Tag: Quote

We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people.  We feel an even deeper pleasure letting everyone know of this fact.  This feeling is EVIL.  Learn to see it in yourself, and then learn to be horrified by how thoroughly it can poison your mind.  Yes evidence may at times force you to disagree with a majority, and your friends may have correlated exposure to that evidence, but take no pleasure when you and your associates disagree with others; that is the road to rationality ruin. 

~Robin Hanson

I’ve always been a religious man

I ‘ve always been a religious man

but I met the banker and it felt like sin

he turned my bailout down

The Banker Man, he let into me

let into me, let into me

The Banker Man, he let into me and spread my name around

He thinks I ain’t got a lick of sense cause I talk slow and my money’s spent

Now, I ain’t the type to hold it against, but he better stay off my farm

Cause it was my Daddy’s and his Daddy’s before

and his Daddy’s before and his Daddy’s before

Five generations of an unlocked door and a loaded burglar alarm.

Lots of pictures of my purdy family

lots of pictures of my purdy family

lots of pictures of my purdy family in the house where I was born.

House has stood through five tornadoes,

Droughts and floods and five tornadoes.

I’d rather wrastle an alligator than to face the Banker’s scorn

Cause he won’t even look me in the eye

He just takes my land and apologize

with pen, paper, and a friendly smile, he says the deed is done.

The sound you hear is my Daddy spinning, The sound you hear is my Daddy spinning

The sound you hear is my Daddy spinning over what the Banker done.

Like to invite him for some pot roast beef and mashed potatoes and sweet tea

follow it up with some banana pudding and a walk around the farm

Show him the view from McGee Town Hill

Let him stand in my shoes and see how it feels

to lose the last thing on earth that’s real

I’d rather lose my legs and arms

Bury his body in the old sink hole

Bury his body in the old sink hole

Bury his body in the old sink hole under cold November sky

Then damned if I wouldn’t go to church on Sunday

Damned if I wouldn’t go to church on Sunday

Damned if I wouldn’t go to church on Sunday

and look the Preacher in the eye.

~Drive-By Truckers, “Sinkhole”

Food isn’t about Nutrition

Clothes aren’t about Comfort

Bedrooms aren’t about Sleep

Marriage isn’t about Romance

Talk isn’t about Info

Laughter isn’t about Jokes

Charity isn’t about Helping

Church isn’t about God

Art isn’t about Insight

Medicine isn’t about Health

Consulting isn’t about Advice

School isn’t about Learning

Research isn’t about Progress

Politics isn’t about Policy

~Robin Hanson, Politics isn’t about Policy

I posted this as a comment in NPK’s essay, but it is one of my favorites, and I thought it deserves a QFD of its own.

America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can’t ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can’t lose what you lacked at conception.

“Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight.

~James Ellroy, American Tabloid

Emphasis added.

If there is anything I take to heart, it is this (in spite of being something of a neo-fascist, Ellroy is brilliant and capable of significant insight – and cracking good crime stories).

Mr. Segundus wished to know, he said, why modern magicians were unable to work the magic they wrote about.  In short, he wished to know why there was no more magic done in England.

It was the most commonplace question in the world.  It was the question which, sooner or later, every child in the kingdom asks his governess or his schoolmaster or his parent.  Yet the learned members of the York society did not at all like hearing it asked and the reason was this: they were no more able to answer it than anyone else.

The President of the York society (whose name was Dr Foxcastle) turned to John Segundus and explained that the question was a wrong one.  “It presupposes that magicians have some sort of duty to do magic — which is clearly nonsense.  You would not, I imagine, suggest that it is the duty of botanists to devise more flowers?  Or that astronomers should labour to rearrange the stars?  Magicians, Mr Segundus, study magic that was done long ago.  Why should anyone expect more?”

An elderly gentleman with faint blue eyes and faintly colored clothes (called either Hart or Hunt — Mr Segundus could never quite catch the name) faintly said that it did not matter whether anyone expected it or not.  A gentleman could not do magic.  Magic was what street sorcerers pretended to do in order to rob children of their pennies.  Magic (in the practical sense) was much fallen off.  It had low connexions.  It was the bosom companion of unshaven faces, gypsies, house-breakers; the frequenter of dingy rooms with dirty yellow curtains.  Oh no!  A gentleman could not do magic.  A gentleman might study the history of magic (nothing could be nobler), but he could not do any.

~Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Since I’ve been talking about the South with some of y’all tonight, I thought I’d share some of my favorites from the world of Southern Rock.

Bloody knuckles and a broken nose

oh, that’s why i never left home

i’ve fought in bars

and i’ve fought in the streets

four more years of fightin’

’til they’re done with me

leave it ’til tomorrow ’til you say good bye

aint in the mood to watch no one cry

tonight it’s whiskey, so buy another round

drink it up boys its my last night in town

momma i ain’t your only son

aint no favorites here, its just how its done

drink it up boys its my last night in town

its too late to turn back now, oh

in the mornin’ its the wide open road

take it far enough it’ll bring you back home

she said “i watched them carry you to the back

couldnt say good by to you like that”

I can only say, “I’m sorry i’s drunk”

so many times ’til it doesnt mean much

when i get home the first rounds on me

raise up that glass – good bye tennessee

momma I ain’t your only son

aint no favorites here, its just how its done

drink it up boys its my last night in town

its too late to turn back now, oh

I can only say, “I’m sorry i’s drunk”

so many times ’til it doesnt mean much

when i get home the first rounds on me

drink it up boys – good bye tennessee

Lucero, “Last Night in Town”

You want to grow up to paint houses like me, a trailer in my yard till you’re 23

You want to be old after 42 years, keep dropping the hammer and grinding the gears

Well, I used to go out in a Mustang, a 302 Mach One in green.

Me and your Mama made you in the back and I sold it to buy her a ring.

And I learned not to say much of nothing and I figured you already know

but in case you don’t or maybe forgot, I’ll lay it out real nice and slow

Don’t call what your wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.

Don’t worry about losing your accent, a Southern Man tells better jokes.

Have fun but stay clear of the needle. Call home on your sister’s birthday.

Don’t tell them you’re bigger than Jesus, don’t give it away.

Six months in a St. Florian foundry, they call it Industrial Park.

Then hospital maintenance and Tech School just to memorize Frigidaire parts.

But I got to missing your Mama and I got to missing you too.

So I went back to painting for my old man and I guess that’s what I’ll always do

So don’t try to change who you are boy, and don’t try to be who you ain’t.

And don’t let me catch you in Kendale with a bucket of wealthy-man’s paint.

Don’t call what your wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.

Don’t sing with a fake British accent. Don’t act like your family’s a joke.

Have fun, but stay clear of the needle, call home on your sister’s birthday.

Don’t tell them you’re bigger than Jesus, Don’t give it away.

Don’t give it away.

Drive-By Truckers, “Outfit”

Ride the blue wind high and free

she’ll lead you down through misery

leave you low, come time to go

alone and low as low can be

If I had a nickel I’d find a game

If I won a dollar I’d make it rain

If it rained an ocean I’d drink it dry

and lay me down dissatisfied

Legs to walk and thoughts to fly

eyes to laugh and lips to cry

a restless tongue to classify

all born to grow and grown to die

So tell my baby I said so long

tell my mother I did no wrong

tell my brother to watch his own

and tell my friends to mourn me none

I’m chained upon the face of time

feelin’ full of foolish rhyme

there ain’t no dark till something shines

I’m bound to leave this dark behind

Ride the blue wind high and free

she’ll lead you down through misery

leave you low, come time to go

alone and low as low can be

Townes Van Zandt, “Rex’s Blues”

The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost.  

~Arthur Schopenhauer

For Michael.

For some time, I have wondered at the adulation towards Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” by people who I know and respect.  Finally, I’ve decided to brave it, and as I’m about halfway through, Jon Chait gives it a massive, ten page review.  He’s gentler on it than I am, but that doesn’t mean he’s nice to it.

Klein’s relentless materialism is not the only thing driving her to see conservatives merely as corporate puppets. … Her ignorance of the American right is on bright display in one breathtaking sentence:

“Only since the mid-nineties has the intellectual movement, led by the right-wing think-tanks with which [Milton] Friedman had long associations–Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute–called itself “neoconservative,” a worldview that has harnessed the full force of the U.S. military machine in the service of a corporate agenda.”

Where to begin? First, neoconservative ideology dates not from the 1990s but from the 1960s, and the label came into widespread use in the 1970s. Second, while neoconservatism is highly congenial to corporate interests, it is distinctly less so than other forms of conservatism. The original neocons, unlike traditional conservatives, did not reject the New Deal. … And their foreign policy often collides head-on with corporate interests: neoconservatives favor saber-rattling in places such as China or the Middle East, where American corporations frown on political risk, and favor open relations and increased trade. Moreover, the Heritage Foundation has always had an uneasy relationship with neoconservatism. … And the Cato Institute is not neoconservative at all. It was virulently opposed to the Iraq war in particular, and it opposes interventionism in foreign policy in general.

It ought to be morbidly embarrassing for a writer to discover that the central character of her narrative [Friedman] turns out to oppose what she identifies as the apotheosis of his own movement. And Klein’s mistake exposes the deeper flaw of her thesis. Friedman opposed the war because he was a libertarian, and libertarian conservatism is not the same thing as neoconservatism.

Emphasis added.

Seriously, do people really believe her when she says that Israel scuttled the peace process to benefit its anti-terrorism industry?  How the hell is this narrative even slightly believable?

Yes, an argument can be made that however much Reid and Pelosi and their cohort deserve punishment, the other side deserves even more punishment.  That’s assuming that you continue to accept the premises of the system, and dutifully choose between the party that commits the crimes and the party with a leadership that will not actually stop the crimes.  However, stepping back and looking at it, the whole system is broken if that’s our choice.  The only option, then, is to opt out, and vote for, well, anybody else.  (Some would say that revolution is an option, but I say that if you have enough energized people to go and burn down enough stuff, you have enough energized people to vote out the bums and vote in a real opposition.)  The fact that most Americans don’t care something about the culture.

“Not me!  I’m not just blindly excusing crimes!  I’m trying to make a difference!” you say, and you’re probably right.  If nobody else is voting third party, it’s irrational for you to vote third party.  However small the difference between the parties might be, if there’s any difference at all, and if those are the only viable options, then you are being completely rational by voting for the guys who promised to at least pick the undigested corn kernels out of the sh!t sandwich.

But here we are:  Crimes were openly revealed on the front page of the nation’s most important newspaper two and a half years ago, and less than a week ago the ostensible political enemies of the criminals gave them full immunity.  And there is no uproar outside a few corners of the blogosphere and a few activist groups.  The fundamental significance of this is lost on or irrelevant to most people, and so the crimes will go on.

~Thoreau, blogging at Unqualified Offerings.  Emphasis added.

Read the whole thing.

If we don’t understand why this is happening, I assure you that we have no chance of stopping it.