Screw the music, I’d rather listen to the Mustang!
…
Actually, I’d rather be driving the Mustang.
Screw the music, I’d rather listen to the Mustang!
…
Actually, I’d rather be driving the Mustang.
"If men could get pregnant, humanity would have become extinct millenia ago." - Marx Dudek
[A] human economy cannot prescribe the terms of its own success. In a time when we wish to believe that humans are the sole authors of truth, that truth is relative, and that all value judgments are subjective, it is hard to say that a human economy can be wrong, and yet we have good, sound, practical reasons for saying so. It is indeed possible for a human economy to be wrong—not relatively wrong, in the sense of being “out of adjustment,” or unfair according to some definition of fairness—but wrong absolutely and according to practical measures. Of course, if we see the human economy as the only economy, we will see its errors as political failures, and we will continue to talk about “recovery.” It is only when we think of the little human economy in relation to the Great Economy that we begin to understand our errors for what they are and to see the qualitative meanings of our quantitative measures. If we see the industrial economy in terms of the Great Economy, then we begin to see industrial wastes and losses, not as “trade-offs” or “necessary risks” but as costs that, like all costs, are chargeable to somebody, sometime.
Wealth is Virtue; the more money you have, the more moral and virtuous you are; conversely those with little or none are the foulest of immoral vermin, and should be punished cruelly, until they repent.
How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way… to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work.
Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle. Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined; oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth. In either case the end result is revolution. When revolution comes it may seem to arise from little causes and petty whims; but though it may spring from slight occasions it is the precipitate result of grave and accumulated wrongs; when a body is weakened by neglected ills, the merest exposure may bring serious disease…
But even democracy ruins itself by excess -– of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy. This is at first glance a delightful arrangement: it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and wisest courses. “As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them” (Protagoras, 317); to get a doctrine accepted or rejected it is necessary only to have it praised or ridiculed in a popular play…
Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters –- like shoe-making -– we think that only a specially-trained person will serve our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state… To devise a method of barring incompetence and knavery from public office, and of selecting and preparing the best to rule for the common good -– that is the problem of political philosophy.
I have a nephew.
Two weeks ago, while my brother and I drove him to the zoo singing country music at the top of our lungs, my nephew stopped us mid-lyric. “What’s free? You said free?” Strapped into a car seat, wearing swim goggles, covered in chocolate, peanut shells, cheddar bunnies, and matchbox cars, my nephew had asked a question so fundamental to all of our daily lives that we often forget it’s a question at all.
I pulled the “I’m-just-the-aunt” card, and turned to my brother to articulate one of the ideals our nation was founded upon, one of the dreams we are all supposed to hold together. Somehow, with no time to prepare, he boiled down freedom to the perfect level for his son’s current cerebral development. “It’s being able to make choices in your life,” he explained. My nephew processed, nodded, and resumed racing his sticky cars around his sticky seat.
My brother didn’t say that freedom meant being able to do absolutely anything you want. He didn’t say that freedom meant having no commitment or responsibility. He defined it as the ability to make choices, and I like that my nephew’s first encounter with this enormous word gave it the weight it deserves.
The latest ListServe mail. Let’s render this down:
Q: What is freedom?
A: Freedom is being able to make choices in your life.
Q: Is freedom being able to do absolutely anything you want?
A: No.
Q: Is freedom having no commitment or responsibility?
A: No.
This is something I should meditate on for a bit…
When a theory is transformed into an ideology, it begins to destroy the self and self-knowledge. Originally born of feeling, it pretends to float above and around feeling. Above sensation. It organizes experience according to itself, without touching experience. By virtue of being itself, it is supposed to know. To invoke the name of this ideology is to confer truthfulness. No one can tell it anything new. Experience ceases to surprise it, inform it, transform it. It is annoyed by any detail which does not fit into its world view. Begun as a cry against the denial of truth, now it denies any truth which does not fit into its scheme. Begun as a way to restore one’s sense of reality, now it attempts to discipline real people, to remake natural beings after its own image. All that it fails to explain it records as its enemy. Begun as a theory of liberation, it is threatened by new theories of liberation; it builds a prison for the mind.
look if you unironically say ‘money can’t buy happiness’ then either you’ve never faced a real financial struggle or you’ve achieved enlightenment, because goddamn does financial security feel an awful lot like happiness when it’s something you’re not used to
I agree with this post.

Or, Honesty in Fantasy Titles.
Personally I read all four of David Eddings' The Blue McGuffin series, and I enjoyed the Pern books up to All the Weyrs of Pern, which was a natural ending to the series.
After a while though, I began to notice much of fantasy and sf can’t escape the Comedy Troupe Take the McGuffin on a Road Trip format.
Neither ‘pure’ socialism, nor 'pure’ libertarianism, can scale up to the nation-state level.
