliferation of paper. Flood-control work by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has actually increased the damage caused by floods. Helmets and other protective gear help to make football more dangerous than rugby. Roads designed to relieve congestion are themselves clogged with traffic. Clear, straight roads often have the highest fatality rates.

The more we introduce conspicuous safety measures, Tenner argues, the greater becomes the likelihood of a Titantic-style disaster in which "belief in the safety of the ship [becomes] the greatest single hazard to the survival of the passengers.
John Adams
"Mistakes Were Made"
Scientific American (10/1996)
[review of Why Things Bite Back
by Edward Tenner and The Logic of
Failure by Dietrich Dorner]

2175) The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
Herbert Spencer
"State-Tamperings with Money and Banks"
Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (1891) [WQ]
quoted by John Adams in
"Mistakes Were Made" in
Scientific American (10/1996)
[review of Why Things Bite Back
by Edward Tenner and The Logic of
Failure by Dietrich Dorner]

2176) On Thu, 14 Nov 1996 02:43:00 -0800 Lenoel, James wrote:
The intellectual snobbery I have read over the last few months is far more odious than a syntactically imperfect but emotionally genuine posting.
Embedded in James's view is the presupposition that it is reasonable for anyone who writes with lucidity and rhetorical efficacy either in responding to an ill-conceived or misguided post to be automatically labeled and consigned to the abhorrent "intellectual" category, whilst simultaneously being charged with "snobbery". At the same time the "emotionally genuine" is thought to be preferable, no matter how fatuous, ill-thought-out or poorly constructed. This is in effect both a 'reductio ad absurdum' of the old Intellect v. Emotion (false) dichotomy, and, further, may be seen as part of what happens when egalitarian democratising values (A Good Thing) are over-literally transposed (A Bad Thing) to a sociolinguistic context.
Alan R. Lockett
posted on [AMB] (11/15/1996)

2177) The America to which the textbooks [of the early twentieth century] welcomed the children of Whitney Creek [Montana] was secular, progressive, rational, scientific and can-do practical - a world full of the glory of man and his achievements.
Jonathan Raban
Bad Land (1996)
quoted by Verlyn Klinkenborg in
"Railroaded" in
New York Times Book Review (11/10/1996)

2178) Reunite Gondwanaland!
bumper sticker
the favorite of Michael Novacek, from
Dinosaur of the Flaming Cliffs (1996)
quoted by James Shreeve in
"Bonespotting" in the
New York Times Book Review (11/10/1996)

Sources

[AMB] - Internet Ambient Music mailing list
[WQ] - Wikiquote

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 376 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Punch and Judy Get Divorced

2008-01-08T23:14:00.000-05:00

2171)
PUNCHES: Hi. I'm back. I'm back. Hi. (SILENCE) Judy, honey, I'm back. I'm really back. Mind if I sit? Actually Judy, d'ya mind if I use the toilet? Ya mind? Judy? Honey? If I use the toilet?

(EXIT. [TOILET FLUSHES.] JUDYS ARE STILL. PUNCHES ENTER)

Whew. That's better. Hey, ya painted the bathroom. It's pink. I thought ya hated pink.

JUDYS: No. You hated pink. I always liked pink.
David Gordon & Ain Gordon
Punch and Judy Get Divorced (musical play, 1996)
2172)
GRAMMA: It's true. All true. I did think then that not talking was like an empty hole, like something not happening, like nothing. But now I think that sometimes something not happening is like something happening.

MA: Judy baby, write this down.
David Gordon & Ain Gordon
Punch and Judy Get Divorced (musical play, 1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 377 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Fascism

2008-01-08T03:38:00.000-05:00

2169) [Fascism] resembles pornography in that it is difficult - perhaps impossible - to define in an operational, legally valid way, but those with experience know it when they see it.
Walter Laqueur
Fascism: Past, Present, Future (1996)
quoted by Robert O. Paxton in
"The Uses of Fascism" in the
New York Review of Books (11/28/1996)
[review of the Laqueur book and
A History of Fascism: 1914-1945
by Stanley G. Payne]

2170) [F]ascism [is] a political practice intended by its leaders to serve quite specific functions: to unite, purify, and energize nations or ethnic groups that have been put under strain by internal divisions, by the fear of decadence, or by tumultuous social change.
Robert O. Paxton
"The Uses of Fascism" in the
New York Review of Books (11/28/1996)
[review of the Laqueur book and
A History of Fascism: 1914-1945
by Stanley G. Payne]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 377 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Politics, 1996

2008-01-08T03:18:00.000-05:00

2166) In the same way that you don't realize how essentially wrong a newspaper is until you read a story on a subject with which you are intimately familiar, you don't know what is wrong with a political campaign until you see it come to your hometown.
Michael Lewis
"Campaign Journal: The Seducer" in
The New Republic (11/18/1996)

2167) I think the main reason most political journalism seems so remote from life as we know it in America is that in life politics is far down the list of concerns whereas political journalism operates on the assumption that politics is the most important thing in the world. Ordinary people understand they are meant to exhibit a certain tedious seriousness when they talk to a journalist about presidential candidates, and so they do. I don't mean this as an insult to ordinary people. Apathy is a perfectly intelligent response to our current politics.
Michael Lewis
"Campaign Journal: The Seducer" in
The New Republic (11/18/1996)

2168) The people who are consumed by their hatred of the Clintons - only some of whom believe they sit at the center of many conspiracies - can be broken down into three schools. There is the Bad Investment School, which consists of people who have lost a great deal of money on an investment sold to them by someone who reminds them of Clinton. There is the Sublimated Sexual Jealousy School, which is comprised mainly of men aged 35-55 who are vaguely aware that Clinton is getting to vote for and to sleep with him in the most unmanly ways, by feigning a kind of female sensibility - feeling their pain and all that - and thus transgressing the basic rules of the game. The hostility this breeds in some is akin to the hostility of the striking union member toward the scab.

[Former FBI agent Gary] Aldrich [author of Unlimited Access] is a good example of the third group - the Law & Order School. The Law & Order school is defined in part by its scrupulousness. Aldrich notes all sorts of irrelevant details [...] which of course lends credence to his accounts. But at the same time he is counting carpet fibers he is repeating every wild rumor he has ever heard [...]

Unlimited Access seems to be inspired by a very modern form of resentment, the kind of resentment that a man who has spent his life climbing the ranks of a large bureaucracy feels towards a man who leapfrogs up the career ladder through a special and obnoxious blend of deferments and degrees. Duty, loyalty and discretion are the qualities most highly valued in Aldrich's world; glibness, shrewdness and nerve are the qualities required to jump from Hot Springs to Oxford, then back to the governor's office and on to the White House. The Law & Order mindset is easy to make fun of but you do so at your own peril. [...] A status structure is a powerful thing.
Michael Lewis
"Campaign Journal: The Seducer" in
The New Republic (11/18/1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 377 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Dawkins: Climbing Mount Improbable

2008-01-07T17:00:00.000-05:00

2156) Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection. [...] It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it couldn't work. You don't need to be a mathematician or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and the other living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does solve. It solves it by breaking the improbability up into small, manageable parts, smearing out the luck need going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes, inch by million-year inch.
Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2157) I looked at one of the discarded [elephant] trunks and wondered how many millions of years it must have taken to create such a miracle of evolution. Equipped with fifty thousand muscles and controlled by a brain to match such complexity, it can wrench and push with tonnes of force. Yet, at the same time, it is capable of performing the most delicate operations such as plucking a small seed-pod to pop in the mouth. This versatile organ is a siphon capable of holding four litres of water to be drunk or sprayed over the body, as an extended finger and as a trumpet or loud speaker.

The trunk has social functions, too; caresses, sexual advances, reassurances, greetings and mutually intertwining hugs; and among males it can become a weapon for beating and grappling like wrestlers when tusks clash and each bull seeks to dominate in play or in earnest. And there I lay, amputated like so many elephant trunks I had seen all over Africa.
Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton
Battle for the Elephants (1992)
quoted by Richard Dawkins in
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)
[Note: Cf. #685 Pinker]
2158) However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.
Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1986)
quoted by Richard Dawkins in
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2159) [Natural selection] has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.
Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1986)

2160) There is a supremely banal reason why transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level. [...] [Z]oologists always insist on classifying a specimen as in one species or another. If a specimen is intermediate in actual form (as many are) zoologists' legalistic conventions still force them to jump one way or the other when naming it. Therefore creationists' claim that there are no intermediates has to be true by definition at the species level, but it has no implications about the real world - only implications about zoologists' naming conventions.
Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2161) To a first approximation all animal species fly.
Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)
[Note: This is a modification of an aphorism by Robert May: see #103 May and #102 Lewin.]
2162) It cannot be said too often that Darwinian theory does not allow for [species'] getting temporarily worse in quest of a long-term goal.
Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2163) All questions about life have the same answer (though it may not always be a helpful one): natural selection.
Dr. Henry Bennet-Clark
quoted by Richard Dawkins in
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2164) The attitude that living things are placed here for our benefit still dominates our culture, even when its underpinnings have disappeared. We now need, for purposes of scientific understanding, to find a less human-centered view of the natural world. If wild animals and plants can be said to be put into the world for any purpose - and there is a respectable figure of speech by which they can - it surely is not for the benefit of humans. We must learn to see things through non-human eyes. [...] Marginally more defensible [is] the idea that [flowers and animals] are placed in the world for the benefit of others with whom they have a naturally evolved mutualism: flowers for the benefit of bees, bees for the benefit of flowers, acacia bullhorns for the benefit of ants and their ants for the benefit of acacias. But this notion of creatures being "for the good" of other creatures is in peril of reductio ad absurdum. We must have no truck with the pop ecologists's fallacy, the holisty grail of all individuals striving for the good of the community, the ecosystem, 'Gaia'.
Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2165) Flowers and elephants are "for" the same thing as everything else in the living kingdoms, for spreading Duplicate Me programs written in DNA language. Flowers are for spreading copies of instructions for making more flowers. Elephants are for spreading copies of instructions for making more elephants. Birds are for spreading copies of instructions for making more birds. [...] The DNA of an elephant constitutes a gigantic program, analogous to a computer program. Like the virus DNA it is fundamentally a Duplicate Me program, but it contains an almost fantastically large digression as an essential part of the efficient execution of its fundamental message. That digression is an elephant. The program says "Duplicate me by the roundabout route of building an elephant first." The elephant feeds as to grow; it grows so as to become an adult; it become an adult so as to mate and reproduce new elephants; it reproduces new elephants to propagate new copies of its original program instructions.
Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 378 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Between New Age and nightmare

2008-01-07T13:22:00.000-05:00

2155) Dead Cities see-saws between the steadying grounds of nebulous chill out and digital attack. The twin planets of Jungle and Ambient now exert so much gravity on digital experimentation that any music unable to reach critical mass on its own steam will be polarised into some well-rehearsed dialogue between New Age and nightmare.
Matt Ffytche
review of Future Sound of London
Dead Cities (cd, 1996) in
The Wire [UK] (10/1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 378 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Science and society

2008-01-07T13:12:00.000-05:00

2151) It is simply a logical fallacy to go from the observation that science is a social process to the conclusion that the final product, our scientific theories, is what it is because because of the social and historical forces acting in this process. A party of mountain climbers may argue over the best path to the peak, and those arguments may be conditioned by the history and social structure of the expedition, but in the end either they find a good path to the peak or they do not, and when they get there they know it. (No one would give a book about mountain climbing the title Constructing Everest.)
Steven Weinberg
Dreams of A Final Theory (1992)
quoted by Martin Gardner in
"Notes of A Fringe Watcher: Physicist
Alan Sokal's Hilarious Hoax" in
Skeptical Inquirer (Nov/Dec 1996)

2152) [Are] the rules of baseball [...] similar to or radically different from the rules of science[?] Clearly they are radically different. Like the rules of chess and bridge, the rules of baseball are made by humans. But the rules of science are not. They are discovered by observation, reason, and experiment. Newton didn't invent his laws of gravity except in the obvious sense that he thought of them and wrote them down. Biologists didn't "construct" the DNA helix; they observed it. The orbit of Mars is not a social construction. Einstein did not make up E=mc² the way games rules are made up. To see the rules of science as similar to baseball rules, traffic rules, or fashions in dress is to make a false analogy that leads nowhere.

[...] [I]t goes without saying that [...] culture influences science. To cite a familiar example, culture can determine to a large extent what sort of research should be funded. And there are indeed fashions in science. [...] But that science moves inexorably closer to finding objective truth can only be denied be peculiar philosophers, naive literary critics, and misguided social scientists. The fantastic success of science in explaining and predicting, above all in making incredible advances in technology, is proof that scientists are steadily learning more and more about how the universe behaves.

The claims of science lie on a continuum between a probability of 1 (certainty) and a probability of 0 (certainly false), but thousands of its discoveries have been confirmed to a degree expressed by a decimal point followed by a string of nines. When theories become this strongly confirmed they turn into "facts," such as the fact that the earth is round and circles the sun, or that life evolved on a planet older than a million years.
Martin Gardner
"Notes of A Fringe Watcher: Physicist
Alan Sokal's Hilarious Hoax"
Skeptical Inquirer (Nov/Dec 1996)

2153) Antiscience includes fundamentalists, creationists, cultists, the Religious Wrong [sic] - people who have a desperate need to believe; that's okay, but they have a equally desperate need to have you believe, too.

[...] If, as our experts tell us, the U.S. public is 93.8 percent scientifically illiterate (or 97.3 percent, depending on how one measures), then small wonder that our population is helpless before the onslaught of antiscience. Look at its advantages: antiscience is positive, authoritative, a haven for people who need safety and assurance, whereas science is hesitant, skeptical, even on -especially of - its own heritage. Not too much comfort there. And science demands some effort, a thought process. Antiscience says: Don't think! Believe! Trust us! We know! Science says: This is the best we can do here, the most we can say, note the error bars in our statement. [...] Not a fair fight. [...]

Science has a four-hundred year track record of progress, and this is measured in many ways: by the ever-widening domain in space, time, and conditions over which we can describe nature and make predictions. All the Antiscience armies combined could not tell you the date of arrival of Halley's comet, whereas, science can give you the year, day, hour, and minute. [...]

It is science that has converted night to day, extended human longevity, cured many dread diseases, enabled people of very modest means to drive across continents, fly over oceans, and surf webs. Following the rules of antiscience (collectively) would condemn the vast majority of humans to extremes of poverty, starvation, and early death, allowing the priests and kings to inhabit their drafty castles, monasteries, and rectories. [...]

But of course there are [...] serious tensions between science, with its associated technology, and society; and these problems are [...] well known: the distribution of scientific knowledge is uneven, and the benefits are far from uniformly spread.
Leon M. Lederman
"A Strategy for Saving Science"
Skeptical Inquirer (Nov/Dec 1996)

2154) Education must be the antidote to superstition, victimization, totalitarianism, bigotry. If it fails here and there we must make it better. We must work together - scientists, educators, psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, anthropologists - to make it better. [...] The strategic vision is that of an ever-increasing number of our citizens could be taught to think scientifically, to understand the critical methods that have allowed scientists and engineers to create so much wealth, these citizens, in the democratic context, would be intolerant of sound bites and baloney, would insist on the proper allocation of national resources, would insist that the products of science and technology be deployed for the long term benefit of the many, and would understand the role of knowledge in social, economic, and cultural contexts. They would be shielded from the philosophical con men and women and snake-oil purveyors. They would surely understand that education must count almost as much as deficit reduction in the future well-being of their children. Whereas in an earlier time, public understanding of science and technology was a cultural plus, in today's and tomorrow's world the stakes are much higher - nothing less than the preservation of our four-hundred-year-old commitment to a rational worldview.
Leon M. Lederman
"A Strategy for Saving Science"
Skeptical Inquirer (Nov/Dec 1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 378 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Race

2008-01-07T00:51:00.000-05:00

2149) [T]here is one aspect of race that is obsolete. This is the notion that race is a shorthand for human biological variation. Race is a folk idea about human biology that caught on in science because it "naturalized" differences in wealth and power. Human biological variation, to the contrary, is complex and amazing; dividing humans into four or so races is a terrible way to conceptualize and comprehend it. Race as biology is actually harmful stuff.

Race gets us into all sorts of confusion when we are not sure if we mean biology or culture and lived experiences.
Alan H. Goodman
(Assoc. Prof. of Biological Anthropology,
Hampshire College, NH)
letter to the editor
Boston Globe Magazine (11/3/1996)
[responding to "Is race obsolete" by
Seth Schiesel and Robert L. Turner (9/22/1996)]

2150) The concept of race is little more than a way of crudely grouping the data describing the huge variety of human physical characteristics. These grouping tend to break down the farther back in time we go. Indeed, it is likely that only our ignorance of human history allows any of us to fill in questions like those on the Census form [which require the respondent to declare his or her race].

[...] The only real advantage of adding the category "multiracial" to the Census would be if it caused so many people to mark the box that the whole sad business of recording race were quickly dropped. Perhaps that would mark the real beginning of the end of America's dreadful, almost primordial, obsession with race.
John W. Chuckman
letter to the editor
Boston Globe Magazine (11/3/1996)
[responding to "Is race obsolete" by
Seth Schiesel and Robert L. Turner (9/22/1996)]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 378 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Don't be a tool!

2008-01-06T20:52:00.001-05:00

2148) [Computer] users should remember the following: (1) You are not a dummy. If you don't understand how to do something or can't remember how, the interface stinks. Complain! (2) If you make an error that cannot be corrected, it's the system's fault, not yours. Complain! (3) If anything requires more than three key presses, three mouse clicks, or three seconds, you time is being wasted. Demand your rights!
Kent L. Norman
(Laboratory for Automation Psychology,
Department of Psychology,
University of Maryland, College Park)
letter to the editor
Technology Review (10/1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 379 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Press foibles

2008-01-06T20:32:00.000-05:00

2146) Mainstream journalism proudly honors objectivity, balance and accuracy. Buts its execution often sifts these values through the filters of prevailing opinion, new knowledge, old prejudices and standard assumptions about who's worth quoting.
Abe Peck
"Don't Ask, Don't Print"
New York Times Book Review (11/3/1996)
[review of Straight News by Edward Alwood]

2147) The press is committed - properly, though sometimes with weird effects - to neutrality on matters of policy. They confine themselves to matters of presentation, which they chew over and reduce to a single piece of consensual wisdom with astonishingly speed. [...] These judgments are entirely based on style points, though, because style is a matter it has been granted to the commentators in the press and television to judge. A position may be wrong-headed, but the candidates cannot be marked down for that. He must be marked down for failing to connect with the American public, for speaking in jargon or abstractions, for repeating himself, or for looking at his watch.

Positions on the issue can be brought into the equation only when they are sufficiently disreputable for the press to feel professionally comfortable about criticizing them [...]
Louis Menand
"Dole's Three Strikes" (10/17/1996) in
New York Review of Books (11/14/1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 379 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Less of the good stuff

2008-01-06T11:11:00.001-05:00

2145) There's a lot of hypocrisy in this talk of big government. [...] There has not been a shrinking of the government, there's been a shrinking of the helping functions of government, the progressive functions of government.
Barbara Ehrenreich
(possibly paraphrased)
on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer
(PBS TV program, 11/5/1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 379 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Some ideas for free

2008-01-05T17:51:00.000-05:00

2136) 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
"Maxims for Revolutionists"
Man and Superman (1903)
quoted in "Some Ideas for Free
from Time Recording"
Emit Records (c.1996)

2137) However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

Stanley Kubrick
interviewed by Eric Nordern
Playboy (9/1968)
Stanley Kubrick: Interviews (2001)
quoted in "Some Ideas for Free
from Time Recording"
Emit Records (c.1996)

2138) Pathological laughter may be accompanied by a true feeling of hilarity, if the reports of the patients are to be considered trustworthy. Like pestilence, the laughter may spread. In East Africa hysterical laughter afflicted almost one thousand persons between 1962 and 1964. predominantly girls: schools were closed, parents of the victims of the laughing epidemic suffered contagion, and the disease spread to neighboring villages; exhausted by laughter, some patients required hospitalisation.
Donald W. Black
Pathological Laughter (1982)
quoted in "Some Ideas for Free
from Time Recording"
Emit Records (c.1996)

2139) Human nature has been sold short [...] Man has a higher nature which is just as instinctive as his lower nature, and this higher nature included the need for meaningful work, for responsibility, for creativeness [...] For doing what is worthwhile and for preferring to do it well.
Abraham Maslow
Eupsychian Management: A Journal (1965)
quoted in "Some Ideas for Free
from Time Recording"
Emit Records (c.1996)

2140) If marijuana is a dangerous drug, the greatest danger associated with smoking it may lie in being arrested.
Robert M. Julien
A Primer of Drug Action (1981)
quoted in "Some Ideas for Free
from Time Recording"
Emit Records (c.1996)

2141) The conservative has little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires.
Freeman Dyson
Disturbing the Universe (1979)
quoted in "Some Ideas for Free
from Time Recording"
Emit Records (c.1996)

2142) The cine-camera and television set allow us to perceive slow motion. The concept of anything other than real time had never occurred to anybody until the first slow-motion movies were shown, and this radically altered people's perceptions of nature.
J.G. Ballard (attributed)
quoted in "Some Ideas for Free
from Time Recording"
Emit Records (c.1996)

2143) Editing disturbs the passage of time, interrupts it and simultaneously gives it something new. The distortion of time can be a means of giving it rhythmical expression.
Andrey Tarkovsky
Sculpting In Time (1986)
quoted in "Some Ideas for Free
from Time Recording"
Emit Records (c.1996)

2144) In Japan something can be right and wrong at the same time. Something may be right in itself but wrong under the circumstances. Instead of right/wrong there is the concept of fit, running from poor fit to exact fit.
Edward DeBono
I Am Right You Are Wrong (1991)
quoted in "Some Ideas for Free
from Time Recording"
Emit Records (c.1996)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 380 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

(3089/898) Cultural politics

2008-01-05T14:11:00.000-05:00

2134) American politics, any country's politics, are shaped by a clash between a party of order and a party of change. At some deep level these parties persist, though on the surface their names change: the Republicans were conservative a generation ago and they are now proudly radical. Since politics involve the distribution of material rewards, it generally suffices, in accounting for the party to which any given interest attaches itself, to know whether a given policy will increase or decrease its wealth and power. There is drama in politics, but relatively little mystery, which is why accounts of ancient Athens or Machiavelli's Florence are still pertinent.

But culture also has two parties. Rochelle Gurstein calls them the party of reticence and the party of exposure. At stake in clashes over culture is not the distribution of material things but the definition of what we value. One party upholds modesty, discretion, grace, shame, honor, vulnerability, refinement, privacy and character; the other party upholds brashness, rationality, science, enlightenment, democracy, equality, improvement and liberation. And there will also be interests in culture as there are in politics [...] Cultural politics contain mystery as well as drama, since the questions are murkier, and there is no easy way to know who will be on what side.
Alan Wolfe
"Sense and Sensitivity"
The New Republic (11/11/1996)
[review of The Repeal of Reticence by
Rochelle Gurstein and The Sex Side of Life
by Constance M. Chen]

2135) Cultural revolutions, like political ones, devour their own children.
Alan Wolfe
"Sense and Sensitivity"
The New Republic (11/11/1996)
[review of The Repeal of Reticence by
Rochelle Gurstein and The Sex Side of Life
by Constance M. Chen]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 380 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.