Quick (page 2)
I’m lazy, so instead of writing long, introspective posts about my feelings, I prefer to just link to funny video clips of kittens or people falling off things, and other such worthwhile entertainments. This is them.
1PM Sun
Yes, we can prepare to fight off zombie attacks, build earth shelters in case we lose ours (although odds are most of us will move in with a friend or relative), learn how to handle background radiation – but the first tier problems most of us face – and the ones most people prepare for first, are the ones we’re familiar with – what will we eat? How will we cook it? How will the hungry kids get fed? How will we keep the food and water coming in a supply disruption, or when we’re too poor to buy it? It isn’t that no one needs a gun or potassium iodate – it is that generally speaking the first question you will encounter in most crises is “Is there dinner? Do I get any?”
1PM Fri
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.
— Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
3PM Thu
The first thing is that I started to eliminate the word “retarded” from my vocabulary a while ago. What happens, when you take any word out of your average everyday roster of words, is that you notice how much you use that word in the first place, and how involuntary it often is: you stop thinking about it for a second, and it just pops out, or you start reaching for a better word, and then notice that you are reaching. This happened when I stopped using “bitch,” “cunt,” “pussy,” all of it; you’re talking, and then there’s a hole in your speech where there wasn’t before, a new set of ellipses. She’s such a… I settled on “dick,” a while ago, because that’s funny. And now I’m back to using “bitch,” but never for other ladies and only in reference to myself, mostly with an absurd suffix because I want to make it a lighthearted and non-venomous word, which I can do because I am a lady and I own it. “Retarded” I don’t own, so it’s just gone. I had to come to terms with the fact that this bit of language was tied to ideas I didn’t want to support, and get rid of it.
Exactly this. 1 Comment
8PM Thu
The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
— Oscar Wilde, The soul of man under Socialism
8PM Thu
…they’re not possessions. Possessions are over. They are data! Data which sometimes manifests itself as my possessions. This refuse then folds itself right back into the social streams of eBay and Freecycle. Light-of-footprint. Door-to-door. Peer-to-peer.
Freedom is just another word for nothing! There is no dead weight in my urban spatiality. No clotted semiotics, cajoling me to behave in the stereotyped haute-bourgeois manner that Deirdre once used to stifle me.
Dematerialisation is defined by its interfaces. That which was product will become a service. That which was a service will accelerate at warp speed toward de-monetisation on the Path-to-Free. So this is not so much a post-divorce flat as a vibrant zone of interactive transaction.
— Bruce Sterling, The Hypersurface of this Decade
11AM Tue
Instead, I would rather that they shoplift. My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift.
4PM Mon
Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good…
There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.
— Oscar Wilde, The soul of man under Socialism
I can’t quite bring myself to agree, but I’m not entirely convinced he’s wrong. To minimise (on the personal scale) the evil effects of a system is to defend and perpetuate that system. This is even more true when the evil effects are not an unfortunate side-effect but the natural outcomes of the system.
Or, to put it elsewise, “using private property for good” is just a way of justifying your own participation and competition in that system. It might be intended as an act of subversion, but it’s not a particularly effective one. 2 Comments
1PM Thu
What I don’t get is the kind of deliberate delusion in which a person chooses to pretend the world is more horrifying and filled with more and more-monstrous monsters. Why would anyone prefer such a place to the real world? Why would anyone wish for a world filled with socialist conspiracies, secret Muslim atheists, Satan-worshipping pop stars and bloodthirsty baby-killers?
— Slacktivist, Preferring Nightmares
11AM Sat
Next, the team asked another group of volunteers to undertake tasks designed to soften their existing views, such as preparing speeches on the death penalty in which they had to take the opposite view to their own. They found that this led to shifts in the beliefs attributed to God, but not in those attributed to other people.
11AM Wed
…retired hairdressers volunteered to cut the hair of out-of-work electricians, who would wire their kitchens in return; retired English teachers gave language lessons in return for the services of a dog-walker. The point was, not a single pfennig changed hands.