Quotations
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Passions, Products, and Utility
or: It’s Just a Phone The MacPsych blog has an interesting post about mobile phones, on the occasion of the latest Apple “event” introducing new iPhoniana. They say: “I have read lots of differing perspective online, from fanboy exclamations of ‘the best phone everrrrrr!’ through to the much more realistic ‘it’s just a fucking phone’. As time passes,… Continue reading
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2025
“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the Party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” “The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is… Continue reading
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The crisis
Dornbusch’s law: “The crisis takes longer to happen than you can possibly imagine, then happens quicker than you can possibly imagine.” Rüdiger “Rudi” Dornbusch Continue reading
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Contradictions can both be true
“At every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of… Continue reading
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Blaming
Politics in the US seems to be more about nonsensical blaming than it used to be. I think it’s because once they’re elected, the greedheads and powerheads just assume that the rest of us are stupid, and will just accept whatever tripe comes out of their mouths. This may be at least partly due to… Continue reading
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What kind of rope do you stock in your store?
“…contemporary capitalism has become indistinguishable from Marx’s critique of it. The system that anti-leftist reactionaries claim to defend now exhibits every pathology that socialist theory predicted: extreme inequality, regulatory capture, the subordination of democratic governance to capital accumulation, the treatment of human needs as secondary to profit maximization.“ –Mike Brock Remember that Karl Marx quote… Continue reading
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And yet again…
Sarah Taber, who describes herself as a small farmer, crop scientist, & ex-farm worker & crop scientist (and was a candidate for Agriculture Commissioner in North Carolina) wrote this on Mastodon. It’s worth a look. Mastodon, by the way, is a web-based tweeting system that works on the basis of lots of small, local or… Continue reading
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And yet…
Reinhold Niebuhr was a widely known public intellectual in 20th Century America. He was a theologian who spent the bulk of his career as a professor at a seminary in Manhattan, NY. Did you know they had those there? Seems unexpected. Anyway, he had some fascinating ideas, including something called “Christian Realism.” I’m not sure… Continue reading
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This pretty much sums it up
Amazing post on Reddit:“…whatever else there is to say, the most important thing about Donald Trump, the thing that is obvious from watching him speak for just 14 seconds, is that he is profoundly stupid. Whatever it is that he might be talking about or doing at any given moment, it’s clear that while he… Continue reading
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Orange Gangster
The term “gangster empire” seems pretty apt. The orange baby has, throughout its adult life, functioned like a crime boss (or at least like what normal people understand a “crime boss” to be. Source material: Lucky Loser. “We have now entered a new phase of Western-led global savagery — prefigured by the genocide in Gaza… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!