Finite and Infinite Games
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Read between October 4, 2019 - April 4, 2020
66%
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history is the drama of genius,
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In a genuine story there is no law that makes any act necessary.
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verity.
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Manichaeism
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True conversions consist in the choice of a new audience, that is, of a new world. All that was once familiar is now seen in startlingly new ways.
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Explanation is an antagonistic encounter that succeeds by defeating an opponent.
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What one wins in a title is the privilege of magisterial speech.
Oskar
Hmm
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the demand for obedience is inherently evil.
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Speaker and listener understand each other not because they have the same knowledge about something, and not because they have established a likeness of mind, but because they know “how to go on” with each other (Wittgenstein).
Oskar
Nice
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Were the gods to address us it would not be to bring us to silence through their speech, but to bring us to speech through their silence.
Oskar
Niiiice
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It is by way of such end-of-history thinking that the discovered laws of behavior to which persons conform become the scripted laws of behavior to which they must conform.
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they do not die at the end, but in the course of play.
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the garden.
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maximized spontaneity.
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We are perfectly free to design a culture that will turn on the awareness that vitality cannot be given but only found,
Oskar
Yes
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To operate a machine one must operate like a machine.
Oskar
Hmmm
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Machines do not, of course, make us into machines when we operate them; we make ourselves into machinery in order to operate them.
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Most consumer products are “styled” inasmuch as they actually standardize the activity or the taste of the consumer.
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we use machines against ourselves.
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When machinery functions perfectly it ceases to be there—but so do we. Radios and films allow us to be where we are not and not be where we are.
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We do not move from our point of departure, but with our point of departure.
Oskar
Nice
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To be at home everywhere is to neutralize space.
Oskar
Mm
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Automobiles do not make travel possible, but make it possible for us to move locations without traveling.
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Weapons are the equipment of finite games designed in such a way that they do not maximize the play but eliminate it.
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Weapons are meant not to win contests but to end them. Killers are not victors; they are unopposed competitors, players without a game, living contradictions.
Oskar
Boom literally key
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Gardening is not outcome-oriented. A successful harvest is not the end of a garden’s existence, but only a phase of it.
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Genuine travel has no destination. Travelers do not go somewhere, but constantly discover they are somewhere else.
Oskar
Nice
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To travel is to grow.
Oskar
Nice
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Genuine travelers travel not to overcome distance but to discover distance.
Oskar
Boom key
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“The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes” (Proust).
Oskar
Nice
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Society regards its waste as an unfortunate, but necessary, consequence of its activities—what is left when we have made essential societal goods available. But waste is not the result of what we have made. It is what we have made.
Oskar
Boom
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Because waste is unveiling, it is not only placed out of sight, it is declared a kind of antiproperty. No one owns it.
Oskar
Key
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Looking about at the wasteland into which we have converted our habitation, we can plainly see that nature is not whatever we want it to be; but we can also plainly see that society is only what we want it to be.
Oskar
Ouch and key
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We see nature as genius when we see as genius.
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responsibility for the garden does not mean that we can make a garden of nature,
Oskar
Yes
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myth reintroduces the silence that makes original discourse possible.
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all this firm knowledge does not expunge myth, but floats in it.
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peregrinus,
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the journey that made knowledge possible
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Our first response to hearing a story is the desire to tell it ourselves—the greater the story the greater the desire.
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Whole civilizations rise from stories—and can rise from nothing else.
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When we look into a story to find its meaning, it is always a meaning we have brought with us to look at.
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myths are significantly unresolved—but unresolved in the way of an infinite game, having rules, or narrative structure, that allow any number of participants at any time to enter the drama without fixing its plot or bringing it to closure in a final scene.
Oskar
Boom
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Myths of irrepressible resonance have lost all trace of an author.
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The gospel can be heard nowhere except from those who themselves have heard it. Although I might hear New York in your voice, there is no possibility I could hear New York by itself.
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myth is the highest form of our listening to each other,
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listening is far more valued by religion than speaking. Fides ex auditu. Faith comes by listening, Paul said.
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The opposite of resonance is amplification. A choir is the unified expression of voices resonating with each other; a loudspeaker is the amplification of a single voice, excluding all others.
Oskar
Nice
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We do not listen to a loudspeaker for what is being said, but only because it is all that is being said. Magisterial speech is amplified speech; it is speech that silences.
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Ideology is the amplification of myth.
Oskar
Boom nice