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.
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
Nova's Bloggie Meme
By Nick
If you are looking for a classic example of the ENTP "the visionary" personality type, than look no further than tech entrepreneur Nova Spivack (We ENTPs can always spot our own kind). About three days ago, he released a meme which I posted below a few hours ago.
The majority of my readers probably skimmed through Mr. Spivack's meme with mild to non-existent interest. That was my initial reaction as well; I mistakenly misclassified it as simple chain-letter meme. However, further study into Spivack's meme has led me to believe that it is in fact an entirely new type of meme, which for lack of a better word, I'll dub as a "bloggie meme". However, let us step back for a second and establish why Spivack's meme has worked. According to wikipedia, a successful meme will usually share the following characteristics:
1. Demonstrating that an idea or technique is beneficial. (eg. a carpenter shows an apprentice that two bits of wood will stick together when a hammer and nail is used to join them.)
Example 1: This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs (and aggregation sites) are most influential in the propagation of memes.
2. Frightening those who would prefer not to propagate the meme (e.g. If you do/do not do this, you will burn in hell) and compensating those who do (e.g. Do this and you will go to heaven after you die).
Example 2: If enough sites participate in the Meme Propagation experiment, I plan to offer a $1000 prize for the best analysis
and visualization of the results -- but only if we get at least 10,000 blogs participating. Let's see how this develops over the next few days, and if enough sites participate then I'll put my money where my mouth is on this one.
3. Identifying an issue or a problem of interest which cannot be solved (e.g. What, if anything, happens after death?) and proposing a solution (e.g., You go to heaven or hell). The solution can not definitively be proved wrong, and as such is relatively safe and fit for further propagation.
Example 3: Are there any demographic patterns to the spread of the data -- for example, by gender, number of years blogging, particular software, geography, etc? Are there any patterns to the space-time distribution of the results? Can we classify blogs that participate into different categories, for example, by type of
audience reached, or by number of downstream readers that result from them? How does this meme move through time -- for example, can we track and visualize the momentum of this meme as it moves? (See my earlier article on measuring meme momentums for some ideas of how to do this).
4. Requiring the individuals who employ the meme to be kind to other people and to spend a lot of time thinking and talking about it (e.g., a priest doing little else besides trying to spread his religion).
Example 4: It seems that certain bloggers read and post much more frequently than others -- we could call their blogs "hot zones," to borrow a term from epidemiology. The hot zone blogs are the blogs that are most interesting to read -- they have their fingers on the pulse so to speak -- they are where memes are born and vectored first. What's interesting is that these hot zone blogs are not necessarily the most well-known or most popular blogs. In fact, I am surprised to see that some of the more well-known blogs have not got the Meme yet! So this is interesting --the blogs that are most on top of current trends are not necessarily those that are the most popular.
And now, just within the last 5 minutes of me writing this, Spivack's Meme now includes a way to increase your blogs google rating. Anyhow, now my entire thesis has changed, but I will say this: This meme is being measured and controlled by his blog posts. He began with a chain letter in the first meme, than he added a monetary reward, and followed by poking the brain of whoever has caught the meme. Unless I'm mistaken, this is a dynamic meme which is responding to its enviroment like a real virus. This is a bloggie meme, this is not a static meme like "alrighty then" from Ace Ventura. In other words, well done Nova. More later, must... read... and.. post... new... meme...
"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.
