Fellowship of Punditry

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Cul Heath

Mick Arran

Jeffrey Barbose

Inspector Lohmann

Eric M. Fink

Michael Lane

Rep. Mark B. Cohen

The Fellowship is accepting new members. Inquire within.

The Sages

  • David Weinberger
  • Jon Lebkowsky
  • Jay Rosen
  • Rebecca MacKinnon
  • Nova Spivack
  • Dan Gillmor
  • Jim Moore
  • Lawerence Lessig
  • Ed Cone
  • Jeff Jarvis
  • Joi Ito
  • The Titans

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  • Jim Hightower
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    Distinguished Colleagues

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  • The American Street
  • wood s lot
  • Rox Populi
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  • Blond Sense
  • Cut To The Chase
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  • ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES
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  • Into the Blogosphere
  • George Orwell

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    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.

    Monday, October 11, 2004

    T4: Archives of Doom

    By null

    This is excerpted from another posting over at the Mirth blog. The essay in its entirety was geared towards the counterproductiveness of advanced societies, but perhaps this is something applicable to Net Politik's budding alliance.

    Technology makes our lives indispensibly convenient and comfortable, and as such, an examination of the "primitive" past societies' methods of social cohesion may indicate that we need to reinvent some of these historical mores to promote our own sustainability.

    Recently, my fascination centered upon a program called NoteTaker, which essentially simulates the look and feel of a traditional bricks-and-mortar notebook. The spiralbound notebook is something that, sadly, my memory cannot place the last date of use for the actual paper medium. Along with most people I know, the utter dependence placed on my little Powerbook is pretty pitiful. This dependence leaves me vulnerable to loss of data of course, which of course gets backed up from time to time via external hard drive. Of course, there is the oh-so-popular iDisk which will do complete backups virtually upon one keystroke. Tempting, and no extra wires or equipment to lug around. It all uploads onto your very own online virtual hard drive... um...soothsayer? Hackers' galore, and so much for progress.

    Our "advanced" society is something that convention places far above that of the "primitive" societies of the past. Of course, these terms are relative to technology only--how soon we forget that technology exposes us to other forms of primitivity, concerning our culture and societal cohesion, and respective modes of spirituality. In these regards, our society is "primitive," not the agrarian and nomadic societies of the past.

    These past societies were tribal in nature, and the survival of each society was dependent on societal cohesion...actually illustrated best by Thomas Hobbe's notion of social contract, which is a matter for another essay of course. These tribes could not survive without rites of passage, which had two noticeable effects: [1] Groupthink and working together were in the best interest of the society, and this cohesion created bonding of an infinite value; [2] Survival of the fittest, or what the intellectuals refer to as "natural selection."

    The natural selection aspect is a bit more complex than we usually interpret as just humping animals in the fields of Africa, which often are used by males to try and explain their need to constantly fuck without regard to emotions and what not. Much more profound things are at work here. These "primitive" rituals involved discomfort, pain, and at times very risky feats involving strength and agility, and they served as rights of passage to be allowed to marry and procreate. Hence, the weaker, wimpier, or simply lazy members of the society were prevented from passing on their "inferior" genes to offspring. The result was that the collective gene pool of these societies grew stronger. Interesting how we see these rituals as barbaric, and our lofty postmodern psyches see only savagery and lack of logic in enduring pain and risking one's life as connected to the good of a society. Sweet irony.

    No, it is we who are weak...on all levels--physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Our reliance on technology has made us stronger in slight respect, but largely vulnerable to destruction and extinction in every other regard. When I think about the weeding out of law school entering classes (1/3 of each set of first year students either fail out or just quit), it doesn't seem so silly anymore. By no means am I arguing that lawyers are more advanced than any other profession, but perhaps this Socratic method and instilling fear of the wrath of the whip really does strenghen the "thought pool." More to come on this in a future part two on this topic, but for now...heh...I'm back playing gleefully (and foolishly) with a virtual simulation of the primitive spiral notebook.

    posted by null at 10/11/2004 04:07:00 AM |

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    "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.

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