February 2012
2 posts
Opinion of the place
“This financial crisis, which could never happen today, was simply the latest in a series of murderous twentieth-century catastrophes which had originated entirely in human brains. From the violence people were doing to themselves and each other, and to all other living things, for that matter, a visitor from another planet might have assumed that the environment had gone haywire, and that...
January 2012
1 post
December 2011
1 post
Power attracts the corruptible
It’s said that “power corrupts”, but actually it’s more that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.
~ David Brin’s Gordon Krantz (dreaming as Benjamin Franklin) in ‘The...
July 2011
1 post
June 2011
4 posts
Up late and thinking messy things in multiple...
The idea that, crudely, our genes (as affected by environmental factors) are our hardware and socialisation our software kind of creeps me out. That I may be nothing more than the interaction — be it the sum, quotient, product or some other factor — of these two and that every action, from scratching my nose to thinking these thoughts and writing these words, is their logical...
May 2011
3 posts
3 tags
April 2011
4 posts
2 tags
60% of South Africans do not socialise outside...
That’s according to the Institute of Justice and Reconciliation’s 2010 SA Reconciliation Barometer. That’s right, in 2010, 16 years after the end of state-sanctioned segregation, 60% of South Africans rarely or never socialise with people of other race groups in more intimate settings such as their homes or the homes of friends. Further, the levels of day-to-day interaction and...
March 2011
3 posts
February 2011
14 posts
Wanderlust
Wanderlust (it works better in the German) is that memory of a place you’ve never been before, catching you unaware, you know? Like the smell of roasting coffee beans on a cold Zagreb morning; the chirrup-chirrup of some as unseen bird in the canopy of a South American tropical forest. True-as-bob, I was once convinced I’d been to Timbuktu by the smell of cinnamon. Is there cinnamon in...
4 tags
4 tags
“You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don’t make money...”
– Maya Angelou (via thesearepeopleyouknow)
2 tags
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People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to...
People’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far the maintenance of life is concerned. They are all just fuel. Advertising filler in the news paper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills; when you feed them to fire, they are just paper. The...
3 tags
Friends
Friends, like apples, are sometimes sour, but we remember them for the days when they were sweet and full of sun.
~ K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams
3 tags
Memory's truth
Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than (their) own.
– Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
3 tags
3 tags
WatchThe politics of black hair (oldie but goldie)
January 2011
9 posts
3 tags
3 tags
December 2010
2 posts
1 tag
3 tags
Fox News viewers most misinformed - let me put on...
“Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that:
most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely)
most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)
the economy is getting worse (26 points)
most scientists do not agree that climate...
October 2010
17 posts
