Quotes

Shame on Y Combinator

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Thiel, a non-employee (a “part-time partner”), is directly supporting Donald Trump at a massive scale — over a million dollars! — after we’ve learned even more of Trump’s horrendous statements, positions, and past actions than we could’ve ever imagined.

This isn’t voting for an economic or social policy — this is literally paying a huge amount of money to directly support a racist, sexist bigot with rapidly mounting allegations of multiple sexual assaults.

Marco.org

Undecided

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To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?” To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

The New Yorker

Girardian Lectionary: Proper 24C

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Does Jesus really think that God is like an unjust judge? Indeed not. But he knows how all of us are inclined to have an unjust judge well installed into our consciousness. In fact as part of our socialization we acquire a voice or set of voices which seem to be completely impervious to anything. This voice or voices, should we be so bold as to want something, will quickly send down little messages to us: “Shouldn’t want that if I were you — better not to want much, so as not to be disappointed”, or “Getting above our station are we?” or, as in the famous Oliver Twist scene, “More?!!” And the point of these messages is to shut down our desire — to get us to mask our discontent with remaining mere puppets of our group. Our unjust judge is internal to each one of us, a glowering “no” in the face of our potential happiness.

James Alison

Escaping the Bully-God of American Evangelicalism

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When I say God comes to Dostoyevsky’s characters, it’s not how evangelicals describe it. It’s more a dawning of a certain truth about themselves, who they are in their brokenness, along with a sense of acceptance and an ability to have compassion on themselves. To grieve what they have done as well as to accept who they are. There’s a way in which the gospel in its purity comes through in The Brothers Karamazov: that the divine is unconditionally loving, even to the worst of people. You can feel it in Dostoevsky too, that he loves his characters, including the worst of them. Fyodor Karamazov, the father, is described in lurid ways as a despicable character, and Smerdyakov, the illegitimate son, has become sinister and malicious, in part under the blows of Fyodor, but you can feel Dostoyevsky caring for them both. He seems able to accept everybody, no matter how despicable. That’s the genuine message of Jesus, as far as I can see it.

Doug Frank

“You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if an…”

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You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.

G.K. Chesterton

Donald Trump: The Dress Rehearsal for Fascism

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Fascism, at its core, is an amorphous and incoherent ideology that perpetuates itself by celebrating a grotesque hypermasculinity, elements of which are captured in Trump’s misogyny. It allows disenfranchised people to feel a sense of power and to have their rage sanctified. It takes a politically marginalized and depoliticized population and mobilizes it around a utopian vision of moral renewal and vengeance and an anointed political savior. It is always militaristic, anti-intellectual and contemptuous of democracy and replaces culture with nationalist and patriotic kitsch. It sees those outside the closed circle of the nation-state or the ethnic or religious group as diseased enemies that must be physically purged to restore the health of nation.

Chris Hedges

Clown Prince of the Revolution

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There has, however, been one important change. A new kind of leftist thinker has emerged—one who clothes his revolutionary zeal in a layer of irony, half-dismissing his own impractical idealism as though speaking through the face paint of a clown. If you set out to study in a humanities department at an American university, it won’t be long before you come across the name of Slavoj Žižek, the philosopher who grew up in the comparatively mild regime of Communist Yugoslavia, qualified as a “dissident” during the declining years of Communism in his native Slovenia, but is now making waves as a radical critic of the West, though one whose tongue is always in his cheek.

City Journal

1,000 True Fans

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To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.

The Technium