Tuesday 1 February 2022

Quotations

SHARE
"As a child, I wanted to be a physicist. I begged my mother to let me go to Tokyo to study physics. I promised I would win the Nobel Prize in Physics. So, 50 years later, I returned to my village and said to my mother, 'See, I have kept my promise. I won the Nobel Prize.' 'No,' said my mother, who has very fine sense of humour, 'You promised it would be in physics!''

Kenzaburo Oe, awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature.

"Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you ...want to do." 

Richard Feynman

“I am afraid that woman appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated.”

Oscar Wilde


"But if the gradualness of this process misled the Romans there were other and equally potent reasons for their blindness. Most potent of all was the fact that they mistook entirely the very nature of civilization itself. All of them were making the same mistake. People who thought that Rome could swallow barbarism and absorb it into her life without diluting her own civilization; the people who ran about busily saying that the barbarians were not such bad fellows after all, finding good points in their regime with which to castigate the Romans and crying that except ye become as little barbarians ye shall not attain salvation; the people who did not observe in 476 that one half of the Respublica Romanorum had ceased to exist and nourished themselves on the fiction that the barbarian kings were exercising a power delegated from the Emperor. All these people were deluded by the same error, the belief that Rome (the civilization of their age) was not a mere historical fact with a beginning and an end, but a condition of nature like the air they breathed and the earth they tread. Ave Roma immortalis, most magnificent most disastrous of creeds!

"The fact is that the Romans were blinded to what was happening to them by the very perfection of the material culture which they had created. All around them was solidity and comfort, a material existence which was the very antithesis of barbarism. How could they foresee the day when the Norman chronicler would marvel over the broken hypocausts of Caerleon? How could they imagine that anything so solid might conceivably disappear? Their roads grew better as their statesmanship grew worse and central heating triumphed as civilization fell."

Medieval People, by Eileen Power who later became Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics 





4 comments:

  1. In that essay I argued that the particular character of our emerging intra-elite conflict is historically unprecedented, because it’s heavily female. America has been producing more female than male graduates since the 1970s, and the same has been true in Britain since the 1990s. The imbalance might be relatively slight (though it's grown less so: 60/40 female to male at some elite US colleges now) but over the decades it compounds. The consequence has been, as numerous articles are now pointing out, an increasingly female-skewed ruling class.

    I put this together with Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction, and Joyce Benenson’s research on female-typical aggression, to suggest that much of what looks like ideological conflict within institutions can plausibly be read as a conflict for increasingly scarce resources conducted in the female key. Whereas men tend to be more direct in their aggression, women typically compete indirectly via tactics such as hidden hierarchies, mob hostility, or conflict disguised as moral condemnation or concern for the group. Seen through that filter, it’s much easier to explain why – for example – one person is forced to resign for “historic tweets” while another weathers the storm: if you assume that in each case it's mostly about office politics, it all makes a great deal more sense.

    I tried to make it clear that the jury’s out for me as to whether this is better or worse than the more violent sequelae Turchin describes in historic cases of elite overproduction. Either way, given that the structural conditions remain in place – women are more overrepresented than ever among college graduates since the pandemic – we can anticipate seeing it escalate over coming years and decades.


    Mary Harrington on Female Elites, Post-Liberalism, and our Cyborg Age
    An exclusive interview
    N.S. Lyons

    ReplyDelete
  2. WASHINGTON, D.C. -- On average, Americans' political party preferences in 2021 looked similar to prior years, with slightly more U.S. adults identifying as Democrats or leaning Democratic (46%) than identified as Republicans or leaned Republican (43%).

    However, the general stability for the full-year average obscures a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter.

    Both the nine-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter and the five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter are among the largest Gallup has measured for each party in any quarter since it began regularly measuring party identification and leaning in 1991.

    https://news.gallup.com/poll/388781/political-party-preferences-shifted-greatly-during-2021.aspx

    ReplyDelete
  3. Listen to me, man! I think we should vote for Enoch Powell. Enoch’s our man. I think Enoch’s right, I think we should send them all back. Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white. I used to be into de, opnow I’m into racism. It’s much heavier, man. Fucking wogs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs. Britain is becoming overcrowded and Enoch will stop it and send them all back.

    Eric Clapton
    August 5, 1976 at the Birmingham Odeon
    https://vdare.com/articles/is-this-a-sovereign-nation-or-just-a-police-state-eric-clapton-covid-and-immigration

    ReplyDelete
  4. 'to be into de, opnow I’m'

    I used to be into dope, now I’m into racism.

    ReplyDelete