Day: August 14, 2011

Caveat: Some Quotes

Uncategorized

This quote is the closest thing I have to a guiding principle. It is succinct but philosophically profound and has layers of complexity. It summarizes Deleuze’s ethical thought, in the context of his work on Spinoza.

  • “Ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation.” – Gilles Deleuze

Here is a compilation of other quotes I like.

  • “Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.” – Robinson Jeffers
  • “Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites who never meet.” – Andy Warhol
  • “Love is not for the faint-hearted, or for the self-possessed” – I think Rumi (Persian poet)
  • “Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.” – un attributed internet meme.  (This is a corollary of Clarke’s law, I guess. )
  • “Live each day as if you will live forever.” – Unknown (to me, anyway)
  • “Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.” – William E. Gladstone
  • “Long live freedom and damn the ideologies” – Robinson Jeffers
  • “But two Kwakiutls in the same blanket…” – Tony Curtis (as the Great Leslie, in The Great Race)
  • “If they can get here, they have God’s right to come.” – Herman Melville
  • “So unprincipled are judges and lawyers that they will even tell the truth if it serves their purposes.” – Robert C. Black
  • “I think we all agree, the past is over.” – George W. Bush
  • “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman
  • “we are the world’s first adolescent civilization.” – David Brin (in a comment on his blog, regarding our own civilization)
  • “With enemies like libertarians, the state doesn’t need friends.” – Robert C. Black
  • “Life is dangerous. No one has survived it yet.” – Unnamed Siberian tour guide quoted in The Economist, Mar 24, 2007.
  • “la vida es un río que pasa y que deja sólo la tierra húmeda” – Augusto Pinochet (en su autobiografia Camino Recorrido, book 1)
  • “La vida es corta… pero ancha” – autor del blog “futuroperfecto”
  • “Pero la vida es un rio / Que te moja con la edad” – Synteks Aleks (musical group) song: La historia de un hombre
  • “nuestras vidas son los rios que van a dar a la mar, que es el morir” – Jorge Manrique (poeta s. XVI).
  • “Mundus Vult Decipi [the world wishes to be deceived]” – James Branch Cabell
  • “The time of your life is the one commodity you can sell but never buy back.” – Robert C. Black
  • “the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.” – George Orwell
  • “The global economy is like a zebra roller-skating through a Volkswagen factory in China on the Fourth of July and it’s snowing.” – Max Eichler (parodying Thomas Friedman)
  • “Life is a partial, continuous, progressive, multiform and conditionally interactive self-realization of the potentialities of atomic electron states.” – John Desmond Bernal
  • “So many words, and so often I grope for them knowing that there’s a correct one but lacking the nous to bring it to articulation. Fearing senile decay. Errrrgh.” – Ann Gillidette
  • “En el fondo el cínico es un cartesiano y un kantiano derrotado: le gustaría disponer de un conocimiento absoluto y una voluntad recta, pero lo considera imposible.” – D. Innerarity (filósofo español – en Dialéctica de la modernidad)
  • “Me get it, cookie is sometimes food. You know what? Right now is sometime!” – Cookie Monster
  • “Good bye, New York. Howdy, East Orange.” – Bob Dylan
  • “Oprah is transcendent; she is a cultural treasure.” – David Letterman.
  • “when the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.” – J. M. Keynes.
  • “Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.” – Mark Twain.
  • “With only 300 bits, you could assign a unique barcode to each of the ten-to-the-ninetieth elementary particles in the universe.” – Seth Lloyd.
  • “It is possible to serve honorably in a dishonorable war.” – Unknown (to me, anyway)
  • “Boredom is your ‘fuller life’ calling you, and your fear of hearing that call.” – Gary Zukav
  • “Religion is like a penis.  It’s fine to have one.  It’s fine to be proud of it.  But please don’t whip it out in public and start waving it around.  And PLEASE don’t try to shove it down my children’s throats.” – Unattributed internet meme
  • “no existe la seguridad, solo existe el amor” – overheard in a trance track
  • “A libertarian is just a Republican who takes drugs.” – Robert C. Black
  • “It’s a good deal, but some poor people remain, oddly, un-fucked.” – Jon Stewart
  • “A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” – James Madison
  • “…doors open to anyone with the will and heart to get here.” – Ronald Reagan (on immigration)
  • “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” – Oscar Wilde
  • “Cake’s existence is have eat cake.” – One of my middle-school students in 2007
  • “There is great chaos under heaven, and the situation is excellent.” – Mao Tse-tung

 

Caveat: The Remarkable Chilean Polity

Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

There are possible solutions, within a system-of-government framework not unlike our own (i.e. presidential, bicameral, republican, more-or-less two-party), to the never-ending U.S. deficit/budget crisis. Why is it that the best, clearest explanation of these budget options comes not in any recent news article on the topic of the actual budget/deficit situation, but in a discussion of how Chile, in contrast, seems to have gotten things “right”? Despite the “Great Recession,” the country is currently still running an underlying structural budget surplus!

I found the article fascinating, extraordinarily clear, and refreshing – I very much recommend it. Despite being posted on an economics blog, it’s entirely accessible to those unversed in the obscurities of the dismal science. The blog’s author, economist Ed Dolan, summarizes:

The centerpiece of Chilean fiscal policy is a balanced budget rule of a much more sophisticated variety than the one endorsed last week [relative to timestamp on blog post: 2011-07-24] by the U.S. House of Representatives. The House bill calls for strict year-to-year balance of total receipts and outlays, whereas Chile’s rule requires annual balance of the structural budget. The two are not at all the same.

I suppose it’s very possible that, in a month, or a year, or a decade, we’ll see some collapse of the Chilean polity, putting a lie to its current apparent functionality (as opposed to the U.S. dysfunctionality). Recent geopolitical developments have certainly been full of interesting surprises. But based on my own time in Chile, back in 1994 (when the dictatorship was still quite fresh in everyone’s mind), there was something about the way that country had emerged from its recent political/economic trauma with a sort of “never again” resolve that impressed me profoundly.


pictureChile is not devoid of problems – the recent clashes between the new, conservative Piñera government and student protesters is a good example of the kind of tensions found there. And like most “tiger”-type, neoliberal economies (including my current home, South Korea), it has huge difficulties balancing economic growth with unequal distribution of wealth and difficult-to-eliminate structural corruption. But having traveled extensively in the world, Chile remains at the very top of my list of favorite places, and though I haven’t been back since 1994, hopefully someday I’ll get back there.

Unlike anywhere else I’ve been in Latin America, in Chile I never had any feeling of impending anarchy, I had no sense that authority is inherently not-to-be-trusted – indeed, one of the striking things in the way that Chileans talked to me about the dictatorship and social unrest of the 70’s and 80’s was that they all deemed it to have been so exceptional vis-a-vis the “normal” Chilean national character. If you study the country’s history, you quickly realize this is, largely, self-mythologizing – but that doesn’t invalidate it as a national self-perception. In fact, it makes it all the more remarkable. It is such a contrast to the way dictatorships and official corruption seem to perceived in most of Latin America, where these things are always taken as “well that’s just the way things always are.” In that way, Chile always felt “first world” to me, despite  lacking that “first world” level of general prosperity.

In other Chile-related news, I recently read that the town of Arica, in the desert north of Chile, recently received 6 millimeters of rain – a typical amount for an hour or two on a summer’s day in Seoul – and set a new record for most precipitation ever. Arica is notoriously the driest place on earth, with some outlying areas having no recorded precipitation in all of history.

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Caveat: Our Potemkin Planet

Buddhism & Zen / Internet & Blogging / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Quotable

I'm not even close to agreeing with everything blogger IOZ writes, but this little summary in a recent post really captures a lot of information and ideas in a very compact bit of prose.  I must quote:

The problem is in fact not that people need jobs but that people need money, and hobbling them to a desk or factory floor is the only moral and legitimate means of funneling currency into their empty jugs.  We need to have fuller employment so that more people are getting paid so that the consumer economy expands ad inf[initum] and repeat as necessary.  There are, if you consider it even briefly, a half million or so unexamined assumptions underlying all of this.

He goes on to declare that both democrats and republicans are silly, which I can marginally agree with, but also that Barack Obama is a murderer (which I will grant is provisionally true, but only in the same sense that every modern American president trying to manage an empire ultimately beyond his control has been a murderer).  I'm less comfortable with such rhetorical flights.  But the preceding thought about jobs cuts to the core of the limitations of life on our increasingly Potemkin Planet. 

His conclusion:  "Beyond the merely pecuniary and the venial: what does your life mean to you beyond your paystub and your appetites?"

I'm working on the answer to this, and feel I'm making only a little progress.  But I agree it needs to be sought.

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