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Cataloguer
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This commit is contained in:
Ben Goldsworthy 2022-12-17 12:41:44 -06:00
commit 9ed1bed1b2
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0
.hugo_build.lock Normal file
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archetypes/default.md Normal file
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---
title: "{{ replace .Name "-" " " | title }}"
date: {{ .Date }}
draft: true
---

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assets/css/abstracts/_fonts.scss Normal file
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@font-face {
font-family: "Input Mono";
src: url(/fonts/InputMono-Regular.ttf);
}

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assets/css/abstracts/_mixins.scss Normal file
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@mixin mq($width, $type: min) {
@if map_has_key($breakpoints, $width) {
$width: map_get($breakpoints, $width);
@if $type == max {
$width: $width - 1px;
}
@media only screen and (#{$type}-width: $width) {
@content;
}
}
}

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assets/css/abstracts/_variables.scss Normal file
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// Colours
$dark: #020202;
$light: #fffff0;
// Fonts
$defaultFont: "Palatino Linotype", "Book Antiqua", Palatino, serif;
$codeFont: "Input Mono", "Lucida Console", Monaco, monospace;
// Breakpoints
$breakpoints: (
"phone": 400px,
"phone-wide": 480px,
"phablet": 560px,
"tablet-small": 640px,
"tablet": 768px,
"tablet-wide": 1024px,
"desktop": 1248px,
"desktop-wide": 1440px
);
// Old Site Versions
$ohwhatohjeez: #ff8900;
$oldphaloskepsis: #003d52;
$omphaloskepsis: #fffff0;

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assets/css/base/_typography.scss Normal file
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html {
font-size: 16px;
color: $dark;
background-color: $light;
font-family: $defaultFont;
}
h1,
h2,
h3,
h4,
h5,
h6 {
font-weight: normal;
margin: 0;
}
a {
text-decoration-skip-ink: auto;
color: $dark;
text-decoration: underline;
opacity: 0.8;
&:hover {
text-decoration: none;
opacity: 1;
}
}
.sic::after {
content: " [sic]";
font-style: italic;
}
.latex {
display: inline !important;
}
pre {
padding-left: 1em;
border-left: 2px outset $dark;
display: inline-block;
max-width: 85%;
}
pre {
overflow: hidden;
}
@media only screen and (min-width: 1024px) {
pre {
margin: 1em 2em;
}
}
q.guillemets {
quotes: "«" "»" "«" "»";
}
q,
blockquote {
quotes: "‘" "’" "“" "”";
}
q::before {
content: open-quote;
}
q::after {
content: close-quote;
}
cite,
cite.book,
cite.film,
cite.tv-show,
cite.comic,
cite.book,
cite.podcast,
cite.album,
cite.report {
font-style: italic;
}
cite.book--bible {
font-style: inherit;
}
cite.legislation,
cite.smallcite,
cite.comic-strip,
cite.short-story,
cite.article,
cite.episode,
cite.video,
cite.chapter,
cite.software,
cite.campaign,
cite.song,
cite.speech,
cite.course,
cite.presentation {
font-style: normal;
}
cite.smallcite::before,
cite.article::before,
cite.comic-strip::before,
cite.short-story::before,
cite.episode::before,
cite.video::before,
cite.chapter::before,
cite.song::before,
cite.poem::before,
cite.campaign::before,
cite.speech::before,
cite.course::before,
cite.presentation::before {
content: "“";
}
cite.smallcite::after,
cite.article::after,
cite.comic-strip::after,
cite.short-story::after,
cite.episode::after,
cite.video::after,
cite.chapter::after,
cite.song::after,
cite.poem::after,
cite.campaign::after,
cite.speech::after,
cite.course::after,
cite.presentation::after {
content: "”";
}
cite.article--shortcite::before,
cite.article--shortcite::after {
content: none;
}
code,
samp,
var,
pre {
font-family: $codeFont;
font-size: 1em;
}
pre .nocode {
font-family: $defaultFont;
font-size: 1em;
padding: 1px 3px;
border-radius: 6px;
border: dashed 1px black;
}
code,
samp,
var {
background-color: #d1d1d1;
border-radius: 5px;
padding: 2px;
}
pre {
max-width: 50vw;
overflow: scroll;
}
h1 code,
.post-title code,
pre code,
h1 samp,
.post-title samp,
pre samp,
h1 var,
.post-title var,
pre var {
background-color: transparent;
padding: 0;
}
.heading code,
.subheading code {
background-color: transparent;
}
pre.prettyprint ol {
padding-left: 3.5em;
}
pre.prettyprint li {
background: none !important;
}
samp {
display: block;
width: 80ch;
margin: 1em 4em;
border-left: 2px solid #ccc;
color: #333;
}
kbd {
padding: 0.1em 0.6em;
border: 1px solid #ccc;
font-size: 11px;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
background-color: #f7f7f7;
color: #333;
box-shadow: 0 1px 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2), 0 0 0 2px white inset;
border-radius: 3px;
display: inline-block;
margin: 0 0.1em;
text-shadow: 0 1px 0 white;
line-height: 1.4;
white-space: nowrap;
}
.pre-nominals,
.post-nominals {
font-size: 0.6em;
font-variant: small-caps;
}

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.link--tile {
text-decoration: none;
box-sizing: border-box;
border: 2px solid transparent;
&:hover {
border-color: $dark;
}
}
.item-tile {
display: grid;
min-height: 180px;
grid-template-columns: 5% auto 5%;
grid-template-rows: 2.5% auto 2.5%;
grid-template-areas:
". . ."
". tile-details ."
". . .";
background-size: cover;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: center;
&.lazy {
background-image: none !important;
}
&--heading {
font-size: 3em;
& .item-tile__header {
opacity: 1;
}
}
&--ohwhatohjeez {
border: 2px solid $ohwhatohjeez;
}
&--oldphaloskepsis {
border: 2px solid $oldphaloskepsis;
}
&--omphaloskepsis {
border: 2px solid $omphaloskepsis;
}
&__header {
text-align: center;
background-color: $dark;
opacity: 0.8;
display: grid;
grid-area: tile-details;
grid-template-columns: 5px auto 5px;
grid-template-rows: 0 auto auto auto;
grid-template-areas:
". . ."
". banner ."
". tile-title ."
". tile-subtitle .";
}
&__banner {
padding: 0.5em 1em 0;
grid-area: banner;
width: auto;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
border-radius: 0 0 10px 10px;
text-align: center;
text-decoration: none !important;
line-height: 0.5em;
background-color: #ebebeb;
}
&__title,
&__subtitle {
color: $light;
margin: 0;
font-weight: normal;
}
&__title {
font-size: 1.4em;
grid-area: tile-title;
align-self: center;
&--long {
font-size: 1em;
}
}
&__subtitle {
font-size: 0.8em;
grid-area: tile-subtitle;
align-self: start;
}
}

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/*
Put this file in /static/css/hugo-easy-gallery.css
Documentation and licence at https://github.com/liwenyip/hugo-easy-gallery/
*/
/*
Grid Layout Styles
*/
.gallery {
overflow: hidden;
}
.gallery .box {
float: left;
position: relative;
/* Default: 1 tile wide */
width: 100%;
padding-bottom: 100%;
}
@media only screen and (min-width : 365px) {
/* Tablet view: 2 tiles */
.gallery .box {
width: 50%;
padding-bottom: 50%;
}
}
@media only screen and (min-width : 480px) {
/* Small desktop / ipad view: 3 tiles */
.gallery .box {
width: 33.3%;
padding-bottom: 33.3%; /* */
}
}
@media only screen and (min-width : 9999px) {
/* Medium desktop: 4 tiles */
.box {
width: 25%;
padding-bottom: 25%;
}
}
/*
Transition styles
*/
.gallery.hover-transition figure,
.gallery.hover-effect-zoom .img,
.gallery:not(.caption-effect-appear) figcaption,
.fancy-figure:not(.caption-effect-appear) figcaption {
-webkit-transition: all 0.3s ease-in-out;
-moz-transition: all 0.3s ease-in-out;
-o-transition: all 0.3s ease-in-out;
transition: all 0.3s ease-in-out;
}
/*
figure styles
*/
figure {
position:relative; /* purely to allow absolution positioning of figcaption */
overflow: hidden;
}
.gallery figure {
position: absolute;
left: 5px;
right: 5px;
top: 5px;
bottom: 5px;
}
.gallery.hover-effect-grow figure:hover {
transform: scale(1.05);
}
.gallery.hover-effect-shrink figure:hover {
transform: scale(0.95);
}
.gallery.hover-effect-slidedown figure:hover {
transform: translateY(5px);
}
.gallery.hover-effect-slideup figure:hover {
transform: translateY(-5px);
}
/*
img / a styles
*/
.gallery .img {
position: absolute;
left: 0;
right: 0;
top: 0;
bottom: 0;
background-size: cover;
background-position: 50% 50%;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
}
.gallery.hover-effect-zoom figure:hover .img {
transform: scale(1.05);
}
.gallery img {
display: none !important; /* only show the img if not inside a gallery */
}
.gallery figure a {
position: absolute;
left: 0;
right: 0;
top: 0;
bottom: 0;
}
/*
figcaption styles
*/
.gallery figcaption,
.fancy-figure figcaption {
position: absolute;
bottom: 0;
left: 0;
right: 0;
background: #000;
color: #FFF;
text-align: center;
font-size: 75%; /* change this if you want bigger text */
background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
opacity: 1;
cursor: pointer;
}
.gallery.caption-position-none figcaption,
.fancy-figure.caption-position-none figcaption {
display: none;
}
.gallery.caption-position-center figcaption,
.fancy-figure.caption-position-center figcaption {
top: 0;
padding: 40% 5px;
}
.gallery.caption-position-bottom figcaption,
.fancy-figure.caption-position-bottom figcaption {
padding: 5px;
}
.gallery.caption-effect-fade figure:not(:hover) figcaption,
.gallery.caption-effect-appear figure:not(:hover) figcaption,
.fancy-figure.caption-effect-fade figure:not(:hover) figcaption,
.fancy-figure.caption-effect-appear figure:not(:hover) figcaption {
background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);
opacity: 0;
}
.gallery.caption-effect-slide.caption-position-bottom figure:not(:hover) figcaption,
.fancy-figure.caption-effect-slide.caption-position-bottom figure:not(:hover) figcaption {
margin-bottom: -100%;
}
.gallery.caption-effect-slide.caption-position-center figure:not(:hover) figcaption,
.fancy-figure.caption-effect-slide.caption-position-center figure:not(:hover) figcaption {
top: 100%;
}
.gallery figcaption p {
margin: auto; /* override style in theme */
}

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.feed-icon {
display: inline-block;
height: 0.6em;
width: 0.6em;
margin-bottom: 0.2em;
}

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assets/css/components/table.scss Normal file
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/* TODO: Not currently used */
@media screen and (max-width: 480px) {
.table-scroller {
overflow-x: auto;
width: 320px;
}
}
table {
border: 1px solid $dark;
margin: auto;
width: 80%;
display: block;
& td {
padding: 0.5em 1em;
border: 1px solid $dark;
}
}

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assets/css/layout/_footer.scss Normal file
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.site-footer {
grid-area: footer;
display: block;
width: 99%; /* Overflows right of viewport otherwise */
position: fixed;
bottom: 0;
& p {
width: fit-content;
margin: auto;
background: $light;
border: 2px solid black;
padding: 0.4em;
border-bottom: none;
font-size: 0.6em;
@include mq('desktop') {
font-size: 1em;
}
}
}

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.site-header {
display: grid;
grid-area: header;
grid-gap: 0;
grid-template-columns: 1fr;
grid-template-rows: auto auto auto auto;
grid-template-areas: "header-title" "header-tagline" "header-icons" "header-nav";
position: sticky;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
text-align: center;
z-index: 1;
&__title,
&__tagline,
&__icons,
&__nav {
background-color: $light;
margin: 0;
}
&__title,
&__tagline,
&__icons {
padding: 5px 0;
}
&__title {
font-weight: normal;
grid-area: header-title;
}
&__tagline {
grid-area: header-tagline;
}
&__icons {
grid-area: header-icons;
border-bottom: 2px solid $dark;
margin-bottom: 0;
}
&__nav {
grid-area: header-nav;
margin: auto;
width: 100%;
@include mq('desktop') {
width: 60%;
}
& ul {
margin-top: 0;
margin-bottom: 0;
}
& li {
width: calc(100% / 3);
display: block;
float: left;
border-bottom: 2px solid black;
border-left: 1px solid black;
border-right: 1px solid black;
padding: 0.4em;
background-color: inherit;
}
& a:first-child li {
border-left: 2px solid black;
}
& a:last-child li {
border-right: 2px solid black;
}
& li {
&:hover {
background-color: #ffffd0;
}
& a {
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
display: block;
}
}
}
}

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.site-content {
grid-area: page-container;
margin-left: 1em;
margin-right: 1em;
@include mq('desktop') {
margin: 2em;
}
}

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@import "abstracts/fonts";
@import "abstracts/variables";
@import "abstracts/mixins";
@import "base/typography";
.site-container {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 2.5% 1fr 2.5%;
grid-template-rows: auto 1fr 2.5%;
grid-template-areas:
"header header header"
"page-container page-container page-container"
"footer footer footer";
min-height: calc(100vh - 4em);
border-top: 0;
@include mq('desktop') {
margin-bottom: 2em;
grid-template-areas:
"header header header"
". page-container ."
"footer footer footer";
border: 2px solid black;
margin-left: 2em;
margin-right: 2em;
}
&--homepage {
align-items: center;
grid-template-rows: auto 2.5%;
grid-template-areas:
"page-container page-container page-container"
"footer footer footer";
margin-top: 2em;
margin-bottom: 2em;
@include mq('desktop') {
border: 2px solid black;
margin-left: 2em;
margin-right: 2em;
grid-template-areas:
". page-container ."
"footer footer footer";
}
}
&--list,
&--section {
align-items: center;
}
}
@import "layout/header";
@import "layout/footer";
@import "layout/main";
@import "components/gallery";
@import "components/icons";
@import "components/item-tile";
@import "components/table";
@import "pages/home";
@import "pages/collection";
@import "pages/single";
@import "pages/organisations-list";
@import "pages/single-organisation";
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
/*@import "themes/dark";*/
}

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.site-content--section,
.site-content--list {
display: grid;
grid-gap: 10px;
grid-template-columns: 0.2fr 1fr 0.2fr;
grid-template-rows: auto auto 60px;
justify-items: center;
align-items: center;
grid-template-areas: "list-page-header list-page-header list-page-header" "list-page-grid list-page-grid list-page-grid" "list-page-footer list-page-footer list-page-footer";
margin-top: 5em;
@include mq('desktop') {
grid-template-areas: ". list-page-header ." "list-page-grid list-page-grid list-page-grid" ". list-page-footer .";
}
& .site-content__header {
grid-area: list-page-header;
text-align: center;
& .page-header__minor-links {
text-align: center;
margin: auto;
overflow: auto;
& ul {
list-style: none;
& li {
float: left;
margin: 0 1em;
& * {
display: inline-block;
}
}
}
& .minor-links__categories {
width: 100%;
display: block;
font-size: 0.8em !important;
overflow: auto;
@include mq('desktop') {
font-size: 1em !important;
}
}
& .minor-links__years {
width: 100%;
display: block;
margin: auto;
width: fit-content;
}
}
}
& .site-content__body {
width: 100%;
display: grid;
justify-items: stretch;
align-items: stretch;
grid-gap: 10px;
grid-area: list-page-grid;
grid-template-columns: 1fr;
grid-template-rows: 1fr;
justify-items: stretch;
align-items: stretch;
&--list {
grid-template-columns: 1fr auto 1fr;
grid-template-rows: auto;
grid-template-areas: ". sections-list .";
}
&--chart {
grid-template-columns: 1em 100% 1fr;
grid-template-rows: 100%;
grid-template-areas: ". section-chart .";
}
}
& .site-content__footer {
grid-area: list-page-footer;
}
}

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.site-content--homepage {
text-align: center;
& .page-title {
font-size: 2.5em;
margin-bottom: 1em;
@include mq('desktop') {
font-size: 4em;
}
& span {
display: block !important;
font-size: 0.3em;
}
}
}

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.organisations-table {
grid-column-start: 1;
grid-column-end: 5;
}

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#organisation-body {
& .index {
display: grid;
grid-gap: 6px 5px;
grid-area: items;
grid-template-columns: repeat(4, 1fr);
grid-template-rows: 1fr;
justify-items: stretch;
align-items: stretch;
grid-template-areas: "item1 item2 item3 item4";
}
& .index .item:nth-child(1) {
grid-area: item1;
}
& .index .item:nth-child(2) {
grid-area: item2;
}
& .index .item:nth-child(3) {
grid-area: item3;
}
& .index .item:nth-child(4) {
grid-area: item4;
}
& details {
cursor: pointer;
opacity: 0.7;
border: 2px solid $dark;
&:hover,
&:focus {
opacity: 1;
}
}
& summary {
&::marker {
font-size: 2em;
padding-left: 2em;
}
& .subheading {
display: inline;
width: 95%;
padding-bottom: 2em;
}
& .index {
border-top: 2px solid $dark;
}
}
}
#hierarchy ul {
list-style: none;
padding-left: 1em;
& .hierarchy-item {
&:before {
content: '\21B3';
margin: 0 0.4em;
}
&--current {
font-weight: bold;
}
&--child:before {
content: '\2192';
}
}
}
.timeline__legend {
& span {
margin: 0 1em;
& * {
display: inline-block;
}
& .colour-square {
width: 1em;
height: 1em;
border-radius: 2.5px;
border: 1px solid $dark;
&--current {
background-color: #bbbbb0;
}
&--past {
background-color: #fffff0;
}
}
}
}
.site-content__body--chart {
& #timeline,
& #map {
width: 100%;
max-width: 100%;
grid-area: section-chart;
}
}
.site-content__body--list {
& .site-content__sections-list {
grid-area: sections-list;
display: block;
list-style: none;
margin: auto;
padding-left: 0;
& li * {
display: inline-block;
}
}
}

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.site-content--single {
display: grid;
column-gap: 2em;
grid-template-columns: 0.4fr 0.6fr;
grid-template-rows: auto auto auto;
& .site-content__header,
& .site-content__footer {
display: grid;
grid-column-start: 1;
grid-column-end: 3;
background-color: $light;
filter: brightness(80%);
@include mq('desktop') {
border: 2px solid $dark;
grid-column-end: 2;
padding: 2em;
}
}
& .site-content__header {
grid-row-start: 1;
grid-row-end: 2;
overflow: auto;
border-bottom: 2px solid $dark;
margin-bottom: 2em;
& .article-header {
text-align: center;
background-color: $dark;
opacity: 0.8;
color: $light;
display: grid;
grid-area: post-header-details;
grid-template-columns: 1fr;
padding: 20px;
grid-template-rows: 1fr auto auto 1fr;
justify-items: center;
align-items: center;
grid-template-areas: "." "post-title" "post-subtitle" ".";
&__series {
margin: 0 auto 1em;
font-size: 1.2em;
}
&__featured-image {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 15% 1fr 15%;
grid-template-rows: 20% 1fr 20%;
grid-template-areas: ". . ." ". post-header-details ." ". . .";
background-position: center center;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-size: cover;
height: 40vh;
min-height: 380px;
width: 100%;
border: 2px solid $dark;
& .attr {
background-color: $dark;
font-size: 0.7em;
color: $light;
width: fit-content;
position: fixed;
padding: 0.2em 0.5em;
opacity: 0.8;
margin: 0 auto;
& a {
color: $light;
}
}
}
&__title,
&__subtitle {
border-bottom: 2px inset $dark;
margin-top: 0.5em;
margin-bottom: 0.5em;
line-height: 1.2em;
border-bottom: 2px inset $dark;
margin-top: 0.5em;
margin-bottom: 0.5em;
line-height: 1.2em;
}
&__title-wrapper {
display: grid;
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---
title: '<cite class="book">Argumentation Schemes</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T12:04:05+00:00
url: /quotes/argumentation-schemes/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
> This refutation tactic is a meta-dialogical move, because the criticism is addressed to the assumptions and to the use of language in the speaker&#8217;s sequence of reasoning. The opening dialogue, that is, the possible defense of the argument, is situated on another level. The discussion moves to a level where agreements about the common meaning of terms in the argument need to be discussed and evaluated. This is the form of the argument from vagueness of verbal classification (Walton 1996 pp 102&ndash;103):
>
> <blockquote class="no-first-quote no-last-quote">
> <p>
> <strong>Argument from Vagueness of a Verbal Classification</strong>
> </p>
>
> <p>
> If an argument <img src="https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=A+&#038;bg=FFFFF0&#038;fg=020202&#038;s=0&#038;c=20201002" alt="A " class="latex" /> occurs in a context of dialogue that requires a certain level of precision, but some property <img src="https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=F+&#038;bg=FFFFF0&#038;fg=020202&#038;s=0&#038;c=20201002" alt="F " class="latex" /> that occurs in <img src="https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=A+&#038;bg=FFFFF0&#038;fg=020202&#038;s=0&#038;c=20201002" alt="A " class="latex" /> is defined in a way that is too vague to meet the requirements of that level of precision, then <img src="https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=A+&#038;bg=FFFFF0&#038;fg=020202&#038;s=0&#038;c=20201002" alt="A " class="latex" /> ought to be rejected as deficient.
> </p>
>
> <p>
> <img src="https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=A+&#038;bg=FFFFF0&#038;fg=020202&#038;s=0&#038;c=20201002" alt="A " class="latex" /> occurs in a context of dialogue that requires a certain level of precision that is appropriate to that context.
> </p>
>
> <p>
> Some property <img src="https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=F+&#038;bg=FFFFF0&#038;fg=020202&#038;s=0&#038;c=20201002" alt="F " class="latex" /> that occurs in <img src="https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=A+&#038;bg=FFFFF0&#038;fg=020202&#038;s=0&#038;c=20201002" alt="A " class="latex" /> is defined in a way that is too vague to meet the requirements of the level of precision appropriate to the context.
> </p>
>
> <p>
> Therefore, <img src="https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=A+&#038;bg=FFFFF0&#038;fg=020202&#038;s=0&#038;c=20201002" alt="A " class="latex" /> ought be rejected as deficient.
> </p>
> </blockquote><footer>p 118</footer>
> To deny a proposition is to claim that the proposition is not true. Thus denial of a proposition is assertion of its negation. When you assert a proposition, you are making a positive claim that it is true. You are making a commitment to the proposition asserted, and thus you are also committed to backing it up by giving a reason why it should be taken as true if anyone questions it. Questioning, as opposed to asserting as well as to denying, is a different speech act. When you question a proposition, you are not necessarily making a claim that the proposition is false or true. Questioning does not necessarily imply commitment. When you make an assertion, you are staking out a positive claim. When you assert something, you are saying you are for it, but you are free to question a proposition without being for or against it. You can be agnostic, but still have doubts and raise questions.<footer>p 225</footer>
> Oppositions were defined with respect to a paradigm established by the use of a term, and based on a specification of the sense of the term. For instance, the adjective <q>white</q> may be used to denote a color absorbing a determinate wavelength of light, or a yellow-appearing wine, or grey-appearing meat, or pinkish skin. The meaning depends on the paradigmatic alternatives; it can be conceived as a semantic area defined by the other elements and by the reality it refers to. White is opposed to read in regard to meat, or to wine, but not to skin.<footer>p 249</footer>

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---
title: '<cite class="book">Being a Quaker: A Guide for Newcomers</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T11:44:05+00:00
url: /quotes/being-a-quaker-a-guide-for-newcomers/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
> Unusually for the core work of a religious group, the whole book [<cite class="book">Quaker Faith and Practice</cite>] is re-compiled from scratch every thirty years or so, ensuring that it remains contemporary and relevant to each new generation.
> They extended their passion for spiritual equality to the details of everyday living, showing aggressive disregard for the niceties of seventeenth century etiquette. They refused to remove their hats to social superiors and never bowed to them. They were contemptuous of social status and called everybody <q>thou</q> and <q>thee</q>, ignoring the more respectful <q>you</q>, which was how everyone else was saying it.
> I was never in prison that it was not the means of bringing multitudes out of their prisons.<footer>George Fox</footer>
> You might expect me to say that first I became a Quaker, then I learnt more about Quaker beliefs and principles, and then I tried to live them out. But it wasn&#8217;t like that. I&#8217;ve always felt the need to try to care for others and give everyone respect &#8211; but not always been very good at it.<footer>anonymous</footer>
> If I try to <q>answer</q> what is good and true in another person, hopefully it will bring those qualities out. Even if it doesn&#8217;t seem to work, this is how I should live. My faith is that it is worthwhile.<footer>anonymous</footer>
> Live simply in order that others may simply live.<footer>Gandhi</footer>
> The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.<footer>G.K. Chesterton</footer>
> There is no end, no target, no victory. Peacemaking becomes a constant, tough, rewarding way of life.
> At the beginning of this book, I said that I wasn&#8217;t trying to convert you. As we reach the end, it seems a good idea to repeat it. I&#8217;m not. What this book has aimed to do is explain a little of who Quakers are and leave the rest to you. They don&#8217;t claim to have the answers. What they do have are some very good questions.
> You don&#8217;t get converted into a Quaker; you gradually come to realise that you are one, usually because other Friends start treating you as one.<footer>Gerald Priestland</footer>
<cite class="book">Advice and Queries</cite> #17 and 28 and 31

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---
title: '<cite class="book">Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T11:44:06+00:00
url: /quotes/bowling-alone-the-collapse-and-revival-of-american-community/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
> On reflection, then, the contrast between increasing party organizational vitality and declining voter involvement is perfectly intelligible. Since their <q>consumers</q> are tuning out from politics, parties have to work harder and spend much more, competing furiously to woo votes, workers, and donations, and to do that they need a (paid) organizational infrastructure. Party-as-organization and party-in-government have become stronger, even as the public has grown less attached to the parties. If we think of politics as an industry, we might delight in its new <q>labor-saving efficiency,</q> but if we think of politics as democratic deliberation, to leave people out is to miss the whole point of the exercise.
> Despite the aspirations of some developers, mall culture is not about overcoming isolation and connecting with others, but about privately surfing from store to store—in the presence of others, but not in their company.
> Yet the integration of families into neighborhoods may not always be beneficial. If the neighborhood norms and networks are at odds with what ethnographer Anderson calls <q>decent</q> values, then families who become enmeshed in the community may run afoul of their own better natures.
> The ideal of participatory democracy has deep roots in American political philosophy. With our experiment in democracy still in its infancy, Thomas Jefferson proposed amending the Constitution to facilitate grassroots democracy. In an 1816 letter he suggested that <q>counties be divided into wards of such size that every citizen can attend, when called on, and act in person.</q> The ward governments would have been charged with everything from running schools to caring for the poor to operating police and military forces to maintaining public roads. Jefferson believed that <q>making every citizen an acting member of the government, and in the offices nearest and most interesting to him, will attach him by his strong feelings to the independence of his country, and its republican constitution.</q>

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---
title: '<cite class="book">Bullshit Jobs</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T10:30:29+00:00
url: /quotes/bullshit-jobs/
categories:
- Reviews
---
> Obviously, I am being slightly facetious here: this is not the only thing a PR department does. I&#8217;m sure in the case of Oxford much of its day-to-day concerns involve more practical matters such as attracting to the university the children of oil magnates or corrupt politicians from foreign lands who might otherwise have gone to Cambridge.
> My own research indicated that within the service economy, there were only three significant exceptions to this rule: information technology (IT) providers, telemarketers, and sex workers. Many of the first category, and pretty much all of the second, were convinced they were basically engaged in scams.<footer>p 22</footer>
> Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried.
> It&#8217;s hard to imagine a surer sign that one is dealing with an irrational economic system than the fact that the prospect of eliminating drudgery is considered to be a _problem_.
<img loading="lazy" src="https://bengoldsworthy.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20180809_084830.jpg" alt="" width="2048" height="2048" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-4289" />
<img loading="lazy" src="https://bengoldsworthy.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20180809_084844.jpg" alt="" width="2048" height="2048" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-4290" />
<img loading="lazy" src="https://bengoldsworthy.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20180809_084907.jpg" alt="" width="2048" height="2048" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-4291" />
<img loading="lazy" src="https://bengoldsworthy.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/IMG_20180816_134804.jpg" alt="" width="2048" height="2048" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-4292" />

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---
title: '<cite class="book">Code: Version 2.0</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T10:28:35+00:00
url: /quotes/code-version-2-0/
categories:
- Reviews
---
> The Internet is wholly insensitive to geographic distinctions<footer>citation on p 57</footer>
> Norms function through the stigma that a community imposes; markets constrain through the price that they exact; architectures constrain through the physical burdens they impose; and law constrains through the punishment it threatens.<footer>p 124</footer>
> In some places you can choose to speak a language that only the recipient can hear (through encryption); in other places encryption is not an option.<footer>p 125</footer>
Modified figure, pg 130
> [K]eep the elements simple, and the compounds will astound.<footer>p 145</footer>
> It is not an offense to protect yourself rather than rely on the state&#8230;[s]elf-sufficiency is strength and going to the law a sign of weakness.<footer>p 180</footer>
> With the relative anonymity of cyberspace and its growing size, norms do not function well there.<footer>p 236</footer>
> Bloggers get authority from the citation others give them; that authority attracts attention.<footer>p 242&ndash;243</footer>
> &#8230;the measure of success for legislation (as opposed to missile tracking software) is not 100 percent. The question the legislature asks is whether the law will make things better off.<footer>p 254</footer>
All of p 300
Barlow&#8217; declaration of independence
> Ideas, or beautiful rhetoric, aren&#8217;t political action.<footer>p 305</footer>
> &#8230;that is a difference in degree, not kind.<footer>p 324</footer>

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---
title: '<cite class="book">Collected Essays</cite> (George Orwell)'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T12:09:21+00:00
url: /quotes/collected-essays-george-orwell/
categories:
- Reviews
---
### <cite class="article">Marrakech</cite> {.subsubheading}
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
<q>Yes, <i>mon vieux</i>, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The Jews! They&#8217;re the real rulers of this country, you know. They&#8217;ve got all the money. They control the banks, finance&mdash;everything.</q><br /> <q>But,</q> I said, <q>isn&#8217;t it a fact that the average Jew is a labourer working for about a penny an hour?</q><br /> <q>Ah, that&#8217;s only for show! They&#8217;re all moneylenders really. They&#8217;re cunning, the Jews.<q><br /> In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old women used to be burned for witchcraft when they could not even work enough magic to get themselves a square meal.</p></blockquote>
<h3 class="subsubheading">
<cite class="article">Looking Back on the Spanish War</cite>
</h3>
<blockquote>
<p>
The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as <q>the truth</q> exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as <q>Science</q>. There is only <q>German Science</q>, <q>Jewish Science</q>, etc.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
To win over the working class permanently, the Fascists would have to raise the general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements.
</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 class="subsubheading">
<cite class="article">Notes on Nationalism</cite>
</h3>
<blockquote>
<p>
Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.
</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 class="subsubheading">
<cite class="article">Anti-Semitism in Britain</cite>
</h3>
<blockquote>
<p>
The point is that something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in modern civilisation, and as a result we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil.
</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 class="subsubheading">
<cite class="article">Poetry and the Microphone</cite>
</h3>
<blockquote>
<p>
Nevertheless one ought not to confuse the capabilities of an instrument with the use it is actually put to.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
Only, the bigger the machine of government becomes, the more loose ends and forgotten corners there are in it. This is perhaps a small consolation, but it is not a despicable one. It means that in countries where there is already a strong liberal tradition, bureaucratic tyranny can perhaps never be complete.
</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 class="subsubheading">
<cite class="article">The Prevention of Literature</cite>
</h3>
<blockquote>
<p>
[A]lmost nobody in our own day is able to speak out as roundly in favour of intellectual liberty as Milton could do 300 years ago&#8212;and this in spite of the fact Milton was writing in a period of civil war.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
Although other aspects of the question are usually in the foreground, the controversy over freedom of speech and of the Press is at bottom a controversy over the desirability, or otherwise, or telling lies.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
Fifteen years ago, when one defended the freedom of the intellect, one had to defend it against Conservatives, against Catholics, and to some extent&mdash;for they were not of great importance in England&mdash;against Fascists. To-day one has to defend it against Communists and <q>fellow-travellers</q>.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not, at this date, menaced to anything like the same extent.
</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 class="subsubheading">
<cite class="article">Politics and the English Language</cite>
</h3>
<blockquote>
<p>
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 class="subsubheading">
<cite class="article">Writers and Leviathan</cite>
</h3>
<blockquote>
<p>
The whole left-wing ideology, scientific and Utopian, was evolved by people who had no immediate prospect of attaining power. It was, therefore, an extremist ideology, utterly contemptuous of kings, governments, laws, prisons, police forces, armies, flags, frontiers, patriotism, religion, conventional morality, and, in fact, the whole existing scheme of things.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
Indeed, the mere sound of words ending in -ism seems to bring with it the smell of propaganda.
</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 class="subsubheading">
<cite class="article">Reflections on Gandhi</cite>
</h3>
<blockquote>
<p>
No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
It is difficult to see how Gandhi&#8217;s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again.
</p>
</blockquote>

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---
title: '<cite class="book">Eichmann in Jerusalem</cite> & <cite class="book">Responsibility and Judgement</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T11:17:52+00:00
url: /quotes/eichmann-in-jerusalem-responsibility-and-judgement/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
## <cite class="book">Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil</cite> {.subheading}
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
From Propst Grüber&#8217;s own testimony, it appeared that he sought not so much <q>alleviation of suffering</q> as exemptions from it, in accordance with well-established categories recognized earlier by the Nazis. The categories had been accepted without protest by German Jewry from the very beginning. And the acceptance of privileged categories&mdash;German Jews as against Polish Jews, war veterans and decorated Jews as against ordinary Jews, families whose ancestors were German-born as against recently naturalized citizens, etc.&mdash;had been the beginning of the moral collapse of respectable Jewish society.
</p>
</blockquote>
> And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody <q>Thou shalt not kill,</q> even though man&#8217;s natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler&#8217;s land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: <q>Thou shalt kill,</q> although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it&mdash;the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted _not_ to murder, _not_ to rob, _not_ to let their neighbors go off to their doom (for that the Jews were transported to their doom they knew, of course, even though many of them may not have known the gruesome details), and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.
> However, to the never-ending surprise of the Nazi officials, even the convinced anti-Semites in foreign lands were not willing to be <q>consistent,</q> and showed a deplorable tendency to shy away from <q>radical</q> measures. Few of them put it as bluntly as a member of the Spanish Embassy in Berlin&mdash;<q>If only one could be sure they wouldn&#8217;t be liquidated,</q> he said of some six hundred Jews of Spanish descent who had been given Spanish passports, though they had never been in Spain&#8230;
> In the case of these <q>privileged categories,</q> an old law of 1933 permitted the government to confiscate property that had been used for activities <q>hostile to the nation and the State.</q> This kind of confiscation had been customary in the case of political prisoners in the concentration camps, and though Jews did not belong in this category&mdash;all concentration camps in Germany and Austria had become _judenrein_ by the fall of 1942&mdash;it took only one more regulation, issues in March, 1942, to establish that all deported Jews were <q>hostile to the nation and the State.</q>
> Politically and psychologically, the most interesting aspect of this incident is perhaps the role played by the German authorities in Denmark, their obvious sabotage of orders from Berlin. It is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with _open_ native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They had met resistance based on principle, and their <q>toughness</q> had melted like butter in the sun, they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage.
> At this slightly tense moment, the witness happened to mention the name of Anton Schmidt, a _Feldwebel_, or sergeant, in the German Army&#8230;Anton Schmidt was in charge of a patrol in Poland that collected stray German soldiers who were cut off from their units. In the course of doing this, he had run into members of the Jewish underground&#8230;and he had helped the Jewish partisans by supplying them with forged papers and military trucks. Most important of all: <q>He did not do it for money.</q> This had gone on for five months, from October, 1941, to March, 1942, when Anton Schmidt was arrested and executed&#8230;
>
> During the few minutes it took Kovner to tell of the help that had come from a German sergeant, a hush settled over the courtroom; it was as though the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honor of the man named Anton Schmidt. And in those two minutes, which were like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness, a single thought stood out clearly, irrefutably, beyond question&mdash;how utterly different everything would be today in this courtroom, in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more stories could have been told.
>
> There are, of course, explanations of this devastating shortage, and they have been repeated many times. I shall give the gist of them in the worlds of one of the subjectively sincere memoirs of the war published in Germany. Peter Bamm, a German Army physician who served at the Russian front, tells in <cite class="book">Die Unsichtbare Flagge</cite> (1952) of the killing of Jews in Sevastopol&#8230;<q>We knew this. We did nothing. Anyone who had seriously protested or done anything against the killing unit would have been arrested within twenty-four hours and would have disappeared. It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian governments in our century that they don&#8217;t permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr&#8217;s death for their convictions. A good many of us might have accepted such a death. The totalitarian state lets its opponents disappear in silent anonymity. It is certain that anyone who had dared to suffer death rather than silently tolerate the crime would have sacrificed his life in vain. This is not to say that such a sacrifice would have been morally meaningless. It would only have been practically useless&#8230;</q>
>
> [The fatal flaw in the argument] became apparent in the example afforded by Sergeant Anton Schmidt&#8230;It is true that totalitarian domination tried to establish these holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear, but just as the Nazis&#8217; feverish attempts, from June, 1942, on, to erase all traces of the massacres were doomed to failure, so all efforts to let their opponents <q>disappear in silent anonymity</q> were in vain. The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be <q>practically useless,</q> at least, not in the long run&#8230;the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody&#8217;s grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but _some people will not_, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that <q>it could happen</q> in most places but _it did not happen everywhere_.
> You told your story in terms of a hard-luck story, and, knowing the circumstances, we are, up to a point, willing to grant you that under more favorable circumstances it is highly unlikely that you would ever have come before us or before any other criminal court. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out an policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations&mdash;as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world&mdash;we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.
## <cite class="book">Responsibility and Judgement</cite></2></p>
### <cite class="article">Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship</cite> {.subsubheading}
> I had taken it for granted that we all still believe with Socrates that it is better to suffer than to do wrong. This belief turned out to be a mistake. There was a widespread conviction that it is impossible to withstand temptation of any kind, that none of us could be trusted or even be expected to be trustworthy when the chips are down, that to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same, whereas in the words of Mary McCarthy, who first spotted this fallacy: <q>If someone points a gun at you and says, <q>Kill your friend or I will kill you,</q> he is <em>tempting</em> you, that is all.</q> And while a temptation where one&#8217;s life is at stake may be a legal excuse for a crime, it certainly is not a moral justification.
> In every bureaucratic system the shifting of responsibilities is a matter of daily routine, and if one wishes to define bureaucracy in terms of political science, that is, as a form of government&mdash;the rule of offices, as contracted to the rule of men, of one man, or of the few, or of the many&mdash;bureaucracy unhappily is the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of rulership. But in the courtroom, these definitions are of no avail. For to the answer: <q>Not I but the system did it in which I was a cog,</q> the court immediately raises the next question: <q>And why, if you please, did you become a cog or continue to be a cog under such circumstances?</q>
> If you are confronted with two evils, thus the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesson one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Those who denounce the moral fallacy of this argument are usually accused to a germ-proof moralism which is alien to political circumstances, of being unwilling to dirty their hands; and it must be admitted that it is not so much political or moral philosophy but religious thought that most unequivocally has rejected all compromises with lesser evils&#8230;Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
> To revert for a moment to the distinction between totalitarian government and other dictatorships, it is precisely the relative rarity of outright crimes that distinguishes fascist dictatorships from fully developed totalitarian ones, although it is of course true that there are more crimes committed by fascist or military dictatorships than would even be conceivable under constitutional government. What matters in our context is only that they are still clearly recognizable as exceptions and that the regime does not openly acknowledge them.
> On the contrary, all our experiences tell us that it was precisely the members of _respectable_ society, who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values against another. I therefore would suggest that the nonparticipants were those whose consciences did not function in this, as it were, automatic way&mdash;as though we dispose of a set of learned or innate rules which we then apply to the particular case as it arises, so that every new experience of situation is already prejudged and we need only act out whatever we learned or possessed beforehand. Their criterion, I think, was a different one: they asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be changed for the better, but simply because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves at all. Hence, they also chose to die when they were forced to participate. To put it crudely, they refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command <q>Thou shalt not kill,</q> but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer&mdash;themselves.
> The dividing line between those who want to think and therefore have to judge by themselves, and those who do not, strikes across all social and cultural or educational differences. In this respect, the total moral collapse of respectable society during the Hitler regime may teach us that under such circumstances those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable: we now know that moral norms and standards can be changed overnight, and that all that then will be left is the mere habit of holding fast to something. Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds. Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.
> According to these earlier notions every action, accomplished by a plurality of men, can be divided into two stages: the beginning, which is initiated by a <q>leader,</q> and the accomplishment, in which many join to see through what then becomes a common enterprise. In our context, all that matters is the insight that no man, however strong, can ever accomplish anything, good or bad, without the help of others. What you have here is the notion of an equality which accounts for a <q>leader</q> who is never more than _primus inter pares_, the first among his peers. Those who seem to obey him actually support him and his enterprise; without such <q>obedience</q> he would be helpless, whereas in the nursery or under conditions of slavery&mdash;the two spheres in which the notion of obedience made sense and from which it was then transposed into political matters&mdash;it is the child or the slave who becomes helpless if he refuses to <q>cooperate.</q> Even in a strictly bureaucratic organisation, with its fixed hierarchical order, it would make much more sense to look upon the functioning of the <q>cogs</q> and wheels in terms of overall support for a common enterprise than in our usual terms of obedience to superiors. If I obey the laws of the land, I actually support its constitution, as becomes glaringly obvious in the case of revolutionists and rebels who disobey because they have withdrawn this tacit consent.
>
> In these terms, the nonparticipators in public life under a dictatorship are those who have refused their support by shunning those places of <q>responsibility</q> where such support, under the name of obedience, is required. And we have only for a moment to imagine what would happen to any of these forms of government if enough people would act <q>irresponsibly</q> and refuse support, even without active resistance and rebellion, to see how effective a weapon this could be.
### <cite class="article">Some Questions of Moral Philosophy</cite> {.subsubheading}
> For Machiavelli, the standard by which you judge is the world and not the self&mdash;the standard is exclusively political&mdash;and that is what makes him so important for moral philosophy. He is more interested in Florence than in the salvation of his soul, and he thinks that people who are more concerned with the salvation of souls than with the world should keep out of politics.
### <cite class="article">Thinking and Moral Considerations</cite> {.subsubheading}
> Kant, in the privacy of his posthumously published notes, wrote: <q>I do not approve of the rule that if the use of pure reason has proved something, this result should later no longer be doubted as though it were a solid axiom</q>; and <q>I do not share the opinion&#8230;that one should not doubt once one has convinced oneself of something. In pure philosophy this is impossible. <em>Our mind has a natural aversion against it</em></q> (my italics). From which it seems to follow that the business of thinking is like the veil of Penelope: it undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.
> We do not know how many of the <q>professional</q> thinkers whose doctrines constitute the tradition of philosophy and metaphysics had doubts about the validity and even the possible meaningfulness of their results. We know only Plato&#8217;s magnificent denial (in the <cite class="book">Seventh Letter</cite>) of what others proclaimed as his doctrines:
>
> <blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
> <p>
> On the subjects that concern me nothing is known since there exists nothing in writing on them nor will there ever exist anything in the future. People who write about such things know nothing; they don&#8217;t even know themselves. For there is no way of putting it in words like other things which one can learn. Hence, no one who possesses the very faculty of thinking (<i>nous</i>) and therefore knows the weakness of words, will ever risk putting down thoughts in discourse, let alone fixing them into so unflexible a form as written letters.
> </p>
> </blockquote>
> The first thing that strikes us in Plato&#8217;s Socratic dialogues is that they are all aporetic. The argument either leads nowhere or it goes around in circles&#8230;None of the _logoi_, the arguments, ever stays put; they move about, because Socrates, asking questions to which he does _not_ know the answers, sets them in motion. And once the statements have come full circle, it is usually Socrates who cheerfully proposes to start all over again and inquire what justice or piety or knowledge or happiness are.
> What we commonly call nihilism is actually a danger inherent in the thinking activity itself. There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous, but nihilism is not its product. Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current, so-called positive values to which it remains bound. All critical examinations must go through a stage of at least hypothetically negating accepted opinions and <q>values</q> by finding out their implications and tacit assumptions, and in this sense nihilism may be seen as an ever-present danger of thinking. But this danger does not arise out of the Socratic conviction that an unexamined life is not worth living but, on the contrary, out of the desire to find results which would make further thinking unnecessary. Thinking is equally dangerous to all creeds and, by itself, does not bring forth any new creed.
> The most conspicuous and most dangerous fallacy in the proposition, as old as Plato, <q>Nobody does evil voluntarily,</q> is the implied conclusion, <q>Everybody wants to do good.</q> The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their mind to be either bad or good.
> Conscience appears as an afterthought, that thought which is aroused either by a crime&#8230;or by unexamined opinions&#8230;or as the anticipated fear of such afterthoughts&#8230;What makes a man fear this conscience is the anticipation of the presence of a witness who awaits him only _if_ and when he goes home.
> For the thinking ego and its experience, conscience, which <q>fills a man full of obstacles,</q> is a side effect. And it remains a marginal affair for society at large except in emergencies&#8230;It&#8217;s political and moral significance comes out only in those rare moments in history when <q>Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,</q> when <q>The best lack all conviction, whilst the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.</q>
>
> At these moments, thinking ceases to be a marginal affair in political matters. When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action. The purging element in thinking, Socrates&#8217; midwifery, that brings out the implications of unexamined opinions and thereby destroys them&mdash;values, doctrines, theories, and even convictions&mdash;is political by implication.
### <cite class="article">Reflections on Little Rock</cite> {.subsubheading}
> The picture looked to me like a fantastic caricature of progressive education which, by abolishing the authority of adults, implicitly denies their responsibility for the world into which they have borne their children and refuses the duty of guiding them into it. Have we not come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world? And do we intend to have our political battles fought out in the school yards?
> If as a Jew I wish to spend my vacations only in the company of Jews, I cannot see how anyone can reasonably prevent my doing so; just as I see no reason why other resorts should not cater to a clientele that wishes not to see Jews while on holiday. There cannot be a <q>right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement,</q> because many of these are in the realm of the purely social where the right to free association, and therefore to discrimination, has greater validity than the principle of equality.
> The point is that force can, indeed must, be centralized in order to be effective, but power cannot and must not. If the various sources from which it springs are dried up, the whole structure becomes impotent. And states&#8217; rights in this country are among the most authentic sources of power, not only for the promotion of regional interests and diversity, but for the Republic as a whole.

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title: '<cite class="book"><q>Exterminate All the Brutes</q></cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T11:34:24+00:00
url: /quotes/exterminate-all-the-brutes/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
> You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.
> Perhaps in fear we seek an increased perception of life, a more potent form of existence? I am frightened, therefore I exist. The more frightened I am, the more I exist?
> All over the rest of the world, we were regarded at the time as nomadic warriors in the style of the Mongols and the Tartars. They reigned supreme from the backs of horses, we from the decks of ships.
> What should I do during my remaining time? Tönnesen would have answered, <q>Nothing.</q> He believed that to be born is to jump off a skyscraper. But life is not like jumping off a skyscraper. It&#8217;s not seven seconds you have, but seven decades. That is enough to experience and achieve a good deal.
>
> The shortness of life should not paralyze us, but stop us from diluted, unconcentrated living. The task of death is to force man into essentials.
>
> That was how I felt when I was still not yet thirty and had a long way to go down to the paving stones below. I did not even see them. Now I can see them rushing up toward me and feel myself falling headlong.
> The direct cause of death was usually disease, but the underlying cause was this: the Indians were far too numerous to be of any economic value within the framework of the conquerors&#8217; society.
> Does not Adam Smith&#8217;s law still apply today? In the long run, will a society that is unable to maintain the right to work be able to maintain the right to live?
> Why did the weed spread more quickly and effectively in the colonies than any other European plants? Was it really through its moral and intellectual superiority that the European rat exterminated other rats?
> It is we who have suppressed it. We do not want to remember. We want genocide to have begun and ended with Nazism. That is what is most comforting.
> It is like losing your foothold in a great love affair. What will happen now? I have no idea. All I know is that I have just thrown myself out into it.
> Eventually the facts trickled out. Of course, educated Frenchmen knew roughly, or even quite precisely, by what means their colonies were captured and administrated.
> Just as educated Frenchmen in the 1950s and 1960s knew what their troops were up to in Vietnam and Algeria.
> Just as educated Russians in the 1980s knew what their troops did in Afghanistan, and educated South Africans and Americans during the same period knew what their <q>auxilliaries</q> were doing in Mozambique and Central America respectively.
> Just as educated Europeans today know how children die when the whip of debt whistles over poor countries.
> It is now knowledge that is lacking. The educated general public has always largely known what outrages have been committed and are being committed in the name of Progress, Civilization, Socialism, Democracy, and the Market.

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title: '<cite class="book">Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987&ndash;2007</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T11:34:24+00:00
url: /quotes/fanged-noumena-collected-writings-1987-2007/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
> There are few horrors comparable to that of the master legislator who realizes that _anarchy is still permitted_.<footer>Nick Land,
>
> <cite class="article">Art as Insurrection</cite></footer>
> What the philosophers have never understood is this: it is the _unintelligibility of the world alone that gives it worth_.<footer>Nick Land,
>
> <cite class="article">Art as Insurrection</cite></footer>
> Sociological fundamentalism, state worship, totalitarian paranoia and fascism, they all exhibit the same basic impulse; hatred of art, (real) freedom, desire, everything that cannot be controlled, regulated, and administered. Fascism hates aliens, migrant workers, the homeless, rootless people of every kind and inclination, everything evocative of excitement and uncertainty, women, artists, lunatics, drifting sexual drives, liquids, impurity, and abandonment.
>
> Philsophy, in its longing to rationalize, formalize, define, delimit, to terminate enigma and uncertainty, to co-operate wholeheartedly with the police, is nihilistic in the ultimate sense that it strives for the immobile perfection of death.<footer>Nick Land,
>
> <cite class="article">Art as Insurrection</cite></footer>
> Let us not forget that philosophy is also primate psychology; that our loftiest speculations are merely picking through a miniscule region of the variegated slime encrusting a speck of dust.<footer>Land,
>
> <cite class="article">Spirit and Teeth</cite></footer>
> The refusal to accept a dungeon is no substitute for a hole in the wall. Only in a voyage to the unknown is there real escape from conviction.<footer>Land,
>
> <cite class="article">Shamanic Nietzsche</cite></footer>
> [How do you make yourself a Nazi?] 4) Foster nostalgia for what is maximally bovine, inflexible, and stagnant: a line of racially pure peasants digging the same patch of earth for eternity. 5) Above all, resent everything impetuous and irresponsible, insist upon unrelenting vigilance, crush sexuality under its reproductive function, rigidly enforce the domestication of women, distrust art, classicize cities to eliminate the disorder of uncontrolled flows, and persecute all minorities exhibiting a nomadic tendency.<footer>Land,
>
> <cite class="article">Making It with Death</cite></footer>
> Nazism can turn you into a stiff before the messy passage into death.<footer>Land,
>
> <cite class="article">Making It with Death</cite></footer>
> thank you for flying with transnational commodification
>
> we shall shortly be arriving in mayhem
>
> if there is anybody on board who can impersonate a pilot
>
> it would be of comfort to the other passengers<footer>Land,
>
> <cite class="article">Circuitries</cite></footer>
> Freud&#8217;s organism is a little security system, a miniaturized city-state political corpuscle, a micropod, relatively secure against external assault, but vulnerable to insurgency.<footer>Land,
>
> <cite class="article">Machinic Desire</cite></footer>
> It makes no more sense to try to rescue the economy from capital by demarketization than it does to liberate the proletarian from false consciousness by decortication.<footer>Land,
>
> <cite class="article">Machinic Desire</cite></footer>
> Sense reaches absolute zero.<footer>Land,
>
> <cite class="article">Meat</cite></footer>
> Philosophy has an affinity with despotism, due to its predilection for Platonic-fascist top-down solutions that always screw up viciously.<footer>Land,
>
> <cite class="article">Meltdown</cite></footer>
> As sino-pacific boom and automatized global economic integration crashes the neocolonial world system, the metropolis is forces to re-endogenize its crisis. Hyper-fluid capital deterritorializing to the planetary level divests the first world of geographic privilege; resulting in Euro-American neo-mercantilist panic reactions, welfare state deterioration, cancerizing enclaves of domestic underdevelopment, political collapse, and the release of cultural toxins that speed-up the process of disintegration in a vicious circle.<footer>Land,
>
> <cite class="article">Meltdown</cite></footer>

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title: '<cite class="book">Journey to the End of the Night</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T15:33:44+00:00
url: /quotes/journey-to-the-end-of-the-night/
categories:
- Reviews
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
At such moments everything adds to your loathsome distress, forcing you in your weakened state to see things, people, and the future as they are – that is, as skeletons, as nothings, which you will nevertheless have to love, cherish and defence as if they existed.</footer> </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
If only I had met Molly sooner, when it was still possible to choose one road rather than another! Before that bitch Musyne and that little turd Lola crimped my enthusiasm! But it was too late to start being young again. I didn&#8217;t believe in it any more!</footer> </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
Every day in the grey of dawn it comes over them, whole clusters cling to the doors and handrails. One enormous rout! Yet all they&#8217;re going to Paris for is a boss, the man who saves you from starvation. The cowards, they&#8217;re scared to death of losing him, though he makes them sweat for their pittance.</footer> </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
I may as well admit it, I haven&#8217;t the strength to drive myself any more; what I&#8217;m looking for, to see me through to the end of my days, is some quiet little backwater of research that will bring me neither enemies nor disciples, but only the mediocre celebrity without jealousy which I sorely need and with which I shall gladly content myself. Among other absurdities, I have considered studying the comparative influence of central heating on haemorrhoids in northern and southern countries.
</p><footer>Serge Parapine</footer>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
This body of ours, this disguise put on by common jumping molecules, is in constant revolt against the abominable farce of having to endure.</footer> </blockquote>

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title: '<cite class="book">Nausea</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T15:35:35+00:00
url: /quotes/nausea/
subtitle: trans. Robert Baldick
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
All the same, for a hundred dead stories there remain one or two living ones. These I evoke cautiously, occasionally, not too often, for fear of wearing them out. I fish one out, I see once more the setting, the characters, the attitudes. All of a sudden I stop: I have felt a worn patch, I have seen a word poking through the web of sensations. I sense that before long that word is going to take the place of several pictures I love. Straight away I stop and quickly think of something else; I don&#8217;t want to tire my memories. In vain; the next time I evoke them, a good part will have congealed.
</p><footer>p 54</footer>
</blockquote>
> Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn&#8217;t let itself be extended; it achieves significance only through its death. Towards this death, which may also be my own, I am drawn irrevocably. Each moment appears only to bring on the moments after. To each moment I cling with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplaceable&mdash;and yet I would not lift a finger to prevent it from being annihilated. This last minute I am spending&mdash;in Berlin, in London&mdash;in the arms of this woman whom I met two days ago&mdash;a minute I love passionately, a woman I am close to loving&mdash;it is going to come to an end, I know that. In a little while I shall leave for another country. I shall never find this woman again or this night. I study each second, I try to suck it dry; nothing passes which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever within me, nothing, neither the ephemeral tenderness of these lovely eyes, nor the noises in the street, nor the false light of dawn: and yet the minute goes by and I do not hold it back, I am glad to see it pass.<footer>p 59</footer>
> When you are living, nothing happens. The settings change, people come in and go out, that&#8217;s all. There are never any beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, it is an endless, monotonous addition. Now and then you do a partial sum: you say: I&#8217;ve been travelling for three years, I&#8217;ve been at Bouville for three years. There isn&#8217;t any end either: you never leave a woman, a friend, a town in one go. And then everything is like everything else: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers, are all the same after a couple of weeks. Occasionally&mdash;not very often &#8212; &mdash;you take your bearings, you realize that you&#8217;re living with a woman, mixed up in some dirty business. Just for an instant. After that, the procession starts again, you begin adding up the hours and days once more. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. April, May, June. 1924, 1925, 1926.<footer>p 61</footer>
> This man had lived only for himself. As a severe and well-merited punishment nobody had come to his bedside to close his eyes.<footer>p 121</footer>
> <q>I was just thinking,</q> I tell him, laughing, <q>that here we are, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence, and that there&#8217;s nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.</q><footer>p 162</footer>
> I understood the Nausea, I possessed it&#8230;The essential thing is contingency. I mean that, by definition, existence is not necessity. To exist is simply _to be there_; what exists appears, lets itself be _encountered_, but you can never _deduce_ it. There are people, I believe, who have understood that. Only they have tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary, causal being. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not an illusion, an appearance which can be dissipated; it is absolute, and consequently perfect gratuitousness. Everything is gratuitous, that park, this town, and myself. When you realize that, it turns your stomach over and everything starts floating about, as it did the other evening at the Rendez-voud des Cheminots; that is the Nausea; that is what the Bastards&mdash;those who live on the Coteau Vert and the others&mdash;try to hide from themselves with their idea of rights. But what a poor lie: nobody has any rights; they are entirely gratuitous, like other men, they cannot succeed in not feeling superfluous. And in themselves, secretly, they _are superfluous_, that is to say amorphous and vague, sad.<footer>p 188</footer>

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---
title: '<cite class="book">On Bullshit</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T11:48:54+00:00
url: /quotes/on-bullshit/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
<q>&#8230;why does it strike him that way [as bullshit]? It does so, I believe, because he perceives what Pascal says as being&mdash;roughly speaking, for now&mdash;unconnected to a concern with the truth. Her statement is not germane to the enterprise of describing reality.</q>
<q>He reacts as though he perceives her to be speaking about her feeling thoughtlessly, without conscientious attention to the relevant facts. Her statement is not <q>wrought with greatest care.</q> She makes it without bothering to take into account at all the question of its accuracy.</q>
<q>The point that troubles Wittgenstein is manifestly not that Pascal has made a mistake in her description of how she feels. Nor is it even that she has made a careless mistake. Her laxity, or her lack of care, is not a matter of having permitted an error to slip into her speech on account of some inadvertent or momentarily negligent lapse in the attention she was devoting to getting things right. The point is rather that, so far as Wittgenstein can see, Pascal offers a description of a certain state of affairs without genuinely submitting to the constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of reality imposes. Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying.</q>
<q>What tends to go on in a bull session is that the participants try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how it feels to hear themselves saying such things and in order to discover how others respond, without it being assumed that they are committed to what they say: It is understood by everyone in a bull session that the statements people make to not necessarily reveal what they really believe or how they really feel. The main point is to make possible a high level of candor and an experimental or adventuresome approach to the subjects under discussion.</q>
<q>These <q>anti-realist</q> doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of <em>correctness</em> to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of <em>sincerity</em>. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself.</q>
<q>&#8230;there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgement that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial&mdash;notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.</q>

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title: '<cite class="book">Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T11:44:06+00:00
url: /quotes/rights-of-man-common-sense-and-other-political-writings/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
## <cite class="book">Rights of Man</cite> {.subheading}
> When the tongue or the pen is let loose in a frenzy of passion, it is the man, and not the subject, that becomes exhausted.
> In the rhapsody of his imagination, he has discovered a world of wind-mills, and his sorrows are, that there are no Quixots to attack them.
> The particular reason for bringing it forward at this moment, (M. de la Fayette has since informed me) was, that if the National Assembly should fall in the threatened destruction that then surrounded it, some traces of its principles might have the chance of surviving the wreck.
> The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of Man, is, that they do not go far enough into antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the intermediate stages of an hundred or a thousand years, and produce what was then done, as a rule for the present day. This is no authority at all. If we travel still farther into antiquity, we shall find a direct contrary opinion and practice prevailing; and if antiquity is to be authority, a thousand such authorities may be produced, successively contradicting each other&#8230;
> &#8230;the equality of man, so far from being a modern doctrine, is the oldest upon record.
> All religions are in their nature kind and benign, and united with principles of morality.<footer>p 138</footer>
> The constitutional dignity of the National Assembly cannot debase itself. Speech is, in the first place, one of the natural rights of Man always retained; and with respect to the National Assembly, the use of it is their _duty_, and the nation is their _authority_.
> Submission is wholly a vassalage term, repugnant to the dignity of Freedom, and an echo of the language used at the Conquest.
> The difference between a republican and a courtier with respect to monarchy, is, that the one opposes monarchy, believing it to be something; and the other laughs at it, knowing it to be nothing.
> The right of a Parliament is only a right in trust, a right by delegation, and that but from a very small part of the Nation; and one of its Houses has not even this.
> When Nations fall out about freedom, a wide field of debate is opened. The argument commences with the rights of war, without its evils: and as knowledge is the object contended for, the Party that sustains the defeat obtains the prize.
> Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of Government.
> After the debate in the Massachusetts convention was closed, and the vote taken, the objecting members rose, and declared, <q><i>That though they had argued and voted against it, because certain parts appeared to them in a different light to what they appeared to other members; yet, as the vote had decided in favour of the constitution as proposed, they should give it the same practical support as if they had voted for it.</i></q>&nbsp;
> If Mr Burke&#8217;s arguments have not weight enough to keep one serious, the fault is less mine than his; and as I am willing to make an apology to the reader for the liberty I have taken, I hope Mr Burke will also make his for giving cause.
> All the constitutions of America are on a plan that excludes the childish embarrassments which occur in monarchical countries. No suspension of government can there take place for a moment, from any circumstance whatever.
> From a small spark, kindled in America, a flame has arisen, not to be extinguished. Without consuming, like the _Ultima Ratio Regum_, it winds it progress from nation to nation, and conquers by a silent operation. Man finds himself changed, he scarcely perceives how. He acquires a knowledge of his rights by attending justly to his interest, and discovers in the event that the strength and powers of despotism consist wholly in the fear of resisting it, and that, in order <q><i>to be free, it is sufficient that he wills it</i></q>.
> Mr Pitt has merited nothing, but he promised much. He gave symptoms of a mind superior to the meanness and corruption of courts. His apparent candour encouraged expectations; and the public confidence, stunned, wearied, and confounded by a chaos of parties, revived and attached itself to him. But mistaking, as he has done, the disgust of a nation against the coalition, for merit in himself, he has rushed into measures, which a man less supported would not have presumed to act.
> &#8230;it would not only be wrong, but bad policy, to attempt by force what ought to be accomplished by reason.
> &#8230;I will conclude this work with stating in what light religion appears to me. If we suppose a large family of children, who, on any particular day, or particular circumstance, made it a custom to present to their parents some token of their affection and gratitude, each of them would make a different offering, and most probably in a different manner. Some would pay their congratulations in themes of verse or prose, by some little devices, as their genius dictated, or according to what they thought would please; and, perhaps, the least of all, not able to do any of those things, would ramble into the garden, or the field, and gather what it thought the prettiest flower it could find, though, perhaps, it might be but a simple weed. The parent would be more gratified by such variety, than if the whole of them had acted on a concerted plan, and each had made exactly the same offering.
> The question is not whether those principles are new or old, but whether they are right or wrong.
## <cite class="article">Letter Addressed to the Addressers</cite> {.subheading}
> The <cite class="book">Rights of Man</cite> is a book calmly and rationally written; why then are you so disturbed? Did you see how little or how suspicious such conduct makes you appear, even cunning alone, had you no other faculty, would hush you into prudence. The plans, principles, and arguments, contained in that work, are placed before the eyes of the nation, and of the world, in a fair, open, and manly manner, and nothing more is necessary than to refute them. Do this, and the whole is done, but if ye cannot, so neither can ye suppress the reading, nor convict the Author; for that Law, in the opinion of all good men, would convict itself, that should condemn what cannot be refuted.
> Had not such persons come forward to oppose the <cite class="book">Rights of Man</cite>, I should have doubted the efficacy of my own writings: but those opposers have now proved to me, that the blow was well directed, and they have done it justice, by confessing the smart.
> To say that the Government of this country is composed of King, Lords, and Commons, is the mere phraseology of custom. It is composed of men; and whoever the men be to whom the Government of any country is entrusted, they ought to be the best and wisest that can be found, and if they are not so, they are not fit for the station. A man derives no more excellence from the change of a name, or calling King, or calling him Lord, than I should do by changing my name from Thomas to George, or from Paine to Guelph.
> Who are those that are frightened at reforms? Are the public afraid that their taxes should be lessened too much? Are they afraid that sinecure places and pensions should be abolished too fast? Are the poor afraid that their condition should be rendered too comfortable?&#8230;The Society mistakes the fears of borough-mongers, placement, and pensioners, for the fears of the people; and the \_temperate and moderate Reform\_ it talks of, is calculated to suit the condition of the former.
## Other Essays {.subheading}
> When we speak of right, we ought always to unite with it the idea of duties; right becomes duties by reciprocity. The right which I enjoy becomes my duty to guarantee it to another, and he to me; and those who violate the duty justly incur a forfeiture of the right.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Dissertation on first principles</cite></footer>
> Let them call me rebel, and welcome; I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul&#8230;<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">American Crisis I</cite></footer>
> There was a time when it was proper, and there is a proper time for it to cease.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Common Sense</cite></footer>
> [W]e have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest, purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Common Sense</cite></footer>
{
> I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Agrarian Justice</cite></footer>
> Land&#8230;is the free gift of the Creator in common to the human race. Personal property is the _effect of Society_; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of Society, as it is for him to make land originally.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Agrarian Justice</cite></footer>

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---
title: '<cite class="play">Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T15:32:14+00:00
url: /quotes/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
You don&#8217;t understand the humiliation of it&mdash;to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable&mdash;that somebody is <em>watching</em>&#8230;
</p><footer>Player</footer>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="script">
<p class="script-line__character">
Guil
</p>
<p class="script-line__text">
The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices&mdash;after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people&#8217;s.
</p>
<p class="script-line__character">
Player
</p>
<p class="script-line__text">
Uncertainty is the normal state. You&#8217;re nobody special.
</p>
<p class="script-line__character">
Guil
</p>
<p class="script-line__text">
But for God&#8217;s sake what are we supposed to <em>do</em>!
</p>
<p class="script-line__character">
Player
</p>
<p class="script-line__text">
Relax. Respond. That&#8217;s what people do. You can&#8217;t go through life questioning your situation at every turn.
</p>
</blockquote>
> [Death is] just a man failing to reappear, that&#8217;s all&mdash;now you see him, now you don&#8217;t that&#8217;s the only thing that&#8217;s real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back&mdash;an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.<footer>Guildenstern</footer>
<blockquote class="script">
<p class="script-line__character">
Ros
</p>
<p class="script-line__text">
We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
</p>
<p class="script-line__character">
Guil
</p>
<p class="script-line__text">
No, no, no&#8230;Death is&#8230;not. Death isn&#8217;t. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can&#8217;t not-be on a boat.
</p>
<p class="script-line__character">
Ros
</p>
<p class="script-line__text">
I&#8217;ve frequently not been on boats.
</p>
<p class="script-line__character">
Guil
</p>
<p class="script-line__text">
No, no, no&mdash;what you&#8217;ve been is not on boats.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="script">
<p class="script-line__character">
Ros
</p>
<p class="script-line__text">
But what&#8217;s the point?
</p>
<p class="script-line__character">
Guil
</p>
<p class="script-line__text">
Don&#8217;t apply logic.
</p>
<p class="script-line__character">
Ros
</p>
<p class="script-line__text">
He&#8217;s done nothing to us.
</p>
<p class="script-line__character">
Guil
</p>
<p class="script-line__text">
Or justice.
</p>
<p class="script-line__character">
Ros
</p>
<p class="script-line__text">
It&#8217;s awful.
</p>
</blockquote>
> (_Quietly_) Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current&#8230;<footer>Guildenstern</footer>

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---
title: '<cite class="book">T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T12:22:03+00:00
url: /quotes/t-a-z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-anarchy-poetic-terrorism/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
## <cite class="book">Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism</cite> {.subheading}
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers, pirates of all signs & meanings.
</p>
</blockquote>
> Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy.
>
> Pick someone at random & convince them they&#8217;re the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune&mdash;say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence.
>
> Bolt up brass commemerative plaques in places (public of private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.
>
> Go naked for a sign.
> Individual artworks (even the worst) are largely irrelevant&mdash;A-S seeks to damage institutions which use art to diminish consciousness & profit by delusion&#8230;.Public book burnings&mdash;why should rednecks & Customs officials monopolize this weapon?&#8230;To throw money away at the Stock Exchange was pretty decent Poetic Terrorism&mdash;but to _destroy_ the money would have been good Art Sabotage. To seize TV transmission & broadcast a few pirated minutes of incendiary Chaote art would constitute a feat of PT&mdash;but simply to blow up the transmission tower would be perfectly adequate Art Sabotage.
> Don&#8217;t picket&mdash;vandalize. Don&#8217;t protest&mdash;deface. When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate. Smash the symbols of the Empire in the name of nothing but the heart&#8217;s longing for grace.
## <cite class="periodical">Communiques of the Association for Ontological Anarchy</cite> {.subheading}
### <cite class="issue">Communique #3 &#8211; Haymarket Issue</cite> {.subsubheading}
> The IDEA of the POLICE like hydra grows 100 new heads for each one cut off&mdash;and all these heads are _live cops_. Slicing off heads gains us nothing, but only enhances the beast&#8217;s power till it swallows us. /// First murder the IDEA&mdash;blow up the monument _inside us_&mdash;& then perhaps&#8230;the balance of power will shift. When the last cop in our brain is gunned down by the last unfulfilled desire&mdash;perhaps even the landscape around us will begin to change&#8230;
> Time never started at all. Chaos never died. The Empire was never founded. We are not now & never have been slaves to the past or hostages to the future.
>
> We suggest that the End of the World be declared a _fait accompli_; the exact date is unimportant. The ranters in 1650 knew that the Millenium comes _now_ into each soul that wakes to itself, to its own centrality & divinity. <q>Rejoice, fellow creature,</q> was their greeting. <q>All is ours!</q>
### <cite class="issue">Communique #7 &#8211; Psychic Paleolithism & High Technology: A Position Paper</cite> {.subsubheading}
> [W]e reject all collaboration with the Civilization of Anorexia & Bulimia, with people so ashamed of never suffering that they invent hair shirts for themselves & others&#8230;
## <cite class="article">Resolution for the 1990&#8217;s: Boycott Cop Culture!!!</cite> {.subheading}
> A nation of schoolyard toadies sucking up to an elite of schoolyard bullies.
## <cite class="article">Temporary Autonomous Zone</cite> {.subheading}
> The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (or land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, _before_ the State can crush it.

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---
title: <cite class="book">Tao Te Ching</cite>
subtitle: trans. Lau Din Cheuk
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T11:09:17+00:00
url: /quotes/tao-te-ching/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
> It is because it lays no claim to merit
> That its merit never deserts it.<footer>Book One, II</footer>
> Therefore the sage puts his person last and it comes first,
> Treats it as extraneous to himself and it is preserved.<footer>Book One, VII</footer>
> Therefore in governing the people, the sage empties their minds but fills their bellies, weakens their wills but strengthens their bones. He always keeps them innocent of knowledge and free from desire, and ensures that the clever never dare to act.<footer>Book One, III</footer>
> Let your wheels move only along old ruts.<footer>Book One, IV</footer>
> Woe to him to wilfully innovates
> While ignorant of the constant,<footer>Book One, XVI</footer>
> Exterminate the sage, discard the wise,
> And the people will benefit a hundredfold;
> Exterminate benevolence, discard rectitude,
> And the people will again be filial;
> Exterminate ingenuity, discard profit,
> And there will be no more thieves and bandits.<footer>Book One, XIX</footer>
> Hence the good man is the teacher the bad learns from;
> And the bad man is the material the good works on.
> Not to value the teacher
> Nor to love the material
> Though it seems clever, betrays great bewilderment.<footer>Book One, XXVII</footer>
> The gentleman gives precedence to the left when at home, but to the right when he goes to war. Arms are instruments of ill omen, not the instruments of the gentleman. When one is compelled to use them, it is best to do so without relish. There is no glory in victory, and to glorify it despite this is to exult in the killing of men.<footer>Book One, XXXI</footer>
> The way is for ever nameless.
> Though the uncarved block is small
> No one in the world dare claim its allegiance.
> Should lords and princes be able to hold fast to it
> The myriad creatures will submit of their own accord,
> Heaven and earth will unite and sweet dew will fall,
> And the people will be equitable, though no one so decrees.<footer>Book One, XXXII</footer>
> The court is corrupt,
> The fields are overgrown with weeds,
> The granaries are empty;
> Yet there are those dressed in fineries,
> With swords at their sides,
> Filled with food and drink,
> And possessed of too much wealth.
> This is known as taking the lead in robbery.
> Far indeed is this from the way.<footer>Book Two, LIII</footer>
Book Two, LVII &#8211; small state, armed populace, night watchman
> To know yet to think that one does not know is best;
> Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.
> It is by being alive to difficulty that one can avoid it.
> The sage meets with no difficulty. It is because he is alive to it that he meets with no difficulty.<footer>Book Two, LXXI</footer>
> The people are hungry:
> It is because those in authority eat up too much in taxes
> That the people are hungry.
> The people are difficult to govern:
> It is because those in authority are too fond of action
> That the people are difficult to govern.<footer>Book Two, LXXV</footer>
> It is the way of heaven to take from what has in excess in order to make good what is deficient. The way of man is otherwise. It takes from those who are in want in order to offer this to those who already have more than enough. Who is there that can take what he himself has in excess and offer this to the empire? Only he who has the way.<footer>Book Two, LXXVII</footer>

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---
title: '<cite class="book">The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T15:25:27+00:00
url: /quotes/the-ecology-of-freedom-the-emergence-and-dissolution-of-hierarchy/
featured_image: /wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Freedom-Park-Duck-Ecology-Rural-Zone-Birds-997028.jpg
categories:
- Reviews
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
If Odin paid for wisdom with the loss of one eye, we have paid for our powers of control with the loss of both eyes.
</p><footer>Murray Bookchin, <cite class=
<q>book</q>>The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy</cite></footer>
</blockquote>
> If such limited surpluses were equitably divided among the multitudes who produce them, a social condition would emerge in which <q><em>want</em> is made general,</q> as Marx observed, <q>and with want the struggle for necessities and all the old shit would necessarily be reproduced.</q>
> [W]hat tantalizing issues does social ecology raise for our time and our future?&#8230;Can we hope to <q>manage</q> the natural environment by a drastic decentralization of agriculture, which will make it possible to cultivate land as though it were a garden balanced by diversified fauna and flora? Will these changes require the decentralization of our cities into moderate-sized communities, creating a new balance between town and country?&#8230;What institutions will be required to create a new public sphere, what social relations to foster a new ecological sensibility, what forms of work to render human practice playful and creative, what sizes and populations of communities to scale life to human dimensions controllable by all?<footer>pp 39&ndash;40</footer>
> But the story of this betrayal does not end with these institutional and subjective changes. It reaches further into the core of the psyche by internalizing hierarchy and domination as eternal traits of human nature&#8230;Only then can the rules be brought into full complicity with their oppression and exploitation, forging within themselves the State that commands more by the power of the <q>inner voice</q> of repentance than the power of mobilized physical violence.<footer>pg 113</footer>
> Hierarchy, class, and ultimately the State penetrate the very integument of the human psyche and establish within it unreflective internal powers of coercion and constraint. In this respect they achieve a <q>sanitizing</q> authority that no institution or ideology can hope to command. By using guilt and self-blame, the inner State can control behaviour long before fear of the coercive powers of the State have to be invoked. Self-blame, in effect, becomes self&mdash;_fear_&mdash;the introjection of social coercion in the form of insecurity, anxiety and guilt.<footer>pp 116&ndash;7</footer>
> Canons of efficiency become a political morality in themselves, thereby replacing the still unarticulated notion of informal, presumably inefficient forms of freedom. Even more than Yahweh, the State is a jealous god.<footer>pg 126</footer>
> The State acquires stability, form, and identiy only when personal loyalties are transmuted into depersonalized institutions, power becomes centralized and professionalized, custom gives way to law, and governance absorbs administration. But the decisive shift from society to the State occurs with the most supreme political act of all: the delegation of power.<footer>pg 129</footer>
> The shopping mall with its extravagant areas delivered over to parked motor vehicles, its sparcity of sales personnel, its cooing <q>muzak,</q> its dazzling array of shelved goods, it&#8217;s elaborate surveillance system, its lack of all warmth and human intercourse, its cruelly deceptive packaging, and its long check-out counters which indifferently and impersonally record the exchange process&mdash;all speak to the denaturing of consociation at levels of life that deeply affront every human sensibility and the sacredness of the very goods that are meant to support life itself.<footer>pg 137</footer>
> Personality as such has become congruent with the various documents, licenses, and records that define one&#8217;s place in the world. More sacred than such documents as passports, which are the archaic tokens of citizenship, a motor vehicle license literally validates one&#8217;s identity, and a credit card becomes the worldwide coinage of exchange.<footer>pg 138</footer>
> Apparently, these dynastic quarrels, assassinations, and usurpation were not of special concern to the <q>masses,</q> who lived an unchronicled inner life in their obscure communities.<footer>pg 146</footer>
> Archilochus and his wandering band of companions are the earliest record we have of that long line of <q>masterless men</q> who surface repeatedly during periods of social decomposition and unrest&mdash;men, and later women, who have no roots in _any_ community or tradition, who colonize the world&#8217;s future rather than its past. Their characters are literally structured to defy custom, to satirize and shatter established mores, to play the game of life by their own rules&#8230;Society must henceforth always warily step aside when they appear on the horizon and silently pray that they will pass by unnoticed by its restive commoners&mdash;or else it must simply destroy them.<footer>pg 154</footer>
> By contrast, the Party was simply a mirror-image of the nation-state, and it&#8217;s fortunes were completely tied to the State&#8217;s development. The Party was meant to be very large, often embracing sizable masses of people who were knitted together bureaucratically in depersonalized, centralized orgas. When the Party was _not _<q>in power</q>, it was the disinherited twin of the State apparatus, often replicating it in every detail. When the Party_ was_ <q>in power,</q> it became the State itself.<footer>pg 189</p>
>
> > The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may well have marked a unique watershed for western humanity. History seemed to be poised at a juncture: society could still choose to follow a course that yielded a modest satisfaction of needs based on complementarity and the equality of unequals. Or it could catapult into capitalism with its rule of equivalence and inequality of equals, both reinforced by commodity exchange and a canon of <q>unlimited needs</q> that confront <q>scarce resources.</p> <footer>pp 214&ndash;215</footer> </blockquote>
> >
> > <blockquote>
> > <p>
> > To the modern mind, technics is simply the ensemble of raw materials, tools, machines, and related devices that are needed to produce a usable object. The ultimate judgement of a technique&#8217;s value and desirability is operational: it is based on efficiency, skill, and cost&#8230;But to the classical mind, by contrast, <q>technique</q> (or <em>techné</em>) had a far more ample meaning. It existed in a social and ethical contect in which, to invoke Aristotle&#8217;s terms, one asked not only <q>how</q> a use-value was produced but also <q>why.</q><br /> In contrast to their strictly operational subordinates, <q>who act without knowledge of what they do, as fire burns,</q> master workers act with an insight and ethical responsibility that renders their craft rational.
> > </p><footer>pg 221</footer>
> > </blockquote>
> >
> > <blockquote>
> > <p>
> > Given sufficient exposure to external forces, a process of negative selection on the level of political life has always been at work to favor the expansion of ruthless cultures at the expense of the more equable ones.
> > </p><footer>pg 252</footer>
> > </blockquote>
> >
> > <blockquote>
> > <p>
> > Such commonplace attitudes are very revealing. They indicate that we have forgotten how to be organisms&mdash;and that we have lost any sense of belonging to the natural community around us, however much it has been modified by society.
> > </p><footer>pg 265</footer>
> > </blockquote>
> >
> > <blockquote>
> > <p>
> > These three great pathways or <q>tools</q> (to use the language of modern instrumentalism) for achieving human freedom&mdash;reason, science, and technics&mdash;that seemed so assured merely a generation ago no longer enjoy their [missing]
> > </p><footer>pg 268</footer>
> > </blockquote>
> >
> > <blockquote>
> > <p>
> > If we mistrust reason today, it is because reason has enhanced our technical powers to alter the world drastically without providing us with the goals and values that give these powers direction and meaning. Like Captain Ahab in Melville&#8217;s <cite class="book">Moby Dick</cite>, we can cry out forlornly: <q>All my means are sane; my motives and objects mad.</q>
> > </p><footer>pg 271</footer>
> > </blockquote>
> >
> > <blockquote>
> > <p>
> > I speak, here, from a world that once knew community in the form of culturally distinct neighborhoods, even in giant cities; that once communicated personally on tenement stoops, on street corners, and in parks rather than electronically; the once acquired its food and clothing from small, personal retailers who chatted, advised, and gossiped as well as checked prices; that once received most of its staples from small farms existing within a few score miles of the city center; that once dealt with its affairs leisurely and formed its judgements reflectively. Above all, this world was once more self-regulating in matters of personal and social concern, more human in scale and decency, more firmly formed in its character structure, and more comprehensible as a social entity to its citizenry.
> > </p><footer>pg 334</footer>
> > </blockquote>

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---
title: '<cite class="book">The Evolution of Co-operation</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T11:16:19+00:00
url: /quotes/the-evolution-of-co-operation/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
> The analysis of the data from these tournaments reveals four properties which tend to make a decision rule successful: avoidance of unnecessary conflict by cooperating as long as the other player does, provocability in the face of an uncalled for defection by the other, forgiveness after responding to a provocation, and clarity of behavior so that the other player can adapt to your pattern of action.
> The evolution of cooperation requires that individuals have a sufficiently large chance to meet again so that they have a stake in their future interaction.
> What accounts for TIT FOR TAT&#8217;s robust success is its combination of being nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear. Its niceness prevents it from getting into unnecessary trouble. Its retaliation discourages the other side from persisting whenever defection is tried. Its forgiveness helps restore mutual cooperation. And its clarity makes it intelligible to the other player, thereby eliciting long-term cooperation.
> TIT FOR TAT won the tournament, not by beating the other player, but by eliciting behavior from the other player which allowed both to do well.
> A population of nice rules is the hardest type to invade because nice rules do so well with each other. Furthermore, a population of nice rules which can resist the invasion of a single mutant rule can resist the invasion of any cluster of other rules.
> The reason is that even a relatively small cluster of discriminating nice rules can invade a population of meanies, and then thrive on their good scores with each other. And once nice rules get a foothold they can protect themselves from reinvasion by meanies.
> The the beauty of the reciprocity of TIT FOR TAT is that it is good in such a wide range of circumstances.

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title: '<cite class="book">The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T12:04:03+00:00
url: /quotes/the-faggots-their-friends-between-revolutions/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
> It was during those years that this group of queer weirdos and so many others before and since then modeled for me how to do friendship. Friendship was not an idea or a status you took for granted, but something you _did_, over and over: When your friend is flying into town, you find a car and pick them up at the airport, and you take them to get burgers at In-N-Out. When it&#8217;s your friend&#8217;s birthday, you bake their favorite cake (Earl Grey if you&#8217;re lucky) and make them a beautiful card from thick pieces of paper and stickers you have collected for the purpose. When your friend needs a place to stay because they are visiting town or recovering from surgery or getting out of prison, you make them a bed from the extra pair of sheets and pillow you keep for visitors, and you leave them a snack in the fridge. In the shadow of structural abandonment, political alienation, family rejection, chronic illness, state violence, and medical neglect, queer friendship saves us. Queer friendship&mdash;that thing that is sometimes called mutual aid, solidarity, disability justice, care, organizing, abolition, or maybe just love&mdash;is what raised me in San Francisco, and what forms the lifeblood of this book. Bobby inscribed my copy, <q>Come home soon.</q><footer>Morgan Bassichis,
>
> <cite class="chapter">Introduction</cite></footer>
> I was thrilled to be gay because there were two things I didn&#8217;t have to do now&mdash;go into the army or get married. And of course over the yuears the two things that the gay movement fought for was to be able to go into the army and get married. But we were thrilled that we didn&#8217;t have to do that. We thought it was fantastic! The gay movement did not follow us there. It went towards acceptance, and we were not about acceptance. We were about changing the rules. We were about opposition.<footer>Larry Mitchell interviewed by Stephen Vider</footer>
> With craftiness and wit the faggots and their friends are able to live in this time, some in comfort and some in defiance. The men remain enchanted by plunder and destruction. The men are deceived easily and so the faggots and their friends have nearly enough to eat and more than enough time to think about what it means to be alive as the third revolutions are beginning.<footer>p 1</footer>
> The faggots consider it their sacred pleasure to engage in indiscriminate promiscuous sexuality. No faggot, regardless of age, race or physical appearance, should ever be horny. Horniness makes the faggots uneasy and nasty and distracts them from the revolutions. Sexuality, like all the necessities of life, must be free and easily available.<footer>p 12</footer>
> The strong women told the faggots that there are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions. The first is that we will get our asses kicked. The second is that we will win&#8230;winning was like surviving, only better&#8230;getting your ass kicked and then winning elevated the entire enterprise of making revolution.<footer>p 21</footer>
> The faggots, passing as men, procure spaces all over the devastated city. Although the men have divided all the city space up and given each space a name so it could be used for only one purpose, the faggots turn everything they can get into spaces to live in and to eat in and to love in.<footer>p 52</footer>
> The queens luxuriate in variety. They often make fun of the faggots for their drab uniformity and their addiction to the men&#8217;s fashions. They queens display infinite weirdnesses to the world. For them, style is the path into the unique self and so to transcendence. They long for everyone to reveal themselves wherever they are.<footer>p 63</footer>
> Pinetree dreams of a glorious, non-violent revolution. Between the dreams he is proficient in the practical. He is certain that he has enough money, which means he always has more than he needs. He is certain that he has a place to live, which means he always has several places to live.
> He stays in solitude a lot to keep his dreams of the glorious, non-violent revolution alive and he wishes Lilac and the others would stay with him and his dreams.
>
> To make his dreams real he lives quietly through his reactionary emotions. He experiences desires to control his environment and he experiences jealousy when his pleasures are threatened and he experiences possessiveness of property. He accepts these emotions much as he accepts depression and the men&#8217;s brutality. They have to be acknowledged and gotten through.
>
> To make his dreams real he celebrates his revolutionary emotions. He experiences joy in sharing and he experiences completeness in loving and he experiences satisfaction in work for others done with compassion. These emotions he writes about on papers stuck to walls and tells strangers about on boats. These he will not forget.
>
> If he can live as if the glorious, non-violent revolution has happened long enough, he will awake one day to find that it has happened.
> Sometimes he is confused about the meaning of what he feels. Then he is depressed and afraid and longs for his friends Lilac and Loose Tomato and Moonbeam to sit with him.<footer>p 76</footer>
> The faggots and their friends fight knowing they will lose. 140 days and the neighbors and the colleagues and the families and the men&#8217;s money and power and Mildred Munich&#8217;s hate speeches make, through legal means, the faggots and their friends illegal once more.
>
> <q>I feel more like my old self already,</q> Loose Tomato exclaims.
>
> Heavenly Blue thinks being illegal is beter. <q>When we were legal they called us every dirty name they could think of. Now maybe they will shut up.</q>
>
> Lilac, who had been thrilled to be legal, now has to agree. <q>We can get on with out subversion,&#8221; he chuckles as he eats a mushroom.</p>
>
> <p>
> <q>I guess,</q> Pinetree muses, <q>we know now that if the men give you anything, you get nothing. If we want it, we got to take it away from them.</q>
> </p><footer>p 103</footer> </blockquote>

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title: '<cite class="book">The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan: Kurdistan, Women’s Revolution and Democratic Confederalism</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T11:09:17+00:00
url: /quotes/the-political-thought-of-abdullah-ocalan/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
> There is a widespread individual and institutional subservient spirit, which is one of the biggest obstacles blocking democratisation. It can only be overcome by creating an awareness of democracy in all parts of society. Citizens must be invited actively to commit themselves to democracy.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">War and Peace in Kurdistan: Perspectives on a Political Solution to the Kurdish Question</cite></footer>
> A just redistribution of the economic resources presently in the possession of the state is particularly important for the liberation of society. Economic supply must not become a tool in the hands of the state for exercising pressure on the people. Economic resources are not the property of the state but of society.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">War and Peace in Kurdistan: Perspectives on a Political Solution to the Kurdish Question</cite></footer>
> It is often said that the nation-state is concerned with the fate of the common people. This is not true. Rather, it is the national governor of the worldwide capitalist system, a vassal of capitalist modernity which is more deeply entangled in the dominant structures of capital than we tend to assume: it is a colony for capital.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Democratic Confederalism</cite></footer>
> Without depriving society of its freedom and ensuring that it can be managed like a herd, central civilisation [see David Wilkinson, SSC universal culture post] cannot sustain or preserve itself, because of the nature of the system according to which it functions.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Liberating Life: Woman&#8217;s Revolution</cite></footer>
> Gender enslavement is different in some ways to class and nation enslavement. Its legitimisation is attained through refined and intense repression combined with lies that play on emotions. Woman&#8217;s biological difference is used as justification for her enslavement. All the work she does is taken for granted and called unworthy <q>woman&#8217;s work</q>. Her presence in the public sphere if claimed to be prohibited by religion, morally shameful; progressively, she is secluded from all important social activities. As the dominant power of the political, social and economic activities are taken over by men, the weakness of women becomes even more institutionalised. Thus, the idea of the <q>weaker sex</q> becomes a shared belief.
> In fact, society treats woman not merely as a biologically separate sex but almost as a separate race, nation or class &mdash; the most oppressed race, nation, or class: no race, class or nation is subjected to such systematic slavery as housewifisation.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Liberating Life: Woman&#8217;s Revolution</cite></footer>
> We might draw more realistic conclusions if we evaluate woman&#8217;s existence as the oldest colonial phenomenon. It may be more accurate to call women the oldest colonised people who have never become a nation. Family, in this social context, developed as man&#8217;s small state.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Liberating Life: Woman&#8217;s Revolution</cite></footer>
> Family is not a social institution that should be overthrown. But it should be transformed. The claim of ownership over women and children, handed down from the hierarchy, should be abandoned. Capital (in all its forms) and power relations should have no part in the relationship of couples. The breeding of children as motivation for sustaining this institution should be abolished.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Liberating Life: Woman&#8217;s Revolution</cite></footer>
> &#8230;the democratic nation&#8217;s individual sees his or her freedom in the communality of society, in the form of the more functional life of small communities.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Democratic Nation</cite></footer>
> Politics not only liberates, it also regulated. Politics is a unique regulatory force; is a kind of art. It represents the opposite of the suppressive regulations of states and rulers. The stronger the politics in a society or nation, the weaker the state and ruling powers. The opposite is also true: the stronger the state or ruling power is in a society or nation, the weaker the politics &mdash; and hence freedom &mdash; in the society.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Democratic Nation</cite></footer>
> On the way to building a democratic nation, we will have to do the opposite of what has been done to date in the name of honour. I am talking about a transformed&#8230;manhood&#8230;It should be done like this: we must abandon any notion of ownership in relation to women. Woman should only belong to herself. She should know that she has no owner, and that the only owner she has is herself. We should not be attached to women with any emotions of subordination, including love and blind love. Likewise, the woman too should stop herself from being dependent and owned.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Democratic Nation</cite></footer>
> The state can only rule by growing at the expense of communality and democracy&#8230;Less of one is more of the other. Full democracy is statelessness. Full state sovereignty is the denial of democracy&#8230;[Democracy] can only increase the opportunities for freedom and equality by restricting the state, making it smaller and by trimming its octopus-like tentacles and their power over society. Towards the end of the process, perhaps the state will become redundant and fizzle out.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Democratic Nation</cite></footer>

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---
title: '<cite class="book">Computer Lib/Dream Machines</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-08-12T15:23:09+00:00
url: /quotes/computer-lib-dream-machines/
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
Computer people are a mystery to others, who seem them as somewhat frightening, somewhat ridiculous. Their concerns seem so peculiar, their hours so bizarre, their language so incomprehensible. Computer people may best be thought of as a new ethnic group, very much unto themselves.
</p><footer>
<cite class="article">The Hearts and Minds of Computer People</cite>, p 107</footer>
</blockquote>
> Back in the early fifties, a New York disk jockey named Jean Shepherd discovered that there were Day People and Night People. This startling disclosure greatly relieved some of us Night People, who were tired of being hassled about it and doubting ourselves.
> When you work late, you decouple from the world: there are no errands, appointments, little deadlines. It&#8217;s a good way to avoid interruption, distraction, confusion; to pursue loose ends; to get it right. That&#8217;s what night people like.
> Many computer people are not just night people, but have unusual ways of treating sleep&mdash;living on other than a 24-hour day, for instance. (I have always preferred about a 30-hour day.) Unfortunately this creates many inconveniences in dealing with Mundanes, offices, restaurants and whatnot.<footer>ibid, p 108</footer>
> After he had been hired by Datapoint, Mark [Samuel Miller] was asked to fill out a medical form. Where the form asked if he had any physical defences, he wrote:
> CARBON BASED.<footer>ibid, p 109</footer>
> Dishwashing and sweeping were shared by volunteers. People stayed up late, got up early, and argued with warmth instead of heat.<footer>ibid, p 109</footer>
> Computer programmers create exact plans for what the computer is to do, then change them till they work.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Some Computer People to Distinguish Among</cite>, p 108</footer>
> _**On-line services**&mdash;things you call up to&mdash;are of course computers. These include databases, bank services by phone, stock quotation services, and on and on. How to recognize all this stuff is still tricky for beginners._<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Things You May Run Into</cite>, p 148</footer>
> So don&#8217;t be snowed by the term <q>simulation.</q> It means much, little or nothing, depending.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">That&#8217;s What Makes Horseracing</cite>, p 150</footer>
> The problem with computer backups is usually that you fail to make them.<footer>p 156</footer>
> Computers can be a tool for freedom or for oppression. What makes the difference is whether we speak up and work together for a world we want.<footer>John S. James, p 157</footer>
> We just don&#8217;t see things coming. With the proper visualization tools, for instance, people might have recognized sooner that AIDS, the new fatal venereal disease, threatens to kill as much as a twentieth of the U.S. population before the end of the century if we don&#8217;t find a vaccine, a cure, or a lifestyle drastically different from any the human race has previously known.<footer>p 158</footer>
> Uneducated people typically think of education as the learning of a lot of facts and skills. While facts and skills certainly have their merits, <q>higher education</q> is also largely concerned with tying ideas together, and especially alternative structures of such tying-together: with showing you the vast uncertainties of things.
> A wonderful Japanese film of the fifties was called <cite class="film">Rasho-Mon</cite>. It depicted a specific event&mdash;a rape&mdash;as told by five different people. As the audience watches the five separate stories, they must try to judge what _really_ happened.
> The Rasho-Mon Principle: everything is like that. The complete truth about something is never known.
> Nobody tells the complete truth, though some try. Nobody knows the complete truth. Nowhere may we find _printed_ the complete truth. There are only different views, assertions, supposed facts that support one view or another but are disputed by disbelievers in the particular views; and so on. There are <q>agreed-on facts,</q> but their _meaning_ is often in doubt.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Rashomonics and the Perplex</cite>, p DM 34</footer>
> _The skillful writer weaves many simultaneous aspects and presentations, tuning emphasis and shading, hinting about what is to come, letting thoughts dangle for later reactivation, and maintaining atmospherics, all at the same time.
> You may say that this is not true of <q>technical writing.</q> I would simply point out that technical writing is usually an enforced system of verbal enumeration under very restrictive rules. It amy assure (at best) that certain things are to be found in certain findable places, but the problem of establishing the reader&#8217;s overall orientation, which is the hardest part, is not improved by any system of rules I know of. And that is the <em class="bold">real</em> problem._<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Idea Transfer</cite>, pp DM 35&ndash;36</footer>
> Basically writing is
> THE TRY-AND-TRY-AGAIN INTERPLAY OF PARTS AND DETAILS against OVERALL AND UNIFYING IDEAS WHICH KEEP CHANGING.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Idea Transfer</cite>, p DM 37</footer>
> 10. YOUR FIELD IS BOUNDED WHERE YOU WANT IT TO BE. Just because others group and stereotype things in conventional ways does not mean they are necessarily right. Intellectual subjects are connected every which-way; your field is what you think it is. (Again, this is one of the things that will give you insights and keep you motivated; but it will get you into trouble if you try to go for degrees.)
> There are limitations. This doesn&#8217;t give you lab experience, and you will continually have to be making up for gaps. But for alertness and the ability to use his mind, give me the man who&#8217;s learned this way, rather than been blinkered and cliched to death within the educational system.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">Idea Transfer</cite>, p DM 38</footer>
> Q. Aren&#8217;t you afraid that writing a flippant book will keep people from taking you seriously?
> A. I do not want to be taken seriously in some quarters until it&#8217;s too late.
> _That part worked a bit too well._<footer>p DM 149</footer>
> _People who knew he was in Auschwitz were frequently shocked by the way that Jack talked about being in the camps. Sometimes he would get a faraway look in his eye and shake his head in disbelief.
> <q>You know,</q> he once told me, <q>it&#8217;s hard to believe it really happened. But it can happen again. In America. Americans like to make rules, and that scares me. If you have too many rules you get locked in a system. It&#8217;s the <em class="underline">system</em> that says this one dies and that one doesn&#8217;t, not the people. That&#8217;s why I don&#8217;t hate the German people. Individuals, yes. Rules, yes. But not all Germans.</q> He shrugged. <q>They just obeyed the rules. But that&#8217;s why we need more Commodores. We need more mavericks, just so the rules don&#8217;t take over.</q>_<footer>Jack Tramiel,
>
> <cite class="book">The Home Computer Wars: An Insider&#8217;s Account of Commodore and Jack Tramiel</cite></footer>

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---
title: '<cite class="book">No Regrets: Dr. Ben Reitman and the Women Who Loved Him</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-09-21T15:21:34+00:00
url: /quotes/no-regrets-dr-ben-reitman-and-the-women-who-loved-him/
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
My religious life may be a mystery to others but to me it is perfectly clear. They are mystified because to them religion is piety, morality and inhibition. To me religion is love and service.
</p><footer>Ben Reitman,
<cite class="book">Follow the Monkey</cite>, p 49</footer>
</blockquote>
> If you drink, you&#8217;ll die, and if you don&#8217;t drink, you&#8217;ll die. Better drink and die.<footer>Russian peasant saying, quoted by Emma Goldman (
>
> <cite class="book">Living My Life</cite>, p 527</footer>
> &#8230;I have learned through tears and blood that the intrinsic human value is not successful meetings, or the adulation of the public, or much publicity. The only enduring and abiding value is the capacity to stand out against friend and foe, to be inseparably allied with the future.<footer>Emma Goldman</footer>
> There are several valid reasons for discharging me but no one mentioned any of them.<footer>Ben Reitman</footer>
> Jail, death, infamy, loneliness and even ridicule are preferable to inertia and acquiescence.<footer>Ben Reitman</footer>
> As much as I believe my father loved my sisters and me and admired my mother, as much as I fantasized for years that he would have married my mother had he been able to, the truth is that he wanted it all. Each woman gave him something the other could not. As long as he was married to Rose, neither my mother not Eileen could claim him. He wanted to keep things just the way they were.<footer>Mecca Reitman Carpenter</footer>

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---
title: '<cite class="book">Chav Solidarity</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-09-25T15:04:54+00:00
url: /quotes/chav-solidarity/
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
I&#8217;ve found it difficult to exist in social movements where my comrades look, move and sound the same as my social workers, judges, and robbery victims.
</p><footer>
<cite class="chapter">Feral Love</cite>, p 117</footer>
</blockquote>
> So, with my white maleness I was able to enter into these settings, and have my skill sets rewarded, but more than anything else, these movements had social value outside of themselves. They may not have been successful, or held in high esteem, but being able to talk about your organising capabilities within a social justice movement is a hell of a lot more palatable to those in power than talking about the same capabilities in the context of working as child prostitute, drug dealer or homeless addict.</q><footer>
>
> <cite class="chapter">Passing, covering, and Becoming Respectable</cite>, p 174</footer>
> My racist practices and beliefs were visceral and blunt. There was little pretence that I was a good citizen of a multicultural society. When the liberal education I&#8217;d received and the leftist activist communities I&#8217;d been around talked about racism, they talked about people like my family and me.
> I could take on their critiques and use them to understand how I&#8217;d learned the basis for my racism. Others who had spent their lives within liberal education and were trained to be good multicultural citizens had more layers to peel back in order to comprehend their racist practices.<footer>
>
> <cite class="chapter">Me the Racist</cite>, p 181</footer>
> &#8230;he was treated with disdain by teachers and all other adults because he had no use for them. He had seen very little good about the world, except for the possibility of having a laugh and an evening of excitement.<footer>
>
> <cite class="chapter">It Gets Done With You</cite>, pp 212&ndash;213</footer>
> These days I have to work out how to be a better person on a daily basis. I have to develop and shape my ethical and moral guidelines and try to stick to them as much as possible. Often it feels counter-intuitive, and often I just flat out fail. I believe that nearly all the choices I make have an affect on something or someone in small and large ways, and that I have to act and analyse them in order for me to learn and grow so that I can do better next time. Some things I can take my time over and some decisions have to be made immediately. A lot of the time I get it wrong, and a lot of the time after the fact I&#8217;m still not sure what&#8217;s right and what&#8217;s wrong.<footer>
>
> <cite class="chapter">Old Road</cite>, pp 228&ndash;229</footer>
> I have, to a greater or lesser extent, learnt to behave as capitalism wishes me to, and have been rewarded both materially and, in some ways, psychologically. This is a contradiction to the ways in which I want to live in the world, but I don&#8217;t believe that throwing this economic security away is the correct response. Instead I need to find ways to entwine my stability, my economic survival, with that of others.<footer>
>
> <cite class="chapter">P.S.</cite>, pp 284&ndash;285</footer>
> Resources help you get time, and they help save ya energy. If anti-capitalist movements want to actually live outside of capital, they need to do more than demand capitalism goes away, they need to make moves to shift it out of their minds and their lives. The money, the resources they have received thus far, are bloody bribes, and they should be treated as such. We&#8217;re bribed to be individuals, not a community, but we can take the bribe and not go back on the social contract. Are you worried that people who get the money won&#8217;t spend it wisely? That maybe you&#8217;d make a better decision? Then that&#8217;s probably because the ideology of state and capital has done its job and settled inside your head, playing an active role in the decisions you make and the perspectives you have. You still think that the money should belong to you, you still think that the people who have less than you economically are in that position through bad decisions, bad education, bad cultural practices… If you&#8217;ve no problem thinking like that, then your anti-capitalist position is a performance, a show, a position you&#8217;ve taken to show your personality. You might as well have got a tattoo, or dyed your hair, or worn a t-shirt with an obscure band&#8217;s name on it.<footer>
>
> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210112161528/https://www.weareplanc.org/blog/all-the-privilege-no-fucking-praxis/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><cite class="article">All the Privilege, No Fucking Praxis</cite></a></footer>

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---
title: '<cite class="book">Letters of Insurgents</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-10-18T16:44:15+00:00
url: /quotes/letters-of-insurgents/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
<q>She&#8217;s a commie,</q> he said, as matter-of-factly as if he were saying, <q>She&#8217;s tall.</q> He had considered and rejected this possibility as well. <q>She started being one during the depression. She likes to talk about it, but I never understood any of that shit about workers wanting commies to run the unions and factories. I never met any who wanted that. But she thought that&#8217;s what they wanted and the union paid her to organize workers to want that. After the war the union threw her out on her ass and not one worker stood up for her. She still thinks that&#8217;s what everyone wants.</q>
</p><footer>Sophia Nachalo and Ron</footer>
</blockquote>
> <q>But my good fellow.</q> Zdenek shouted, <q>don&#8217;t you see that it&#8217;s impossible to overthrow a ruling social order with organisation and discipline? What you&#8217;re talking about is the reinstatement of the ruling order, not its overthrow.</q><footer>Yarostan Vochek and Zdenek</footer>
> I can&#8217;t formulate either my goals or my means. I can tell you neither where I&#8217;m going nor how I&#8217;ll get there. Yet I feel more vibrant, more alive, than I felt when I thought I knew my direction and my destination because I had words for them. I feel alive precisely because I don&#8217;t know what the next moment will bring.<footer>Yarostan</footer>
> Despite all that&#8217;s happened during the past fourteen years, Daman has somehow managed not to change a single one of his ideas!&#8230;He could have put all his views on a phonograph record fourteen years ago and anyone who wanted to meet him could simply play the record. That&#8217;s eerie. Daman isn&#8217;t altogether a living person.<footer>Sophia</footer>
> A prisoner whose helplessness leads him to seek out guards who are <q>on our side</q> is terribly similar to the worker who thinks a politician is <q>on our side.</q> The prisoner&#8217;s justification is that the guards are armed. The prisoner&#8217;s human prospects do in fact reside in the guard. But a worker who thinks his human prospects reside in the politician is deluded.<footer>Yarostan</footer>
> I know that the only way you&#8217;d ever go to a university building would be with a stick of dynamite in your hand.<footer>Tina</footer>
> You have your reasons. But your reasons aren&#8217;t good enough for me. They don&#8217;t grow out of my own life. I do things for Sabina&#8217;s reasons and I do others for Sophia&#8217;s but I never do anything for my own reasons. I don&#8217;t even know what my own reasons are. And that&#8217;s all I want right now. To discover my own reasons. To become me, Tina, a human entity, someone who&#8217;s neither Sophia nor Sabina.<footer>Tina</footer>
> Finally I admitted, <q>I&#8217;m completely lost. I don&#8217;t understand you, Sabina&#8230;And I don&#8217;t see how I fit into it all!</q>
> Sabina reached for my hand and said, looking straight into my eyes, <q>There&#8217;s nothing to understand, Sophia, and nothing to fit into. It&#8217;s your life to do with as you will. There&#8217;s no structure. Nothing is banned. Everything is allowed. No holds are barred.</q>
> <q>What&#8217;s everything?</q> I asked hesitantly.
> Letting go of my hand, she said, <q>My life, my desires, my capacities; those are my axioms.</q><footer>Sophia and Sabina</footer>
> A person freely creates her own life, but in circumstances not of her own choosing.<footer>Sabina</footer>
> Every person who comes into this room has an altogether different account of what&#8217;s happening; each person has different stories to tell. And it&#8217;s precisely this that makes every encounter so stimulating.<footer>Sophia</footer>
> <q>I wouldn&#8217;t feel bad for having a bad memory, Sophia, but for having to take someone else&#8217;s word about an event I had experienced. How can you let everything in your head just lie where it falls, without ever moving it around? There&#8217;s no such thing as a bad memory; you&#8217;re just lazy!</q><footer>Sabina</footer>
> It&#8217;s easy to have reservations, Sophia. I didn&#8217;t act on them, and that&#8217;s all that counts.<footer>Sabina</footer>
> Alberts affirmed technology; he rebelled against everything that constrained the further development of productive forces. That&#8217;s why he ended up considering human beings reactionary. Human beings constrain the development of productive forces; human beings have to be overcome. The beings who would inhabit the crystal palace wouldn&#8217;t be human beings.<footer>Sabina</footer>
> Yara showed me that what my mother had called the devil is what&#8217;s most natural in all of us, what we feel; it&#8217;s our desires and our passions; it&#8217;s what we are. No sword is needed to embed the devil in us; the devil is already there; it&#8217;s the removal of the devil that requires a sword.<footer>Mirna</footer>
> Was I really what Yara had called me: a hypocrite who applauded at a great distance acts which I dared not undertake in my own home and neighborhood?<footer>Yarostan</footer>
> According to official accounts, an army of four million men is massed at our frontiers. Four million! In some circles they&#8217;re described as <q>barbarian hordes,</q> but I&#8217;m sure the vast majority of them are workers, exactly like the people they&#8217;re coming to repress&#8230;It would be more comforting to think the invaders were creatures from another planet, or insects. What is so terrifying is the thought that the invaders are workers like ourselves, workers who may next week be repressed by armies consisting of some of the very workers they are repressing now. It isn&#8217;t <q>they,</q> <q>the enemy,</q> who are driving those tanks and carrying those rifles. It&#8217;s <q>we</q> &mdash; we comrades, fellow workers, brothers, we who failed to communicate with each other, we who failed to destroy the schools where we&#8217;re taught to produce the tanks &mdash; the schools where we&#8217;re taught to obey the commanders who order us to assassinate each other.<footer>Yarostan</footer>
> What kind of system can afford to support a permanent force of four million trained assassins? Can you even imagine how much of society&#8217;s activity has to be concentrated on war-related work to supply an army of four million &mdash; in <q>peace time</q>?<footer>Yarostan</footer>
> I don&#8217;t have the instincts of ants or bees; I can&#8217;t function in a hive.<footer>Yarostan</footer>
> My very dreams were contaminated by the monstrosity he [Titus Zabran] stood for: the will to impose mental constructs on living people &mdash; which as Zdenek so perceptively pointed out can only be done by means of <q>historically available</q> instruments: guns, tanks, police and armies.<footer>Sophia</footer>
> I think the split was between the world of those who, like Ted, Jan and Mirna, sought to realize their own potentialities among others realizing theirs, and the world of those who, like Luisa and Daman and Titus Zabran, sought to fit human beings into what Sabina called a crystal palace, which in practice was always the same regimented barracks, the hive you&#8217;ve rejected. Like Sabina, and like me, you had a foot in both worlds.<footer>Sophia</footer>

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---
title: '<cite class="book">The Bible</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-10-18T16:34:24+00:00
url: /quotes/the-bible/
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
Then Mordecai commanded to answer Esther, Think not with thyself that thou shalt escape in the king&#8217;s house, more than all the Jews. For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, <i>then</i> shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place; but thou and thy father&#8217;s house shall be destroyed
</p><footer>Esther 4:12&ndash;13</footer>
</blockquote>
> Knowst thou _not_ this of old, since man was placed upon earth, That the triumphing of the wicked _is_ short, and the joy of the hypocrite _but_ for a moment?<footer>Job 20:4&ndash;5</footer>
> The <span class="lord">Lord</span> also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble.<footer>Psalm 9:9</footer>
> For he remembered that they _were but_ flesh; a wind that passeth away, and cometh not again.<footer>Psalm 78:39</footer>
> He that reproveth a scorner getteth to himself shame: and he that rebuketh a wicked _man getteth_ himself a blot. Reprove not a scorner, lest he hate thee: rebuke a wise man, and he will love thee. Give _instruction_ to a wise _man_, and he will be yet wiser: teach a just _man_, and he will increase in learning.<footer>Proverbs 9:7&ndash;9</footer>
> Treasures of wickedness profit nothing: but righteousness delivereth from death.<footer>Proverbs 10:2</footer>
> The memory of the just _is_ blessed: but the name of the wicked shall rot.<footer>Proverbs 10:7</footer>
> The merciful man doeth good to his own soul: but _he that is_ cruel troubleth his own flesh.<footer>Proverbs 11:17</footer>
> There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and _there is_ that withholdeth more than is meet, but _it tendeth_ to poverty. The liberal soul shall be made fat: and he that watereth shall be watered also himself&#8230;He that diligently seeketh good procureth favour: but he that seeketh mischief, it shall come unto him.<footer>Proverbs 11:24&ndash;25 & 27</footer>
> Better _is_ a little with righteousness than great revenues without right. A man&#8217;s heart deviseth his way: but the <span class="lord">Lord</span> directeth his steps.<footer>Proverbs 16:8&ndash;9</footer>
> Bread of deceit _is_ sweet to a man; but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel. _Every_ purpose is established by counsel: and with good advice make war.<footer>Proverbs 20:17&ndash;18</footer>
> WHEN thou sittest to eat with a ruler, consider diligently what _is_ before thee: And put a knife to thy throat, if thou _be_ a man given to appetite. Be not desirous of his dainties: for they _are_ deceitful meat. Labour not to be rich: cease from thine own wisdom.<footer>Proverbs 23:1&ndash;4</footer>
> If a ruler hearken to lies, all his servants _are_ wicked.<footer>Proverbs 29:12</footer>
> For _there is_ no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now _is_ in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise _man_? as the fool.<footer>Ecclesiastes 2:16</footer>
> I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all _is_ vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.<footer>Ecclesiastes 3:18&ndash;20</footer>
> Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do _it_ with thy might; for _there is_ no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.<footer>Ecclesiastes 9:10</footer>
> I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race _is_ not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, not yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. For man also knoweth not his time: as the fish that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so _are_ the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.<footer>Ecclesiastes 9:11&ndash;12</footer>
> Learn to do well; seek judgement, relive the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.<footer>Isaiah 1:17</footer>
Ezekiel 18 &#8211; sins of the father and the son
Ezekiel 33:1&ndash;9 &#8211; the duty of a watchman
> Woe _be_ to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks?<footer>Ezekiel 34:2</footer>
> And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw _it_, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners? But when Jesus heard _that_, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.<footer>St. Matthew 9:10&ndash;12</footer>
> The harvest truly _is_ plenteous, but the labourers _are_ few.<footer>St. Matthew 9:37</footer>
> And when ye come into an house, salute it. And if the house be worthy, let your peace come upon it: but if it be not worthy, let your peace return to you. And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgement, than for that city.<footer>St. Matthew 10:12&ndash;15</footer>
> This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with _their_ lips; but their heart is far from me.<footer>St. Matthew 15:8</footer>
> For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall an man give in exchange for his soul?<footer>St. Matthew 16:25&ndash;26</footer>
> Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh! Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast _them_ from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast _it_ from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.<footer>St. Matthew 18:7&ndash;9</footer>
> And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.<footer>St. Mark 10:23&ndash;25</footer>
> But of that day and _that_ hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is. _For the Son of man is_ as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch. Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning: Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping.<footer>St. Mark 13:32&ndash;26</footer>
> When thou are bidden of any _man_ to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room; lest a more honourable man than thou be bidden of him; And he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, Give this man place; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room. But when thou are bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade the cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meet with thee. For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that abaseth himself shall be exalted.<footer>St. Luke 14:8&ndash;11</footer>
> I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep. The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the good shepherd, and know my _sheep_, and am known of mine.<footer>St. John 10:11&ndash;14</footer>
> For _I mean_ not that other men be eased, and ye burdened: But by an equality, _that_ now at this time your abundance _may be a supply_ for their want, that their abundance also may be _a supply_ for your want: that there may be equality: As it is written, He that _had gathered_ much had nothing over; and he that _had gathered_ little had no lack.<footer>2 Corinthians 8:13&ndash;15</footer>
> Do not rich men oppress you, and draw you before the judgement seats?<footer>James 2:6</footer>
> What _doth it_ profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him? If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, And one of you say under them, Depart in peace, be _ye_ warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what _doth it_ profit? Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew the my faith by my works.<footer>James 2:14&ndash;18</footer>
> Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what _shall be_ on the morrow. For what _is_ your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.<footer>James 4:13&ndash;14</footer>
> Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth _it_ not, to him it is sin.<footer>James 4:17</footer>
> For he that will love life, and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips that they speak no guile; Let him eschew evil, and do good; let him seek peace, and ensue it&#8230;And who _is_ he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good? But and if ye suffer for righteousness&#8217; sake, happy _are ye_: and be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled; But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and _be_ ready always to _give_ an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear: Having a good conscience; that, whereas they speak evil of you, as of evildoers, they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ. For _it is_ better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well doing, than for evil doing.<footer>1 Peter 3:10&ndash;11 & 13&ndash;17</footer>
> And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that say on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses _were_ as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone. By these three was a third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths. For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails: for their tails _were_ like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt. And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk: Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.<footer>Revelation 9:17&ndash;21</footer>
also
> And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory.<footer>Revelation 16:8&ndash;9</footer>

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---
title: '<cite class="book">Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-10-29T14:37:27+00:00
url: /quotes/seeing-like-a-state/
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
The premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed <q>map</q> of its terrain and its people. It lacked, for the most part, a measure, a metric, that would allow it to <q>translate</q> what it knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view. As a result, its interventions were often crude and self-defeating.
</p><footer>p 2</footer>
</blockquote>
> These state simplifications, the basic givens of modern statecraft, were, I began to realize, rather like abridged maps. They did not successfully represent the actual activity of the society they depicted, nor were they intended to; they represented only that slice of it that interested the official observer. They were, moreover, not just maps. Rather, they were maps that, when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade. Thus a state cadastral map created to designate taxable property-holders does not merely describe a system of land tenure; it creates such a system through its ability to give its categories the force of law.<footer>p3</footer>
> Telling a farmer only that he is leasing twenty acres of land is about as helpful as telling a scholar that he has bought six kilograms of books.<footer>p 26</footer>
> Customary naming practices throughout much of the world are enormously rich. Among some peoples, it is not uncommon for individuals to have different names during different stages of life (infancy, childhood, adulthood) and in some cases after death; added to these are names used for joking, rituals, and mourning and names used for interactions with same-sex friends or with in-laws. Each name is specific to a certain phase of life, social setting, or interlocutor. A single individual will frequently be called by several different names, depending on the stage of life and the person addressing him or her. To the question <q>What is your name?</q> which has a more unambiguous answer in the contemporary West, the only plausible answer is <q>It depends.</q><footer>p 64</footer>
> The discriminating interventions that a legible society society makes possible can, of course, be deadly as well. A sobering instance is wordlessly recalled by a map produced by the City Office of Statistics of Amsterdam, then under Nazi occupation, in May 1941. Along with lists of residents, the map was the synoptic representation that guided the rounding up of the city&#8217;s Jewish population, sixty-five thousand of whom were eventually deported&#8230;The Nazi authorities of course, supplied the murderous purpose behind the exercise, but the legibility provided by the Dutch authorities supplied the means to its efficient implementation. That legibility, I should emphasize, merely amplified the capacity of the state for discriminating interventions&mdash;a capacity that in principle could as easily have been deployed to feed the Jews as to deport them.<footer>p 78</footer>
> The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a <q>civilizing mission.</q><footer>p 82</footer>
> State officials can often make the categories stick and impose their simplifications, because the state, of all institutions, is best equipped to insist on treating people according to its schemata. Thus categories that may have begun as the artificial inventions of cadastral surveyors, census takers, judges, or police officers can end by becoming categories that organize people&#8217;s daily experience precisely because they are embedded in state-created institutions that structure that experience.<footer>pp 82&ndash;3</footer>
> In dictatorial settings where there is no effective way to assert another reality, fictitious facts-on-paper can often be made eventually to prevail on the ground, because it is on behalf of such pieces of paper that police and army are deployed.<footer>p 83</footer>
> Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls.<footer>&mdash;Italo Calvino,
>
> <cite class="book">Invisible Cities</cite></footer>
> The best a planner can hope for is to modestly enhance rather than impede the development of urban complexity.<footer>p 143</footer>
> A language is the joint historical creation of millions of speakers. Although all speakers have some effect on the trajectory of a language, the process is not particularly egalitarian. Linguists, grammarians, and educators, some of them backed by the power of the state, weigh in heavily. But the process is not particularly amendable to a dictatorship, either. Despite the efforts towards <q>central planning,</q> language (especially its everyday spoken form) stubbornly tends to go on its own rich, multivalent, colorful way.<footer>p 143</footer>
> If the state&#8217;s goals are minimal, it may not need to know much about the society. Just as a woodsman who takes only an occasional load of firewood from a large forest need have no detailed knowledge of that forest, so a state whose demands are confined to grabbing a few carts of grain and the odd conscript may not require a very accurate or detailed map of the society. If, however, the state is ambitious&mdash;if it wants to extract as much grain and manpower as it can, short of provoking a famine or a rebellion, if it wants to create a literate, skilled, and healthy population, if it wants everyone to speak the same language or worship the same god&mdash;then it will have to become both far more knowledgeable and far more intrusive.<footer>p 184</footer>
> In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.<footer>Leo Tolstoy,
>
> <cite class="book">War and Peace</cite></footer>
> It is far easier for would-be reformers to change the formal structure of an institution than to change its practices.<footer>p 255</footer>
> Nussbaum shows convincingly how Plato attempted, especially in the <cite class="book">Republic</cite>, to transform the realm of love&mdash;a realm that almost by definition is one of contingency, desire, and impulse&mdash;into a realm of techne or episteme.<footer>p 320 (
>
> <cite class="book">The Fragility of Goodness</cite>, chs 5 and 6)</footer>
> When rapid judgements of high (not perfect) accuracy are called for, when it is important to interpret early signs that things are going well or poorly, then there is no substitute for mētis.<footer>p 330</footer>
> It is worth emphasizing the degree to which oral cultures, as opposed to written cultures, may avoid the rigidity of orthodoxy. Because an oral culture has no textual reference point for making deviations, its religious myths, rituals, and folklore are likely to drift. The tales and traditions currently in circulation vary with the speaker, the audience, and local needs. Having no yardstick like a sacred text to measure the degree of drift from its Ur-tradition, such as culture can change greatly over time and simultaneously think of itself as remaining faithful to tradition.<footer>p 332</footer>

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title: '<cite class="book">To Dare Imagining</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-10-31T14:54:00+00:00
url: /quotes/to-dare-imagining/
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
A popular systematic mobilization seemed to have been beyond the imaginary of the left for a long time, and now it should come from the Kurdish regions of war-torn Syria? As if emerging from the secret, unwritten corners of history&mdash;with a smile nonetheless&mdash;was not enough, the Kurds are now given the task of passing the litmus test on behalf of all revolutions that ever existed.
</p><footer>Dilar Dirik,
<cite class="article">Rojava: To Dare Imagining</cite></footer>
</blockquote>
> To top it off, such an ordinary looking anti-charismatic fellow, Ocalan&mdash;a face in the crowd&mdash;as in the portraits hung everywhere; a little plump, sober and serious, no beard, no moustache, no pony-tail, no Cuban cigar, dull clothing like an accountant or like ex-wheat-trader Ismet. Age 68. A Santa Claus with a set of great ideas in his sleigh.<footer>Michael Taussig,
>
> <cite class="article">Kobane: The Mastery of Non-mastery</cite></footer>

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title: '<cite class="book">Between the World and Me</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-11-03T14:49:39+00:00
url: /quotes/between-the-world-and-me/
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
The new people were something else before they were white&mdash;Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish&mdash;and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths.
</p>
</blockquote>
> But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error.
> It does not matter that the <q>intentions</q> of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, <q>intend</q> for you is secondary. Our world is physical.
> But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, <q>white people</q> would cease to exist for want of reasons. There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been <q>black,</q> and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that separated the <q>white</q> from the <q>black,</q> even if it meant that their own blue-eyed sons would live under the lash.
> Your uncle Ben became a fellow traveler for life, and I discovered that there was something particular about journeying out with black people who knew the length of the road because they had traveled it too.
> It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.
> The writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his own nation. Perhaps his own nation more than any other, precisely because it was his own.
> Perhaps being named <q>black</q> had nothing to do with any of this; perhaps being named <q>black</q> was just someone’s name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah.
> It must have been around that time that I discovered an essay by Ralph Wiley in which he responded to Bellow’s quip. <q>Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,</q> wrote Wiley. <q>Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.</q>
> My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
> And still and all I knew that _we were_ something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real.
> Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be.
> The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.
> &#8230;being drafted into the black race&#8230;
> But my experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration.
> I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
> &#8230;I should not mistake her calm probing for the absence of anger.
> It was like falling in love&mdash;the things that get you are so small, the things that keep you up at night are so particular to you that when you try to explain, the only reward anyone can give you is a dumb polite nod.
> <q>Make the race proud,</q> the elders used to say. But by then I knew that I wasn’t so much bound to a biological <q>race</q> as to a group of people, and these people were not black because of any uniform color or any uniform physical feature. They were bound because they suffered under the weight of the Dream, and they were bound by all the beautiful things, all the language and mannerisms, all the food and music, all the literature and philosophy, all the common language that they fashioned like diamonds under the weight of the Dream.
> And though I could never, myself, be a native of any of these worlds, I knew that nothing so essentialist as race stood between us.
> We were not enslaved in France. We are not their particular <q>problem,</q> nor their national guilt. We are not their niggers.
> Remember that this consciousness can never ultimately be racial; it must be cosmic. Remember the Roma you saw begging with their children in the street, and the venom with which they were addressed. Remember the Algerian cab driver, speaking openly of his hatred of Paris, then looking at your mother and me and insisting that we were all united under Africa.
> And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident!), and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.
> What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility.
> When it came to her son, Dr. Jones’s country did what it does best—it forgot him. The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world. I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.
> Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world.
> We have taken the one-drop rules of Dreamers and flipped them. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.

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title: '<cite class="book">Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-11-03T14:42:02+00:00
url: /quotes/natives-race-and-class-in-the-ruins-of-empire/
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
It&#8217;s easy for people just slightly younger than myself, and born into a relative degree of multiculturalism, to forget just how recently basic public decency towards black folks was won in this country&#8230;
</p><footer>p5</footer>
</blockquote>
> I was not born with an opinion of the world but it clearly seemed that the world had an opinion of people like me. I did not know what race and class supposedly were but the world taught me very quickly, and the irrational manifestations of its prejudices forced me to search for answers&#8230;
> Nobody told white Britain that, over there in the colonies, Caribbeans and Asians were being told that Britain was their mother country, that it was the home of peace and justice and prosperity and that they would be welcomed with open arms by their loving motherland. Similarly, no one told my grandparents and others over there in the colonies that most white Britons were actually poor, or that the UK had a history of brutal labour exploitation and class conflict at home. You see, out there in the colonies, whiteness implies aristocracy, whiteness is aspirational, and as the only white people my grandparents knew of in Jamaica were the ruling classes, this association was entirely rational.<footer>p11</footer>
> Asians were niggers too, back then<footer>p11</footer>
> The reaction to our grandparents, and even more to their British-born children, was one of general and irrational revulsion, such that the mere mention of their treatment is sure to elicit rage and embarrassment today, now that the pioneering Windrush generation has official become part of Britain&#8217;s national story.<footer>p12</footer>
> Despite all this, my grandfather Brinsley worked hard, saved his pennies and moved out to the suburbs. Everything British capitalism says a good worker should do for the system to reward them &mdash; which, to be fair, it obviously did in his case. His neighbours all signed a petition to have the nigger removed from the street but my granddad, for reasons I could never quite understand, chose to stay put.<footer>p12</footer>
> So where are we now? Has nothing at all changed since the decade I was born? While it&#8217;s obviously true that aristocratic privilege and whiteness are among the basic assumptions of British ruling-class ideology, it&#8217;s also obvious that Britain&#8217;s inner cities &mdash; London in particular &mdash; are now some of the most successfully multi-ethnic experiments in the <q>Western</q> world, despite what the right-wing press would like to pretend. Multi-ethnic Britain is a result of what scholar Paul Gilroy calls our <q>convivial</q> culture, the normal everyday decency of ordinary people that for the most part keeps the peace in the face of enormous challenges. Racism and anti-racism, complete contempt for the poor and Christian charity, home to the world&#8217;s top universities and a strong disdain for learning, the pioneer of <q>Anglo-globalisation</q> whose citizens constantly bemoan other peoples right to move freely without a hint of irony &mdash; Britain has long been a land of startling paradoxes. For example, why did Britain have an abolitionist movement on a far greater scale than any of the other major European slaveholding powers, even while Britain had become the premier slave trader? Why, two centuries later, was there such revulsion towards and organisation against apartheid by <q>radical</q> groups here, even as <q>our</q> government, British corporations and banks supported it?<footer>p 12&ndash;13</footer>
> Britain has two competing traditions &mdash; one rooted in ideas of freedom, equality and democracy, and another that sees these words as mere rhetoric to be trotted out at will and violated whenever it serves the Machiavellian purposes of power preservation. This is how the UK can have the largest of the demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq and yet still have a government that entirely ignored its population on an issue with such globe-shifting implications.<footer>p13</footer>
> My father&#8217;s and uncles&#8217; bodies are tattooed with scars from fighting the National Front (NF), Teddy Boys and Skinheads; mine is not.<footer>p13&ndash;14</footer>
> Poor people racism, bad, rich people racism, good.<footer>p14</footer>
> It seems Britain&#8217;s most honest racists emphasise the spiritual connection they feel for their American cousins quite well. Yet in reality, the hanging of black people was never a particular phenomenon in domestic Britain; ironically, the vast majority of people hung in British history were white, and they were often poor people hung by the state for not respecting rich people&#8217;s property. Oh the irony, oh the lack of respect for one&#8217;s own ancestors!<footer>p15</footer>
> While ethnic bigotry has been around for millennia and probably affects every known human community to some degree, the invention, or at least codification, or <q>race</q> was an eighteenth and nineteenth century pan-Euro-American project, in which British intellectuals played a central role.<footer>p15</footer>
> I am partly a product of Britain&#8217;s injustices, of its history of class and race oppression, but also of its counter-narrative of struggle and the compromises made by those in power born of those struggle. I am a product of the empire, but also of the welfare state.
> &#8230;the ethnocentric and racist strains to the Brexit campaign rhetoric&#8230;
> &#8230;those who, unlike us, are raced&#8230;
> In reality, the idea of race has been one of the most important ideas in the modern world, it has underpinned centuries of enslavement, justified genocide and been used to decide the demarcation line between who lives and who dies, who gets to access rights of citizenship, property, migration and the vote. To not want to debate, discuss and deal with an idea that has been so impactful reveals a palpable lack of interest in humanity, or at least certain portions of it.<footer>p33&ndash;34</footer>
> We are conquered people living in the conquerors&#8217; lands, and as such we are people without honour.<footer>p36</footer>
> Like so much else within racial theory, a biological fiction but a social and political reality.
> I chose to identify with the black side of my heritage, not because black people are paragons of moral excellence who can do no wrong but simply because white supremacy is an unjust, idiotic and ultimately genocidal idea and because blackness can accommodate difference far more easily than whiteness can &mdash; because their historical and ontological origins are entirely different.
> &#8230;I&#8230;made no real attempt to understand how different 1990s Britain was from 1920s America (I was a teenager after all).<footer>p40</footer>
> Having defined themselves as superior and marked themselves out as racially distinct for the purposes of being able to own other humans and profit form their labour, whites understood that they had made themselves a potential target for racial revenge now that black people were free. The entire history of the USA since 1865, particularly in the southern states, has been indelibly shaped by this fear.
> While it’s absolutely obvious that white people have no monopoly on ethnic hatreds or dominating and brutalising other human beings, in my personal opinion – and I do believe it’s somewhat grounded in the evidence – the idea of race and white supremacy pioneered in eighteenth-century Europe, combined with newly formed nation states and industrial technology, took the human capacity for and practice of barbarity to levels rarely if ever before seen in history. It was Europe’s capacity for and mobilisation of greater organised violence that colonised the planet, not liberal ideas, Enlightenment Humanism or the Protestant work ethic. And the dehumanisation of the racial other made mass killing particularly permissible and thus was central to Western dominance.
> Had Japan come to dominate the modern world we may now be discussing the prejudices of the Japanese.
> Thus whiteness has always functioned as a tool of domination, as Charles Mills puts it: <q>Whiteness is a phenomenon unthinkable in a context where white does not equal power at some structural level.</q>
> The picture is nevertheless complicated in Britain – at home, if not in its former empire – and _might_ provide some of the reasons why white people here sometimes find terms like <q>white supremacy’ and ‘white privilege</q> either inapplicable to Britain or hard to understand.
> The mental and emotional benefits of whiteness are why my granddad – working class, a soldier who had been tortured in battle, an uneducated alcoholic with few serious accomplishments to speak of – could still say <q>well at least I am not a nigger</q> as frequently as he did. What did my grandfather understand about whiteness that so many pretend they cannot?
> Real-life racism makes you paranoid&#8230;
> &#8230;as always there is much crossover between assumptions based on class indicators and race (race itself being one of the biggest and most obvious class indicators).
> It’s also interesting how class norms can be a disability going into certain spaces, like televised debates, because the truth is that working-class people often don’t have time for all the poncey doublespeak, and when someone is openly patronising and rude our natural response is to tell them to fuck off or, if they are rude enough, to offer them a trip outside for a good old dust-up.
> The threat posed to some people’s entire sense of identity by an exhibition of human excellence inside a black body is an amount of fear, sideways admiration and contempt for another group of humans that I can’t even imagine being constantly burdened by.
> So why have so many white people and publications been upset by black sporting achievement? I mean, I can’t imagine watching Russian or Chinese dominance in gymnastics and thinking I’m never going to try that because I am not Russian or Chinese, much less feeling ethnically inadequate. I can’t imagine watching <cite>Lord of the Rings</cite> and thinking, _Oh, white people being excellent again, what a bummer_. This brings us to one of the least spoken about aspects of Western racial mythologies over the past few centuries: the insanity it inflicts on many of its intended beneficiaries. An identity predicated on supremacy is not healthy or stable. An identity that says <q>I am, because you are not</q> is what Hegel was talking about when he wrote his master–slave dialectic, even if he did not realise this himself. The long and short of it is that the master makes himself a slave to his slave by needing that domination to define him.
> I know some black and brown folk reading this will think I have gone crazy, but hear me out. As much as racism might piss me off, I’d never want to have been born anyone other than myself in this culture at this time. Why? Because in spite of whatever challenges I might face, I love my people, history and culture and I don’t need Chinese people or Indians or Spaniards to not reach their full human potential to feel good about myself; that is far too much power to give to another group. I can be inspired by the brilliance of Shakespeare or Stephen Hawking or Lao Tzu and it’s totally fine that they are not black. I’m sure people racialised as white but not aggressively tethered to a supremacist identity feel similarly. So while we are often encouraged to spill our hearts about how bad racism is as if we were its sole victims, and as if white people can’t even comprehend what is going on, I’d never want to swap roles and be the one spitting on children because they look different and want to go to school, or be ready to beat a child to death because they apparently whistled at a woman of my <q>race</q>.
> The nation has just had to get used to an England football team that is half black&#8230;
> Prior to colonialism, black Africans seem to have found their blackness perfectly beautiful and normal, unsurprisingly. But also, by making whiteness the colour of oppression, the colour that defined a person’s right to own other human beings, to rape and kill and steal with impunity, white supremacists had paradoxically opened up the way for blackness to become the colour of freedom, of revolution and of humanity.17 This is why it’s absurd to compare black nationalism and white nationalism; not because black people are inherently moral, but because the projects of the two nationalisms were entirely different. This difference is why the black nationalist Muhammad Ali could still risk his life, give up the prime years of his career and lose millions of dollars in solidarity with the non-black, non-American people of Vietnam. It’s also why Ali could show as much sympathy as he did to the white people of Ireland in their quarrels with Britain, despite him saying, somewhat rhetorically, that <q>the white man is the devil</q>.
> The revolutionary and oppositional nature of black identity is also part of why so many millions of people racialised as white are inspired by the black culture, music and art in spite of all racist propaganda that they have been exposed to asserting that these people – and thus their culture – are inferior. It’s why John Lennon – great as he was – can never be a symbol of freedom for black people in the way that Bob Marley, Nina Simone or Muhammad Ali are for so many white people.
> Think of it like this; there are today British citizens – perhaps millions of us – who, however fringe we may be considered in mainstream politics, are genuinely horrified at our government’s foreign policy, its arms dealing and war-mongering, and there are also a few rogue MPs who constantly vote against the British war machine – but does any of that mean that the British ruling class generally take anti-war humanitarianism at all seriously?
> Of course not. This is how they can support terrorists in Libya while claiming to save Libyans with humanitarian bombs, and then let people fleeing from Libya drown in the sea while the Foreign Secretary makes jokes about clearing away the dead bodies to a laughing audience; or how they can sell arms to the Saudis for them to kill Yemeni civilians at the exact same time that they are waging war in Syria under the rubric of humanitarianism.
> The victims of the transatlantic traffic did not think that they were being sold out by their <q>black brothers and sisters’ any more than the Irish thought that their ‘white brothers and sisters</q> from England were deliberately starving them to death during the famine.
> The average death toll in these skirmishes seems to have been about twenty-five and the historian David Richardson estimates that a million fewer people had to go through the middle passage because of this one form of resistance alone.
> It is notable that there were not any major rebellions against transportation to penal colonies, let alone a revolution in the UK, during all the years that Britons were being shipped against their will to Australia and elsewhere. But I will not suggest that this is because white Brits are uniquely docile, as there are several other more likely possible explanations: the British State was too well armed; class divisions were too strong; people were too divided.
> <q>Africans sold their own people’ is the historical version of ‘black on black violence</q>.
> The destruction of historical memory is not limited to documents – while Britain has preserved the HMS Victory as a tribute to Nelson, as well as other ships from key periods of British history, not a single slave ship survives.
> The primary difference between Britain and other empires was not that <q>we were not as bad as the Belgians or the Third Reich</q> – which is true but is such a shit boast – but that Britain succeeded in dominating the globe and still kind of does, albeit as a second fiddle to the USA in the Anglo-American Empire.
> Can Britain ever behave in the world like the democracy it claims to be, or is such a thing entirely impossible?
> While I’m sure Mr Ferguson and others would accuse me of <q>working myself up into a state of high moral indignation’ about the crimes of the British Empire, I’ll bet that he and others like him will be wearing their poppy every 11 November; that is, they will be ‘working themselves up into a state of high moral indignation</q> about dead people when those dead people are truly British – the Kenyans tortured in the 1950s were legally British citizens but naturally there will be no poppies or tears for them. The implications are clear – some ancestors deserve to be remembered and venerated and others do not. Those that kill for Britain are glorious, those killed by Britain are unpeople. If we truly cared for peace, would we not remember the victims of British tyranny every 11 November too?
> What is most fascinating about British intellectual discourse is that we can see brutality ever so clearly when it wears Japanese or German or Islamic clothes, but when it comes to looking in the mirror at the empire on which the sun never set – the eighteenth-century’s premier slave trader, the mother country of the Commonwealth and one of the pioneer countries in developing and then putting into practice the Enlightenment philosophy of white supremacy – so many suddenly become blind, deaf and dumb, unable to see murder as murder.
> But there is absolutely no reason to assume that what the scholar George M. Frederickson calls <q>overtly racist regimes</q> could not return, though today an obsessive focus on essentialised cultural, ethnic and religious differences often serves many of the same functions as overt racism.
> This was not about the books or trading licences at all – it was about the allocation of space, about belonging, about who is deserving of access and of rights. It was about matter that finds itself out of place. Dirt.
> I make these confessions not to appear tough or to add some ghetto drama to my narrative but simply because they are true and because they’re important.
> Rich people crime good, poor people crime bad.
> I ultimately take responsibility for my own actions, but there is still a story there and being treated like and presumed to be a criminal for years before I ever contemplated actually carrying a knife is part of that story.
> It’s precisely because I have been exposed to my own potential for murder, because I know that I am not inherently a good person and that we all change to one degree or another according to our circumstances, that I have such an interest in trying to help create conditions that encourage the best in people.
> There is intelligence in rebellion, they are just channelling it in the wrong direction.
> Yes, you have survived, but it is bittersweet; some of the best minds of your generation have been wasted, the children that grew up with the safety blankets of money and whiteness have gotten twice as far working half as hard&#8230;
> We may both have been eating at the same restaurant in Venice, but we are not the same.
> Poor people have no real voice in British politics, but we do have an unelected second chamber of <q>lords</q> influencing policy.
> It is one of history’s great ironies that the most extreme incarnation of white supremacy, the Nazis, did more to undermine white dominance, damage Western prestige and make space for <q>third world</q> freedom struggles than any other force in the previous three centuries.
> When we argued about the Scramble for Africa she reproduced the old railways argument, the one that goes something like, <q>colonialism gave the natives railways, so it was good, the end</q>.
> Another time she went as far as saying that <q>Europeans did not actually know Africans were human so you can’t really blame them for enslaving Africans, whereas when they got to China the humanity [of the Chinese] smacked them in the face.</q>
> The incident became, for me, the perfect embodiment of Dr King’s statement to the effect that the greatest impediment to racial justice in America was not the open bigot but the indifferent and cowardly white liberal, more concerned with a quiet life than justice.<footer>also quoted in
<cite class="book">Why I&#8217;m No Longer Talking to White People About Race</cite></footer> </blockquote>
Chapter 10 &#8211; Britain and America
> Any practical pan-Africanism to my mind must also recognise difference and diversity; it’s no good saying <q>anti-black racism exists, so black people must become a simple monolith</q>.
I believe to some extent we are living through another crisis of whiteness, perhaps the final one, and that this crisis is tied up with several other complicated political and historic threads, such as the looming ecological disaster, domestic class conflict, Islamic fascism, the pivot to Asia and, if the Marxist scholars are correct, the very end of capitalism itself, though I am aware that capitalism’s inevitable end has been predicted ever since its beginning!</blockquote>
> But as I was watched the Trump inauguration on a TV screen in Addis Ababa, it all looked so satirical that I could not help but see the signs of an empire in decline. The question, then, is how painful might the fall be?
> In some ways, though, the <q>decline of the West</q> lot are correct that the Europe they imagine is indeed doomed, because it never really existed in the first place. This lilywhite Europe where everyone knew their place, things were peaceful and everyone got along simply melts into thin air against the historical record of land clearances, the violence of nation-state formations, religious purges, anti-Jewish pogroms, the Hapsburgs, Napoleon, a couple of world wars and the inquisition.
> As you may be able to tell, I am not particularly optimistic about the future and I hope to be proved spectacularly wrong. I fear the only question for the life of someone like me born in 2018 is how extreme the tragedies and carnage they will surely live through will be.&#8217;

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title: '<cite class="book">Regarding the Pain of Others</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-11-03T14:46:48+00:00
url: /quotes/regarding-the-pain-of-others/
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
To those who are sure that right is on one side, oppression and injustice on the other, and that the fighting must go on, what matters is precisely who is killed and by whom. To an Israeli Jew, a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide-bomber. To a Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank round in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordnance. To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. During the fighting between Serbs and Croats at the beginning of the recent Balkan wars, the same photographs of children killed in the shelling of a village were passed around at both Serb and Croat propaganda briefings. Alter the caption, and the children&#8217;s deaths could be used and reused.
</p>
</blockquote>
> The destructiveness of war—short of total destruction, which is not war but suicide—is not in itself an argument against waging war unless one thinks (as few people actually do think) that violence is always unjustifiable, that force is always and in all circumstances wrong—wrong because, as Simone Weil affirms in her sublime essay on war, <cite class="article">The Iliad, or The Poem of Force</cite> (1940), violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing.
> Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half&#8217;s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists.
> The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, was described as <q>unreal,</q> <q>surreal,</q> <q>like a movie,</q> in many of the first accounts of those who escaped from the towers or watched from nearby. (After four decades of big-budget Hollywood disaster films, <q>It felt like a movie</q> seems to have displaced the way survivors of a catastrophe used to express the short-term unassimilability of what they had gone through: <q>It felt like a dream.</q>)
> To be sure, nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously.
> Since I find these ideas formulated in my own essays on photography&mdash;the earliest of which was written thirty years ago&mdash;I feel an irresistible temptation to quarrel with them.
> How much easier, from one&#8217;s chair, far from danger, to claim the position of superiority. In fact, deriding the efforts of those who have borne witness in war zones as <q>war tourism</q> is such a recurrent judgment that it has spilled over into the discussion of war photography as a profession.
> &#8230;victims are interested in the representation of their own sufferings. But they want the suffering to be seen as unique. In early 1994, the English photojournalist Paul Lowe, who had been living for more than a year in the besieged city, mounted an exhibit at a partly wrecked art gallery of the photographs he had been taking, along with photographs he&#8217;d taken a few years earlier in Somalia; the Sarajevans, though eager to see new pictures of the ongoing destruction of their city, were offended by the inclusion of the Somalia pictures. Lowe had thought the matter was a simple one. He was a professional photographer, and these were two bodies of work of which he was proud. For the Sarajevans, it was also simple. To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo&#8217;s martyrdom to a mere instance. The atrocities taking place in Sarajevo have nothing to do with what happens in Africa, they exclaimed. Undoubtedly there was a racist tinge to their indignation—Bosnians are Europeans, people in Sarajevo never tired of pointing out to their foreign friends—but they would have objected too if, instead, pictures of atrocities committed against civilians in Chechnya or in Kosovo, indeed in any other country, had been included in the show. It is intolerable to have one&#8217;s own sufferings twinned with anybody else&#8217;s.
> To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell&#8217;s flames.
> But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.
> Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? All this, with the understanding that moral indignation, like compassion, cannot dictate a course of action.
> There&#8217;s nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: <q>Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.</q>

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title: '<cite class="book">Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-11-03T14:54:03+00:00
url: /quotes/why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race/
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
They truly believe that the experiences of their life as a result of their skin colour can and should be universal.
</p>
</blockquote>
> It&#8217;s not really surprising, because they&#8217;ve never known what it means to embrace a person of colour as a true equal, with thoughts and feelings that are as valid as their own. Watching <cite class="film">The Color of Fear</cite> by Lee Mun Wah, I saw people of colour break down in tears as they struggled to convince a defiant white man that his words were enforcing and perpetuating a white racist standard on them.
> It was never written with the intention of prompting guilt in white people, or to provoke any kind of epiphany. I didn&#8217;t know at the time that I had inadvertently written a break-up letter to whiteness. And I didn&#8217;t expect white readers to do the Internet equivalent of standing outside my bedroom window with a boom box and a bunch of flowers, confessing their flaws and mistakes, begging me not to leave.
> A quick word on definitions.
> I write – and read – to assure myself that other people have felt what I&#8217;m feeling too, that it isn&#8217;t just me, that this is real, and valid, and true.
> Despite support from influential names like John Maynard Keynes and George Bernard Shaw, there was no legislation passed in Britain to cement eugenics into the workings of the state (for example, forced sterilisation), and a 1931 Private Members Bill advocating this was outvoted in Parliament.
> As the fighting intensified, some white rioters berated the police for holding them back from attacking black people.
> On the other end of the spectrum, in 1959, Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, saw fit to return to parliamentary politics after stepping down in 1930. He stood in a constituency near Notting Hill and advocated the repatriation of immigrants, losing with an 8.1 per cent share of the vote.
> Then, in 1965, Britain&#8217;s first-ever race-relations legislation was granted by parliament. The Race Relations Act was an odd move for the British government, having made such a strong statement against the free movement of its Commonwealth citizens just three years earlier. The Act stated that overt racial discrimination was no longer legal in public places – although it didn&#8217;t apply to shops or private housing.
> There was no way of knowing the exact number of non-white people living in Britain as the census didn&#8217;t include a question on race until 1991. Barely any complaints were made to the board, and those that were made were almost futile. It had no authority to punish those against whom complaints were made. Instead, its role was one of mediation between the complainant and the organisation or person being complained about.
> The Act was strengthened three years later, outlawing the denial of housing, employment or public services on the grounds of race.
> Just over a decade after its formation, the National Front stood over three hundred people in the 1979 general election, and won almost 200,000 votes.<footer>how many seats?</footer>
> Anecdotally, anti-racism campaigners insisted that black people were being unfairly targeted by sus laws. The notion of who does and who doesn&#8217;t look suspicious – particularly in a British political climate that just ten years earlier was denying black people employment and housing – was undoubtedly racialised.
> There was at least one documented incident of police officers arresting black boys for the crime of looking like criminals.
> When police officers stopped to help a wounded black boy, a crowd approached them, and the situation escalated.
> Because history is written by the winners, evidence of police harassment of people of colour in the early 1980s is hard to come by.
> At the same time of this intense police brutality, there was also a movement towards restoring the eroded trust between people of colour and the police. Taking their lead from the United States, the police began to enact a new strategy. Community policing put officers in touch with people in local areas so that residents could get to know them. The late Chief Constable John Alderson strongly argued in the early 1980s that police should have more human involvement with the places they policed. But this kind of community approach did not work to the benefit of black people.
> His research saw him ask trainee police cadets at the college to write anonymous essays on the topic of <q>blacks in Britain</q>. The responses were shocking.<footer>and full of [
>
> _sic_]s</footer>
> So that I could explain to them, not to blame them for holding those views. You explain to them how it comes about that they all think the way they do.<footer>John Fernandes</footer>
> Dozens of people sustained injuries, and a photojournalist trying to take pictures of the riot was killed.
> But I don&#8217;t think my ignorance was an individual thing. That I had to go looking for significant moments in black British history suggests to me that I had been kept ignorant. While the black British story is starved of oxygen, the US struggle against racism is globalised into the story of the struggle against racism that we should look to for inspiration – eclipsing the black British story so much that we convince ourselves that Britain has never had a problem with race.
> After Britain voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, we were told reported hate crimes drastically grew in number, and that racism was on the rise in Britain again. But looking at our history shows racism does not erupt from nothing, rather it is embedded in British society. It&#8217;s in the very core of how the state is set up. It&#8217;s not external. It&#8217;s in the system.
> If all racism was as easy to spot, grasp and denounce as white extremism is, the task of the anti-racist would be simple. People feel that if a racist attack has not occurred, or the word <q>nigger</q> has not been uttered, an action can&#8217;t be racist.
> Structural racism is dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of people with the same biases joining together to make up one organisation, and acting accordingly. Structural racism is an impenetrably white workplace culture set by those people, where anyone who falls outside of the culture must conform or face failure. _Structural_ is often the only way to capture what goes unnoticed – the silently raised eyebrows, the implicit biases, snap judgements made on perceptions of competency.
> Highly educated, high-earning white men are very likely to be landlords, bosses, CEOs, head teachers, or university vice chancellors.
> They are unlikely to boast about their politics with colleagues or acquaintances because of the social stigma of being associated with racist views. But their racism is covert. It doesn&#8217;t manifest itself in spitting at strangers in the street.
> This demands a collective redefinition of what it means to be racist, how racism manifests, and what we must do to end it.
> But let&#8217;s say that our black boy (and it&#8217;s always a boy – there&#8217;s little to no research in this area focused on the life chances of black girls) avoids being excluded and makes it far enough into his school journey to take exams.
> The evidence suggests his fortunes might drastically change as a greater proportion of black students than white students progress to higher education after sixth form or college. But, along race lines, access to Britain&#8217;s prestigious universities is unequal, with black students less likely to be accepted into a high-ranking, research-intensive Russell Group university than their white counterparts.
> It&#8217;s a dire indication of what universities think intelligence looks like.
> Although there&#8217;s no recent official figures, a 2009 report from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission estimated that roughly 30 per cent of all black men living in Britain are on the National DNA Database, compared with about 10 per cent of white men and 10 per cent of Asian men.
> Our black man&#8217;s life chances are hindered and warped at every stage. There isn&#8217;t anything notably, individually racist about the people who work in all of the institutions he interacts with. Some of these people will be black themselves. But it doesn&#8217;t really matter what race they are. They are both in and of a society that is structurally racist, and so it isn&#8217;t surprising when these unconscious biases seep out into the work they do when they interact with the general public.
> Because, if the current system worked correctly, and if hiring practices were successfully recruiting and promoting the right people for the right jobs in all circumstances, I seriously doubt that so many leadership positions would be occupied by white middle-aged men.
> I think that we placate ourselves with the fallacy of meritocracy by insisting that we just don&#8217;t see race. This makes us feel progressive. But this claim to not see race is tantamount to compulsory assimilation. My blackness has been politicised against my will, but I don&#8217;t want it wilfully ignored in an effort to instil some sort of precarious, false harmony.
> Colour-blindness is a childish, stunted analysis of racism. It starts and ends at <q>discriminating against a person because of the colour of their skin is bad</q>, without any accounting for the ways in which structural power manifests in these exchanges. With an analysis so immature, this definition of racism is often used to silence people of colour attempting to articulate the racism we face. When people of colour point this out, they&#8217;re accused of being racist against white people, and the accountability avoidance continues. Colour-blindness does not accept the legitimacy of structural racism or a history of white racial dominance.
> But indulging in the myth that we are all equal denies the economic, political and social legacy of a British society that has historically been organised by race.
> Meanwhile, it is nigh-on impossible for children of colour to educate ourselves out of racist stereotyping, though if we accumulate enough individual wealth, we can pretend that we are no longer affected by it.
> How can I define white privilege? It&#8217;s so difficult to describe an absence. And white privilege is an absence of the consequences of racism.
> To some, the word <q>privilege</q> in the context of whiteness invokes images of a life lived in the lap of luxury, enjoying the spoils of the super-rich. When I talk about white privilege, I don&#8217;t mean that white people have it easy, that they&#8217;ve never struggled, or that they&#8217;ve never lived in poverty. But white privilege is the fact that if you&#8217;re white, your race will almost certainly positively impact your life&#8217;s trajectory in some way. And you probably won&#8217;t even notice it.
> A few years ago I got into a conversation with a friend&#8217;s white, French girlfriend about racism. I spoke to her honestly about my experiences. It was going well, and she was telling me about the troubles she faced as the youngest and only woman in her workplace, often having to work twice as hard to prove herself as competent to her employers. We were getting along, and we found we had common ground. I told her about an experience of being passed over for a job I&#8217;d interviewed for and finding out through mutual friends that the position had gone to a white woman my age with almost identical experience to me. I had felt the slap in the face of structural racism, the kind of thing you only hear about in statistics about black unemployment, but never hear about from the people affected by it.
> Then she said, <q>You don&#8217;t know if that was racism. How do you know it wasn&#8217;t something else?</q>
> Raising racism in a conversation is like flicking a switch. It doesn&#8217;t matter if it&#8217;s a person you&#8217;ve just met, or a person you&#8217;ve always felt safe and comfortable with. You&#8217;re never sure when a conversation about race and racism will turn into one where you were scared for your physical safety or social position.
> In the <cite class="periodical">Weekly Worker</cite> in 2014, socialist writer Charlie Winstanley wrote of his utter disdain at an argument about race that had taken place in his activist group.
> &#8230;who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice&#8230;
> Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.<footer>Martin Luther King, Jr.</footer>
> Later, she confides, <q>As I&#8217;ve become more conscious in terms of race and where I am in the world, they&#8217;ve become more distant&#8230;<br /> To be humble, and to learn that they are racist even if they don&#8217;t think that they are.<br /> I used to worry about not being black enough, but I&#8217;m starting to feel that I&#8217;m part of the diversity of blackness. There&#8217;s more than one way of being black.</q><footer>Jessica</footer>
> Rather than mixed-race relationships proving that society is over race, they prove that people&#8217;s actions often move faster than social progress.
> There&#8217;s nothing to suggest that a black child with a white parent, or who is adopted into a white family, won&#8217;t be on the receiving end of immeasurable love and support. But, having never experienced it, the parents might not be well equipped to deal with the racism their child will receive.
> It was with a cunning linguistic sleight of hand that the politicians insisted that considering a child&#8217;s race was actually fuelling racism&#8230;
> <q>I think white people get defensive when you call them white,</q> she tells me over Skype, <q>because they&#8217;ve internalised a message that goes it&#8217;s rude to point out somebody else&#8217;s race, and it&#8217;s dangerous territory because you might inadvertently be racist, because they could take offence at that mention of race. There&#8217;s a really bizarre circuitous logic that doesn&#8217;t touch on any of the underlying issues&#8230;<br /> I think what made me feel defensive is that I was embarrassed that there was a chance that someone knew something that I didn&#8217;t&#8230;</q><footer>Jennifer Krase</p>
> When I write about white people in this book, I don&#8217;t mean every individual white person. I mean whiteness as a political ideology. A school of thought that favours whiteness at the expense of those who aren&#8217;t.<footer>not until PAGE 80!</footer>
> Why don&#8217;t white people think they have a racial identity?
> It seems there is a belief among some white people that being accused of racism is far worse than actual racism.
> Freedom of speech means the freedom for opinions on race to clash. Freedom of speech doesn&#8217;t mean the right to say what you want without rebuttal, and racist speech and ideas need to be healthily challenged in the public sphere. White fear tries to stop this conversation from happening.
> This strength of feeling over classic stories being ruined wasn&#8217;t around when the Charles Dickens novel <cite>Oliver Twist</cite> was remade into a film in which the lead character was cast in the image of a cartoon cat.
> This line of thought demonstrates a real struggle to identify with black humanity in any conceivable way. To them we are an unidentifiable shifting mass, a simplistic, animalistic herd.
> And there&#8217;s an element of just speaking the truth of what it means to be a black woman in the UK that it would be ridiculous, as a white person, to not read that as implicating you.<footer>Lola Okolosie</footer>
> The politics of whiteness transcends the colour of anyone&#8217;s skin. It is an occupying force in the mind. It is a political ideology that is concerned with maintaining power through domination and exclusion. Anyone can buy into it, just like anyone can choose to challenge it. White women seem to take the phrase <q>white feminism</q> very personally, but it is at once everything and nothing to do with them.
> Misogyny is not a problem that can be solved with closed borders, nor a crash course in Received Pronunciation. It exists in the psyche of what it means to be a man in every country.
> I fear that, although white feminism is palatable to those in power, when it has won, things will look very much the same. Injustice will thrive, but there will be more women in charge of it.
> Feminism, at its best, is a movement that works to liberate all people who have been economically, socially and culturally marginalised by an ideological system that has been designed for them to fail. That means disabled people, black people, trans people, women and non-binary people, LGB people and working-class people. The idea of campaigning for equality must be complicated if we are to untangle the situation we&#8217;re in.
> Feminism needs to demand a world in which racist history is acknowledged and accounted for, in which reparations are distributed, in which race is completely deconstructed.
> I understand that these demands are utopian and unrealistic. But I think feminism has to be absolutely utopian and unrealistic, far removed from any semblance of the world we&#8217;re living in now. We have to hope for and envision something before agitating for it, rather than blithely giving up, citing reality, and accepting the way things are. After all, utopian ideals are as ideological as the political foundations of the world we&#8217;re currently living in. Above everything, feminism is a constant work in progress. We are all still learning.
> Women are expected to smile, swallow our feelings and be self-sacrificial.
> Not displaying anger wasn&#8217;t going to stop me being labelled as angry, so I thought: fuck it. I decided to speak my mind.
> There is no point in keeping quiet because you want to be liked.
> We should be rethinking the image we conjure up when we think of a working-class person. Instead of a white man in a flat cap, it&#8217;s a black woman pushing a pram.
> Affixing the word <q>white</q> to the phrase <q>working class</q> suggests that these people face structural disadvantage because they are white, rather than because they are working class.
> Things have switched from berating working-class people for daring to exist, to extending a hand of help to them as long as it&#8217;s in opposition to those grasping ethnic minorities. Sticking <q>white</q> in front of the phrase working class is used to make assumptions about race, work and poverty that compounds the currency-like power of whiteness.
> It&#8217;s about asking why whiteness has this reflexive need to define itself against immigrant bogey monsters in order to feel comfortable, safe and secure. Why am I saying one thing, and white people are hearing something completely different?<footer>perhaps it&#8217;s because you keep inventing your own definitions?</footer>
> White people, you need to talk to other white people about race&#8230;Talk to other white people who trust you.
> If you feel burdened by your unearned privilege, try to use it for something, and use it where it counts. But don&#8217;t be anti-racist for the sake of an audience. Being white and anti-racist in your private or professional life, where there&#8217;s very little praise to be found, is much more difficult, but ultimately more meaningful.
> We really need to be honest with ourselves, and recognise our own inherent biases, before we think about performing anti-racism for an audience.
> But I don&#8217;t want white guilt. Neither do I want to see white people wasting precious time profusely apologising rather than actively doing things. No useful movements for change have ever sprung out of fervent guilt.
> In a world where blunt, obvious acts are just the tip of the iceberg of racism, we need to describe the invisible monolith. Now, racism can be found in the way a debate is framed. Now, racism can be found in coded language. Attacking racist frame, form, functions and codes with no words to describe them can make you feel like you are the only one who sees the problem. We need to see racism as structural in order to see its insidiousness. We need to see how it seeps, like a noxious gas, into everything.

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title: '<cite class="book">Between Hell and Reason: Essays from the Resistance Newspaper <cite class="periodical">Combat</cite>, 1944&ndash;1947</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-11-13T14:52:17+00:00
url: /quotes/between-hell-and-reason/
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
We know today that there are no more islands and that borders are meaningless. We know that in a world which moves faster and faster, where the Atlantic can be crossed in less than a day and where Moscow can speak to Washington within a matter of hours, we are forces into either fraternity or complicity. The 1940s have taught us that an injury to a student in Prague strikes down simultaneously a worker in Paris, that the blood shed on the banks of a central European river brings a Texas farmer to spill his own blood in the Ardennes, which he sees for the first time. There is no suffering, no torture anywhere in the world which does not affect our everyday lives&#8230;<br /> We all know, then, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the new world order we seek can be neither national nor even continental, and certainly not Western or Eastern. It must be universal. We can no longer take hope form partial solutions or concessions. The compromise in which we live means anguish today and murder tomorrow.
</p><footer>
<cite class="article">International Democracy and Dictatorship</cite>, 26 November 1946</footer>
</blockquote>
> The clash of empires is already becoming secondary to the clash of civilizations. Everywhere the colonial peoples are demanding that their voices be heard. Perhaps in ten years, perhaps in fifty, the pre-eminence of Western civilization will be in question. We might as well recognize this now and admit these civilizations into the world parliament, so that its laws will be truly universal and a universal order will be established.<footer>
>
> <cite class="article">The World Goes Fast</cite>, 27 November 1946</footer>

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title: '<cite class="book">A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-11-30T14:35:18+00:00
url: /quotes/a-road-unforeseen-women-fight-the-islamic-state/
---
Glossary, pp 13&ndash;14
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
The more I learned about the Rojava cantons, the more I heard echoes in my mind of <cite class="book">The Lord of the Rings</cite>, Tolkien&#8217;s saga of a lust for power gone mad and a handful of people pitted against it in a battle that will decide the fate of the world. As their strategy council decides, <q>We must take a hard road, a road unforeseen. There lies our hope, if hope it be.</q> Only by destroying the ring of power, rather than trying to use it themselves, can Tolkien&#8217;s heroes defeat evil; only be destroying that metaphorical ring of power called the state, built on domination and ruled by force, do members of the Syrian and Turkish Kurdish liberation movement believe they can create societies based on equality, democracy, ecology, and mutual respect.
</p><footer>p 19</footer>
</blockquote>
> With few important exceptions, left-wing movements have been overwhelmingly led by men and served by women: men making speeches, women making coffee. As a result, the history of the Left is lopsided, reflecting the ideas, history, and experience of only half the species. Its theory does not accurately describe the world, and its practice does not prefigure any future society most of us would want to belong to. No wonder it has reached an impasse. How could a theory and practice based&mdash;at best&mdash;on the experience of only half the human race possibly be adequate? The famous Zen riddle asks, <q>What is the sound of one hand clapping?</q> It is the sound we have been hearing for the last hundred years, the sound of left-wing feminists beating their heads against the wall.<footer>p 34</footer>
> Referring to the role played by some Kurds [in the Armenian genocide] at that time, he said, <q>Our grandparents, incited by others, committed wrongs, but we, their grandchildren, will not repeat them.</q><footer>p 159</footer>
> Communes work in two ways. First, they resolve problems quickly and early&mdash;for example, a technical problem or a social one. Some jobs can be done in five minutes, but if you send it to the state, it gets caught in a bureaucracy. So we can solve issues quickly. The second way is political. If we speak about true democracy, decisions can&#8217;t be made from the top and go to the bottom, they have to be made at the bottom and then go up in degrees. There are also district councils and city councils, up to the canton. The principle is <q>few problems, many resolutions.</q> So that the government doesn&#8217;t remain up in the air, we try to fill the bottom of it.<footer>Cizire co-chair Cinar Salih, p 170</footer>
> This rule by terror was the model of an ideal society being held out to Sunni Muslims all over the world. The weak states of Iraq and Syria were unable to defeat it. Only when Daesh got to Kobane did it encounter a society with a political vision as strong as its own, based on diametrically opposed ideas.<footer> 239</footer>

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---
title: '<cite class="book">They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933&ndash;45</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-12-29T17:46:08+00:00
url: /quotes/they-thought-they-were-free/
---
<blockquote class="no-first-blockquote">
<p>
<em>While it lasts.</em> My ten Nazi friends, when I knew them ten years ago, had never believed that <q>it,</q> the thousand-year Reich, would outlive them&mdash;as it didn&#8217;t. Hitler got them to a pitch and held them there, screaming at them day in and day out for twelve years. They were uneasy through it all. If they believed in Nazism&mdash;as all of them did, in substantial part or in all of it&mdash;they still got what they could out of it while the getting was good. None of them was astounded when the getting turned bad.
</p><footer>p 9</footer>
</blockquote>
> But it was ten years ago, and twenty, that the United States Air Force (in its own words) <q>produced more casualties than any other military action in the history of the world</q> in its great fire raid on Tokyo, and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimpson, appalled by the absence of public protest in America, though <q>there was something wrong with a country where no one questioned</q> such acts committed in its name.<footer>quoting from
>
> <cite class="book">The Decision to Drop the Bomb</cite> (Giovannitti & Freed)</footer>
> It was what most Germans wanted&mdash;or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.
> He had a copy of Mein Kampf (who hadn&#8217;t?), but he had never opened it who had?).
> They were the Nazis, the little men to whom, if ever they voiced their own views outside their own circles, bigger men politely pretended to listen without ever asking them to elaborate.
> And in Kronenberg <q>nobody</q> (nobody my friends knew) went cold, nobody went hungry, nobody went ill and uncared for. For whom do men know? They know people of their own neighborhood, of their own station and occupation, of their own political (or nonpolitical) views, of their own religion and race.
> You and I leave <q>some sort of trouble on the streets</q> to the police; so did my friends in Kronenberg.
> Man doesn&#8217;t meet the State very often.
> So, in the body politic as in the body personal, nonresistance to the milder indulgences paves the way for nonresistance to the deadlier.
> One minded one&#8217;s own business in Germany, with or without a dictatorship. The random leisure which leads Americans into all sorts of afterhour byways, constructive, amusing, or ruinous, did not exist for most Germans. One didn&#8217;t go out of one&#8217;s way, on a day off, to <q>look for trouble</q>&mdash;there less than here. Germans were no more given to associating with nonconformist persons or organizations than we are. They engaged themselves in opposing the government much less than we do. Few Americans say <q>No</q> to the government&mdash;fewer Germans.
> None of my ten friends said <q>No</q> to the Nazi government, and only one of them, Teacher Hildebrandt, thought <q>No.</q>
> Those who came back from Buchenwald in the early years had promised&mdash;as every inmate of every German prison had always had to promise upon his release&mdash;not to discuss his prison experience. You should have broken your promise. You should have told your countrymen about it; you might, though the chances were all against you, have saved your country had you done so. But you didn&#8217;t. You told your wife, or your father, and swore them to secrecy. And so, although millions guessed, only thousands knew. Did you want to go back to Buchenwald, and to worse treatment this time? Weren&#8217;t you sorry for those who were left there? And weren&#8217;t you glad you were out?
> You look every man in the eye, and, though your eyes may be empty, they are clear. You are respected in the community. Why? Because your attitudes are the same as the community&#8217;s. But are the community&#8217;s attitudes respectable? That&#8217;s not the point.
> Men who did not know that they were slaves do not know that they have been freed.
> Moral indignation outside Germany was free, but it was scarce.
> The mortal choice which every German had to make&mdash;whether or not he knew he was making it&mdash;is a choice which we Americans have never had to confront. But personal and professional life confronts us with the same kind of choice, less mortally, to be sure, every day.
> The middle parties, between the two millstones, played no role at all between the two radicalisms. Their adherents were basically the Bürger, the bourgeois, the <q>nice</q> people who decide things by parliamentary procedure; and the politically indifferent; and the people who wanted to keep or, at worst, only modify the status quo.<footer>Herr Kessler, p 88</footer>
> They wanted a representative leader in place of unrepresentative representatives.
> If I diverted them, they came back to it. The one passion they seemed to have left was anti-Semitism, the one fire that warmed them still.
> An American may be helpless, but he doesn&#8217;t know it.
> What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even in the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security.<footer>The philologist, p 145</footer>
> The world you live in&mdash;your nation, your people&mdash;is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.<footer>The philologist, p 149</footer>
> Yes, it was always the excesses that we wished to oppose, rather than the whole program, the whole spirit that produced the first steps, A, B, C, and D, out of which the excesses were bound to come. It is so much easier to <q>oppose the excesses,</q> about which one can, of course, do nothing, than it is to oppose the whole spirit, about which one can do something every day.<footer>The philologist, p 152</footer>
> He himself, Hofmeister, had violated the <q>law,</q> that is, what his superiors told him to do, by revealing to the pastor that there would be a Gestapo man present, and the pastor was willing to jeopardize an innocent man along with himself. <q>It was like a slap in the face,</q> said Hofmeister, and I saw that even a policeman might have a hard time of it in the police state.<footer>p 182</footer>
> National Socialism, made in Germany, out of the German character, is the worst thing that modern man has made.
> Worse, certainly, than Communism; for it is not the performance of political systems which justifies or condemns them, but their principles. Communism, in principle, supposes itself to represent the wretched of the earth and bars no man by nature from Communist redemption; the Nazis, in categorical contrast, took themselves to be the elite of the earth and consigned whole categories of men to perdition by their nature. The distinctions between these two totalitarianisms may not command much interest in the present temper of the Western Christian; they are still distinctions.
> There is (or, until very recently, was) no Jewish nation to suffer pressure and put consequent pressure on both its members and the outside world. It is the individual Jew who is both object and subject of the pressures which, in Germany&#8217;s case, are sustained and exerted by the nation.
> Instead of saying that the Jews were the <q>decomposing element</q> in Imperial Rome&mdash;a favorite citation of the Nazis&mdash;Mommsen should have said that the Jew was able, because he had to be, to adjust himself to a decomposing, as to any other kind, of Rome.
> &#8230;only the Germans could have been unbored by Hitler&#8230;
> National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists.
> The besieged intellect operates furiously; the general intelligence atrophies. Theories are evolved of the grandest order and the greatest complexity, requiring only the acceptance of the nonworlds, the Ideas, in which they arise. The two extremist doctrines that have seized hold of our time&mdash;Marx&#8217;s, denying that there is anything in man, and Freud&#8217;s, denying that there is anything outside&mdash;are Made in Germany. If you will only accept Marx&#8217;s <q>human nature has no reality</q> or Freud&#8217;s <q>conscience is nothing but the dread of the community,</q> you will find them both irresistibly scientific.
> In such exquisitely fabricated towers a man may live (or even a whole society), but he must not look over the edge or he will see that there is no foundation.
> The way to win wars is to hit the pictures on the worker&#8217;s, the miner&#8217;s, the soldier&#8217;s parlor wall.
> Now, what makes civilizing so hard is that, even if the primitives recognize their own condition as primitive (which I don&#8217;t know that they do), they do not always recognize that of the civilized as superior.
> Take the pressure off them, and they might claim that they won the last war. But that would be better than their claiming that they will win the next war.

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title: '<cite class="book">Blessed is the Flame: An introduction to concentration camp resistance and anarcho-nihilism</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2021-01-25T12:17:18+00:00
url: /quotes/blessed-is-the-flame/
---
> If this were Nazi Germany expanding out before me, how would I live my life?
>
> What if I were in my grandmother&#8217;s position in 1943?
> &#8230;that reflective spirit of resistance rooted in the basic existential understanding that recalcitrance is simply a more meaningful and joyous form of existence than docility.
> For a variety of reasons history has exceptionalized this particular genocide, but I&#8217;ve come to understand it as part of an unbroken continuum of domination that neither began nor ended with Hitler.
> Such positive aspirations offer nothing more than a dangling carrot for us to pursue in a situation in which the stick, string, and prize all need to be destroyed.
> In the end, the resistance organizations spent years organizing for a general uprising that never happened. Instead, a group of desperate, informally-organized inmates staged what would be the only coordinated insurrection in the history of Auschwitz.
> Many contemporary anarchists have sought to sever themselves completely from the model of formal organizations and to orient themselves towards more wild and joyous forms of coordinated action.
> Rather than spend our lives preparing for a mass awakening that likely will not happen, better to attack now and see where it takes us.
> That being said, while the informal organizational methods being experimented with by nihilists are exciting and have clearly facilitated a great deal of incendiary action, they also carry with them inevitable shortcomings and pitfalls, not least of which is the sort of solipsism that results in a Greenpeace office getting bombed.
> Ultimately somebody along the line is going to have to make shady ethical choices, regardless of organizational model.
> The lessons of the Holocaust were well learned. We will walk through the very last door as long as it is the easiest of a well managed set of choices.
> Anarchism is fundamentally posed to challenge many cruel optimisms held by society, and anarchism is in turn having its own cruel optimisms challenged by nihilism. Nihilism is the incredulous voice whispering impossible questions.
> Nothing is guaranteed to work, yet we attack regardless. We do so naked, having shed the rags of morality, ideology, and politics that had accumulated over time. We confront this world raw, in all its horrifying glory. We negate every truth and rule and we proceed with a spirit of incendiary experimentation. We dream big, expect little, and celebrate every moment of rupture. We take every opportunity to ensure that those in power lose sleep and that they functionaries have miserable jobs. We set our lives to ripping up the geraniums that line the extermination camp paths, pissing in the gears of society&#8217;s machinery, and when all else fails, we will fallow in the footsteps of those who spent their final minutes in the gas chambers singing and fucking.

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title: '<cite class="book">The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2021-01-27T12:17:18+00:00
url: /quotes/the-procrastination-equation-how-to-stop-putting-things-off-and-start-getting-stuff-done/
---
> &#8230;the guiltless leisure you can enjoy when your daily tasks are done.
> With all the camaraderie, alcohol, sex, and&mdash;headiest of all temptations&mdash;the freedom to enjoy them all, university can lure us into the unregulated state of bliss where the liberties of adulthood are combined with only a minority of the responsibilities.
> Businesses respond to our dominant desires, so there is no coercion or conspiracy here, just the invisible hand of the market building a limbic system wonderland.
> Materialism and consumerism are merely emergent properties of our neurobiology given free reign in a free market.
> So here&#8217;s the situation. Procrastination isn&#8217;t just battling a hundred million years of evolution. It is battling a hundred million years of evolution that are being actively exploited at every turn by the very fabric of our society.
> I now gathered that procrastination in excess was, or had become, a marked feature in Coleridge&#8217;s daily life. Nobody who knew him ever thought of depending on any appointment he might make. Spite of his uniformly honourable intentions, nobody attached any weight to his assurances in re future [in regard to the future]. Those who asked him to dinner, or any other party, as a matter of course sent a carriage for him, and went personally or by proxy to fetch him; and as to letters, unless the address was in some female hand that commanded his affectionate esteem, he tossed them all into one general dead-letter bureau, and rarely, I believe, opened them at all.<footer>Letter from Coleridge&#8217;s friend</footer>
> If over the breakfast table you call the CEO mom and the Chairman of the board dad, you are likely going to be wealthy no matter what your personal vices are.
> Other chronic procrastinators might end up in a career&mdash;and there are a few&mdash;where it is very difficult to procrastinate&mdash;careers with built-in daily goals, like sales or journalism. With everything due today, the leeway to procrastinate is exceedingly slim.
> It is a big world and you need to experience at least some of it.
> He that has not mastery over his inclinations, he that knows not how to resist the importunity of present pleasure or pain, for the sake of what reason tells him is fit to be done, wants the true principle of virtue and industry, and is in danger never to be good for anything.<footer>John Locke</footer>
> Despite its disastrous track records, thought suppression is a popular technique used to combat&mdash;ineffectively&mdash;everything from homosexual urges to racial stereotypes.
> Your second line of defense is to run a &#8216;smear campaign&#8217; on whatever features your limbic system finds desirable.
> To get motivated, they need a clear and close finish line.
> If you protect your routine, eventually it will protect you.
Giloviqh T & Medvec V.H. (1996) The experience of regret
Roese NJ & Summervilla A (2005) What we regret&#8230;and why
King LA & Hicks JA (2007) Whatever happened to &#8216;what might have been&#8217;?

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title: '<cite class="book">La Peste</cite>/<cite class="book">The Plague</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2021-05-19T19:34:36+00:00
url: /quotes/the-plague/
---
&#8216;Without raising his voice Rieux said that he knew nothing about that, but that it was the language of a man weary of the world in which he lived, yet who still had some feeling of his fellow men and was determined for his part to reject any injustice and any compromise&#8217;
p 12
&#8216;As long as each doctor was not aware of more than two or three cases, no one thought to do anything. But, after all, someone only had to decide to do an addition, and the tally was disturbing.&#8217;
p 29
&#8216;When war breaks out people say: &#8216;It won&#8217;t last, it&#8217;s too stupid.&#8217; And war is certainly too stupid, but that doesn&#8217;t prevent it from lasting.&#8217;
p 30
&#8221;Calculations like that are meaningless, doctor, and you know it as well as I do. A hundred years ago, an outbreak of plague killed all the inhabitants of a town in Persia, except the man who washed bodies, who had carried on with his job throughout.&#8217;
&#8216;He got his one chance in three, that&#8217;s all&#8217;, Rieux said.&#8217;
Tarrou & Rieux, p 100
&#8216;At the same time as aid by air or by road, every evening on the airwaves or in the press, pitying or admiring comments rained down on this now solitary town; and, every time, the doctor was irritated by the epic note or the tone of a prize-giving address. Of course he knew that the concern was genuine, but it could only express itself in the conventional language in which men try to explain what unites them with the rest of humanity. Such language could not be applied to the little, daily efforts of Grand, for example, and could not describe Grand&#8217;s significance in the midst of the plague.&#8217;
p 105-6
&#8221;I&#8217;m glad to find out that he is better than his sermon.&#8217;
&#8216;Everyone is like that,&#8217; said Tarrou. &#8216;You just need to give them the opportunity&#8217;.
He smiled and winked at Rieux.
&#8216;It&#8217;s my task in life, that: to give opportunities.&#8221;
Rieux and Tarrou, p 115
&#8221;What is decency?&#8217; Rambert asked, suddenly serious.
&#8216;In general, I can&#8217;t say, but in my case I know that it consists in doing my job.&#8217;
Rambert & Rieux, p 125
&#8216;The trouble is, there is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence and, if only because they last so long, great misfortunes are monotonous. In the memory of those who have lived through them, the dreadful days of the plague do not seem like vast flames, cruel and magnificent, but rather like an endless trampling that flattened everything in its path.&#8217;
p 138
&#8216;Other man will make history. I know too that I clearly cannot judge those others. There is a quality which is lacking in me to make a reasonable murderer.&#8217;
Tarrou p 195
&#8221;Perhaps,&#8217; the doctor said. &#8216;But you know, I feel more solidarity with the defeated than with saints. I don&#8217;t think I have any taste for heroism and sainthood. What interests me is to be a man.&#8221;
Rieux p 197
&#8216;Rieux knew what the old man was thinking at that moment as he wept, and he thought the same: that this world without love was like a dead world and that there always comes a time when one grows tired of prisons, work and courage, and yearns for the face of another human being and wondering, affectionate heart.&#8217;
p 201
&#8216;But if that is what it meant to win the game, how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, and deprived of what one hopes. This was no doubt how Tarrou had lived and he was aware of the sterility of a life without illusions. There is no peace without hope and Tarrou, who denied men the right to condemn anyone, yet who knew that no one can prevent himself from condemning and that even victims can sometimes be executioners &#8211; Tarrou had lived in a state of turmoil and contradiction, and he had never known hope. Is this why he longed for sainthood and sought peace in the service of men?&#8217;
p 225
> <q>Question: how can one manage not to lose time? Answer: experience it at its full length. Means: spend days in the dentist&#8217;s waiting-room on an uncomfortable chair; live on one&#8217;s balcony on a Sunday afternoon; listen to lectures in a language that one does not understand, choose the most roundabout and least convenient routes on the railway (and, naturally, travel standing up); queue at the box-office for theatres and so on and not take one&#8217;s seat; etc.</q><footer>Jean Tarrou</footer>
> <q class="guillemets">Question : comment faire pour ne pas perdre son temps? Réponse : l&#8217;éprouver dans toute sa longueur. Moyens : passer des journées dans l&#8217;anticambre d&#8217;un dentiste après-midi ; écouter des conférences dans une langue qu&#8217;on ne comprend pas, choisir les itinéraires de chemin de fer les plus longs et les moins commodes et voyager debout naturellement ; faire la queue aux guichets des spectacles et ne pas prendre sa place, etc. </q><footer>Jean Tarrou</footer>

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title: <cite class="book">Nestor Makhno &mdash; Anarchy's Cossack</cite>
subtitle: The Struggle for Free Soviets in the Ukraine 1917&ndash;1921
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: -001-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
draft: true
url: '/?post_type=quotes&p=6708'
---
&#8216;The communism to which we aspire assumes that there is individual freedom, equality, self-management, initiative, creativity and plenty&#8230;We have had the chance and we have striven to build a society on the libertarian principles of non-violence, but the Bolsheviks have not allowed us to proceed with this. They have turned the clash of ideas into a struggle against men. Not only has the entire State apparatus, despised by the people, with its functionaries and its prisons and so on, not been liquidated, but it has simply been re-cast. The Bolsheviks have proclaimed might as their only right.&#8217;
&#8211; Makhno, from \_Nestor Mackno&#8217;s Footsteps\_ p 570
&#8216;All the rest of the group&#8217;s militants being outlawed, it was decided that Makhno would adopt a &#8220;line of behavior&#8221; i.e., that he should remain within the law.&#8217;
&#8211; pp 23-24
&#8216;Also he noticed the difference in treatment doled out by the administration in its dealings with intellectual and political &#8220;bigwigs&#8221; on the one hand and to mere workers and peasants on the other and likewise the attitude of the former lot of inmates towards the latter. Whereas the latter were frequently beaten, the intellectuals had no hesitation in shaking the hands of those responsible for such maltreatment; likewise, they had no problem in securing the privilege of not being oblige4d to carry their irons with them all the time. They worked in the workshops that were interesting and above all monitored the inmates&#8217; internal administration very closely, which meant that all help from the outside passed through their hands and that they shared out this booty as they saw fit. In this way Makhno grasped once and for all that &#8220;&#8230;such is the psychology of these intellectuals who seek from the socialist idea adn from their militancy only the means of ensconcing themselves as masters and governors. These gentlemen wind up unable to understand anymore that the offering of handshakes and the making of gifts in kind of in cash to torturers who, pocketing these gifts, go off to beat up the co-religionists of the very people who have just greeted them so amicably is intolerable.&#8221;&#8216;
&#8211; pp 30-31
&#8216;All his life, Makhno was to regret the chronic disorganization of anarchists and its baneful impact, for all their numbers and good qualities, their inability to work to make hard and fast reality of their schemes of emancipation.&#8217;
&#8211; p 37
&#8216;In short, his responsibilities were enormous but his power small. In that he was indeed the consistent libertarian militant.&#8217;
&#8211; p 40

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title: '<cite class="book">The Wretched of the Earth</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: -001-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
draft: true
url: '/?post_type=quotes&p=6741'
---
&#8216;What does Fanon care whether you read his work or not? It is to his brothers that he denounces our old tricks, and he is sure we have no more up our sleeves&#8217;
&#8211; Sartre, preface p11
&#8216;Such a colonized intellectual, dusted over by colonial culture, will in the same way discover the substance of village assemblies, the cohesion of people&#8217;s committees, and the extra-ordinary fruitfulness of local meetings and groupments.&#8217;
-p37
&#8216;But at the beginning of his association with the people the native intellectual over-stresses details and thereby comes to forget that the defeat of colonialism is the real object of the struggle. Carried away by the multitudinous aspects of the fight, he tends to concentrate on local tasks, performed with enthusiasm but almost always too solemly. He fails to see the whole of the movement all the time. He introduces the idea of special disciplines, of specialized functions, of departments within the terrible stone crusher, the fierce mixing machine which a popular revolution is.&#8217;
-p38-9
&#8216;A world divided into compartments, a motionless, Manichaeistic world, a world of statues: the statue of the general who carried out the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge: a world which is sure of itself, which crushes with its stones the backs flayed by whips: this is the colonial world.&#8217;
-p40
&#8216;The supernatural, magical powers reveal themselves as essentially personal; the settler&#8217;s powers are infinitely shrunken, stamped with their alien origin. We no longer really need to fight against them since what counts is the frightening enemy created by myths. We perceive that all is settled by a permanent confrontation on the phantasmic plane.&#8217;
-p43
&#8216;They no longer limit themselves to regional horizons, for they have caught on to the fact that they live in an atmosphere of international stress.&#8217;
-p60
&#8216;The group requires that each individual perform an irrevocable action. In Algeria, for example, where almost all the men who called on the people to join in the national struggle were condemned to death or searched for by the French police, confidence was proportional to the hopelessness of each case. You could be sure of a new recruit when he could no longer go back into the colonial system&#8230;Violence is thus seen as comparable to a royal pardon. The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence.&#8217;
-pp67-68
&#8216;The Mother: And I had dreamed of a son to close his mother&#8217;s eyes.
The Rebel: But I chose to open my son&#8217;s eyes upon another sun.
The Mother: O my son, son of evil and unlucky death&#8212;
The Rebel: Mother of living and splendid death,
The Mother: Because he has hated too much,
The Rebel: Because he has too much loved.
The Mother: Spare me, I am choking in your bonds. I bleed from your wounds.
The Rebel: And the world does not spare me&#8230;There is not anywhere in the world a poor creature who&#8217;s been lynched or tortured in whom I am not murdered and humiliated&#8230;&#8217;
-Aimé Cesaire, \_Les Armes miraculeuses\_ pp133-7
&#8216;It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that is understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from above. But if you speak the language of every day; if you are not obsessed by the perverse desire to spread confusion and to rid yourself of the people, then you will realize that the masses are quick to seize every shade of meaning and to learn all the tricks of the trade. If recourse is had to technical language, this signifies that it has been decided to consider the masses as uninitiated. Such a language is hard put to it to hide the lecturer&#8217;s wish to cheat the people and to leave them out of things&#8217;
&#8216;Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand.&#8217;
-p 152
&#8216;The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion, in the true understanding of their interests and in knowing who are their enemies.&#8217;
-p 154
&#8216;In an under-developed country, experience proves that the important thing is not that three hundred people form a plan and decide upon carrying it out, but that the whole people plan and decide even if it takes them twice or three times as long. The fact is that the time taken up by explaining, the time &#8220;lost&#8221; in treating the worker as a human being, will be caught up in the execution of the plan. People must know where they are going, and why.&#8217;
-pp 155-6

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title: '<cite class="book">Real England</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: -001-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
draft: true
url: '/?post_type=quotes&p=6754'
---
&#8216;Commitment to place and to culture can provide a bulwark against the advance of the global consumer machine. Without that bulwark, we are left exposed.&#8217;
&#8211; p 15
&#8216;One classic if that the old squire&#8217;s house is now being tarted up by a \_Sunday Times\_ Rich List developer. He&#8217;s put a wall round the house so that you can&#8217;t see the house or the garden. He even knocked the rooks&#8217; nests out of the trees. They were noisy and scruffy, you see: not the done thing. I got the police onto him and they gave him a warning because it was against the Wildlife and Countryside Act. The rooks immediately rebuilt. I hope they shit on his car.&#8217;
&#8211; Robin Page, p 159
&#8221;We&#8217;re doing a Noah&#8217;s Ark job, really,&#8217; he says. &#8216;Somebody has to.&#8221;
&#8211; Derek Tolman, p 242
&#8216;In twenty years&#8217; time, when all of Delhi&#8217;s street vendors, tailors, small shopkeepers, kettle-menders, cobblers, machinists, hawkers and cooks are but a memory, and in their place is a productive, modern, profitable, sterile and inhuman maze of plate glass and chain stores, then the success of India&#8217;s development and modernisation will be hymned by business editors and politicians. All of the gains will have been tallied up and none of the losses, except in the hearts of those who understand what is missing. The fields will have been cleared of weeds, the butterflies which remain will be confined to the hedge banks, and India, according to all the benchmarks that matter, will be a better place.&#8217;
&#8211; pp 267-8
&#8216;Delhi, England, Beijing, Prague, Melbourne, anywhere else you care to look&#8230; this &#8216;development&#8217; &#8211; this beast which crushes all before it and calls that crushing progress &#8211; is the real enemy now. It existed before Marx, before Adam Smith, before trades unions, before the stock market. Back in the 1830s, Cobbett called it simply &#8216;the Thing&#8217;, but it was ancient even then.
This is not about Left versus Right. This is about the individual versus the crushing, dehumanising machine, whether that machine is represented by the profit-hungry corporation, the edict-issuing state or &#8211; today&#8217;s global reality &#8211; a powerful alliance of the two. The machine may come at us from &#8216;Left&#8217; or &#8216;Right&#8217;; the twentieth century has given us many examples of both variants. But wherever it comes from, it always overshadows any mere individual who stands near it.
If Cobbett were here today, he&#8217;d recognise the Thing immediately; grown bigger and smarter than in his day, but the same creature nonetheless. The government wants your fingerprints on a central database. Tesco wants to know exactly what you buy and when. Subway wants your local high street. CCTV cameras shout at you in public. Millionaires buy up the countryside. Corporations privatise the streets. Legislation forces the little guys out of business but doesn&#8217;t touch the clones. Everywhere you look, the results are the same &#8211; top-heavy, selfish, elephantine power is crushing the life out of people and places. The Thing is still with us, and it&#8217;s still hungry.&#8217;
&#8211; p 269
&#8216;It seems to me that, though the many problems I encountered on my journeys were diverse, complex and often very place-specific., there was one overall principle which tied them together; at a local level, people did not have enough power. If this is the problem, then the solution suggests itself very clearly: re-localising that power, and trusting people to use it.
This would provide us with any number of new possibilities. Most crucially, perhaps, it would allow people to feel what they should have been feeling all long &#8211; a sense of ownership of their place and their community. Then they could begin to feel again that political action is worthwhile, because they do will actually make a difference: they have the ability to re-shape their place as they want it, not as the distant demands of business require it.
I have seen, in many places, what happens when communities are given &#8211; or take &#8211; real power at local level, things which would have been thought impossible start to happen. For years, politicians have been biting their nails over the &#8216;apathy&#8217; of the electorate. Their proposed answers &#8211; voting by text message, anyone? &#8211; have often been laughable, because they have been asking the wrong questions. People are not apathetic. They&#8217;re just sick of voting. Locally, the people they vote for have been stripped of so many powers by central government that it&#8217;s hardly worth the bother. Nationally, you can choose from one of two groups of market fundamentalists in suits. The things that aren&#8217;t counted will continue to be overlooked, and what happens to your neighbourhood will continue to be out of your hands. Why bother?
The urgent task is to tame the Thing; to bring power back home, to local level.&#8217;
&#8211; pp 276-7

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title: Ghosts of My Life
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: -001-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
draft: true
url: '/?post_type=quotes&p=6759'
---
&#8216;The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations&#8230;The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;The Slow Cancellation of the Future&#8221;, p 8
&#8220;Resisting Left Melancholy&#8221; Wendy Brown
&#8216;Brown&#8217;s left melancholic is a depressive who believes he is realistic; someone who no longer has any expectation that his desire for radical transformation could be achieved, but who doesn&#8217;t recognise that he has given up.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid, p 23
&#8216;&#8230;the shift that Brown describes &#8211; from a left that confidently assumed the future belonged to it, to a left that makes a virtue of its own incapacity to act &#8211; seems to exemplify the transition from desire to drive. The kind of melancholia I&#8217;m talking about, by contrast, consists not in giving up on desire but in refusing to yield. It consists, that is to say, in a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call &#8220;reality&#8221; &#8211; even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid, p 24
&#8216;the second kind of melancholia that hautological melancholia must be distinguished from is what Paul Gilroy calls &#8220;postcolonial melancholia&#8221;. Gilroy defines this melancholia in terms of an avoidance; it is about evading &#8220;the painful obligations to work through the grim details of imperial and colonial history and to transform paralyzing guilt into a productive shame that would be conducive to the building of a multicultural nationality that is no longer phobic about the prospect of exposure to either strangers or otherness.&#8221; It comes out of a &#8220;loss of a fantasy of omnipotence&#8221;. Like Brown&#8217;s left melancholy, then, postcolonial melancholia is a disavowed form of melancholia: it&#8217;s &#8220;signature combination&#8221;, Gilroy writes, is that of &#8220;manic elation with misery, self-loathing, and ambivalence.&#8221; The postcolonial melancholic doesn&#8217;t (just) refuse to accept change; at some level, he refuses to accept that change has happened at all. He incoherently holds on to the fantasy of omnipotence by experiencing change only as decline and failure, for which, naturally, the immigrant other must be blamed (the incoherence here is obvious: if the postcolonial melancholic were really omnipotent, how could he be harmed by the immigrant?)&#8217;
&#8211; ibid, p 24
&#8216;Michael Hardy and Antonio Negri are right when they say that the revolutionary take on race, gender and sexuality struggles goes far beyond the demand that different identities be recognised. Ultimately, it is about the dismantling of identity. The &#8220;revolutionary process of the abolition of identity, we should keep in mind, is monstrous, violent, and traumatic. Don&#8217;t try to save yourself &#8211; in fact, your \_self has\_, to be sacrificed! This does not mean that liberation casts us into an indifferent sea with no objects of identification, but rather the existing identities will no longer serve as anchors.&#8221; While Hardt and Negri are correct to warn of the traumatic dimensions of this transformation, as they are also aware, it also has its joyful aspects. Throughout the 20th century, music culture was a probe that played a major role in preparing the population to \_enjoy\_ a future that was no longer white, male or heterosexual, a future in which the relinquishing of identities that were in any case poor fictions would be a blessed relief.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid, pp 27&#8211;8
&#8216;Capital can never openly admit that it is a system based on inhuman rapacity; the Terminator can never remove its human mask.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Ghosts of My Life: Goldie, Japan, Tricky&#8221;, p 31
&#8216;[Britain is] a country that seemed to to have given up rationing only reluctantly.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division&#8221;, p 50
&#8216;&#8230;the true Schopenhauerian moments are those in which you achieve your goals, perhaps realise your long-cherished heart&#8217;s desire &#8211; and feel cheated, empty, no, more &#8211; of it less? &#8211; than ampty, voided. Joy Division allways sounded as if they had experienced one too many of those desolating voidings, so that they coudl no longer be lured back onto the merry-go-round. They know that satiation wasn&#8217;t succeeded by tristesse, it was itself, immediately, tristesse. Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn&#8217;t want really want[sic] what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid, p 61
&#8216;&#8221;What do you think spies are, moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They&#8217;re not, they&#8217;re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me,&#8221; Burton&#8217;s Leamas tells his lover, Liz, after it has been revealed that they were pawns in a complex plot hatched by Control and Smiley. It is the beyond-good-and-evil agent, the one who acts without performing complex moral calculations, the one who cannot belong to the &#8220;normal&#8221; world, who allows ordinary folk to sleep easily. Yet duty is only the pretext; there is also the matter of the deep libidinal lure of this no-man&#8217;s-land for outsiders like Leamas and Smiley.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Smiley&#8217;s Game: \_Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy\_&#8221;, p 70
&#8216;A secret sadness lurks behind the 21st century&#8217;s forced smile. This sadness concerns hedonism itself, and it&#8217;s no surprise that it is in hip-hop &#8211; a genre that has become increasingly aligned with consumerist pleasure over the past 20-odd years &#8211; that this melancholy has registered most deeply. Drake and Kanye West are both morbidly fixated on exploring the miserable hollowness at the core of super-affluent hedonism. No longer motivated by hip-hop&#8217;s drive to conspicuously consume &#8211; they long ago acquired anything they could have wanted &#8211; Drake and West instead dissolutely cycle through easily available pleasures, feeling a combination of frustaration, anger, and self-disgust, aware that something is missing, but unsure exactly what it is.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Another Grey World: Darkstar, James Blake, Kanye West, Drake and &#8216;Party Hauntology'&#8221;, p 175
&#8216;Once those space are enclosed, practically all of the city&#8217;s energy is put into paying the mortgage or the rent. There&#8217;s no time to experiment, to journey without already knowing where you will end up. Your aims and objectives have to be stated up front&#8230;Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there&#8217;s no work to do. If neoliberalism&#8217;s magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fantacism of productivism inw hich nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;&#8216;Always Yearning for the Time that Just Eluded Us&#8217; &#8211; Introduction to Laura Oldfield Ford&#8217;s \_Savage Messiah\_ (Verso, 2011)&#8221;, pp 186&#8211;7

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title: Conflictual Wisdom
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: -001-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
draft: true
url: '/?post_type=quotes&p=6763'
---
&#8216;What does it mean to grow older as an anarchist; feeling the same discontent, yet, growing to see even more confusing challenges in not surrendering to it?&#8217;
&#8216;&#8230;I am not fighting just to feel free in my life, but to be free&#8230;&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;To My Comrades&#8221; callout
&#8216;Which side of history will you die on?!&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;A Second Try&#8221; callout
&#8216;Capitalism isn&#8217;t winning. It already won. And anarchists are the ultimate losers and have to play [a] most tragic role in this farce.&#8217;
&#8211; Comrade Grusha, &#8220;Hello, My Dear Comrade!&#8221;
&#8216;The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.&#8217;
&#8211; Anonymous, &#8220;Light and Love to You Comrade&#8221;
&#8216;We spend more time reminiscing then[sic] plotting because we all know.&#8217;
&#8211; Betty, &#8220;My Love May Be Dormant, But It Ain&#8217;t Dead&#8221;
&#8216;There are going to be times where our actions in the streets help crack open spaces where people can see a different way of relating, or they can experience, even for a moment, a feeling of freedom.&#8217;
&#8211; Wiley, &#8220;OK Well, Enough of the Ramble&#8221;
&#8216;Probably nothing, but possibly everything.
And those are the best odds I can expect to play if I am in the habit of believing in troubling things like freedom. I might never know the results of what we do, but I have trouble thinking they could be worse than if we had done nothing at all.&#8217;
&#8211; Pat the Bunny
&#8216;I don&#8217;t participate in anarchist struggle because I think I can save the world.&#8217;
&#8216;I don&#8217;t participate in anarchist struggle because I think I can save the world. I fight because I know that one day the whole world will be destroyed&#8212;the earth will be consumed by the sun, leaving only ash&#8212;and when that day comes, I want the story that ends to be a story of beauty and tragedy and resistance to tyranny. I want the story we live to be a story of joy and courage. I fight becaus I know that there is no happily ever after, there is no salvation or revolution waiting for us at the end of history, there is just what we do today. That is all the beauty and meaning in the world that there will ever be.&#8217;
&#8216;In a cyclical narrative, the question is not whether you will win, but which side you want to be on, which role you want to play.&#8217;
&#8211; Anonymous, &#8220;In a Cyclical Narrative, the Question is Not Whether You Will Win&#8221;
&#8216;My twenty-year-old self wasn&#8217;t wrong when I concluded that an uncertain future was more desirable than the scripted life of mediocrity offered to me by success under capitalism.&#8217;
&#8211; Anonymous, &#8220;Changes: An Organizer Reflects&#8221; (Peak Magazine, vol 53 Issue 4 Winter 2014)
&#8216;Individuals choosing the convenience of rejoining society as a traitor over prison for not cooperating humiliates our struggle, implying that it is possible to live a life in whic world as we know it after choosing to understand it for the vile authoritarian nightmare it is, and due to convenience; betraying such a position and those who share it.&#8217;
&#8211; Anonymous, &#8220;For a Community that Can Overcome Trauma and Defeat Repression&#8221;

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title: Gormenghast Trilogy
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: -001-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
draft: true
url: '/?post_type=quotes&p=6730'
---
\## Titus Groan
&#8216;Glorious&#8217;, said Steerpike, &#8216;is a dictionary word. We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect. In dead and shackled language, my dears, you _are_ glorious, but oh, to give vent to a brand new sound that might convince you of what I really think of you, as you sit there in your purple splendour, side by side! But no, it is impossible. Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia. Dead words defy me. I can make no sound, dear ladies, that is apt.&#8217;
&#8216;You could try,&#8217; said Clarice. &#8216;We aren&#8217;t busy,&#8217;
&#8212;pg 207
\## Gormenghast
&#8216;There was immediate agreement about this. Like one man they [the professors] saw an even lazier future open out its indolent vistas before them&#8217;
&#8212;pg 456
&#8216;The idea that any one of them [the professors&#8217; should get married seemed to them ludicrously funny. It was not that they felt themselves unworthy, far from it. It was that such a thing belonged to another world.&#8217;
&#8212;pg 465
&#8216;The fanaticism of his [Barquentine] loyalty to the House of Groan had far outstripped his interest or concern for the living &#8211; the members of the Line itself. The Countess, Fuschia and Titus were mere links to him in the blood-read, the imperial chain &#8211; nothing more. It was the chain that mattered, not the links. It was not the living metal, but the immeasurable iron with its patina of sacred dust. It was the Idea that obsessed him and not the embodiment. He moved in a hot sea of vindication, a lust of loyalty.&#8217;
&#8212;pg 489
&#8216;This was not a habit with him [Steerpike]. He had no habits in that sort of way. He did what he wanted to do. He did what furthered his plans. It getting up at five in the morning would lead to something he coveted, then it was the most natural thing in the world for him to rise at that hour.&#8217;
&#8212;pg 492
&#8216;That but few of the Professors had ever tasted the heady mead of youth in no way dulled the contours of their self-portraits which they were not painting of themselves.&#8217;
&#8212;pg 540
&#8216;&#8230;whispered Flannelcat, who had waited for a long while for the moment when by coincidence he would both have the courage to say something and have something to say.&#8217;
&#8212;pg 544
&#8216;To his [Bellgrove&#8217;s] mind an armchair was something to curl up in, or to drape oneself across. It was a thing for human delectation. It was not built to be perched on.&#8217;
&#8212;pg 662
\## Titus Alone
&#8216;The fox-like man (a narrow-chested creature with reddish hair above his ears, a very sharp nose and a brain far to large for him to manage with comfort) replied:&#8217;
&#8212;pg 789
&#8216;Beautiful policeman,&#8217; said Muzzlehatch. &#8216;You are exceeding your duty. This is a party &#8211; or it was &#8211; but you are making something vile out of it.&#8217;
Muzzlehatch worked his shoulders to and fro and shut his eyes.
&#8216;Don&#8217;t you ever have a holiday from crime? Do you never pick up the world as a child picks up a crystal globe &#8211; a thing of many colours? Do you never love this ridiculous world of ours? The wicked and the good of it? The thieves and the angels of it? The all of it? Throbbing, dear policeman, in your hand? And knowing how all this is inevitably so, and that without the dark of life you would be out on your ear? Yet see how you take it. Passports, visas, identification papers &#8211; does all this mean so much to your official mind that you must needs bring the filthy stink of it to a party? Open the gates of your brain then, policeman dear, and let a small sprat through.&#8217;
&#8212;pg 793
&#8216;So Titus fled from Juno. Out of the garden and down the riverside road he kept on running. A sense of both shame and liberation filled him as he ran. Shame that he had deserted his mistress after all the kindness and love she had showered on him; and liberation in finding himself alone, with no one to weigh him down with affection.&#8217;
&#8212;pg 831
&#8216;I have deserted Juno.&#8217;
&#8216;Deserted her?&#8217;
&#8216;Yes.&#8217;
&#8216;It had to happen. She is too good for males.&#8217;
&#8212;pg 834
&#8216;She was my everything. But like the damned creature that I inescapably am, I swapped her for the freedom of my limbs. For solitude which I eat as though it were food. And if you like, for animals&#8230;&#8217;
&#8212;ibid
&#8216;Hurt my feelings! Ha ha! Ha ha! I am a kind of crocodile on end. I have no feelings. As for you. Get on with life. Eat it up. Travel. Make journeys in your mind. Make journeys on your feet. To prison with you in a filthy garb! To glory with you in a golden car! Revel in loneliness. This is only a city. This is no place to halt.&#8217;
&#8212;ibid
&#8216;He [sober Carter] keeps his partner under observation, for Crack-Bell is apt to become too much of a good thing.
Yes, Crack-Bell is happy. Life to him is a case of &#8216;now&#8217; and nothing but &#8216;now&#8217;. He forgets the past as soon as it has happened and he ignores the whole concept of a future. But he is full of the sliding moment. He has a habit of shaking his head, not because he disagrees with anything, but through the sheer spice of living. He tosses it to and fro, and sends the locks cavorting.&#8217;
&#8212;pg 847
&#8216;He [Titus] longed for isolation, and in his longing he recognized that same canker of selfishness that had made itself manifest in his attitude towards the Black Rose in her pain.
What kind of brute was he? Was he destined to destroy both love and friendship? What of Juno? Had he not the courage or the loyalty to hold fast to his friends? Or the courage to speak up? Perhaps not. He had, after all, deserted his home.
Forcing himself to frame the words, he turned his head to Muzzlehatch, &#8216;I want to get away from you,&#8217; he said. &#8216;From you and everyone. I want to start again, when but for you, I would be dead! Is this vile of me? I cannot help it. You are too vast and craggy. Your features are the mountains of the moon. Lions and tigers lie bleeding in your brain. Revenge is in your belly. You are too vast and remote. Your predicament burns. It makes me hanker for release. I am too near you. I long to be alone. What shall I do?&#8217;
&#8216;Do what you like, boy,&#8217; said Muzzlehatch, &#8216;skidaddle to the pole for all I care, or scorch your bottom on the red equator. As for his lady? She is ill. _Ill_, you numbskull! Ill as they take them on this side of breath.&#8217;
&#8212;pg 862

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title: Postcolonial Melancholia
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: -001-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
draft: true
url: '/?post_type=quotes&p=6775'
---
&#8216;Neither women nor workers were committed to a country. They turned away from the patriotism of national states because they had found larger loyalties. Their task was to fashion new networks of inter-connectedness and solidarity that could resonate across boundaries, reach across distances, and evade other cultural and economic obstacles.&#8217;
&#8211; p 5
&#8216;Why should the assertions of ethnocentricity and untranslatability that are pronounced in the face of difference have become an attractive and respectable alternative to the hard but scarcely mysterious work involved in translation, principled internationalism, and cosmopolitan conviviality.&#8217;
&#8211; p 8
&#8216;The natives, whose bodies are comparatively worthless, already exist in a space of death, for which their characteristic lack of industry makes them responsible. Like the generic enemies, the invisible prison inmates, and all the other shadowy &#8220;third things&#8221; that race thinking lodges between animal and human, their lives are best administered under the flexible governance produced by special emergency rules and exceptional or martial laws.&#8217;
&#8211; p 11
&#8216;Their[the Camp Delta prisoners] plight suggests that the most fundamental lines of division are no longer those that separate citizens from stateless people. The tenure of national citizenship can now be easily revoked or diminished. It affords no more guarantees.&#8217;
&#8211; p 22
&#8216;The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.&#8217;
&#8211; Hugh of St Victor
&#8216;This connection is not only evident in the obvious cases like Israel&#8217;s heavily fortified dominion over occupied Palestinian territories but in the more general mechanics of what Andre Gorz called the &#8220;south africanisation&#8221; of social life in the overdeveloped world. Gorz&#8217;s useful term derives from this reading of the &#8220;pre-revolutionary&#8221; phase of South African political culture, but I think it travels well and can still illuminate the export of many social and economic relations associated historically with colonial societies into the heartlands and hubs of overdevelopment. The appeal of security and the related appearance of gated and secured residential spaces are two important components of this larger change. The proliferation of service work and reappearance of a caste of servile, insecure, and underpaid domestic laborers, carers, cleaners, deliverers, messengers, attendants, and guards are surely others. The segmentation and casualization of employment, health, and dwelling are the foundations on which these aspects of the privatization and destruction of the civic order have come to rest.&#8217;
&#8211; p 45
&#8216;As he watched the destructive vortex of World War I suck in so much of what was precious and worth defending in European civilization, Freud lamented the failure of the civilized world to move beyond war as a means of settling its disputes. His essays from that time capture the flavor of the cosmopolitan response offered by powerless and disillusioned individuals who have cultivated a larger loyalty to civilization than their original national states could possible contain or allow. He describes their predicament and connects it to the acquisition of a nonnational or transnational &#8220;fatherland&#8221; that can serve the disillusioned and estranged as a &#8220;museum&#8221; in which the very best and most meaningful elements of human culture might be stored for uplifting contemplation&#8230;The same kind of intuitive estrangement can be found in the work of many fugitives and refugees from Nazism. It culminates in a new way of being at home in the world through an active hostility toward national solidarity, national culture, and their privileging over other, more open affiliations.&#8217;
&#8211; p 68
&#8216;His travelers&#8217; experiences establish that being a stranger can be invaluable as an opportunity to know the world better and to experience it in more complex and satisfying forms.&#8217;
&#8211; p 70
&#8216;What, after all, might the vagrant and exile have gained by their separation from the cozy comforts of the national community, even in its worthy oppositional pattern?&#8217;
&#8211; p 79
&#8216;In an illuminating interview about the circumstances of his[Tom Hurndall] shooting, his mother Jocelyn provided some important clues as to her son&#8217;s decision to move unarmed, as an act of solidarity and witness, into a zone of conflict: &#8220;Tom wanted to experience everything; he threw himself at life. He had gone to Israel to see a world outside his own. &#8230; He wanted to understand and feel at first hand what civilians were suffering in Palestine. He wanted to find the truth behind the propaganda, seek out injustices. &#8230;Tom wen tot Gaza to expose injustice. I profoundly respect the fact that he sought to make a difference. Somewhere along the line he decided to value life, not just his own, but those around him.&#8221;&#8216;
&#8211; pp 80-1
&#8216;For many commentators on the attacks on New York and Washington, the caged and rights-less prisoners deserve their fate because they have reverted to alien cultural type. Ethnic absolutism comprehends their evil and their affiliation to fundamentalist Islam as neither a choice nor an act of will. It sees these outcomes as the result of their instinctive responses to the combined pressures of ethnohistory, divergent tradition, and biocultural or even genomic division. Politically, the detainees&#8217; perverse tenure of British citizenship becomes nothing more than a retroactive indictment of the United Kingdom&#8217;s overly lax immigration control and nationality legislation in the past. A good many of them can, if it becomes politically expedient, be retrospectively stripped of the citizenship they have wrongfully acquired. They have been abomg us, but they were never actually of us. Thir presence in the United Kingdom is likely to have been the illegitimate result of arranged marriages designed to circumvent immigration control&#8230;&#8217;
&#8211; p 122

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title: The Seeker of Truth Who Insisted on Another World
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: -001-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
draft: true
url: '/?post_type=quotes&p=6779'
---
&#8216;What we are looking for in Europe is what lies hidden &#8211; beyond Western civilisation and capitalist modernity &#8211; here in the Middle East, whose history got lost.&#8217;
&#8216;The revolution in Europe begins with the revolution in Kurdistan.&#8217;
&#8216;The love for society is not possible in an exploited society.&#8217;
&#8216;If we want to create a new realisation of socialist life, we must go where freedom is most widely realised. The mountains of Kurdistan are an extraordinary place. They offer the opportunity to experience oneself in practice. They make you realise what it means to be committed and to make an effort; and they make you understand the meaning of this effort anew. How deep are the traces that the system leaves in our way of thinking?&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;My Name is Bager Nûjiyan&#8221;

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title: '<cite class="book">Resistance, Rebellion, and Death</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: -001-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
draft: true
url: '/?post_type=quotes&p=6796'
---
<q>No,</q> I told you, <q>I cannot believe that everything must be subordinated to a single end. There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don&#8217;t want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.</q> You retorted: <q>Well, you don&#8217;t love your country.</q>
&#8211; Letters to a German Friend, First Letter (p 5)
I want to tell you at once what sort of greatness keeps us going. But this amounts to telling you what kind of courage we applaud, which is not your kind. For it is not much to be able to do violence when you have been simply preparing for it for years and when violence is more natural to you than thinking. It is a great deal, on the other hand, to face torture and death when you know for a fact that hatred and violence are empty things in themselves. It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization.
&#8211; ibid (pp 6-7)
&#8216;&#8230;the spirit is of no avail against the sword, but&#8230;the spirit together with the sword will always win out over the sword alone. That is why we have now accepted the sword, after making sure that the spirit was on our side.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 9)
&#8216;Man is mortal. That may be; but let us die resisting; and if our lot is complete annihilation, let us not behave in such a way that it seems justice!&#8217;
&#8211; Obermann, Letter 90
&#8216;I know that heaven, which was indifferent to your horrible victories, will be equally indifferent to your just defeat. Even now I expect nothing from heaven. But we shall at least have helped save man from the solitude to which you wanted to relegate him.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid, Fourth Letter (p 32)
&#8216;No one can expect that these men&#8212;the nation&#8217;s best&#8212;will again accept doing what the best and purest did for twenty-five years&#8212;that is, loving their country in silence and silently despising her leaders. The Paris that is fighting tonight intends to command tomorrow. Not for power, but for justice; not for politics, but for ethics; not for the domination of France, but for her grandeur.
Our conviction is not that this will take place, but that this is taking place today in the suffering and obstinacy of the fight. And this is why, despite men&#8217;s suffering, despite the blood and wrath, despite the dead who can never be replaced, the unjust wounds, and the wild bullets, we must utter, not words of regret, but words of hope, of the dreadful hope of men isolated within their fate.
This huge Paris, all black and warm in the summer night, with a storm of bombers overhead and a storm of snipers in the streets, seems to us more brightly lighted than the City of Lights the whole world used to envy us. It is bursting with all the fires of hope and suffering, it has the flame of lucid courage and all the glow, not only of liberation, but of tomorrow&#8217;s liberty.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;The Blood of Freedom&#8221; (Combat 24 August 1944) (pp 36-7)
&#8216;Nothing is given to men, and the little they can conquer is paid for with unjust deaths. But man&#8217;s greatness lies elsewhere. It lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition. And if his condition is unjust, he has only one way of overcoming it, which is to be just himself.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;The Night of Truth&#8221; (Combat 25 August 1944) (pp 39-40)
&#8216;This is why I cannot share your opinion that we are in complete agreement in matters of politics. For you are willing to keep silent about one reign of terror in order the better to combat another one. There are some of us who do not want to keep silent about anything. It is our whole political society that nauseates us. Hence there will be no salvation until all those who are still worth while have repudiated it utterly in order to find, somewhere outside insoluble contradictions, the way to a complete renewal. In the meantime we must struggle.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Why Spain?&#8221; (Combat December 1948) (pp 82-3)
&#8216;The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it. There are ambitions that are not mine, and I should not feel at ease if I had to make my way by relying on the paltry privileges granted to those who adapt themselves to this world.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 83)
&#8216;And if freedom is regressing today throughout such a large part of the world, this is probably because the devices for enslavement have never been so cynically chosen or so effective, but also because her real defenders, through fatigue, through despair, or through a false idea of strategy and efficiency, have turned away from her.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Bread and Freedom&#8221; (p 89-90)
&#8216;There is no ideal freedom that will someday be given us all at once, as a pension comes at the end of one&#8217;s life. There are liberties to be won painfully, one by one, and those we still have are stages&#8212;most certainly inadequate, but stages nevertheless&#8212;on the way to total liberation. If we agree to suppress them, we do not progress nonetheless. On the contrary, we retreat, we go backward, and someday we shall have to retrace our steps along that road, but that new effort will once more be made in the sweat and blood of men.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 93)
&#8216;I confess, insofar as I am concerned, that I cannot love all humanity except with a vast and somewhat abstract love. But I love a few men, living or dead, with such force and admiration that I am always eager to preserve in others what will someday perhaps make them resemble those I love. Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Homage to an Exile&#8221; (pp 102-3)
&#8216;Censorship and oppression prove that the word is enough to make the tyrant tremble&#8212;but only if the word is backed up by sacrifice. For only the word fed by blood and heart can unite men, whereas the silence of tyrannies separates them. Tyrants indulge in monologues over millions of solitudes. If we reject oppression and falsehood, on the other hand, this is because we reject solitude. Every insubordinate person, when he rises up against oppression, reaffirms thereby the solidarity of all men. No, it is not you or a distant newspaper that you defended by resisting oppression, but the entire community that unites us over and above frontiers.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 104)
&#8216;When oppression wins out, as we all know here, those who nevertheless believe that their cause is just suffer from a sort of astonishment upon discovering the apparent impotence of justice. Then come the hours of exile and solitude that we have all known. Yet I should like to tell you that, in my opinion, the worst thing that can happen int he world we live in is for one of those men of freedom and courage I have described to stagger under the weight of isolation and prolonged adversity, to doubt himself and what he represents. And it seems to me that at such a moment those who are like him must come toward him (forgetting his titles and all devices of the official orator) to tell him straight from the heart that he is not alone and that his action is not futile, that there always comes a day when the palaces of oppression crumble, when exile comes to an end, when liberty catches fire. Such calm hope justifies your action. If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 106)
&#8216;Even when accepted in the interest of realism and efficacy, such a flouting of honor serves no purpose but to degrade our country in her own eyes and abroad.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Preface to Algerian Reports&#8221; (p 115)
&#8216;For that still unimaginable but not so distant future we must organize and stand together. The absurd and heart-breaking aspect of the tragedy we are living through comes out in the fact that, in order someday to reach those world-wide perspectives, we must now gather together in paltry fashion to beg merely, without making any other claims yet, that on a single spot of the globe a handful of innocent victims be spared. But since that is our task, however obscure and ungrateful it may be, we must tackle it decisively in order to deserve living someday as free men&#8212;in other words, as men who refuse either to participate or to suffer terror.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Appeal for a Civilian Truce in Algeria&#8221; (p 142)
&#8216;The moral advantage those nations derived from the fact that they had been oppressed in the recent past was wasted by them in a few days.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Socialism of the Gallows&#8221; (p 167)
&#8216;But it is my intention to talk about it crudely. Not because I like scandal, nor, I believe, because of an unhealthy streak in my nature. As a writer, I have always loathed avoiding the issue; as a man, I believe that the repulsive aspects of our condition, if they are inevitable, must merely be faced in silence. But when silence or tricks of language contribute to maintaining an abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Reflections on the Guillotine&#8221; (p 177)
&#8216;There are no just people&#8212;merely hearts more of less lacking in justice. Living at least allows us to discover this and to add to the sum of our actions a little of the good that will make up in part for the evil we have added to the world.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 221)
&#8216;&#8230;the reality of a man&#8217;s life is not limited to the spot in which he happens to be. It lies also in other lives that give shape to his&#8212;lives of people he loves, to begin with&#8230;and also lives of unknown people, influential and insignificant, fellow citizens, policemen, professors, invisible comrades from the mines and foundries, diplomats and dictators, religious reformers, artists who create myths that are decisive for our conduct&#8212;humble representatives, in short, of the sovereign chance that dominates the most routine existences.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Create Dangerously&#8221; (p 259)

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title: The Satanic Bible
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: -001-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
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---
&#8216;8. I break away from all conventions that do not lead to my earthly success and happiness.&#8217;
&#8211; I, &#8220;The Book of Satan&#8221; (p 30)
&#8216;The Satanist realized that man, and the action and reaction of the universe, is responsible for everything, and doesn&#8217;t mislead himself into thinking that someone cares.&#8217;
&#8216;Positive thinking and positive _action_ addup to results.&#8217;
&#8216;Just as the Satanist does not pray to God for assistance, he does not pray for forgiveness for his wrong doings&#8230;When a Satanist commits a wrong, he realizes that it is natural to make a mistake&mdash;and if he is truly sorry about what he has done, he will learn from it and take care not to do the same thing again.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;_WANTED!:_God&mdash;Dead or Alive&#8221; (p 41)
&#8216;Satanism encourages any form of sexual expression you may desire, _so long as it hurts no one else_. This statement must be qualified, to avoid misinterpretation. By not hurting another, this does not include the unintentional hurt felt by those who might not agree with your views on sex, because of _their_ anxieties regarding sexual morality. Naturally, you should avoid offending others who mean a great deal to you, such as prudish friends and relatives. However, if you earnestly endeavor to escape hurting them, and despite your efforts they accidentally find out, you cannot be held responsible, and therefore should feel no guilt as a result of either your sexual convictions, or their being hurt because of those convictions.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Satanic Sex&#8221; (p 69)
&#8216;I have taken they name as a part of myself! I live as the beasts of the field, rejoicing in the fleshly life! I favor the just and curse the rotten!&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Invocation to Satan&#8221; (p 144)

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title: Necropolitics
author: Ben
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date: -001-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
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url: '/?post_type=quotes&p=6807'
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&#8216;Similar to the majority of contemporary wars &mdash; including the war on terror and diverse forms of occupation &mdash; colonial wars were wars of extraction and predation. On the sides of the winners and the losers alike, they invariably led to the ruin of something unfigurable, almost nameless, entirely different to pronounce &mdash; how can one recognize in the enemy&#8217;s face that one seeks to blow away, but whose wounds one could equally treat, another face that renders them in their full humanity, and thus as similar to oneself?&#8217;
&#8211; p 4
&#8216;This violence was to be directed against the colonial system. This system&#8217;s particularity lay in its manufacturing a panoply of suffering that, in response, solicited neither the accepting of responsibility nor solicitude nor sympathy and, often, not even pity. To the contrary, it did everything to deaden people&#8217;s capacity to suffer because the natives were suffering, everything to dull their ability to be affected by this suffering.&#8217;
&#8211; p 5
&#8216;Colonial conquests witnessed an acceleration of the confrontation between human and machine, itself the premise for <q>industrial war</q> and the butcheries emblematized by the 1914&ndash;18 war. Also on the occasion of colonial conquests, a habituation was cultivated to higher human losses, notably among enemy troops. Moreover, the wars of conquest were asymmetrical wars from start to finish. Throughout one and a half centuries of colonial warfare, colonial armies lost few men. Historians estimate the losses at between 280,000 and 300,000 &mdash; relatively low figures if we consider that close to 250,000 died during the Crimean War alone. During the three main <q>dirty wars</q> of decolonization (Indochina, Algeria, Angola and Mozambique), 75,000 deaths were recorded on the colonial side and 850,000 on the indigenous side.&#8217;
&#8211; p 24
&#8216;Many historians have remarked that colonial empires were anything but systems endowed with an absolute coherence. Improvisation, ad hoc reactions in the face of unforeseen situations, and, very often, informality and weak institutionalization were the rule. But far from attenuating the brutality and atrocities of colonial empires, this porosity and this segmentarity only made them more pernicious. Wherever the thick veil of secrecy worked to shroud acts of misprision, the zones of immunity could be extended beyond all reason by invoking the imperative of security, zones whose impenetrability made them into quasi-natural machines of inertia.&#8217;
&#8211; p 26
&#8216;The exteriorized violence in the colonies remained latent in the metropole. Part of the work of democracies is to deaden any awareness of this latecy; it is to remove any real chance of interrogating its foundations, its underneath, and the mythologies without which the order that ensures the reproduction of state democracy suddenly falters. The great fear of democracies is that this violence, latent on the interior and exteriorized in the colonies and other third places, suddenly resurfaces, and then threatens the idea that the political order was created out of itself (instituted all at once and once and for all) and had more or less managed to pass itself off as common sense.&#8217;
&#8211; p 27
&#8216;In fact, a new kind of war, utterly planetary, has apparently already been launched and is unfolding on all fronts, being imposed upon us entirely from the outside. We are in no way responsible either for its causes or for its progress, or for the situations of extremity that it engenders far away from our homes. Its cost in finances, blood, and bodies is said to be incalculable&#8230;During the special operations conducted by formally constituted armed forces, supposed enemies are coldly dispatched, at point-blank range, without warning, with no way out, and without any risk that the said enemies might retaliate.&#8217;
&#8211; pp 30&#8211;31
&#8216;Terrorist activism and antiterrorist mobilization have more than one thing in common. Both strike the law and rights at their very roots.
On the one hand, the terrorist project aims to effect the collapse of a society of rights, whose deepest foundations it objectively threatens; on the other, antiterrorist mobilization relies on the idea that extraordinary measures alone will enable enemies to be overcome and that state violence ought to be able to bear down on these enemies unreservedly. In this context, the suspension of rights and lifting of the guarantees that protect individuals are presented as the condition of survival of these same rights. In other terms, the law cannot be protected by the law &mdash; only nonlaw can protect it. To protect the state of law against terror, it is deemed, violence must be done to the law, or we must constitutionalize what only yesterday was seen as an exception or as outright lawlessness.&#8217;
&#8216;How can one demand that ordinary and innocent Muslims answer in the name of those who, at any rate, are scarcely concerned with their lives and, in a pinch, want them dead? In this era of great brutality, while everybody is killing with chain saws, is it necessary to continue to stigmatize those who flee death because they seek refuge in our countries instead of stoically consenting to dying in the same place they were born?&#8217;
&#8211; p 33
&#8216;We have, it is true, always lived in a world deeply marked by diverse forms of terror, that is to say, of squandering human life. There is nothing new about ahving to live under terror, and therefore under a regime of squanderers. Historically, one of the strategies of the dominant states has always consisted in spatializing and discharging that terror by confining its most extreme manifestations in some racially stigmatized third place &mdash; the plantation under slavery, the colony, the camp, the compound under apartheid, the ghetto or, as in the present-day United States, the prison.&#8217;
&#8211; p 34
&#8216;Nanoracism defines an era of scullion racism, a sort of pocketknife racism, a spectacle of pigs wallowing in the mud pit.&#8217;
&#8211; p 58
&#8216;Speaking also of lesions (_lésions_) and cuts, it is now clear that on this European ice flow of a continent&#8212;as well as in America, South Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and elsewhere&#8212;those who suffer daily racist injuries must today be counted in the hundreds of thousands. They constantly run the risk of letting themselves be cut to the quick by someone, by an institution, a voice, or a public or private authority, that asks them to justify who they are, why they are here, where they have come from, where they are going, why they do not go back to where they came from, that is, a voice or authority that deliberately seeks to occasion in them a large or small jolt, to irritate them, to upset them, to get them to lose their cool precisely so as to have a pretext to violate them, to unceremoniously undermine that which is most private, most intimate, and vulnerable in them.&#8217;
&#8211; pp 58-9
&#8216;Now the distance that separates the phobia of the dump from the camp has always been very short. Refugee camps, camps for the displaced, migrant camps, camps for foreigners, waiting areas for people pending status, transit zones, administrative detection centers, identification or expulsion centers, border crossings, temporary welcome centers, ones for asylum seekers, refugee towns, migrant integration towns, ghettos, jungles, hostels, migrant homes&#8212;the list goes on ever further, as Michel Angier observed in a recent study. This endless list does not stop referring to an ever-present reality, though often largely invisible, not to say all-too-familiar and in the end banal. The camp, it ought to be said, has not only become a structural feature of our globalized condition. It has ceased to scandalize. Better still, the camp is not just our present. It is our future: our solution for <q>keeping away what disturbs, for containing or rejecting all excess, whether it is human ,organic matter or industrial waste.</q> In short, it is a form of government of the world.&#8217;
&#8211; p 60
&#8216;Despite all the horrors of the Negro slave trade, colonialism, fascism, Nazism, the Holocaust, and other massacres and genocides, Western nations especially&#8212;their bowels bloated with all sorts of gases&#8212;continue to mobilize racism in all manner of more or less harebrained and murderous histories. Histories about foreigners and about hordes of migrants in whose faces our doors must be slammed shit; about he barbed wire that we must hastily erect lest we get swamped by a tide of savages; about the borders that must be reestablished as if they had never disappeared; about nationals, including those form very old colonies, who still need to be labeled as immigrants; about intruders that must be driven out; about enemies that must be eradicated; about terrorists who have it in for us because of our way of life and who must be targeted from high altitude by drones; about human shields transformed into the collateral damage of our bombardments; histories about blood, throat-slitting, soil, fatherland, traditions, identity, pseudo-civilizations besieged by barbarous hordes, about national security, and all kinds of epithet-dissonant histories; histories to induce fear in oneself and to turn everything as black as soot, endless histories that are continuously recycled in the hope of pulling the wool over the eyes of the most gullible.
It is true that, having fomented misery and death far away&#8212;far from the gaze of their own citizens&#8212;Western nations now dread the return of the law of the sword, its arrival in one of those pious acts of vengeance demanded by the law of the talion.&#8217;
&#8211; p 61
&#8216;Several critiques have already been addressed to this strongly normative reading of the politics of sovereignty, so I will not rehearse them here. My concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but _the generalized instrumentalized of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations._&#8216;
&#8211; p 68
&#8216;But entanglement is not all that characterizes the now. Indeed, wherever we look, the drive is decisively toward contraction, containment, and enclosure. By enclosure, contraction, and containment, I do not simply mean the erection of all kinds of walls and fortifications, gates and enclaves, or various practices of partitioning space, of offshoring and fencing off wealth. I am also referring to a _matrix of rules_ mostly designed for those human bodies deemed either in excess, unwanted, illegal, dispensable, or superfluous.
Indeed, perhaps more than at any other moment in our recent past, we are increasingly faced with the question of what to do with those whose very existence does not seem to be necessary for our reproduction, those whose mere existence or proximity is deemed to represent a physical or biological threat to our own life.&#8217;
&#8211; pp 96-7
&#8216;Another great cycle of repopulation is taking place in the world. However, these people are not deserters. They are fugitives. Threatened by one calamity or another, they have escaped their places of birth and childhood&#8212;places where they lived but which one day became uninhabitable, impossible abodes. In response to this great upheaval, familiar, well-rehearsed refrains sound out in unison. <q>Demographic explosion.</q> <q>Armed conflicts.</q> <q>The rise of religious extremism.</q> <q>Gold Rush, to Europe!</q> <q>The migrant crisis.</q> <q>Why are they coming here?</q> <q>They should just stay put.</q>
Resting on the fable of <q>foreign aid,</q> many are still wont to believe in fairy tales. Despite the fact that between 1980 and 2009, net transfers of financial resources from Africa to the rest of the world reached the threshold of approximately 1,400 billion dollars, and illicit transfers totaled 1,350 billion dollars, the belief somehow holds firm that countries of the North subsidize those of the South.&#8217;
&#8211; p 98
&#8216;We must close the borders. Filter those who make it across them. Process them. Choose who we want to remain. Deport the rest. Sign contracts with corrupt elites from the countries of origin, third world countries, transition countries. They must be turned into the prison guards of the West, to whom the lucrative business of administering brutality can be subcontracted. These states must become the protectorates of Europe&#8212;at once prisons for those seeking to leave and dumping grounds for those of whom it would be better to rid ourselves.&#8217;
&#8211; p 98-9
&#8216;In truth, the problem is neither the migrants nor the refugees nor the asylum seekers. Borders. Everything begins with them, and all paths lead back to them. They are no longer merely a line of demarcation separating distinct sovereign entities. Increasingly, they are the name used to describe the organized violence that underpins both contemporary capitalism and our world order in general&#8212;the women, the men, and the unwanted children condemned to abandonment; the shipwrecks and drownings of hundreds, indeed thousands, weekly; the endless waiting and humiliation in consulates, in limbo; days of woe spent wandering in airports, in police stations, in parks, in train stations, then down onto the city pavements, where at nightfall blankets and rags are snatched from people who have already been stripped and deprived of virtually everything&#8212;bare bodies debased by a lack of water, hygiene, and sleep. In short, an image of humanity on a road to ruin.&#8217;
&#8211; p 99
&#8216;As the philosopher Elsa Dorlin has suggested, this form of violence sets its sights on a prey. It bears a likeness to the great hunts of yesteryear, to both fox hunting and trapping and their respective techniques&#8212;research, pursuit, and entrapment, prior to driving the prey to a point at which it is surrounded, captured, or killed with the aid of foxhounds and bloodhounds.
But it also belongs to a long history of manhunts. Gregoire Chamayou has studied the modalities of these in his book <cite class="book">Manhunts</cite>. The targets are always roughly the same&#8212;Maroon slaves, Red Indians, blacks, Jews, the stateless, the poor, and, more recently, the homeless.&#8217;
&#8211; p 101
&#8216;In an increasingly Balkanized and isolated world, where are the most deadly migrant routes? It is Europe! Who claims the largest number of skeletons and the largest marine cemetery in this century? Again, it is Europe! The greatest number of deserts, territorial and international waters, channels, islands, straits, enclaves, canals, rivers, ports, and airports transformed into iron curtain technologies? Europe! And to top it all off, in these times of permanent escalation&#8212;the camps. The return of camps. A Europe of camps. Samos, Chios, Lesbos, Idomeni, Lampedusa, Vintimille, Sicily, Subotica&#8212;the list goes on.
Refugee camps? Camps for displaced people? Migrant camps? Waiting rooms for people in process? Transit zones? Detention centers? Emergency accommodation centers? Jungles? Composite, heterogeneous landscapes, certainly. Let us sum up all of the above in a single phrase, the only one which paints a truthful picture of what is going on: camps for foreigners. In the end, that&#8217;s all they are. Camps for foreigners, both in the heart of Europe and at its border. This is the only suitable name for these devices and for the kind of penitentiary geography that they serve to enforce.&#8217;
&#8211; p 102
&#8216;Will the twenty-first century prove to be the century of assessment and selection on the bias of security technologies? From the confines of the Sahara, across the Mediterranean, the camps are once more on their way to becoming the last step in a certain European project, a certain idea of Europe in the world, her macabre emblem, just as Aimé Césaire foretold in his \_Discourse on Colonialism\_ only too recently.&#8217;
&#8211; p 103
&#8216;In its most tech-dystopian instantiation, <q>the future is an anxious bird, flying in circles over a hot, flat, crowded landscape, biding its time until an ISIS-operated drone sprays weaponized bird flue in its face. What else can it do? The clock is ticking down and nothing is sustainable. The seas are boiling, filthy with plastic bags and drowning polar bears; the smoggy air will soon be swarming with (more) U.S> military drones, rogue-states nuclear drones, homemade bioweaponry, and Amazon&#8217;s fleet of robotic delivery devices.</q>&#8216;
&#8211; p 106
&#8216;If yesterday&#8217;s drama of the human subject was exploitation by capital, the tragedy of the multitude today is that they are unable to be exploited at all.&#8217;
&#8211; p 111
&#8216;Division and occupation go hand in hand with expulsion and deportation, and often also with an avowed or disavowed program of elimination. When all is said and done, not for nothing will the camp-form have accompanied, practically everywhere, logics of the eliminatory settlement.&#8217;
&#8211; p 127
&#8216;About the Algerian war in particular, Fanon argued that it often had all the aspects of a <q>genuine genocide.</q> In fact, in its structure as well as in its ornament&mdash;above all when it rested on racist and supremacist presuppositions&mdash;the colonial process always revolved around the genocidal drive. In many cases, this drive never materialized. But it was always there, in a latent state. It reached its maximal point of incandescence in times of war&mdash;of conquest, occupation, or counterinsurgency. This genocidal drive proceeded in molecular fashion. For the most part simmering, ti crystalized from time t time by shedding blood (slaughters, massacres, repressions), events that continually recurred. Its point of paroxysm was war. It executed and revealed to all the threat that every colonial system is ready to wield when its survival is at stake: spill as much blood as possible, shatter piece by piece the worlds of the colonized and transform them into an undifferentiated pile of ruins, of bodies torn to shreds, of forever broken lives, an uninhabitable place.&#8217;
&#8211; p 128
&#8216;In Fanon&#8217;s mind, at issue was not to conquer the state but instead to create another formation of sovereignty. As a privileged moment of the upsurge of the new, regenerative violence aimed to produce other forms of life.&#8217;
&#8211; p 129
&#8216;For Fanon, then, the right to indifference, or to ignorance, does not exist. For that matter, he considered that, beyond its purely technical aspects, the doctor&#8217;s task in a colonial context was to rise up in revolt, become indignant, show alarm for the fate dealt to those whose backs are bent over and whose <q>lives are stopped,</q> whose faces bear the marks of despair, in whose stomachs resignation can be read, in whose blood one diagnoses <q>prostrate exhaustion of a whole lifetime.</q>&#8216;
&#8211; p 147
&#8216;Side by side with humanity&#8217;s other rejects (those expropriated after the enclosure of the commons, peons and deported criminals, impressed sailors on board military and commercial marines, reprobates of radical religious sects, pirates and buccaneers, those absent without leave and deserters of every name under the sun), Negros are located throughout the length and breath of the new commercial routes, in ports, on boats, everywhere that forests must be cut back, tobacco produced, cotton grown, sugar cane cut, rum made, ingots transported, and furs, fish, sugar, and other products manufactured.&#8217;
&#8211; pp 157&#8211;8
&#8216;In evoking, apropos of the question of our times, the passerby, that is to say, the fugitive character of life, no praise is being made either of exile or of refuge, flight, or nomadism.
Nor is this a celebration of a bohemian and rootless world.
In current conditions, simply no such world exists. Instead, the aim is to convoke, as I have tried to throughout this long essay, the figure of a human out to make great strides up a steep path&mdash;who has left, quit his country, lived elsewhere, abroad, in places in which he forges an authentic dwelling, thereby tying his fate to those who welcome and recognize their own face in his, the face of a humanity to come.
Becoming-human-in-the-world is a question neither of birth nor of origin or race.
It is a matter of journeying, of movement, and of transfiguration.&#8217;
&#8211; p 187
&#8216;Let us be content to observe that future thinking will necessarily be about passage, crossing, and movement. This thinking will be about flwoing life, about passing life, which we strive to translate as an event. This thinking will not be about excess but about surplus, that is to say, about that which, as it has no price, must escape sacrifice, expenditure, loss.
If such thinking is to be articulated, it is further to be recognized that Europe, which has given so much to the world and taken so much in return, often by force and by ruse, is no longer the world&#8217;s center of gravity. No longer is Europe that place over there to where we must go to find the solutions to the questiosn we have posed over here. It is no longer the pharmacy of the world.&#8217;
&#8211; p 188

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title: 'The Sorrows of Young Werther [trans Bayard Quincy Morgan]'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: -001-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
draft: true
url: '/?post_type=quotes&p=6811'
---
&#8216;If on the other hand we just keep working straight ahead, with all our weakness and strain, we very often find that we get further with our tacking and tardiness than others with their sailing and rowing &mdash; and surely one has a true feeling of one&#8217;s worth when one keeps pace with others or even outruns them.&#8217;
&#8211; pp 63-4
&#8216;_8th January 1772_
What sort of people are they whose whole soul is wrapped up in ceremony, whose entire striving and contriving is devoted to the goal of moving their chair one place nearer the head of the table?&#8230;
How foolish not to see that the place you occupy really makes no difference, and that the one who occupies the first place so seldom plays the first role! How many kings are ruled by their ministers, how many ministers by their secretaries! And ten who is first? It is he, I think, who surveys the rest, and who has so much power or cunning as to harness their abilities and passions to the execution of his plans.&#8217;
&#8211; p 67
&#8216;_16th June_
True, I am but a wanderer, a rover on earth! Are you more than that?&#8217;
&#8211; p 78

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title: 'The Fall [trans Robin Buss]'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: -001-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
draft: true
url: '/?post_type=quotes&p=6812'
---
&#8216;[Sympathy]&#8217;s the emotion felt by a prime minister or company chairman: you get it cheap after some disaster. Friendship is not so easy: It&#8217;s long and hard to win, but when it&#8217;s there, you can&#8217;t get rid of it, you have to make do.&#8217;
&#8211; Jean-Baptiste Clamence, p 20
&#8216;We&#8217;ve reached the age of lucidity: dialogue has been replaced by communiqués. &#8220;Here&#8217;s the truth,&#8221; we say. &#8220;You can argue over it if you wish, we don&#8217;t care, but in a few years the police will come and show you I&#8217;m right.&#8221;&#8216;
&#8211; ibid, p 29
&#8216;My good fellow, I have to admit, with all humility, that I have always been supremely vain. Me, me, me: that&#8217;s the refrain that runs through my precious life and you could hear it in everything I said. I have never been able to speak without boasting, especially if I did so with that resounding restraint that I was so good at.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid, p 30
&#8216;It&#8217;s that I have always lived free and in control. Quite simply, I felt liberated in my relations with others for the excellent reason that I recognized no equal to myself. I have always considered myself more intelligent than anyone, as I told you, but also more sensitive and more skilled, a crack shot, a peerless driver, the best lover.; Even in areas where I could easily recognize my inferiority, such a tennis, it was hard for me to believe that, if I had time to train, I should not outclass the top seeds. I saw only superiority in myself, which explained my benevolence and peace of mind. When I did care for another person, it was out of pure condescension, freely conceded, and all the merit was mine.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid, p 31
&#8216;You see, I can&#8217;t stand being bored, and the only thing I really enjoy in life is entertainment.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid, p 37
&#8216;Once you&#8217;re dead, they&#8217;ll take the opportunity to assign idiotic or vulgar motives to your action. My dear friend, martyrs should choose to be forgotten, mocked or exploited. As for being understood, never.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid, p 47
&#8216;I appeared hard, yet I have never been able to resist the offer of a drink or a woman! I was considered active and energetic, yet my kingdom was the bed. I proclaimed my loyalty, yet I think that there is not a single person that I loved whom I did not also eventually betray.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid, p 53
&#8216;With courtesy and a deeply felt sense of solidarity, I daily spat in the faces of the blind.
Frankly, is there any excuse for this? There is one, but it is so feeble that I can&#8217;t imagine using it. In any case, here it is: I have never been able to believe, deep inside, that human affairs are serious matters. I had no idea what was serious, only that I was not in everything that I saw, which seemed to me merely an amusing, or tedious game.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid, p 54
&#8216;You&#8217;re wrong, dear fellow, the boat is going at a good pace. But the Zuyder Zee is a dead sea, or almost. With its flat shores, lost in the mist, one can&#8217;t tell where it starts of ends. So we&#8217;re proceeding with no points of reference and we can&#8217;t assess our speed. We&#8217;re going forward, but nothing changes. This is not sailing, but a dream.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid, p 61

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title: Better Never to Have Been
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: -001-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
draft: true
url: '/?post_type=quotes&p=6922'
---
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40441396
&#8216;&#8230;in a democracy those committed to non-procreation could never, in the long run, prevail politically against those committed to procreation.
Moreover, it is curious how democracy favours breeding over immigration. Offspring have a presumed right to citizenship, while potential immigrants do not. Imagine a polarized state consisting of two opposing ethnic groups. One increases its size by breeding and the other by immigration. Depending on who holds power, the group that grows by immigration will either be prevented from growing or it will be accused of colonialism. But why should democracy favour one indigenous group over another merely because one breeds rather than increases by immigration? Why should breeding be unlimited but immigration curtailed where political outcomes are equally sensitive to both ways of enhancing population?&#8217;
&#8211; p 11&#8211;2
&#8216;Conscious life, although but a blip on the radar of cosmic time, is laden with suffering&#8212;suffering that is directed to no end other than its own perpetuation.&#8217;
&#8211; p 83

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title: Fundamentals of Military Medicine
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: -001-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
draft: true
url: '/?post_type=quotes&p=6988'
---
&#8216;Armies are typically larger and sicker than the more technologically oriented weapons systems service, so much of the knowledge related to keeping a force fit and healthy is derived from land force military medicine.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Introduction&#8221; p 25
&#8216;By serving in the military, all soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines have committed to unlimited liability in service on behalf of the nation, even to the point of dying for their country.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Officership and the Profession of Arms&#8230;&#8221; p 91
&#8216;Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and never to be content with a half-truth when the whole can be won.&#8217;
&#8211; Cadet&#8217;s Prayer
&#8216;Emergency medicine is complaint driven.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Approach to the Emergency Patient&#8221; p 730

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title: '<cite class="book">The Ethics of Ambiguity</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: -001-11-30T00:00:00+00:00
draft: true
url: '/?post_type=quotes&p=7085'
---
&#8216;However, such salvation is only possible if, despite obstacles and failures, a man preserves the disposal of his future, if the situation opens up more possibilities to him. In case his transcendence is cut off from his goal or there is no longer any hold on objects which might give it a valid content, his spontaneity is dissipated without founding anything. Then he may not justify his existence positively and he feels its contingency with wretched disgust. There is no more obnoxious way to punish a man than to force him to perform acts which make no sense to him, as when one empties and fills the same ditch indefinitely, when one makes soldiers who are being punished march up and down, or when one forces a schoolboy to copy lines. Revolts broke out in Italy in September 1946 because the unemployed were set to breaking pebbles which serves no purpose whatever&#8230; This mystification of useless effort is more intolerable than fatigue. Life imprisonment is the most horrible of punishments because it preserves existence in its pure facticity but forbids it all legitimation. A freedom can not will itself without willing itself as an indefinite movement. It must absolutely reject the constraints which arrest its drive toward itself. This rejection takes on a positive aspect when the constraint is natural. One rejects the illness by curing it. But it again assumes the negative aspect of revolt when the oppressor is a human freedom&#8230; The prison is repudiated as such when the prisoner escapes. But revolt, insofar as it is pure negative movement, remains abstract. It is fulfilled as freedom only by returning to the positive, that is, by giving itself a content through action, escape, political struggle, revolution. Human transcendence then seeks, with the destruction of the given situation, the whole future which will flow from its victory. It resumes its indefinite rapport with itself.There are limited situations where this return to the positive is impossible, where the future is radically blocked off. Revolt can then be achieved only in the definitive rejection of the imposed situation, in suicide.&#8217;
&#8216;Normally the child escapes the anguish of freedom. He can, if he likes, be recalcitrant, lazy; his whims and his faults concern only him. They do not weigh upon the earth. They can not make a dent in the serene order of a world which existed before him, without him, and where he is a state of security by virtue of his very insignificance. He can do with impunity whatever he likes. He knows that nothing can ever happen through him; everything is already given; his acts engage nothing, not even himself.&#8217;
&#8216;His acts are never positive choices, only flights. He can not prevent himself from being a presence in the world, but he maintains this presence on the {pl e}(?) of bare facticity. However, if a man were permitted to be a brute fact, he would merge with the trees and pebbles which are not aware that they exist; we would consider these opaque lives with indifference. But the sub-man arouses contempt, that is, one recognizes him to be responsible for himself at the moment that one accuses him of not willing himself &#8211; The fact is that no man is a datum which is passively suffered; the rejection of existence is still another way of existing; nobody can know the peace of the tomb while he is alive. There we have the defeat of the sub-man. He would like to forget himself, to be ignorant of himself, but the nothingness which is at the heart of man is also the consciousness that he has of himself. His negativity is revealed positively as anguish, desire, appeal, laceration, but as for the genuine return to the positive, the sub-0man eludes it. He is afraid of engaging himself in a project as he is afraid of being disengaged and thereby of being in a state of danger before the future, in the midst of its possibilities. He is thereby led to take refuge in the ready-made values of the serious world. He will proclaim certain opinions; he will take shelter behind a label; and to hide his indifference he will readily abandon himself to verbal outbursts or even physical violence. One day, a monarchist, the next day, an anarchist, he is more readily anti-semitic, anti-clerical, or anti-republican. Thus, though we have defined him as a denial and a flight, the sub-man is not a harmless creature. He realizes himself in the world as a blind uncontrolled force which anybody can get control of. In lynchings, in pogroms, in all the great bloody movement organized by the fanaticism of seriousness and passion, movements where there is no risk, those who do the actual dirty work are recruited from among the sub-men. That is why every man who wills himself free within a human world fashioned by free men will be so disgusted by the sub-men.&#8217;
&#8216;As we have also seen, the situation of the world is so complex that one can not fight everywhere at the same time and for everyone. In order to win an urgent victory, one has to give up the idea, at least temporarily, of serving certain valid causes; one may even be brought to the point of fighting against them. Thus, during the course of the last war, no Anti-fascist could have wanted the revolts of the natives in the British Empire to be successful; and yet, we can no blame those who, considering their emancipation to be the more urgent action, took advantage of the situation to obtain it. Thus, it is possible, and often it even happens, that one finds himself obliged to oppress and kill men who are pursuing goals whose validity one acknowledges himself.
But that is not the worst thing to be said for violence. It not only forces us to sacrifice the men who are in our way, but also those who are fighting on our side, and even ourselves. Since we can conquer our enemies only by acting upon their facticity, by reducing them to things, we have to make ourselves things; in this struggle in which wills are forced to confront each other through their bodies, the bodies of our allies, like those of our opponents are exposed to the same brutal hazard: they will be wounded, killed, or starved. Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it. And even outside of periods of crisis when blood flows, the permanent possibility of violence can  constitute between nations and classes a state of veiled warfare in which individuals are sacrificed in a permanent way.&#8217;
&#8216;In \_Plutarch Lied\_ Pierrefeu rightly says that in war there is no victory which can not be regarded as unsuccessful, for the objective which one aims at is the total annihilation of the enemy and this result is never attained; yet there are wars which are won and wars which are lost. So is it with any activity; failure and success are two aspects of reality which are the start are not perceptible.&#8217;
&#8216;In order for the return to the positive to be genuine it must involved negativity, it must not conceal the antinomies between means and end, present and future; they must be lived in a permanent tension; one must retreat from neither the outrage of violence nor deny it, or, which amounts to the same thing, assume it lightly. Kierkegaard has said that what distinguishes the pharisee from the genuinely moral man is that the former considers his anguish as a sure sign of his virtue; from the fact that he asks himself, &#8220;Am I Abraham?&#8221; he concludes, &#8220;I am Abraham;&#8221; but morality resides in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning. The problem which we are posing is not the same as that of Kierkegaard; the important thing to us is to know whether, in given conditions, Isaac must be killed or not. But we also think that what distinguishes the tyrant from the man of good will is that the first rests in the certainty of his aims, whereas the second keeps asking himself, &#8220;Am I really working for the liberation of men? Isn&#8217;t this end contested by the sacrifices through which I aim at it?&#8221; In setting up its ends, freedom must put them in parentheses, confront them at each moment with that absolute end which it itself constitutes, and contest, in its own name, the means it uses to win itself.&#8217;
&#8216;In the first place, it seems to us that the individual as such is one of the ends at which our action must aim. Here we are at one with the point of view of Christian charity, the Epicurean cult of friendship, and Kantian moralism which treats each man as an end. He interests us not merely as a member of a class, a nation, or a collectivity, but as an individual man. This distinguishes us from the systematic politician who cares only about collective destinies; and probably a tramp enjoying his bottle of wine, or a child playing with a balloon, or a Neapolitan lazzarone loafing in the sun in no way helps in the liberation of man; that is why the abstract will of the revolutionary scorns the concrete benevolence which occupies itself in satisfying desires which have no morrow. However, it must not be forgotten that there is a concrete bond between freedom and existence; to will man free is to will there to be being, it is to will the disclosure of being in the joy of existence; in order for the idea of liberation to have concrete meaning, the joy of existence must be asserted in each one, at every instant; the movement towards freedom assumes its real, flesh and blood figure in the world by thickening into pleasure, into happiness. If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing, then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy. The saving of time and the conquest of leisure have no meaning if we are not moved by the laugh of a child at play. If we do not love life on our own account and through others, it is futile to seek to justify it in any way
&#8230;The ambiguity of freedom, which very often is occupied only in fleeing from itself, introduces a difficult equivocation into relationships with each individual taken one by one. Just what is meant by the expression &#8220;to love others&#8221;? What is meant by taking them as ends? In any event, it is evident that we are not going to decide to fulfil the will of every man. There are cases where a man positively wants evil, that is, the enslavement of other men, and he must then be fought. It also happens that, without harming anyone, he flees from his own freedom, seeking passionately and alone to attain the being which constantly eludes him. If he asks for our help, are we to give it to him? We blame a man who helps a drug addict intoxicate himself or a desperate man commit suicide, for we think that rash behaviour of this sort is an attempt of the individual against his own freedom; he must be made aware of his error and put in the presence of the real demands of his freedom. Well and good. But what if he persists? Must we then use violence? There again the serious man busies himself dodging the problem; the values of life, of health, and of moral conformism being, set up, one one does not hesitate to impose them on others. But we know that this pharisaism can  cause the worst disasters: lacking drugs, the addict may kill himself. It is no more necessary to serve an abstract ethics obstinately than to yield without due consideration to impulses of pity or generosity; violence is justified only if it opens concrete possibilities to the freedom which I am trying to save.; by practicing it I am willy-nilly assuming an engagement in relation to others and to myself; a man whom I snatch from the death which had chosen has a right to come and ask me for the means and reasons for living; the tyranny practiced against an invalid can be justified only by his getting better; whatever the purity of the intention which animates me, any dictatorship is a fault for which I have to get myself pardoned..&#8217;
&#8216;&#8230;love authorizes severities that are not granted to indifference.&#8217;
&#8216;There are cases still more disturbing because there the violence is not immediately efficacious; the violences of the Resistance did not aim at the material weakening of Germany; it happens that their purpose was to create such a state fo violence that collaboration would be impossible; in one sense, the burning of a whole French village was too high a price to pay for the elimination of three enemy officers; but those fires and the massacring of hostages were themselves parts of the plan; they created an abyss between the occupiers and the occupied. Likewise, the insurrections in Paris and Lyons at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or the revolts in India, did not aim at shattering the yoke of the oppressor at one blow, but rather at creating and keeping alive the meaning of the revolt and at making the mystifications of conciliation impossible.&#8217;

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title: 'A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster'
---
Chapter 3: THE MIZPAH CAFÉ
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Highlight: Some even include the seventeenth-century New England Puritans among the Utopians, though their regime of sober piety, stern patriarchs, and enforced conformity resembles a lot of other peoples’ gulags.
Chapter 4: PAULINE JACOBSON’S JOY
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Chapter progress: 8.84%
Highlight: San Francisco has been called “the city that destroyed itself,” but a king is not his country, and a government is not the people.
Chapter 5: GENERAL FUNSTON’S FEAR
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Highlight: elite panic.
Chapter 6: WILLIAM JAMES’S MORAL EQUIVALENTS
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Highlight: The response to disaster depends in part on who you are—a journalist has different duties than a general—but who you become is also an outgrowth of what you believe.
Chapter 6: WILLIAM JAMES’S MORAL EQUIVALENTS
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Highlight: Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,
Chapter 6: WILLIAM JAMES’S MORAL EQUIVALENTS
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Highlight: He suffered one severe depression in his early adulthood, and the rest of his life can be seen as a struggle for sufficient meaning and purpose to keep from being pulled under again, a struggle perhaps made more intense
Chapter 6: WILLIAM JAMES’S MORAL EQUIVALENTS
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Chapter progress: 17.68%
Highlight: , “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,”
Chapter 7: DOROTHYDAY’S OTHER LOVES
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Highlight: “While the crisis lasted, people loved each other.”
Chapter 9: A TALE OF TWO PRINCES: THE HALIFAX EXPLOSION AND AFTER
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Highlight: catastrophe always means social change. There is not always progress.
Chapter 9: A TALE OF TWO PRINCES: THE HALIFAX EXPLOSION AND AFTER
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Highlight: Giving is itself the gift, and there can be a deep mutuality between giver and recipient in the horizontality of altruism rather than the hierarchy of charity. More complex exchanges take place in the arts: is it the writer or singer who is giving the work, or the reader or listener who brings the gift of attention, or are they knit together in a mutuality whose give-and-take is complicated?
Chapter 9: A TALE OF TWO PRINCES: THE HALIFAX EXPLOSION AND AFTER
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Highlight: Capitalism’s fundamental premise is scarcity, while a lot of tribal and gift economies operate on a basis of abundance. Their generosity is both an economic and an ethical premise.
Chapter 9: A TALE OF TWO PRINCES: THE HALIFAX EXPLOSION AND AFTER
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Highlight: Three hundred and fifty years after Hobbes, the biobehavioral scientists Shelley E. Taylor and Laura Cousino Klein concluded that contrary to the longtime assumption about how human beings respond to danger, women in particular often gather together to share concerns and abilities. They conclude that “this ‘tend-and-befriend’ pattern is a sharp contrast to the ‘fight-or-flight’ behavior pattern that has long been considered the principal responses to stress by both men and women. For women, that didn’t quite make any sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
Chapter 9: A TALE OF TWO PRINCES: THE HALIFAX EXPLOSION AND AFTER
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Highlight: J. K. Gibson-Graham
Chapter 9: A TALE OF TWO PRINCES: THE HALIFAX EXPLOSION AND AFTER
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Highlight: In short, man is so naturally a creature of society, that it is almost impossible to put him out of it.”
Chapter 9: A TALE OF TWO PRINCES: THE HALIFAX EXPLOSION AND AFTER
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Highlight: . If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.
Chapter 10: FROM THE BLITZ AND THE BOMB TO VIETNAM
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Highlight: Much in the marketplace urges us toward safety, comfort, and luxury—they can be bought—but purpose and meaning are less commodifiable phenomena, and a quest for them often sends seekers against the current of their society.
Chapter 11: HOBBE S IN HOLLYWOOD,OR THE FEW VERSUS THE MANY
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Highlight: The China Syndrome
Chapter 19: NINE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN QUESTIONS
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Highlight: From that point, the people yearning to sacrifice might have been asked to actually make sweeping changes that would make a society more independent of Mideast oil and the snake pit of politics that goes with it, reawakened to its own global role and its local desires for membership, purpose, dignity, and a deeper safety that came not from weapons but from a different role in the world and at home.
Chapter 23: LOVE AND LIFEBOATS
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Highlight: Nearly all the older houses had front porches and people still sat on them, enjoying themselves on warm evenings, of which there are many, and on hot nights people—poorer people, probably people without decent air-conditioning, but also my friend’s more middle-class neighbors—sat out under the trees that lined some of the streets, or the shaded traffic meridians, held barbecues to which the whole block might be invited, and generally lived in public among each other. They lacked that shrinking fear of strangers and sacralization of privacy that governs much of the architecture of suburbia and the growth of gated communities, the sprawls where no one mingles or, it sometimes seems, gets out of their car except in
Chapter 23: LOVE AND LIFEBOATS
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Highlight: The Lower Ninth is notorious for drugs and crime, but like most such neighborhoods the reputation is earned by a fraction of its population, and the majority of churchgoers, retirees, working people, children, and others lead ordinary lives.
Chapter 24: BELOVED COMMUNITY
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Highlight: She radiated the same joy many others there did: that this was exactly the meaningful work they had always wanted, and the heat and disarray and discomfort mattered not at all compared to this great sense of arrival. Everywhere people were having the public
Chapter 24: BELOVED COMMUNITY
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Highlight: conversation about politics and values a lot of us dream about the rest of the time, average-looking people of all ages from all over the country, particularly the heartland.
Chapter 24: BELOVED COMMUNITY
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Highlight: Early in his work with the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. began to talk about the “beloved community.” The movement was against discrimination, segregation, and other manifestations of racism. In King’s eyes, it was not only against but also for—for a larger vision, a utopian ideal of fellowship, justice, and peace. Every activist movement begins by uniting its participants in important ways, giving them a sense of purpose drawn from the wrongs they seek to right and the shared vision of a better world. In 1957, King wrote that the ultimate aim of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a key player in the movement, was “to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America where brotherhood is a reality. . . . Our ultimate goal is
Chapter 24: BELOVED COMMUNITY
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Chapter Progress: 81.22%
Chapter 25: EPILOGUE: THE DOORWAY IN THE RUINS
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Highlight: Only this dispersed force of countless people making countless decisions is adequate to a major crisis.
Chapter 25: EPILOGUE: THE DOORWAY IN THE RUINS
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Highlight: They are akin to a shadow government—another system ready to do more were they voted into power. Disaster votes them in, in a sense, because in an emergency these skills and ties work while fear and divisiveness do not. Disaster reveals what else the world could be like—reveals the strength of that hope, that generosity, and that solidarity. It reveals mutual aid as a default operating principle and civil society as something waiting in the wings when it’s absent from the stage.

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title: '<cite class="book">Anarchy Works: Examples of Anarchist Ideas in Practice</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2020-07-11T11:34:24+00:00
url: /quotes/anarchy-works-examples-of-anarchist-ideas-in-practice/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
> &#8230;maybe all of us can feel it:
>
> our bosses and tormentors are afraid of what they would do without us,
>
> and their threat is a promise&mdash;
>
> the best parts of our lives are anarchy already.
> &#8230;it is eurocentric, to say the least, to assume that a hunter-gatherer who knows the uses of a thousand different plants is less sophisticated than an operator at a nuclear power plant who knows how to push a thousand different buttons but doesn&#8217;t know where his food comes from.
> Capitalism may be capable of feats of production and distribution that have never been possible before, but at the same time this society is tragically unable to keep everyone fed and healthy, and has never existed without gross inequalities, oppression, and environmental devastation. One might argue that members of our society are socially stunted, if not outright primitive, when it comes to being able to cooperate and organize ourselves without authoritarian control.
> Whenever people overcome alienation and come together with their neighbors, they develop exciting new ways of coordinating and making decisions. Once they liberated themselves from landlords, priests, and mayors, the uneducated and downtrodden peasants of Aragon proved themselves equal to the task of making not just a whole new world, but hundreds of them.
> Rather than being bound to the blind letter of the law, which cannot take into account specific circumstances or people&#8217;s needs, and depending on a powerful minority for enforcement, the method of diffuse sanctions allows everyone to weigh for herself how serious the transgression is. It also allows transgressors the opportunity to convince others that their actions were justified, thus providing constant challenges to the dominant morality&#8230;In a horizontal society, people enforce decisions according to how enthusiastic they are about those decisions. If almost everybody strongly supports a decision, it will be upheld vigorously, whereas if a decision leaves most people feeling neutral or unenthusiastic, it will only be partially enforced, leaving open more room for creative transgression and exploring other solutions.
> The alienation of labor that is a part of capitalism destroys natural incentives to work such as the pleasure of acting freely and the satisfaction of a job well done.
> When children start school, they are self-guided, curious about the world they live in, and believe everything is possible. When they finish, they are cynical, self-absorbed, and used to dedicating forty hours of their week to an activity they never chose.
> Apologists for capitalism typically argue that intellectual property encourages the development of technology because it gives people the assurance, as incentive, that they can profit from their invention. What kind of cretin would invent something socially useful if he wouldn&#8217;t get exclusive credit for it and profit from it? But the technological mainstays of our world were developed by groups of people who let their inventions spread freely and didn&#8217;t take credit for them&mdash;everything from the hammer to stringed musical instruments to domesticated grains.
> Technology is not blinking lights and whirring gadgets. Technology is adaptation.
> When people have to take responsibility for all the costs of their own actions, it removes the pathological insulation from consequences which lies at the root of bourgeois whims. The result is carefully weighed, mature desires.
> Gift-giving increases their social wealth: friendships and other relationships that create a safety network which cannot be stolen.
> In economies that value local self-sufficiency over trade and production, communities have to deal with the environmental consequences of their own economic behaviors. They cannot pay others to take their garbage or starve so they can have an abundance.
> Anarchists take an entirely different view of the problems that authoritarian societies place within the framework of crime and punishment. A crime is the violation of a written law, and laws are imposed by elite bodies. In the final instance, the question is not whether someone is hurting others but whether she is disobeying the orders of the elite.
> If you need bread and stealing is a crime, you will be punished for taking it, even if you take it from someone who doesn&#8217;t need it. But if your society focuses on people&#8217;s needs and desires rather than on the enforcement of static laws, you have the opportunity to convince your community that you needed bread more than the person you took it from.
> For every human need, a totalitarian system must provide it, subdue it, or substitute a surrogate.
> Without the enforced homogenization of nation-stations, there would be even more variety, as languages and cultures evolve and blend with each other. Borders hinder this cultural diffusion, and thus promote conflict by formalizing similarities and differences. Borders don&#8217;t protect people; they are a means by which governments protect their assets, which include us. When the borders shift in a war, the victorious state has advanced, staking its claim to new territory, new resources, and new subjects. We are plunder&mdash;potential cannon fodder, taxpayers, and laborers&mdash;and borders are the walls of our prison.

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title: Atomic Habits
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2022-03-18T21:05:55+00:00
url: /quotes/atomic-habits/
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&#8216;Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.&#8217;
&#8216;&#8230;the word identity was originally derived from the Latin word essentitas, which means being, and identidem, which means repeatedly. Your identity is literally your &#8220;repeated beingness.&#8221;&#8216;
&#8216;Social skills. When I walk into a party, I will introduce myself to someone I don&#8217;t know yet.&#8217;
&#8216;One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.&#8217;
&#8216;I refer to this as the difference between being in motion and taking action. The two ideas sound similar, but they&#8217;re not the same. When you&#8217;re in motion, you&#8217;re planning and strategizing and learning. Those are all good things, but they don&#8217;t produce a result.
Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome. If I outline twenty ideas for articles I want to write, that&#8217;s motion. If I actually sit down and write an article, that&#8217;s action. If I search for a better diet plan and read a few books on the topic, that&#8217;s motion. If I actually eat a healthy meal, that&#8217;s action.
Sometimes motion is useful, but it will never produce an outcome by itself. It doesn&#8217;t matter how many times you go talk to the personal trainer, that motion will never get you in shape. Only the action of working out will get the result you&#8217;re looking to achieve.&#8217;
&#8216;The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.&#8217;
&#8216;After this initial period of exploration, shift your focus to the best solution you&#8217;ve found&#8212;but keep experimenting occasionally. The proper balance depends on whether you&#8217;re winning or losing. If you are currently winning, you exploit, exploit, exploit. If you are currently losing, you continue to explore, explore, explore.&#8217;
&#8216;People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.&#8217;
&#8216;HABITS CREATE THE FOUNDATION FOR MASTERY.&#8217;

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title: 'Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica'
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> Quicksanders also appear in all the other categories. The more time you have spent on the ice, the less time you have spent elsewhere; your orbit can shift before you know it, and it seems you have nowhere to go but back to the ice. All your things are in a storage unit, or at a friend's or a parent's.
>> Nicholas Johnson (p 89)

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title: 'Brigadistes: Lives for Liberty'
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> The Battle of Teruel toppled his [Milton Wolff] principles. In the middle of the battleground, with little time to think, he decided that his commitment to peace required him to grab a machine gun, aim at the fascists running toward him, and pull the trigger. Soon after, he would be the commandant of the Lincoln Battalion.
>> (p 88--9)
> Stretching before many of those who fought in the International Brigades were lives teeming with history. They fought in the Resistance, or with the partisans, or in an army in World War II, or in Soviet or American prisons, and they reached the end of life with a catalogue of unspeakable struggles. But when they were old and on their deathbeds, the places many of them returned to were the Jarama and the Ebre. Perhaps because, as the Frenchman George Sossenko put it, that was where they lost their virginity.
>> (p 116--7)

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title: 'Building Free Life: Dialogues with Öcalan'
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> If Rojava represents the principle of _life_, the Caliphate represents the principle of _death_. It is a simple as that. It's astonishing that any situation in this <q>complex modern</q> world can be so clear. ISIS is evil. Rojava is good. ISIS must be destroyed. Rojava must be saved.
>> Peter Lamborn Wilson, "Abdullah Öcalan" (p 57)
> For Öcalan, democracy without a state presumes an interwoven network composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees. Federalism is seen as a basic principle of human organization. Defined as such, democratic confederalism is not a program for political change but an act of social self-determination.
> This form of balkanization from the world of capitalist modernity is effected through the production of alternative and oppositional conceptions of a non-state space, a recovery/invention of the new/old world that would consist of multiple autonomous micro-societies bound together within mutually agree upon federal structures. More ambitiously than Svetozar Markovi{c'}, Öcalan suggests a world federation as a successor to the hierarchical interstate organization of the capitalist world-system. The statist nation would be replaced by a geographical confederation of confederations, in which all affairs would be settled by mutual agreement, contact, and arbitration.
>> Andrej Gruba{cv}i{c'}, "<q>There Can Be No Utopia or Reality That is More Ambitious Than This</q>: The Democratic Modernism of Svetozar Markovi{c'} and Abdullah Öcalan" (p 129)
> A feature of the movements of the 1960s and of the world revolution of 1968 is that they started at the periphery of the world-system and found their echo in the center. The events in Paris in May 1968, as well as the large student demonstrations on the campuses of the universities of the United States, would not have been possible witout Algeria or Vietnam, for example, but also not without the October 2, 1968, massacre at the Plaza de Tlatelolco, in Mexico.
> This is important, because history teaches us that profound movements always begin in the peripheries, and then move to the center, although the Eurocentric culture tends to focus uniformly on the latter. Subcomandante Marcos said it very clearly: <q>The great transformations neither start from above nor by monumental and epic events but with small movements that seem irrelevant to the politician and the analyst who look at them from above.</q>
> >> Ra{u'}l Zibechi, "Imaginary Dialogues with Öcalan: Updating Critical Thinking" (pp 134--5)
> <q>Being like Che,</q> the phrase that said it all, was not only about respect for the revolutionary icon fallen a year earlier in combar. It was a promise of life---a promise of giving your own life if necessary---for the revolution that would being happiness and well-being to the world. We repeated <q>Being like Che</q> as a mantra whenever we faced any difficulty or simply from habit. That's how certain we were that we would fight the enemy, weapons in hand.
>> ibid (p 136)
> ...Marxism has ended to be a theoretical discourse about revolutionary strategy, while anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice.
>> David Graeber, "Öcalan as Thinker: On the Unity of Theory and Practice as Form of Writing" (p 173)
> Commodification <q>paves the way for fallacy, extortion, and theft.</q> Applied to society as a whole, its logic becomes an unmitigated disaster: <q>the mental acceptance of the society's commodification is to abandon being human. And this is beyond barbarity.</q> The prospect of life within a system defined by such logic fills him with <q>disgust.</q> Revolutionaries employing the high style tend to avoid this sort of language or, at best, use it very sparingly.
> Some would argue that Öcalan is simply being unusually honest. John Holloway calls this <q>the scream.</q> Radical theorists, he observes, may write as if their descriptions of the contradictions of global capitalism are a result of reasoned contemplation, as if having made careful examination of the workings of the system and discovered its laws of motion, they were finally forced to the conclusion that something is terribly wrong. But it isn't really true. In every case, the analyst begins with a deeply emotional, gut feeling that something is terribly wrong. A scream of horror, even, at the violence and suffering and sheer insanity of the world we see all around us. This is always what comes first. We begin with that horror, and then try to apply the tools of reason to understand how suhc a world is possible.
>> ibid (p184--5)
> However, as James C. Scott pointed out, the breakdown of a civilization is not necessarily equivalent to the annihiliaton of the people involved. Failing systems break up into smaller often less hierarchical forms of organization. Sometimes systemic collapse can even lead to more freedom and greater well-being for the majority, as was the case when the Western Roman Empire disintegrated and both slavery and the ravaging mercenary armies largely disappeared from Europe for centuries.
> The difference today, however, is that the current system is much more dangerous than the Roman Empire was. It is, indeed, by far the most violent and dangerous civilization that has ever existed since the first structures of power and domination emerged in Mesopotamia five thousand years ago. And it might turn out to be even more destructive when breaking apart. Western civilizatioon has bestowed upon us fifteen thousand nuclear warheads and six hundred million small arms, which could quickly turn against everybody. Furthermore, a globalized industrial society is much more vulnerable to deteriorating supply mechanisms due to economic or ecological disruptions than an agrarian society such as Rome's. Therefore, today's transition strategies must not only deal with political and economic reorganization but also with the question of how to respond to sudden system failures, supply bottlenecks, and the spread of violence.
>> ibid (p 191--2)

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title: 'Critical Thought in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra I: Contributions by the Sixth Commission of the EZLN'
date: 2022-12-07
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<q>Imagine that the system is like this shelter. It is meant to be lived in. But a large and heavy room has been built on the roof of the house, and inside of that room men and wmoen celebrate their wealth.</q>
It didn't need to be said, but the person speaking warned us anyway that the weight was too much for the central beam. The house wasn't built to support a lot of things on top of it, and the stage where all of those men and woman fought each other over the throne was heavy, very heavy, too heavy. So it was ot be expected that the beam would groan in protest.
<q>What should we do?</q> the speaker asked, demanding collective thought.
We considered the options. We could reinforce the beam. If we prop it up here and there, it was said, we might alleviate the weight a bit, but it would reduce the available space inside the house. With more and more reinforcements, the house would be ocnverted into a labyrinth of supports and repairs, making it useless for spending the night, cooking, eating, sheltering oneself from the sun and rain, serving as hose to the word and the listening ear, for holding parties, or for resting.
The house wouldn't be a house anymore. That is, instead of a place to live, it would become something that's sole purpose is to support what's above. It would just be another structure. Those who lived within it would do so with the sole purpose of keeping those above up there, initially by working to repair and reinorce the structure, and then by converting their own bodies into another part of that structure. This is an absurdity: a house like that cannot be lived in.
Of course it would have been logical for those who designed the house to have thought to reinforce the lower part before adding weight ot the top. But no, in the frenzy o fth emoment, they added more and more things on top, the majority of which were useless and ostenatious.
Then there finally came a time when those above forgot that they were being held up by those below. What's more, they even started to think that htose below existed thanks to the mercy and kidness of those above, and that in fact it was those above who sustained those below.
It's tre that those above wee fewer in number, but their things were much heavier.
If they had thought about it a little, which each new weight above, they would have added a reinforcement below. Not only did they not do this, but in their eagerness to accuulate more and more above, they were dismantling the primary support sfo rthe building. As if that weren't enough all of the beams, especially the principal one, had rotted,,because those who had been assigned to maintain the edifice were instead busy stealing parts of the structure and pocketing the money that should have been dedicated to the maintenance of the beams.
---SupGaleano, On How We Arrived at the Watchtower and What We Saw from There (pp 1--2)
Where we live, that is, in the mountainous regions, in the hills, was designated as a reserve. They didn't know that indigenous people lived there, in what they call the <em>Montes Azules Biosphere</em>. So nobody counted how many little boys and girls were born here. That is, capitalism didn't know anything about us because no one took our existence into account; we didn't exist for them.
-(p 60)
People think that everything that we say is just magically accomplished. No _compeneros_ and _compeneras_, brothers and sisters, what we are is organized.
-(p 66)
---SupMoises, Political Economy I: A View from the Perspective of the Zapatista Communities
For us, as an organization that resists and struggles in rebellion, we first need to be clear on why one would resist and rebel. If we are not clear on the <q>why.</q> the <q>from what,</q> and the <q>for what,</q> we simply cannot go forward.
For us, resistance and rebellion give us life. Why? Because we are clear on the <q>from what</q> and the <q>for what,</q> as well as the <q>for whom.</q> So we carry out what we've agreed upon and see if it produces the results we wanted.
-(p 126)
That is why we say that we are very _other_. Because we move as if we were trying on a show, or clothes---we try it on and see if it fits, and if not then we keep looking for the one that does fit. That's how we are, _companeos, companeras, brothers and sisters, that is what our resistance and rebellion is about.
-(p 136)
---SupMoises, Resistance and Rebellion II
The path you traveled up to now has been intense, that's for sure. But you know well that there is still a long way to go.
You know something? One of the ways those above try to deceive those of us below is to convince us that if we can't get something quickly and easily then we can never get it. They convince us that long and difficult struggles do nothing but wear us out and in the end we achieve nothing. They disrupt our calendar below by superimposing on it their calendar from above: elections, large events, rallies, commemorations, and _rendezvous_ with history, all of which only serve to hide our pain and rage.
-(pp 158--9)
Meanwhile, we Zapatistas also march sometimes. We chant impossible slogans or we remain silent, instead raising banners and fists, and always with heads raised. We don't protest in order to defy the tyrant but to salute those who confront him from other geographies and other calendars. To defy him, we construct. To defy him, we create. To defy him, we imagine. To defy him, we grow and multiply. To defy him, we live. To defy him, we die. Instead of tweets, we make schools and clinics. Instead of trending topics, we have festivals to celebrate that life that defeats death.
In the land of those lenders from the city, the master continues to rule with another face, another name, another color. In the land of the Zapatistas, the people rule and the government obeys.
-(p 162)
---SupGaleano, The Crack in the Wall: First Note on Zapatista Method
6. <q>Neither theory without practice nor practice without theory,</q> we have said. In saying that we are not talking about a division of labor: those who think on one side and those who at on the other. What we are saying is that those who do theory should have a practice, and that this dictum is almost required by scientific method. But critical thoguth carries within it this poison: if it's only thought, it doesn't manage to be critical. On the other hand, thse who are working on that practice should be reflecting on that practice. This is not only because if one depends on a theorist to explain things to oyu and tell you waht to do, then you end up, well, how should I say it... you end up anxious about whether or not you should vote. But it is also, and above all, because we should keep in mind that our struggle doesn't have a defined timeline. On the contrary, it will span entire generations. These theoretical reflections that we provide should thus serve those who come after us when our celndar reaches its final day. In one word, it will be their inheritance.
-(p 181)
How can I put it? Have you noticed how in the media and entertainment industry, the genocides and serial murders are presented without feeling, with a knd of numbness? Well, the modern politcal class isn't ke that, they aren't numb. They understand perfectly well what is going on and they have emotions. They only tihng is these emotions aren't of shame and remorse. No, they take joy in what's going on. We are not faced with something mechanical that tortures, kills, dismembers, disappears, or exhibits a victim. We are talking about relishing a crime about feeling and enjoying the power of evicting a person from their home, of dispossessing them of their land, of taking away their things, of imosing terror upon them, of making them see their fragility, of emphasizing their defenselessness, of humiliatiing them, of showing them disdain, of crushing them, of murdering them, of killing them in life and again in death. All of this is for no other reason than to exercise Power across the entire axis of the social pyramid: from the tycoon to the head of the family, passing through governors, legislatures, judges, police, informers and snitches, supervisors, floor managers, overseers, and foremen along the way.
-(p 183)
One final sign: The crisis that is coming is not going to send us a telegram, and it won't be announced on monuments or billboards. No, it's the kind of thing that puts a foot in the door before oyu manage to close it. It creeps in through the windows, emerges from the cracks. It slips in between the news about currently trending scandals. You know what they say about the revolution not being televised? Well, the crisis in fact is, but it looks like no one is paying attention.
-(p 185)
Now then. What if this isn’t the case? What if this is just a Zapatista hallucination? What if local and national free enterprise can continue its buoyant step into a bright future? What if the international banking institutions don’t really prey upon the goods of families, countries, and continents? What if global capitalism does indeed recognize differences and diversity?
What if the parties of the left do in fact prioritize their principles and programs over their eagerness for official posts? What if those who govern moderate their rapaciousness and dedicate a good part of their loot to reconstructing a social security net? What if this is just a passing rain shower, a few dark butts that will drift on by themselves?
If all this happens—that is, if nothing happens—would it have done you damage to be organized? Would it have so disturbed you to have taken, along with others [_otros_, _otras_, _otroas_] your destiny into your own hands? Would it have been such a bother to have listened to _otroas_, similar to or different from you? Would you be poorer, less of a person? Would you feel empty, incomplete, useless?
The world, your world, would it be worse or better?
-(p 186)
We grew. A movement like that of the Zapatistas has that curse: it grows. I am not referring to growing in quantity, but rather in problems and challenges. That is how our history is made, and how we make our history.
...
We have that this before, but I am going to remind you of it now: our rebellion is our <q>NO</q> to the system. Our resistance is our <q>YES</q> to something else being possible.
-(p 188)
A ship. A big one, as if it were a nation, a continent, an entire planet. With all of its crew and its hierarchies; that is, its above and its below. With its disputes over who commands, who is more important, who has the most—the standard debates that occur anywhere there is an above and a below. But this proud ship was having difficulty, moving without clear direction and with water pouring in from both sides. As tends to happen in these cases, the cadre of officers insisted that the captain be relieved of his duty. Complicated as things tend to be when determined by those above, it was decided that in effect, the captain’s time had passed and it was necessary to name a new one. The officers debated among themselves, disputing who had more merit, who was better, who was best.
The commotion was heard in the deepest part of the ship, below the water line where the majority of the crew lived and worked. Even though they weren’t seen, they were important. In plain terms, the ship moved thanks to their work. The commotion above was nothing new for those below. They knew that every once in a while, those above fought over who would be captain. None of this mattered to the owner of the ship. It could be whoever, what interested the owner was that the ship produced, transported, and collected commodities across the oceans.
-(pp 190--1)
While we look for the way to get the translation to Loa Otroa, s/he continued there above, observing what happened on deck. Over there for example, was a stage full of little flags of one color. Over there a little further, another with flags of the same color, and another, and another. It’s curious because from close up, it looks like they are a lot of different colors and shapes, but at a distance you can see that all the stages have the same design and the same color. Bored, Loa Otroa looked to the horizon. S/he shuttered and sharpened her gaze to confirms what s/he has seen. Loa Otroa climbed back down to deck and went through the hatch to the bottom part of the ship.
Once there s/he looked for a notebook and begins to draw incomprehensible signs. S/he called Loas Otroas and shows them the notebook. Loas Otroas look at each other, look at the notebook, and look at each other again, speaking a very ancient language. Who knows what they saw because there is no translator on hand. But after a little while like that, exchanging gazes and words, they begin to work feverishly.
The End
-(pp 195--6)
---The Method, the Bibliography, and a Drone Deep in the Mountains of the Mexican Southeast
The flower of the word will not die. The masked face which today has a name may die,but the word which came from the depth of history and the earth can no longer be cut by the arrogance of the powerful. We were born of the night. We live in the night. We will die in her. But the light will be tomorrow for others, for all those who today weep at the night, for those who have been denied the day, for those for whom death is a gift, for those who are de nied life. The light will be for all of them. For everyone everything. For us pain and anguish, for us the joy of rebellion, for us a future denied, for us the
dignity of insurrection. For us nothing.
---Fourth Declaration of the Lacendon Jungle
What if we began with the hypotheis: <q>the capitalist system is good, omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal as of its beginnings (let's locate, for example, its big bang in the industrial revolution), infinite, immortal, capable of regeneration, adaption, and modification.</q>
As a social scientist, you may opt, of course, to sing the praises of such a magnificent being, or you may redesign your conceptualization and see it as a beast that can be tamed. If you choose the first, a place awaits you in one of the many neoliberal think tanks. If you choose the second approach, failure awaits you, but you will always have the perennial consolation of <q>at least we did someting,</q> not to mention a place in institutional politics.
---SupGaleano, The Genealogy of the Crime (p 251)
Previously accustomed to a world where poverty and misfortune always afflicted other geographies and calendars, the poorly-named middle class today begins to understand that its place is increasingly among the victims rather than among the spectators (and never as the executioner, even if it longs for this).
-(p 262)
For a good part of the world, this problem has been understood as a problem of public administration. The almost unanimous diagnosis is that it is an issue of corruption in the governmental apparatus. But here the issue is that there is no politcally defined flag to combat corruption; the right, the left, and the <q>independent</q> political wings all declare themselves against administrative corruption. All are eager to offer integrity and honesty...and all end up caught in some scandal.
Here then is the fundamental question, according to use Zapatistas: has the nation-state, the state as we know it, remained untouched by this system's war? Or are we faced with a hologram, an image of what it once was, a cardboard figure into which various characters stick their faces for the official photo of the season? Perhaps it is neither one nor the other. Perhaps the nation-state is no longer what it was, but it does maintain some resistance against supernational powers?
When the representatives of some European state, let's say Greece, sit down to talk to Madam Angela Merkel, are they talking to the _Bundestag_, the International Monetary Fund, the Europen Central Bank, the European Commission, all four, or none of the above?
In order to find the answer to this question, from our perspective, we would need to reconstruct the genealogy of the nation-state and compare the results with our current reality. And from there, we can ask the following questions: What were the foundations of the state? Which of these foundations still exist? Which have disappeared? And which have mutated? What were the state's functions, its place, its sphere of influence, its areas of interest?
At first glance it appears evident that some of its principle characteristics have been the victims of this ongoing war. It is more and more difficult to talk of sovereignty, territory, authority, the monopoly on violence, of juridical[sic] domination, of independence.
-(pp 264--4)
Are we being unjust? Are we being intolerant and fundamentalist because we appear to be sitting in judgement of a system that has bought <q>freedom</q> to a humanity that was subjugated by medieval darkness and slavery? Are we purposefully ignoring how the sciences and the arts have taken off under capitalism? Are we obscuring the gigantic scientific and technological advances that thanks to capitalism forces diseases into retreat and made new forms of communication possible as never before? Are we letting ourselves be seduced by the nostalgic notion that <q>the past was better?</q> Are we hiding the fat that hte Hydra itself wasn't bad, that is was the corruption and perversity of bad governments that made it bad? Are we ignoring the possibility that it just needs some wise and experienced guidance in order to abandon its criminal instincts, its enthusiasm for destruction, and its militaristic madness, all of which have humanity on the verge of extinction?
Are we purposefully forgetting that wars are waged by men (and woman and others [otroas]) and not by systems? Wasn't it Adolf Hitler who ordered the Holocaust? Wasn't it Harry Truman who ordered the atomic bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Wasn't it Bin Laden who ordered the attack on the Twin Towers? Sure, but who is the individual in charge of imposing this nightmare on the Palestinian people? Who is the person responsible for the Nakba, which, 67 years later (in May of 2015), still holds children, elders, women and men as hostages of Israeli state terror?
In history, that is, in the reconstruction of the genealogy of the pains and wounds that humanity has suffered, one has a choice: one can either search for cruel and corrupt individuals; or one can search fr the material bases. The former will allow us, with great effort, to discover certain facts; yet it will not resist a test of logic. For example, <q>If Truman had not existed and had not been president of the United States, would the atomic bombs not have been dropped?</q>
If, on the contrary, we <q>raise</q> (or <q>lower</q>) the complexity of the explanation from an individual to a group, from a group to a sector of society (to a social class, to be more rigorus), from a sector to a complex society, from a society to a form of social organization in a particular calendar and geography---we'd end up finding there a social system, that is, a form of material relations.
-(pp 264--5)
If it's true that capitalism produces not only wealth as well as scientific and technological advances, but also misery, destruction, and death, then we must name things for what they are: capitalism produces for war and because of war. Its advancement and development depend on war, and it is war that articulates its genalogy, its main power line, its backbone.
...
The poorly-named <q>times of peace</q> are not actually so peaceful. All the time and everywhere, the system destroys and kills. It's not that its existence provoes wars, but that it exists because of war.
And one of the things we detect in this new phase of capitalist war, a phase we call world war, is that it seeks the destruction of a particular territory in order to rebuild it. More precisely: it disorganizes it so as to reorder it. Yes, capitalism provokes chaos and feeds off of it.
-(p 267)
Wars lie. Not one of them has the honesty to confess, <q>I kill in order to steal.</q> Wars always invoke noble motives, they kill in the name of peace, in the name of god, in the name of civilization, in the name of progress, in the name of democracy and, in case there are any doubts, as if all those lies don't suffice, the mainstream media is willing to invent imaginary enemies to justify the conversion of the world into a huge insane asylum and an immense slaughterhouse... Wars sell themselves by lying, just like cars. They are marketing endeavors and public opinion is the target.
-Eduardo Galeano (p 269)
I cross-checked the report by El{i'}as Contreras with other reports. Aother orbital telescope reported that the current world dept is equivalent to 286% of the Gross Global Domestic Product (<cite class="report">Debt and (not much) deleveraging,</cite> McKinsey Global Institute. McKinsey & Company, February 2015). That means you would have to generate nearly three times the production of the entire planet earth just to balance the global economy.
Every nation-state and their respective governments are on the list of debtors, every one of them, as are the big industrial and commercial corporations. Who do they owe? Nobody knows anymore. The organizatin of the financial world is beyond even the most twisted imagination.
Yes. Finance capital. It installs and topples governments. it makes countries appear and disapear. It is behind housing evictions as well as massive construction projects, behind terrorist attacks and ethnic cleansings, behind presidential decrees as well as the dispossession of indigenous peoples'lands. What does it live on? Where does it get its money? Well, from debts and speculation.
-(pp 272--3)
Currently, the capitalist system no longer sustains itself solely on profits produced through the exploitation of labor. Now finance capital uses fictious money that is backed by nothing, such that profits must be obtained by different methods. One method is the appropriation of future labor, which is held as dept by the banks.
...There is a lot of fictitious money without material wealth to back it up which nations will have to pay back at a high interest rate.
In the case of the workers, they have already reached the limits of indebtedness because of their low salaries. Eight out of every ten people in the world are over-indebted. Ten out of every ten countries are over-indebted. It is in this context that the worder enters into the logic of compensating for a low salary through the sphere of circulation, increasing consumption via debt and credit.
...
More credit does not mean a better life, it means pawning the future for generations to come.
-Economists from Centre for Multidisciplinary Analysis a tthe National Autonomous University of Mexico (pp 273--4)
In this logic, the countries that fail will be discarded along with their populations. A literal war will break out against the populations that are surplus for capitalism.
The results? Rising unemployment, the seizure of national partimonies, the economic elimination of various countries, and an increase in the global migrant population to nearly 40% of the world, to name just a few.
There are already signs: entire continents will be behilden to the financial system. The populations, groups, communities, or people who impede it or find themselves distanced from it will simply be erased.
-ibid (p 275)
But if the greed of the Hydra is infinite, earth and humanity are nor. And it is here, friends and enemies [_amigoas_ and _enemigoas_], where critical thought compels us to do something. It is here where critical thought smacks us across the face and asks:
<q>And what about you?</q>
-(p 276)
---SupMarcos & SupGaleano, A World War
So the _partidista_ brother comes to us all sad and asks us what to do, saying that he is screwed. Well, you know what we say to him:
We don't tell him that he should change to another party---the one that is now the least bad option. We don't tell him to vote. Nor do we tell him not to vote. We don't tell him that he should become a Zapatista because we already know, from our history, that not everyone has the strength or heart to be a Zapatista. We don't make fun of him. We tell him that he should organize, plain and simple.
<q>And then what do I do?</q> he asks.
We say to him:
<q>Then you will see for yourself what to do, what emerges in your heart and your head. No one else is going to tell you what to do.</q>
And he says,
<q>The situation is really bad.</q>
We don't like to him, grandstand, or make speeches. We tell him the truth:
<q>It's going to get worse.</q>
---SupMoises, Get Organized (On the Elections) (pp 290--1)
Look companeroas, companeros, companeras, and also those who aren't companeros and companeras and companeroas: the Comandanta Miriam and the little girl _Defensa Zapatista_ are linked through struggle, a struggle for freedom. We understand that if those above win, this link will be broken.
The Zapatista compaeras Lizbeth and Selena said here that they grew up without knowing what an _hacienda_ was, what a <q>kept</q> peon was, what domestic slaves were. They grew up knowing about _caracoles_, _Juntas de Buen Gobierno_, Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities in Rebellion, health and education _promotores_. It was they, along with their entire generation of course, who created the <cite class="periodical">Tercios Compas</cite>, and so on.
The little girl, _Defensa Zapatista_, could grow up and say the same thing, <q>I don't know what an _hacienda_ is, what a <q>kept</q> peon is,</q> but instead of _caracoles_, there could be shopping malls, golf courses, luxury hotels, open-pit mines. That's what's at stake here, not what already happened, but what's around the corner.
-(p 300)
We must awaken the young people of the countryside and the city to help them think like adults. We must take the elderly and help them feel young, because they must teach the young people. They can use the last years of their lives to accompany the young people in struggle.
-(p 312)
---More Seedbeds/Seminars

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---
title: '<cite class="book">Exquisite Rebel</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2021-06-20T10:05:59+00:00
url: /quotes/exquisite-rebel/
subtitle: 'The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre &mdash; Anarchist, Feminist, Genius'
---
&#8216;One interesting theme of this speech is de Cleyre&#8217;s ambivalent relation to the idea of <q>leadership,</q> whether Goldman&#8217;s, her own, or anyone else&#8217;s. She certainly could not, conformably to her own ethics, tell people what to do, even were they willing to follow her. Her leadership, then, was not rabble-rousing or even large-scale organizing. Rather, she reached people one at a time in a kind of ministry and when she spoke she took care that the autonomy of each member of her audience was respected in her words and in her delivery. She led, of course, by example, by her purity of purpose, by her deep dedication to helping specific people to survive and thrive.&#8217;
&#8211; Crispin Sartwell, &#8220;Priestess of Pity and Vengeance&#8221; (p 12)
&#8216;&#8230;how well I recall the bitter energy with which I repelled my teacher&#8217;s enjoinder, when I told her I did not wish to apologize for an adjudged fault as I could not see that I had been wrong and would not feel my words. <q>It is not necessary,</q> said she, <q>that we should feel what we say, but it is always necessary that we obey our superiors.</q> <q>I will not lie,</q> I answered hotly, and at the same time trembled&#8230;&#8217;
&#8211; Voltai, &#8220;The Making of an Anarchist&#8221;
&#8216;Beyond these, there was a wild craving after freedom from conventional dress, speech, and custom; an indignation at the repression of one&#8217;s real sentiments and the repetition of formal hypocrisies, which constitute the bulk of ordinary social intercourse&#8230;An eager wish, too, for something better in education than the set program of the grade-work, every child&#8217;s head measured by every other child&#8217;s head, regimentation, rule, arithmetic, forever and ever; nothing to develop originality of work among teachers; the perpetual dead level; the eternal average. Parallel with all these, there was a constant seeking for something new and fresh in literature, and unspeakable ennui at the presentation and re-presentation of the same old ideal in the novel, the play, the narrative. the history.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (pp 55-6)
&#8216;It does not lie in me to believe that millions of people pack themselves like sardines, worry themselves into dens out of which they must emerge <q>walking backward,</q> so to speak, for want of space to turn around, poison themselves with foul, smoke-laden, fever-impregnated air, condemn themselves to stone and brick above and below and around, if they just didn&#8217;t _have_ to.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 61)
&#8216;If one man working now can produce ten times as much as he can by the most generous use dispose of for himself, what shall be said of the capacities of the free worker of the future? And why, then, all this calculating worry about the exact exchange of equivalents? If there is enough and to waste, why fret for fear someone will get a little more than he gives? We do not worry for fear some one will drink a little more water than we do, except it is in a case of shipwreck; because we know there is quite enough to go around. And since all these measures for adjusting equivalent values have only resulted in establishing a perpetual means whereby the furnisher of money succeeds in abstracting a percentage of the product, would it not be better to risk the occasional loss in exchange of things, rather than to have this false adjuster of differences perpetually paying itself for a very doubtful service?&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (pp 62-3)
&#8216;And then, to turn buttward, starward, skyward, and let the dreams rush over one&mdash;no longer awed by outside powers of any order&mdash;recognizing nothing superior to oneself&mdash;painting, painting endless pictures, creating unheard symphonies that sing dream sounds to you alone, extending sympathies to the dumb brutes as equal brothers, kissing the flowers as one did when a child, letting oneself go free, go free beyond the bounds of what _fear_ and _custom_ call the <q>possible,</q>&mdash;this too Anarchism may mean to you, if you dare to apply it so. And if you do some day,&mdash;if sitting at your work-bench, you see a vision of surpassing glory, some picture of that golden time when there shall be no prisons on the earth, nor hunger, nor houselessness, nor accusation, nor judgement, and hearts open as printed leaves, and candid as fearlessness, if then you look across at your lowbrowed neighbor, who sweats and smells and curses at his toil,&mdash;remember that as you do not know his depth neither do you know his height. He too might dream if the yoke of custom and law and dogma were broken from him. Even now you know not what blind, bound, motionless crysalis is working there to prepare its winged thing.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Anarchism&#8221; (p 80)
&#8216;For there are some whose nature it is to think and plead, and yield and yet return to the address, and so make headway in the minds of their fellowmen; and there are others who are stern and still, resolute, implacable as Judah&#8217;s dream of God;&mdash;and those men strike&mdash;strike once and have ended. But the blow resounds across the world. And on a night when the sky is heavy with storm, some sudden great white flare sheets across it, and every object starts sharply out, so in the flash of Bresci&#8217;s pistol shot the whole world for a moment saw the tragic figure of the Italian people, starved, stunted, crippled, huddled, degraded, murdered; and at the same moment that their teeth chattered with fear, they came and asked the Anarchists to explain themselves. And hundreds of thousands of people read more in those few days than they had ever read of the idea before.
Ask a method? Do you ask Spring her method? Which is more necessary, the sunshine or the rain? They are contradictory&mdash;yes; they destroy each other&mdash;yes, but from this destruction the flowers result.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (pp 81-2)
&#8216;Through witnessing these unexpected acts and their still more unanticipated results, I have gradually worked my way to the conviction that, whilst I cannot see the logic of forcible physical resistance (entailing perpetual retaliations until one of the offended finally refuses to retaliate), there are others who have reached the opposite conclusions, who will act according to their convictions, and who are quite as much part and parcel of the movement towards human liberty as those who preach peace at all costs; that my part as a social student and lover of freedom is to get as wide an outlook as I can, endeavor to appreciate the relative values of contending and interplaying forces, try to detect among the counter-movements the net results, the general forward impulse cutting new barriers, and to move with it, quite confident that there is room and enough for me to hold my individual course within that broad sweep.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Events Are the True Schoolmasters&#8221; (p 86)
&#8216;The ideal of society without government allures us all; we believe in its possibility and that makes us anarchists. But since its realization is in the future, and since the future holds unknown factors, it is nearly certain that the free society of the unborn will realize itself according to no man&#8217;s present forecast, whether individualist, communist, mutualist, collectivist, or what-not. For forecasts are useful as centerizing points of striving only.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 87)
&#8216;&#8230;to remain in a continually exalted moral condition isnot human nature. THat has happened which was prophesied: we have gone down hill from the Revolution until now; we are absorbed in <q>mere money-getting.</q> The desire for material ease long ago vanquished the spirit of &#8217;76. WHat was that spirit? The spirit that animated the people of Virginia, of the Carolinas, of Massachusetts, of New York, when they refused to import goods from England; when they preferred (and stood by it) to wear coarse homespun cloth, to drink the brew of their own growths, to fit their appetites to the home supply, rather than submit to the taxation of the imperial ministry&#8230;The love of material ease has been, in the mass of men and permanently speaking, always greater than the love of liberty.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Anarchism and American Traditions&#8221; (p 97)
Vine story, start of &#8220;The Dominant Idea&#8221; (pp 113-4)
&#8216;&#8230;while not yet overwhelmingly successful in their avowed purposes, are evidence sufficient that humanity no longer seeks dirt as a means of grace.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 118)
&#8216;But the dominant idea of the age and land does not necessarily mean the dominant idea of any single life&#8230;I am certain that in the dark ages, when most men prayed and cowered, and beat and bruised themselves, and sought afflictions, like that St. Teresa who said, <q>Let me suffer, or die,</q> there were some, many, who looked on the world as a chance jest, who despised or pitied their ignorant comrades, and tried to compel the answers of the universe to their questionings&#8230;&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (pp 119-20)
&#8216;What, then, would I have? you ask. I would have men invest themselves with the dignity of an aim higher than the chase for wealth; choose a thing to do in life outside of the making of things, and keep it in mind,&mdash;not for a day, nor a year, but for a life-time. And the keep faith with themselves!&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 122)
Intro, &#8220;Crime and Punishment&#8221; (p 127)
&#8216;<q>The demons of our sires become the saints that we adore,</q>&mdash;and the saints, the saints and the heroes of our fathers, are criminals according to our codes.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 128)
&#8216;<q>I will not let you alone. I am no Atlas. I am no more than a fly; but I will annoy you, I will buzz in your ears; I will not let you sleep. You must think about this.</q>&#8216;
&#8211; ibid (p 128)
&#8216;Out of one great soul-stuff are we sprung, you and I and all of us; and if in you the virtue has grown and not the vice, do not therefore conclude that you are essentially different from him whom you have helped to put in stripes and behind bars. Your balance may be more even, you may be mixed in smaller proportions altogether, or the outside temptation has not come upon you.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 130)
&#8216;Set the standard as high as you will; live to it as near as you can; and if you fail, try yourself, judge yourself, condemn yourself, if you choose. Teach and persuade your neighbor if you can; consider and compare his conduct if you please; speak your mind if you desire; but if he fails to reach your standard or his own, try him not, judge him not, condemn him not. He lies beyond your sphere; you cannot know the temptation nor the inward battle nor the weight of the circumstances upon him. You do not know how long he fought before he failed. Therefore you cannot be just. Let him alone.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 130)
&#8216;Do you punish them for their idiocy or for their unfortunate physical condition? On the contrary, you pity them you realize that life is a long infliction to them, and your best and tenderest sympathies go out to them. Why not to the other, equally a helpless victim of an evil inheritance?&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 134)
&#8216;If I believed in severity at all I should say that these were the criminals upon whom society should look with the most severity, because they are the ones who have most mental responsibility. But that also is nonsense; for such an individual has within him a severer judge, a more pitiless jailer than any court of prison,&mdash;his conscience and his memory. Leave him to these; or no, in mercy take him away from these whenever you can; he will suffer enough, and there is no fear of his action being repeated.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 136)
&#8216;Have you ever watched it coming in,&mdash;the sea?&#8230;&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 141)
&#8216;&#8230;the opportunities of the official criminal are much greater than those of the unofficial one.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 142)
&#8216;Those who have not suffered cannot understand how to punish; those who have understanding _will_ not.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 144)
&#8216;I said at the beginning and I say again&#8230;that all personalities are intertwined and rushing upon doom together.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 144)
&#8216;When Cardinal Mannning wrote: <q>Necessity knows no law, and a starving man has a natural right to a share of his neighbor&#8217;s bread,</q> who though of arresting Cardinal Manning? His was a carefully written article in the <cite class="periodical">Fortnightly Review</cite>. Who read it? Not the people who needed bread. Without food in their stomachs, they had not fifty cents to spend for a magazine.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation&#8221; (p 151)
&#8216;I have not the tongue of fire as <span class="small-caps">Emma Goldman</span> has; I cannot <q>stir the people</q>; I must speak in my own cold, calculated way.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 154)
&#8216;Freethought, broadly defined, is the right to believe as the evidence, coming in contact with the mind, forces it to believe. This implies the admission of any and all evidence bearing upon any subject which may come up for discussion.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;The Economic Tendency of Freethought&#8221; (p 170)
&#8216;Do you know what you do?&mdash;Craven, you worship the fiend, Authority, again! True, you have not the ghosts, the incantations, the paraphernalia and mummery of the Church. No: but you have the <q>precedents,</q> the <q>be it enacteds,</q> the red-tape, the official uniforms of the State; and you are just as bad a slave to statecraft as your Irish Catholic neighbor is to popecraft. Your government becomes your God, from whom you accept privileges, and in whose hands all rights are vested.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 172)
&#8216;Subvert the social and civil order! Aye, I would destroy, to the last vestige, this mockery of order, this travesty upon justice!
Break up the home? Yes, every home that rests on slavery! Every marriage that represents the sale and transfer of the individuality of one of its parties to the other! Every institution, social or civil, that stands between man and his right; every tie that renders one a master, another a serf; every law, every statute, every be-it-enacted that represents tyranny; everything you call American privilege that can only exist at the expense of international right. Now cry out, <q>Nihilist&mdash; disintegrationst!</q>&#8230;
But is it true that freedom means disintegration? Only to that which is bad. Only to that which ought to disintegrate.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 175)
&#8216;<q>But suppose you have murderers, brutes, all sorts of criminals. Are you not afraid to lose the restraining influence of the4 law?</q>&#8230;Second, this is not a question of expediency, but of right. In antebellum days the proposition was not, Are the blacks good enough to be free? but, Have they the right? So today the question is not, Will outraged result from freeing humanity? but, Has it the right to life, the means of life, the opportunities of happiness?
In the transition epoch, surely crimes will come. Did the seed of tyranny ever bear good fruit? And can you expect Liberty to undo in a moment what Oppression has been doing for ages? Criminals are the crop of despots, as much a necessary expression of the evil in society as an ulcer is of disease in the blood; and so long as the taint of the poison remains, so long there will be crimes.
<q>For it must needs that offences come, but woe to him through whom the offence cometh.</q> The crimes of the future are the harvests sown of the ruling classes of the present. Woe to the tyrant who shall cause the offense!&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 177)
&#8216;Ah! if only our Liberal friends were but half as anxious to propagate truth as our orthodox opponents are to promulgate falsehood. If only they were half as willing to work with mind and heart and pocketbook for the elevation of humanity as to list3en to pretty speeches about it.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Secular Education&#8221; (p 186)
&#8216;It is of no importance to me whether this is a polygamous, polyandric, or monogamous marriage, nor whether it was blessed by a priest, permitted by a magistrate, contracted publicly or privately, or not contracted at all. It is the permanent dependent relationship which, I affirm, is detrimental to the growth of individual character, and to which I am unequivocally opposed&#8230;
I believe that the only way to preserve love in anything like the ecstatic condition which renders ti worthy of a distinctive name&mdash;otherwise it is either lust or simply friendship&mdash;is to maintain the distances. Never allow love to be vulgarized by the common indecencies of continuous close communion. Better be in familiar contempt of your enemy than of the one you love.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Those Who Marry Do Ill&#8221; (p 199)
&#8216;Yet from the viewpoint that the object of life should be the development of individuality, such have lived less successfully than many who may not have lived so happily.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 201)
&#8216;That love and respect may last, I would have unions rare and impermanent. That life may grow, I would have men and women remain separate personalities. Have no common possessions with your love more than you might freely have with one not your love. Because I believe that marriage stales love, brings respect into contempt, outrages all the privacies and limits the growth of both parties, I believe that <q>they who marry do ill.</q>&#8216;
&#8211; ibid (p 206)
Account of Solomon, &#8220;The Case of Woman Versus Orthodoxy&#8221; (pp 214&#8211;5)
&#8216;And I, for one, bless the hour when a stinging lash drove women forth into the industrial arena&#8230;No one will accuse me of loving the horrors of modern society, no one will suppose that I want them to continue for one moment after the hour when it is possible to be rid of them.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 217)
&#8216;What is it to be illegitimate? To be despised, or pitied, by those whose spite or whose pity isn&#8217;t worth the breath it takes to return it.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Sex Slavery&#8221; (p 230)
&#8216;As for the final outcome, it matters not one iota. I have my ideal, and it is very pure, and very sacred to me. But yours, equally sacred, may be different and we may both be wrong. But certain am I that with free contract, that form of sexual association will survive which is best adapted to time and place, thus producing the highest evolution of the type. Whether that shall be monogamy, variety, or promiscuity matters naught to us; it is the business of the future, to which we dare not dictate.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 236)
&#8216;Every new definition of right, every fresh leveling of powers, has been bought with the blood of the bravest and best; bought by the sacrifice of those who climbed Mount Pisgah but never entered the Promised Land.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;The Political Equality of Women&#8221; (p 242)
&#8216;And every gardener will watch for indications with great anxiety. If he finds the plant revolts against his experiments, he will desist at once, and try something else; if he finds it thrives, he will emphasize the particular treatment so long as it seems beneficial. But when he will surely not do, will be to prepare a certain area of ground tall just alike, with equal chance3s of sun and amount of moisture in every part, and then plant everything together without discrimination&mdash;mighty close together!&mdash;saying beforehand, <q>If plants don&#8217;t want to thrive on this, they ought to want to; and if they are stubborn about it, they must be made to.</q>&#8216;
&#8211; &#8220;Modern Educational Reforms&#8221; (p 255)
&#8216;What, now, can we offer in the way of suggestions for reform? Speaking abstractly, I should say that the purpose of education should be to furnish a child with such fundamental knowledge and habits as will preserve and strengthen his body, and make him a self-reliant social being, having an all-around acquaintance with the life which is to surround him and an adaptability to circumstances that will render him able to meet varying conditions.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 261)
&#8216;What is really necessary for a child to know which he is not taught now? and what is taught that is unnecessary?
As to reading and writing there is no dispute, thought there is much dispute about the way of doing it. But beyond that children should know&mdash;_things_; from their earlier school days they should know the geography of their own locality, not rehearsing it from a book, but by going over the ground, having the relations of place explained to them, and by being shown how to model relief maps themselves. They should know the indications of the weather, being taught the use of instruments for measuring air-pressures, temperatures, amount of sunshine, etc.; they should know the special geology of their own locality, the nature of the soil and its products, through practical exhibition; they should be allowed to construct, from clay, stone, or brink, such little building as they usually like to make and from them the simple principles of geometry taught. You see, every school needs a big yard, and play-rooms with tools in them,&mdash;the use of which tools they should be taught.&#8217;
&#8211; ibid (p 263)
&#8216;But the evil of pinning faith to indirect action is far greater than any such minor results. The main evil is that it destroys initiative, quenches the individual rebellious spirit, teaches people to rely on someone else to for them what they should do for themselves; finally renders organic the anomalous idea that by massing supineness together until a majority is acquired, then through the peculiar magic of that majority, this supineness is to be transformed into energy. That is, people who have lost the habit of striking for themselves as individuals, who have submitted to every injustice whilst waiting for the majority to grow, are going to become metamorphosed into human high-explosive by a mere process of packing!&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Direct Action&#8221; (p 284)
&#8216;I saw deep down in the hull of the ocean liner the men who shoveled the coal&mdash;burned and seared like paper before the grate; and I knew that <q>the record</q> of the beautiful monster, and the pleasure of the ladies who laughed on the deck, were paid for with these withered bodies and souls.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;The Eleventh of November, 1887&#8221; (p 291)
&#8216;But whatever his private life, he was the representative of wealth and greed and power; in accepting the position he accepted the rewards and the dangers, just as a miner who goes down in the mine for $2.50 a day or less, accepts the danger of the firedamp&#8230;And he died; _not as a martyr, but as a gambler who had won a high stake and was struck down by the man who had lost the game_: for that is what capitalism has made of human well-being&mdash;a gambler&#8217;s stake, no more.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;McKinley&#8217;s Assassination&#8221; (p 303)
&#8216;If it appears to you that I am talking nonsense, permit me to tell you it is because you have dulled your own powers of perception; in seeking to become too intellectually appreciative, you have lost the power to fill primitive things. Try to recover it.&#8217;
&#8211; &#8220;Literature the Mirror of Man&#8221; (p 316)
&#8216;There are two spirits abroad in the world,—the spirit of Caution, the spirit of Dare, the spirit of Quiescence, the spirit of Unrest; the spirit of Immobility, the spirit of Change; the spirit of Hold-fast-to-what-which-you-have, the spirit of Let-go-and-fly-to-what-which-you-have-not; the spirit of the slow and steady builder, careful of its labors, loath to part with any of its achievements, wishful to keep, and unable to discriminate between what is worth keeping and what is better case aside, and the spirit of the inspirational destroyer, fertile in creative fancies, volatile, careless in its luxuriance of effort, inclined to case away the good together with the bad.
Society is a quivering balance, eternally struck afresh, between these two.&#8217;
&#8216;Now, the idea of God is, in the first place, an exceeding contradiction. The sign God, so Deists tell us, was invented to express the inexpressible, the incomprehensible and infinite! Then they immediately set about defining it. These definitions prove to be about as self-contradictory and generally conflicting as the original absurdity.&#8217;

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title: <cite class="book">Intelligence in an Insecure World</cite>
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2019-11-22T15:24:18+00:00
url: /quotes/intelligence-in-an-insecure-world/
categories:
- Uncategorised
---
> &#8230;intelligence is more art than science and, like art, is about nuance. Politicians distrust nuance.
> Here, the relation between knowledge and power is like that of lamppost and drunk: to provide support not illumination.<footer>p 46</footer>
> Secrecy is one form of resistance: attempts to maintain personal privacy or business confidentiality are forms of resistance to the efforts of others to collect information. But if privacy fails then lying and deception are other forms of resistance.<footer>p 46</footer>
> Ironically, perhaps, our endeavours to understand security networks mirror those facing intelligence analysts when they map criminal or terrorist networks.<footer>p 55</footer>
> [Intelligence is] the mainly secret activities&mdash;targeting, collection, analysis, dissemination and action&mdash;intended to enhance security and/or maintain power relative to competitors by forewarning of threats and opportunities.<footer>p. 19</footer>
Para-states &#8211; p 70 https://fas.org/irp/world/para/index.html
SIGINT process &#8211; p 93 nsa.gov/sigint/index.cfm
> We have already made the distinction between <q>information</q> and <q>intelligence</q>, identifying the former with material (documents, maps, photos, taped conversations, computer files) that may be donated, found or collected and hte latter with what is produced after analysis&mdash;the process of evaluation of the information.<footer>p 103</footer>
> The very sophistication of the modern information gathering system&#8230;[produces the problem of overload. Intelligence systems may demand ever more data in the empirical illusion that more data will solve the mysteries and secrets&mdash;rather, they are likely to suffer the fate of the thirsty individual who tries to drink from a fire hose.<footer>p 105. see Organizational pathologies in police intelligence systems</footer>
> Kent&#8217;s classification of three main forms in which strategic intelligence was produced: basic descriptive, current reportorial and speculative-evaluative.
> There is a time element to this: with strategic intelligence, time may not be so crucial and it will be easier to observe how intelligence affects policy, whether the latter is pursued overtly or covertly, or&#8230;how policy affects intelligence. But where time is of the essence the distinction may disappear: counterinsurgency doctrine talks of F3EA, <q>Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyse</q>, in which Finish is not only aimed at the kill or capture of a <q>target</q> but also at seizing documents and computers (<q>collection</q>), as special forces seek to establish a continuous <q>battle-rhythm</q> for the <q>intelligence/operations cycle</q>. Thus <q>intelligence is operations</q>.<footer>p 122(?)</footer>
> The drone programme has implications for our understanding of intelligence, and in particular represents a further challenge to the concept of the intelligence cycle. Within the drone programme, and within a broad remit, intelligence officers are taking decisions on action arising out of intelligence, and the time-frame within which this occurs is highly compressed. In the case of the Predator, individuals are _targeted_ and information is _collected_ by the officers remotely piloting the drone and watching the real-time footage it relays; the _analysis_ is undertaken immediately by the same people involved in the collection; and the _response_ (action) follows immediately from the analysis (to launch or not to launch a Hellcat missile with the intention to kill). There is no need for any wider _dissemination_. Analysis and action are so closely linked in this case as to be inseperable.<footer>p 134(?)</footer>
> &#8230;it is clear from both the regularity and costs of intelligence failures, includign at the ethical level, that intelligence is too important to be left to the spooks.<footer>p 200</footer>
> &#8230;one of several paradoxes of intelligence is that the more collection problems are solved, the worse analytical problems become.<footer>p 206</footer>

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title: Book Log
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All the books I've read

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title: '<cite class="periodical">Lumpen</cite>'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2022-07-27
---
# Issue 1
'I started to think about class very early on in my life. I saw a real difference between by middle-class friends' and working-class friends' homes and families. Beatings, screaming, neglect, domestic abuse and abuse of animals was rife in the working-class community I grew up in. From what I could see, in middle-class homes, the people were gently, non-violent. Nothing was grotesque, animals had toys and beds, got pedicures and the kids were fair-weather and grew up to be really good and really excited about life, generally. These middle-class kids were and as adults are present and active in their own livess, not simply watching it happen to them, with little control. THe lives of these happy and well rounded kids are only made possible by the slow and bleak grind of lives lived by others; their counterpart - a black mirror, the other side of the fence.'
--- H.P., "Dissociation" p 22
'Of course the working class of this country already know all too well where they stand. We've no need for well-off kids to wander into the parts of town they've been warned to avoid to explain to us lowly commoners how society is structured. The working class is lacking in the time, energy, and belief in their own agency to actually exercise their political power as a class, we are not lacking in eyesight. If people from more advantegeous economic backgrounds want to make themselves useful, they need to actually speak to workers and ask them what they need. You'll find that when those needs are met, people are very eager to engage politically. There's a reason, for all its reactionary politics, that Britain has such a strong working-class history. People know which side their bread is buttered on.'
--- K. Kemp, "What Are Socialists For?" p 36
'I notice this particularly as I'm working on climate change. Mostly I'm surrounded by fairly middle-class, academic and affluent colleagues. So when they discuss solutions to climate change, those solutions are often based on reduction: Individual reduction of carbon footprints, of consumer goods, of flying and driving. When I talk to poorer people about climate change, there is rarely anything to "give up," or "reduce" in their own lives - poor people aren't frequently flying, or driving two cars, or wasting lots of food - so their solutions are more useful. If you're poor, the solutions to climate change are either out of your control (the landlord won't insulate your house) or they are about "adding" to your life (eg the local authority should build houses with PVs on the roof, or provide space for community gardens). The solutions become about how society should be reorganised. to add to, build on, and improve lives.
Similarly, when I worked in the mental health services, the service users, who were largely from poor and working-class backgrounds, could clearly see that mental health would collectively improve with better housing, working conditions, pay, and well funded social care budgets, plus better access to informed choice of medical intervention.
The point here is community. working-class and poor people survive by collective action and community. The higher the social class the more individualised life becomes, in my experience (until you get to the super rich, with it's own international borderless, rule-less community, but that's a whole other article!).
A big problem in society is that poor people don't know what it's like to have money or security, and wealthier people really don't understand how and absent financial safety net shapes you.'
--- Tanya Hawkes, "Get Rich or Try Stealing" pp 85--6
'The state can be violence. The violence of Home Office deportations, or the murder contained in the targets of the Department for Work and Pensions. But it can also be the Good Friday Agreement, where boring policy creates a mundane peace and stability for a traumatised people. Or it can be the Wales Future Generations Act, an attempt to protect people who don't exist yet - people with no power over what happens right now in society.
The state, in theory, can be representative of people through deliberative, democratic process. It can be a tool to protect people, or a weapon to patrol the gates of inequality.'
--- ibid p 89
# Issue 2
'So why, when I started writing this, was my mental health so preoccupied with the leader of the opposition? Last night my gyros shop boss who struggles to pay his bills joked that his accountant told him that he should employ 16 year olds only, as he would only have to pay them £3.50 an hour. It was only a joke and he's a good man but it is a good example of how our class enemies think. Forever trying to get as much labour out of us as they can for as little a wage as possible. I told him that if Corbyn got in, he'd scrap the youth rate and on top of that he'd have to pay me £10 an hour! We smiled at McDonalds being forced to pay this but the trugth is that it's been ten years of austerity and it's all I've known since I was a teenager. The idea that all of the barriers we face could fall down overnight with one man is such a tantalising, wistful, and actually rather evil dream to sell to the youth it occurs to me now.
Imagine seeing neoliberal austerity ravage your country for more than a decade. The people riot and strike and some start to hope that a coalition of socialists can put a stop to it. They don't and they can't. This coalition has to jump into bed with the devil before they implement anything. So, you move away from this crisis, to a country that has more welfare and work. Here, though, wages stagnate and welfare is crippled. Division permeates this country in the same way as it did your own. Austerity worsens. The rhetoric again is of EU Exit, immigration, and cutbacks. The same shit everywhere. As before, the people here put hope in a "socialist" leader. Maybe things will be different here or maybe things will be exactly the same...
Nevermind. Those of us entitled to vote will roll the dice and vote. To save the NHS without actually having to fight _on the streets_ for it, the country will vote. We will take the bus that goes closest to our destination.'
--- Gee, "There's Nothing More Permanent Than the Temporary" pp 24--5
'This is his unquiet grave/Corpse-absent yet spirit-bound'
--- Dominic Beard, "Luke Kelly In Wolverhampton." p 50
'Traditionally, the radical and revolutionary Left in Britain has been blind to the prison struggle, unlike in those countries and societies where the prison experience is an inevitable consequence and part of the wider political struggle and therefore recognised as an important part and element of that struggle. By comparison, the British Left, with its largely educated middle-class composition, has related to the imprisoned as the "Lumpen Proletariat", or that element of the most marginalised poor least relevant to the political struggle or even a potential danger to it. In so-called "Liberal Democracies" it is the poorest and most socially disadvantaged who populate the prisons, whilst those allowed the freedom to engage in non-violent political activity rarely experience penal represson or state violence, and so see or experience no connection with the imprisoned, or an inevitable relationship between political struggle and imprisonment. Whereas in other more openly repressive societies the prison struggle is recognised as an intrinsic part of the wider social and political struggle, in "liberal democracies" like the UK, the prison experience is mostly known only to those existing on the outer margins of that society, and those viewed as beyond the pale even by those claiming a commitment to revolutionary struggle.'
--- John Bowden, "The Prison Struggle" pp 95--6
'To push back against these forces we must address two main ways that capitalist society alienates us. First, it isolates us. Second, it convinces us that we cannot meaningfully shape the world around us. Only by organising in our communities, (and in many cases our communities need some serious resuscitation to be recognised as such at all), can we strip away the layers of alienation that have wrapped around our minds. Only by helping each other with no transaction, no expectation of payment or profit, can we convince not just one another but ourselves that we are free agents in this world who can change our environment.
It can be difficult when so much of our time is taken up by survival, but we must take it upon ourselves to learn useful skills. Learn to build things, learn to grow food, develop skills that will not only afford us greater independence but will allow us to really interact with the world, to create something with our labour other than numbers on someone else's accounts. This is not to indulge in some fantasy of disappearing into the woods like some unhinged survivalist, it's to spread the incredibly dangerous idea that us filthy peasants are all capable adults who can change the world.'
--- K. Kemp, "A Legion of Shoemakers" pp 126--7
# Issue 3
'I am in some ways very privileged, I'm white and have a degree. I see myself as spiritually middle class, if not financially. Defined as, middle class people like me, find me interesting and validate me but ultimately won't/can't save me. I heard of an artist who was in the Venice Biennale and had hence "made it" except they hadn't because they died in the Grenfell fire. This reminded me everything I needed to know about class assimilation. It's not real. They want your art they don't want you. What knots me to the world and its exploitation and obsession with transaction is my reliance on Universal Credit and a British passport. Here is where I betray a part of my class and myself to exist. Make deals to survive. And I know I am lucky to even have that. A privilege of being a citizen.
And I believe I have the heart of a revolutionary. One fine day I am just drinking a cup of tea and a thought comes to mind... Ooh!!!! The company I kept, the books I read I am that too. It wasn't about the amount of times I had been arrested it was how I felt. Revolutionary heart is like, a bit crap as a description. Maybe it's like police brutality. You don't need the word brutality because police is inherently brutal. Maybe I just have a heart. Whatever it is it's a lifelong thing that I gotta keep healthy. Like the SPK say, we gotta protect ourself against kidney stones as well as capitalism. So I guess action point to me, look after my heart. How?'
--- Dudley II, "Radical Child Phenomenology: or how to look after your heart when you're underclass" pp 81--2
# Issue 4
'Considering this, it is important to ask the question -- where has being moderate, realistic, and practical got us? It has got us more of the Conservatives. It has got us an NHS that has been privatised behind our backs. It has got us a list as long as our collective arm of people who have committed suicide because their benefits were stopped or because their application for benefits was rejected altogether. We struggle through dull meetings that drain and demoralise us, making arguments about the evils of neoliberalism that we've all made a hundred times before and often to the same people. They smile at us and tell us that they share our concerns, that like us they also care about people who are struggling to make ends meet. Maybe they will even stand on a picket line alongside the workers that they have so much contempt for, telling them how they are in solidarity with them and how difficult it must be to live on such low wages.
3. Poverty & Drudgery -- A False Distinction
The wishy washy conception of poverty begins and ends with lack. It begins with lack because the concern is with an unequal distribution of the social product. It ends with lack because it fails to realise that the product is ours in the first place. Pity the poor who can't afford a holiday aboard or all the mod cons! This conception of poverty is intellectually debased because it is a strictly bourgeois conception of poverty. It testifies to the sovereignty of money whilst failing to recognise the tyranny of that sovereignty. This bourgeois conception of poverty is beneath us because it fails to recognise that it is a systematic daily denial of our true capacities that built the New Jerusalem for the bourgeoisie and the dark satanic mills for the rest of us. As such, we must be willing to say that we the workers of the world deserve not only all of the social product but much more. We deserve a life worth living, a life where we can flourish and become what we are capable of becoming.'
--- Martin Bradbury, "Alienation As Poverty" pp 81--2

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title: 'Manufacturing the Enemy: The Media War Against Cuba'
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Chapter 6: Introduction
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Highlight: The perception is that privately operated media equates to independence and a democratic barrier to state authoritarianism. In fact, when mainstream media ownership finds itself under the control of the uber-rich reactionary corporate elements of society, you don’t need government pressure to ensure compliance, it comes willingly.
Chapter 6: Introduction
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Highlight: Cuba’s revolution is one of the few movements that succeeded in ousting US hegemony and keeping it out—but at a great cost.
Chapter 6: Introduction
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Highlight: Cuban leadership considers itself to be under siege, necessitating measures to protect its citizens that the press condemns as human right constraints. Policies that in much the same way reflected civil right restrictions that were put into place and accepted by American society following 9/11. The mass media did its job well in justifying measures such as the Patriot Act, but giving the same consideration to others who have faced far more incidents of terrorism is not appropriate.
Chapter 6: Introduction
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Highlight: What is missed is comparative data. The benefits from the country’s social programs were in the vast majority enjoyed by those living in Havana and Cuba’s other urban areas. In the countryside, they were virtually non-existent before the revolution. Fidel Castro’s movement was aimed at changing that dynamic, to try and provide those in the rural regions with similar community assistances. To erase the urban centric attitude of a government official who stated: “Havana is Cuba, the rest is landscape.
Chapter 6: Introduction
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Highlight: An article in La Monde Diplomatique provided a rare insight into what the Cuban Revolution really meant: It may be that the heroes of the Sierra Maestra would find the question of orthodoxy versus reform irrelevant. Journalist Fernando Ravsberg points out that “Soviet-style socialism was never a political aim in Cuba: it was seen as a means of saving the revolution, whose first goal
Chapter 6: Introduction
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Highlight: was national independence. Under those conditions, the struggle goes on, with or without socialism.”
Chapter 7: 1. Media Control of Cuban History
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Highlight: No island so small ever maintained a separate existence near a country so great and a government so powerful.27 There
Chapter 8: 2. The Media versus the Revolution
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Highlight: Speaking to French journalist Jean Daniel, on his way to meet Castro in 1963, the US president articulated: I believe that there is no country in the world, including all the African regions, including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization,
Chapter 8: 2. The Media versus the Revolution
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Highlight: humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owning to my country’s policies during the Batista regime …To some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins.
Chapter 8: 2. The Media versus the Revolution
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Highlight: When it became apparent that the American side had no intention of negotiation, the revolutionary government accelerated nationalizing property (regardless of what foreign entity owned it) with little regard to reparations. However, by the 1980s, compensation for nationalized properties belonging to all non-US countries had been settled.29
Chapter 8: 2. The Media versus the Revolution
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Highlight: Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles
Chapter 10: 4. The Media Opens and Closes Against Cuba
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Highlight: the media’s role is not to examine Cuba’s society fairly; it is to validate regime change.
Chapter 10: 4. The Media Opens and Closes Against Cuba
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Highlight: Kimber’s voice was but a small whisper against the cacophony of righteous bleating falling from the avalanche of mainstream media misinformation.
Chapter 11: 5. Future Coverage
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Highlight: “Mr. Díaz-Canel, who became Cuba’s new president on Thursday, the day before his 58th birthday, has spent his entire life in the service of a revolution he did not fight.”25 It takes considerable effort to come up with a criticism so tortured and convoluted in its construct—particularly one with absolutely no relevancy. But when it comes to Cuba, there seemingly is no limit to stretching credibility or setting different standards. As there are no current US leaders who fought in the 1776 revolution, the New York Times certainly would not be giving any consideration to make a similar value judgment.

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title: 'Martin Monath: A Jewish Resistance Fighter Among Nazi Soldiers'
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Chapter 9: 3. Letters from Berlin and Brussels
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Chapter 10: 4. Underground
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Highlight: – the Allied bombing campaign was also conceived to prevent the development of an independent movement of the German population against Hitler.32
Chapter 21: [No. 5] Special Issue – June 1944
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Highlight: Of course, the English and American bourgeoisie intends to bloodily suppress this revolution. To do this it will not be afraid to use the repressive apparatus inherited from German capital, be it police, special troops, or even former Nazi formations. But there is a gap in the accounting of these gentlemen! They have not accounted for the English and American workers.

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title: 'Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life'
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> He who is not malign does not live serenely but with a peculiarly chaste hardness and intolerance. Lacking appropriate objects, his love can scarcely express itself except by hatred for the inappropriate, in whcih admittedly he comes to resemble what he hates. The bourgeois, however, is tolerant. His love of people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
>> (p 25)
> In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so. The justified guilt-feelings of those exempt from physical work ought not become an excuse for the <q>idiocy of rural life</q>.
>> (p 28)
> Beauty of the American landscape: that even the smallest of its segments is inscribed, as its expression, with the immensity of the whole country.
>> (p 49)
> We can tell whether we are happy by the sound of the wind. It warns the unhappy man of the fragility of his house, hounding him from shallow sleep and violent dreams. To the happy man it is the song of his protectedness: its furious howling concedes that it has power over him no longer.
>> (p 49)
> To the question what is to be done with defeated Germany, I could say only two things in reply. Firstly: at no price, on no conditions, would I wish to be an executioner or to supply legitimations for executioners. Secondly: I should not wish least of all with legal machinery, to stay the hand of anyone who was avenging past misdeeds. This is a thoroughly unsatisfactory, contradictory answer, one that mkes a mockery of both principle and practice. But perhaps the fault lies in the question and not only in me.
>> (p 56)
> A first precaution for writers: in every text, every piece, every paragraph to check whether the central motif stands out clearly enough. Anyone wishing to express something is so carried away by it that he ceases to reflect on it. Too close to his intention, <q>in his thoughts</q>, he forgets to say what he wants to say.
> No improvement is too small or trivial to be worthwhile. Of a hundred alterations each may seem trifling or pedantic by itself; together they can raise the text to a new level.
> One should never begrudge deletions. The length of a work is irrelevant, and the fear that not enough is on paper, childish. Nothing should be thought worthy to exist simply because it exists, has been written down. When several sentences seem like variations on the same idea, they often only represent different attempts to grasp something the author has not yet mastered. Then the best formulation shoudl be chosen and developed further. It is part of the technique of writing to be able to discard ideas, even fertile ones, if the construction demands it. Their richness and vigour will benefit other ideas at present repressed. Just as, at table, one ought not eat the last crumbs, drink the lees. Otherwise, one in suspected of poverty
> ...
> ...Precisely the writer most unwilling to make concessions to drab common sense must guard against draping ideas, in themselves banal, in the appurtenances of style...
> Should the finished text, no matter of what length, arouse even the slightest misgivings, these should be taken inordinately seriously, to a degree out of all proportion to their apparent importance. Affective involvement in the text, and vanity, tend to diminish all scruples. What is let pass as a minute doubt may indicate the objective worthlessness of the whole.
>> (pp 85--6)
> Properly written texts are like spiders' webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them. The soundness of a conception can be judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up one cell of reality, it should, without violence by the subject, penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object as soon as other objects crystallize around it. In the light that it casts on its chosen substance, other begin to glow.
> In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, re-arranges, ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
>> (p 87)
> If he [Nietzsche] consigns <q>happiness through an _id{e'}e fixe</q> to the lunatic asylum, the origin of _amor fati_ might be sought in a prison. Love of stone walls and barred windows is the last resort of someone who sees and has nothing else to love.
>> (p 98)
> To play off workers' dialects against the written language is reactionary. Leisure, even pride and arrogance, have given the language of the upper classes a certain independence and self-discipline. It is thus brought into opposition to its own social sphere. It turns against the masters, who misuse it to command, by seeking to command them, and refuses to serve their interests. The language of the subjected, on the other hand, domination alone has stamped, so robbing them further of the justice promised by the unmutilated, autonomous word to all those free enough to pronounce it without rancour. Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies. From the objective spirit of language they expect the sustenance refused them by society; those whose mouths are full of words have nothing else between their teeth. So they take revenge on language. Being forbidden to love it, they maim the body of langauge, and so repeat in impotent strength the disfigurement inflicted on them. Even the best qalities of the North Berlin or cockney dialetcs, the ready repartee and the mother wit, are marred by the need, in order to endure desperate situations without despair, to mock themselves along with the enemy, and so to acknowledge the way of the world.
>> (p 102)
> The technique of the concentration camp is to make the prisoners like their guards, the murdered, murderers...An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realiziation of universality in the reconciliation of differences. Politics that are still seriously concerned with such a society ought not, therefore, propound the abstract equality of men even as an idea. Instead, they should point to the bad equality today, the identity of those with interests in films and in weapons, and conceive the better state as one in which people could be different without fear...The melting-pot was introduced by unbridled industrial capitalism. The thought of being cast into it conjures up martyrdom, not democracy.
>> (p 103)
> Someone who acts in a manner that by accepted norms is greviously wrong, like taking revenge on an enemy or refusing pity, will hardly feel spontaneous guilt, but rather summon the feeling up by a painful exertion. This is not without relevant to the doctrine of reason of state, the severanve of morality from poitics. It conceives the extreme contrast between public affairs and rpivate existence in the same way. A major crime appears to the individual very largely as a mere infringement of conventions, not only because the nroms it offends are themselves conventional, ossified, unbinding on the living subject, but because their objectication as such, even when they have underlying substane, holds them at a distance from the moral innervations, the sphere of conscience. The thought of particular indelicacies, however, micro-organisms of wrongdoing, unnoticed perhaps by anyone else --- that at a social gathering one say down too early at table, or at a tea reception put cards with the guests' names at their places, though this is done only at dinners --- such trifles can fill the delinquent with unconquerable remorse and a passionately bad conscience, and on occasion with such burning shame that he shrinks from confession them even to himself. There is nothing particularly noble in this, for he knows that society, having no objections to inhumanity, has all the more to impropriety...
>> (p 180)

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'Be a community that calls for what is good, urges what is right, and forbids what is wrong: those who do this are the successful ones. Do not be like those who, after they have been given clear revelation, split into factions and fall into disputes: a terrible punishment awaits such people.'
--- The Family of 'Imran 3:104--5
The Cave 18:71--82 - guy killing a kid

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title: Rogue States
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Chapter 15: 10. The United States and the “Challenge of Relativity”
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Highlight: Puzzling over the contention that “‘human rights’ extend to food and shelter,” Seth Faison reviews a “perennial sticking point in United States–China diplomacy, highlighting the contrast between the American emphasis on individual freedom and the Chinese insistence that the common good transcends personal rights.” China calls for a right to “food, clothing, shelter, education, the right to work, rest, and reasonable payment,” and criticizes the US for not upholding these rights—which are affirmed in the UD, and are “personal rights” that the US rejects.
Chapter 15: 10. The United States and the “Challenge of Relativity”
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Expert studies have regularly concluded that "there is no direct relation between the level of crime and the number of imprisonments"
Chapter 16: 11. The Legacy of War
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On the other hand, the bombing of South Vietnam on a vastly greater scale [than that of North Vietnam] was costless. There was nothing the South Vietnamese could do about it. Accordingly, it was not an issue at the time. There were no protests about it. Virtually none. Protests were almost entirely about the bombing of the North, and it shas essentially disappeared from history, so that it doesn't have to be mentioned in McNamara's memoirs or in other accounts, and, as I say, there wasn't even any planning for it. Just a casual decision it doesn't cost us anything, why not just kill a lot of people? It's an interesting incident that tells you a lot about the thinking that runs from the earliest days right to the present. We're not talking about ancient history as when we talk about Amalek and the Frankish wars and Genghis Khan.
Chapter 16: 11. The Legacy of War
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The general lessons of history are clear enough. The legacy of war is faced by the losers. We have thousands of years of pretty consistent records about this. The powerful are too emotionally exhausted, or two overcome with self-adulation, to have any role or responsibility, though for them to portray themselves as suffering victims is an unusual form of moral cowardice.
Chapter 18: 13. Power in the Domestic Arena
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Highlight: Capital is mobile, labor is not, and, unfortunately, international links are quite weak.
Chapter 19: 14. Socioeconomic Sovereignty
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Highlight: From a more fundamental perspective, we could describe it as an array of mega-corporations, often linked to one another by strategic alliances, administering a global economy which is in fact a kind of corporate mercantilism tending toward oligopoly in most sectors, heavily reliant on state power to socialize risk and cost, and to subdue recalcitrant elements.
Chapter 19: 14. Socioeconomic Sovereignty
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Highlight: In fact, in 1998 the United States even threatened to withdraw funding if the World Health Organization even monitored the effects of trade conditions on health.15
> Global Trade: New World Disorder
Chapter 19: 14. Socioeconomic Sovereignty
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Chapter progress: 77.74%
Highlight: 18 It’s quite natural that dismantling of the post-war economic order should be accompanied by a significant attack on substantive democracy—freedom, popular sovereignty, and human rights—under the slogan TINA (There Is No Alternative). It’s kind of a farcical mimicry of vulgar Marxism. The slogan, needless to say, is self-serving fraud. The particular socioeconomic order that’s being imposed is the result of human decisions in human institutions. The decisions can be modified; the institutions can be changed. If necessary, they can be dismantled and replaced, just as honest and courageous people have been doing throughout the course of history.

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title: 'Rojava: Peoples in Arms'
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> We really understood from the beginning what R{e^}ber Apo [Abdullah Ocalan] was telling us when he said <q>our work is to dig a well with a needle</q>. It is a really long-term process. In Islam, there is the significant meaning of the Well of Zamzam [close to where the Kaaba is, the holiest pplace in Islam]. And in Islam, it is said, when you give a lot of efforts, and when you dig a well with a needle, the most beautiful thing you can have is the Zamzam water; we dug for all those years, and all we saw, after all this effort, is the blood of our children. Before the war, many people in Rojava would ask <q>why are your children going to the mountains to join the Apoist movement? Why are you giving them to Turkey? What has it got to do with our problems here in Rojava?</q> In 2014, all these people had their answer when hundreds, if not thousands of our children returned from the mountains and from Bakur, crossed the border to defend Koban{e^}. Many of them did not have time to drink a cup of water in Koban{e^} before they fell, defending the city and defending our population. The people of Koban{e^} who were sceptical about the fact that our children went to the mountains got their answer.
> Ay{sh}e Efendi, Co-Chair of the PYD in Koban{e^} (p 6)
> It is enough! I hope you will not take it as a threat, and misunderstand when I am saying: <q>If you don't let our Kurdish children live in peace, we will not let the children of the world live in peace.</q> We continue to rise up around the world. Of course, we are saying this in a respectful, peaceful way, and so far all our actions have been with peaceful intentions, and we will continue this way. We continue to rise up and we will not stop our struggle. We have the right and we will continue to defend ourselves.
> ibid (p 10)
> *Do you think people not being willing to commit to a dight has something to do with comfort and that a certain clarity means giving up comfort?*
> I do think that it is a factor. But it's only one aspect. I think the main reason is fear. Just plain feear. Fearing the uncertain, fearing the future, fearing consequences like death or prison. But friends and family also play a part. And, of course, also comfort, be it a relationship, or a warm apartment, or the co-workers with whom you can have a beer with[sic] after finishing work. That doesn't exist here. And the revolution will not be all done in three years. The revolution is a task for life and a decision for life and that makes a lot of people back away. I have lived through this myself and it is the hardest fight to be fought. And it has consequenes, which will make you ache from tim eto time. In difficult times, when you feel really sh\*tty, you will of course sometimes think of Mum and Dad and your buddies at home. But if we leave behind our family, and our personal belongings in order to dedicate our whole life to the revolution, to freedom, then our actions will have an impact on society. The people see that I have left many things behind. They are thinking: <q>He has so many options. He could do anything he wants. But he is here and chose to fight.</q> That's giving hope to the people. That's what in a way defines a vanguard. That you with setting an example show that it is possible to achieve a free life, and having so much hope and trust in history that it will come true one day. And that attracts other people.
> Member of YPG International (p 149)

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title: 'Sara: My Whole Life Was a Struggle'
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Chapter 7: Sara
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Highlight: Those who didn’t have the strength to work illegally as revolutionary leftists entered the CHP as leftists to try to oppose the state.
Chapter 7: Sara
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Highlight: I just didn’t know yet what being a revolutionary really meant. The theoretical-ideological dimension and the practical-organizational work were both strange to me. A few general truths had impressed me, but I lacked information and consciousness. I didn’t want to become a revolutionary at the behest of others, or to join a fraction without really being convinced about it. That train of thought wasn’t conscious, but that’s how I was from the beginning. Still, my self-awareness was growing.
Chapter 7: Sara
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I wasn't fussy about those with whom I sympathized, but I felt a deep connection to these friends. Gradually I developed a position strong enough that those who instilled confidence in me gave me unsurpassed joy and excitement. I did not hesitate, hold back, or doubt. I didn't ask where this story would lead, who these people were, or what they represented. The answers lay in the confidence, grounded in respect and love that I felt toward the comrades because of their way of life. I was sure that over time all specific questions would be answered.
It isn't wasy to describe everything, or for you to understand, without having lived it yourself. Writing can't do justice to the simplicity and beauty of those days or capture my feelings at the time. As I write, I'm experiencing them once again, with all my heart and with full consciousness. It was wonderful to arrive, so unconditionally and genuinely, through contradictions and struggles, at an idea. It was an immense joy, and I will repeat it aloud now: _I'm the happiest person in the world because I participate in this struggle_.
Chapter 7: Sara
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Highlight: I had no difficulty staying in touch with people and usually left a mostly positive impression.
Chapter 7: Sara
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Highlight: It was better to have a horrible end than an unending horror, so that’s how I behaved.

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title: The Dispossessed
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To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest.
Oiie was fond of his wife and trusted her. He behaved to her and to his children very much as an Anarresti might. In factm at home, he suddenly appeared as a simple, brotherly kind of man, a free man.
This was the Urras he had learned about in school on Anarres. This was the world from which his ancestors had fled, preferring hunger and the desert and endless exile.
<q>Do you know what your society has meant, here, to us, these last hundred and fifty years? DO you know that when people here want to wish each other luck they say, <q>May you get rebortn on Anarres!</q> To know that it exists, to know that there is a society without government, without police, without economic exploitation, that they can never say again that it's just a mirage, an idealist's dream!</q>
> Maedda

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title: The Reproduction of Daily Life
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> In the performance of their daily activities, the members of capitalist society simultaneously carry out two processes: they reproduce the form of their activities, and they eliminate the material conditions to which this form of activity initially responded. But they do not know they carry out these processes; their own activities are not transparent to them. They are under the illusion that their activities are responses to natural conditions beyond their control and do not see that they are themselves authors of those conditions.
>> (p 3)
> In the Economist's pictorial representations of the workings of heaven, the angels do everything and men do nothing at all; men simply enjoy that these superior beings do for them. Not only does Capital produce and money work; other mysterious beings have similar virtues. Thus Supply, a quantity of things which are sold, and Demand, a quantity of things which are bought, together determine Price, a quantity of money; when Supply and Demand marry on a particular point of the diagram, they give birth to Equilibrium Price, which corresponds to a universal state of bliss. The activities of everyday life are played out by things, and people are reduced to things (<q>factors of production</q>) during their productive hours, and to passive spectators of things during their <q>leisure time.</q>
>> (pp 17--8)
> With unions, daily life is similar to what it was before unions. In fact, it is almost the same. Daily life continues to consist of labor, of alienated activity, and of npaid labor, or forced labor. The unionized worker no longer settles the terms of his alienation; union functionaries do this for him. The terms on which the worker's activity is alienated are no longer guided by the individual worker's need to accept what is available; they are now guided by the union bureaucrat's need to maintain his position as pimp between the sellers of labor and the buyers.
>> (p 22)
> Anything which can be transformed into a marketable good is grist for Capital's mill, whether it lies on the capitalist's land or on the neighbor's, whether it lies on the capitalist's land or on the neighbor's, whether it lies above ground or under, boats on the sea or crawls on its floor, whether it is confined to other continents or other planets. All of humanitys explorations of nature, from Alchemy to Physics, are mobilized to search for new materials in which to store labor, to find new objects that somoene can be taught to buy.
> Buyers for old and new products are created by any and all available means, and new means are constantly discovered. <q>Open markets</q> and <q>open doors</q> are established by force and fraud. If people lack the means to buy the capitalists' products, they are hired by capitalists and are paid for producting the goods they wish to buy; if local craftsmen already produce what the capitalists have to sell, the craftsmen are ruined or bought-out; if laws or traditions ban the use of certain products, the laws and the traditions are destroyed; if people lack the objects on which to use the capitalists' products, they are taught to buy these objects; if people run out of physical or biological wants, then capitalists <q>satisfy</q> their <q>spiritual wants</q> and hire psychologists to create them; if people are so satiated with the products of capitalists that they can no longer use new objects, they are taught to buy objects and spectacles which have no use but can simply be observed and admired.
>> (p 30)

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title: 'Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse'
author: Ben
type: quotes
date: 2022-03-18T20:59:31+00:00
url: /quotes/why-we-fight-essays-on-fascism-resistance-and-surviving-the-apocalypse/
---
&#8216;Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1935, &#8220;Those who are against Fascism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf. They are willing to eat the calf, but they dislike the sight of blood.&#8221;&#8216;
-Natasha Lennard, &#8220;Foreword&#8221;
&#8216;Our secondary religion is the quest to reveal our shadow selves, the conspiracy that undergirds every significant moment of history. Assassinations must have resulted from a coordinated campaign, the grand movement, the machinations of masons or Jews or sacred bloodlines, never just the obvious aboveground conspiracy of capital and statecraft. Our religious identity and political paranoia have a chicken-and-the-egg quality, one informs the other in a self-reinforcing cycle. They find their unity in what they are waiting for: an end by either fire or ice.&#8217;
**&#8216;These mass mobilizations in the U.S. followed those in regions around the world: Chile, Belarus, Rojava, Hong Kong, Bolivia, the world is seeing a return to history.&#8217;**
-&#8220;Introduction&#8221;
&#8216;Third Positionism, which draws Left ideas into fascist politics, is the dominant form of open fascism today. True fascist ideologues, the &#8220;idea makers&#8221; in these movements who currently make up the most radical element, necessarily consider themselves anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and opposed to current Western governments.&#8217;
**&#8216;If fascists see cultural spaces as premeditating political ones, then the movement of fascists into cultural spaces is effectively political. If fascist public speech is intended to recruit and organize, then fascist public expression is indistinguishable from fascist organizing. If fascist organizing results in violence, whether explosions of &#8220;seemingly random&#8221; street violence, or genocide if they were to take power, then fascist organizing is fascist violence.&#8217;**
&#8216;Fascism can only hide its violence for so long. The history of white nationalism has been the history of bloodthirsty terrorism, a point which marks all fascist parties and organizations in all countries in all times. While fascist intellectuals and move and movement leaders desperately want to decouple the image of identitarian nationalist ideas from street and State violence, this is impossible in the real world. Within a long enough timeframe there will always be killing.&#8217;
&#8216;Crisis is essential to capitalism and will increase as global economic markets continue to shake with instability. That penchant for crisis, mixed with the stratification built into capitalism and the State&#8217;s reliance on bigotry, makes fascist explosions inevitable.&#8217;
**&#8216;The most effective counter to fascist recruitment is Left mobilization, and the only thing that stops violence is mass refusal.&#8217;**
-&#8220;25 Theses of Fascism&#8221;
**&#8216;There is an eschatology to current affairs under these conditions. People feel the sense of a looming apocalypse because the institutions that once protected them are falling apart. In this moment of crisis we can choose how to respond, with solidarity or with barbarism.&#8217;**
**&#8216;&#8221;If men define situations are real, they are real in their consequences,&#8221; wrote William and Dorothy Thomas.&#8217;**
&#8216;&#8221;The problem is that the desire to liberate and the desire to oppress are the same fucking desire,&#8221; Kevin Van Meter, the author of Guerrilas of Desire, told me late a night years ago. He was echoing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who write in <cite>Anti-Oedipus</cite> that &#8220;the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism.&#8221; That desire is inside us and can go a number of ways depending on the conditions we create.&#8217;
-&#8220;Wolf Age&#8221;
&#8216;We are experience a profound shift in our time&#8212;a reaction to global financial and climate collapse&#8212;and the cracks in the edifice mean that so much is possible: a potential world of horrors or one of new beginnings.&#8217;
-&#8220;Contested Space&#8221;
&#8216;Global capitalism, carbon fuel sources, infinite growth, destructive forms of mass production, and liberal democracies were all built on quicksand. When we discovered what we had done we were already sinking.&#8217;
**&#8216;As crisis becomes the new normal, splits will form in the working class, with privileged groups fighting to maintain their menial comforts and kick their own reckoning with a changing world down the road.&#8217;**
**&#8216;Climate change will be seen most presciently in the manufacture of &#8220;the refugee&#8221; as a infinite category; dislocation will become a mass experience.&#8217;**
&#8216;While people naturally respond to crisis with mutual aid, years of racial tribalism and nationalism has twisted our natural instinct and when placed into the context &#8220;immigration&#8221; that programming can override the community&#8217;s caring instincts.&#8217;
&#8216;We are best when we live out the principles of a new society as a form of survival today. Rejecting the alienation of industrial capitalism and the false communitarianism of tribalism are steps towards the type of relationships that can endure. These can, and should, be founded on sincere bonds, federated on a wide scale for coordination, yet do not need to be modeled on radical political movements as we know them today.&#8217;
&#8216;Individualism, the sanctity of the traditional family, the boundaries between peoples and identity, are arcane relics, bargains of survival in a world with expired rules.&#8217;
&#8216;They expanded across the world through Manifest Destiny, and once they had their fill they closed the door behind them.&#8217;
**&#8216;The instabliity that we are transitioning to can be one of fortified borders or no borders, and it is the destruction of all national boundaries that leads to the eventual destruction of all nations, of all private properties, and the social constructs that the rich use to further exploit the rest of us. If we want to flourish on the other side of this Armageddon, then we have to choose to do it as one international federated community. To commit to the commune, all of us together, is the strength, the inverse of the tribal.&#8217;**
&#8216;Marx and Engels created the construction of the worker as the vulnerable point of dialectic: capital created the worker for exploitation, but that unique position could be capital&#8217;s undoing.&#8217;
**&#8216;We either commit to the new world or we don&#8217;t, and that requires acting in earnest, experimenting, visioning, and even a certain amount of idealism. We can reclaim the romantic, return ourselves to passionate living and dreaming. This crisis can be a revolution, and so we can live revolutionary lives, with art, community, and spirit at the center. We do not have to return to the status quo on the conclusion of merely surviving, and we can do that by making decisions about what we will strive for. We cannot determine the whole of our future, but we can choose what we run towards.&#8217;**
&#8216;Our side of Armageddon is when we fight to remain a community and to sustain our vision of the world. We didn&#8217;t choose the circumstances that are coming to bear on us, but we can choose how we are going to use this situation.&#8217;
&#8216;But we aren&#8217;t just talking about this weight, this apocalypse, we are talking about the battle at its beginning. This is the point where the armies amass on sacred land and have to battle at its beginning. This is the point where the armies amass on sacred land and have to battle for what kind of world we are going to be left with after the fall.&#8217;
-&#8220;Introduction to Armageddon&#8221;
&#8216;&#8230;the majority of us believe that the system is not just randomly imperfect; rather, it tends to be disproportionately imperfect against people of color and poor people.&#8217;
-&#8220;Because of Their Violence&#8221;
&#8216;Revolutionary politics lives inside us, stoked through the intoxicating effect of massive, emancipatory ideas. These fantasies, visions of what could be possible, sustain social movements. This spark seems small&#8212;it lives largely in our imagination&#8212;but we are nevertheless seduced by its power to see something much larger (a small key opens a large door).&#8217;
&#8216;And all of these: economic starvation, mass killings, stratification as a solution to increased instability, are eschatological. Each factor works in concert with the other to suggest that this moment of Rojava&#8217;s revolution is only for a moment. A brief glimmer before the rest of the world collapses onto it with the weight of our circumstances. This story has continued into 2020, with starts and stops, and it seems unclear how the future of the region will play out.&#8217;
&#8216;When we say that Rojava is a revolutionary society, we mean it quite literally. It is a war society. It exists, as we know it now, in the eye of the storm; they are building a utopian vision while facing encroaching violence. There has never been a moment when the Rojava experiment was safe; there was no time when it was guaranteed the right to see through its vision.&#8217;
**&#8216;Revolutions are difficult to make and maintain. The easy path would be to continue with some version of the status quo, to find reforms that make sense and that offer the illusion of incremental improvements. Revolutions are risky. They usually fail, and even where they don&#8217;t, a lot of heartache and trials lie ahead. History is not linear, with determined end points, but a trail of unanticipated upheavals: 1871, 1917, 1936, 1968, 1980, 1989, 1994, 2011, 2013, 2020, and a lot of others in between. A revolutionary society wants more than we have had before, more than has ever seemed possible to grasp. So we make the choice to fight for something, to suffer and sacrifice, because we are willing to roll the dice. Because we want more.
Revolutions express our passion for a life worth living; comfort and stability is sacrificed for the hope of better days. In Rojava, every moment matters. Even seemingly mundane parts of society are imbued with meaning because they are at war, not only with the invading armies but also with their own past. The ways armies are trained, bridges are built, and food is grown are all being reimagined, and are all areas of struggle.&#8217;**
&#8216;The Internal Security Forces of Rojava (Asayish) would beg you not to call them _police_. They provide community protection services, and those who serve have to learn nonviolent conflict resolution skills and feminist theory before they can even think of picking up a gun. In the future, they hope to offer Asayish training to everyone, breaking down the need for a professionalized class of law enforcement and making community self-defense collaborative. They are even implementing transformative justice approaches to harm in support of the vision of eliminating the carceral state.&#8217;
**&#8216;&#8221;For believe me!&#8212;the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously!&#8221; wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in <cite>The Gay Science</cite>, meaning that it is only under strife that we become our best selves. &#8220;Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves!&#8221;&#8216;**
**&#8216;If we give up now, then this will only have been a window into what could have been, a story we will continue to tell for the coming decades in reading groups or at conferences or in our personal laments and revolutionary longings. We have so many visions of these revolutionary possibilities (after all, we still remember Catalonia). We don&#8217;t just want another moment in time.&#8217;**
-&#8220;Living Your Life in a State of War&#8221;

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title: Book Readlist
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Books I want to read

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title: 'Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW'
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Glib-tongued theory is of little help in the class struggle unless it is backed by class loyalty and class action ... A man is not what he thinks, but what he does. It is easy to think war, or think strike, or to theorise on tactica, but it takes real manhood and real womanhood to back up these theories and these thoughts in the actual everyday battle of the working class.
> Direct Action
His [Tom Glynn] confidence was well founded: employers were not obliged to recognize unions, but workers in strategic positions in industries such as transport, mining, and power could defy the law.
> Lucien van der Walt, "<q>All Workers Regardless of Craft, Race or Colour</q>: The First Wave of IWW Activity and Influence in South Africa"

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title: Films
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title: Film Log
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All the films I've seen

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