Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
John Stuart Mill
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.
The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.
Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.
A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
Mark Twain
Don't let schooling interfere with your education.
All generalizations are false, including this one.
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
The Public is merely a multiplied "me."
Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we."
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
Winston Churchill
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.
Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.
Otto Von Bismarck
When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.
I have seen three emperors in their nakedness, and the sight was not inspiring.
Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.
Be polite; write diplomatically ;even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.
Voltaire
A witty saying proves nothing.
If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.
When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.
Karl Marx
Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.
All I know is I'm not a Marxist.
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
Thursday, October 07, 2004
Smash the State
By Anonymous
"Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger." - Abbie Hoffman
In 1970 at the age of 17 I was hawking copies of a newspaper known as the Chicago Seed. In it was the stuff you might expect for the era; Smash the State, End the War, Alternative Politics, Freedom.
I suppose I took all that a bit too seriously for my tender age, looking back. If you must know I was idealistic enough to believe in that, but practical enough to know that if I hung out in these circles the sex and drugs would follow. A dreamer I was - an idiot I was not.
I did that for a long time. I lived in the Chicago area during the infamous '68 convention and it had a marked effect on me even at 15. Yeah ok - it was a fad/thing but in time I went to school on it and involved myself as a grunt in the lines of the Counter-Culture well into the 70s.
You don't notice things happening on a day-to-day basis when you're involved in a thing like that. You aren't in on policy-making and you're more into the scene than the details. But I distinctly recall going door to door in a rich Chicago suburb (without a permit) with a partner after having been dispatched by a group known as Citizens For a Better Environment back in the early 70s to get donations for whatever they were about back then. And I remember one particular house we came to. The door was answered by this woman - probably in her early 30s at the time - who could have stepped out of the pages of Playboy. Well-dressed and all the equipment and a face and a voice and a perfume and when I got back on my feet I heard my partner give our little speech and she shook her head and started in on on us about how "You're going to regret getting the government involved in every aspect of your life. In time you're not going to want the government to have that much say in your business or your economy. You have to let the market handle what is essentially a property rights issue."
No - seriously! That's exactly what she said. I remember it because that voluptuous voice was all I could imagine for the rest of the night. "You're going to regret getting the government involved in every aspect of your life."
I don't know if it was the unexpected educated clarity that came out of that particular package or what it was... but I swear to you from that day on I began to look at things a bit differently.
I had been out there in the streets - I thought - telling people to smash the state, and began to realize what I was ending up doing was becoming the state. And not the state we had - but a state that was, indeed, getting more and more involved in my life as each year passed.
The Free Speech Movement that was born in Berkeley in the early 60s had morphed into the Politically Correct Speech Movement. Alternative Politics became a permanent place at the table of the Democratic Party (which we had denounced because they got us escalated into Viet Nam big time) and the most ambitious among us began speaking of the benefits of the Two Party System.
It didn't dawn on most what was happening. We never noticed that while all that was morphing, Abbie Hoffman was living "underground" while being chased all over the country by the FBI for what amounted to a trumped-up cocaine charge. Think we would have noticed? Made the connection? Not really.
So by the end of the 70s, as the residue of the counter-culture became the mainstream, the battle was over. Most - in the estimation of a few of us - caved. They caved to power and they caved to practicality and they caved to the fact that there really was no basis for their personal belief system.
Some of us are just sticks-in-the-mud though - you know? Here it is 2004 and at the age of almost 51 I am hawking blogging on a thing known as the internet. And in my stuff you might not read into what I'm saying, but its the usual stuff; Smash the State, End the War, Alternative Politics, Freedom.
The liberals do nothing for liberty, and the government is everywhere. That wasn't what I was in the streets for 30+ years ago.
"Netpolitik is a new style of diplomacy that seeks to exploit the powerful capabilities of the Internet to shape politics, culture, values, and personal identity. But unlike Realpolitik — which seeks to advance a nation’s political interests through amoral coercion — Netpolitik traffics in “softer” issues such as moral legitimacy, culturalidentity, societal values, and public perception." - The Rise of Netpolitik
PUN-DIT (n) : A learned man; a teacher; a source of opinion; a critic: a political pundit.
"Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger." - Abbie Hoffman
- I thought - telling people to smash the state, and began to realize what I was ending up doing was becoming the state. And not the state we had - but a state that was, indeed, getting more and more involved in my life as each year passed.
