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all movement was dance.
I must remember, if I can, that really we are always in a spacesuit of one sort or another. We just don’t usually see it so clearly.
I’m going to tell them you’re the father.”
Oh shit!
He studied the disabled players in their musical ecstasy. He could feel in his facial muscles that the expressions on their faces were like those on his own face when he was feeling good about something. He only had to give in to it, to release his resistance to it, and those same expressions would be on his face—when he relaxed, or felt happy, or even right now—that was his look, right there before him to be seen. His cheeks burned with some strange mixture of shame and affinity. He was so often amazed or stunned, so often moved by simple things, obscure things. He was more like these
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Beautiful passage.
Deng himself could of course be subjected to a similar downtrending judgment, having ordered the violent end of the Tiananmen demonstrations. Maybe everyone ever in power would deserve such an equivocal judgment. Or everyone alive! Just try not to dip below fifty percent! You’ll find it’s not that easy.
... indeed ...
They’re the precariat, do you know that word? No? Everyone’s precarious now, you should know that word. You’re the precariat.
“I like Mao. Listen to this: ‘Not to have a correct political view is like having no soul.’ You hear that?” “I do,” Fred said. “But what’s correct?” “Maybe you can learn that here, it’s the very next quote. ‘Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice: the struggle to make things, the class struggle, and scientific experiment.’”
“I want to be an agnotologist,” he said to Qi. “I want to study what we don’t know.”
Agnotology: the study of the unknown!
America is more of a one-party state than China. It’s entirely ruled by the market. Actually the market is the only party in the world now, or it wants to be.
“Your parties are just factions. That’s why people in your country are so angry. They can see it’s just one party, and one-party states are always corrupt. Polyarchies are better because power gets distributed to various groups. They’re inefficient and messy, with lots of turf battles, but that’s the cost of distributing power. It’s better than concentrated power.”
Shyness.
If democracy came to China they would end up electing idiots, as in America.
:*(
But if money as it exists now is just feudalism liquefied, maybe this carboncoin is a try at something better. Maybe it’s the labor theory of value back again, with the labor involved required to be for the good of the biosphere, and the money only good for that labor.”
Intriguing idea for governance!
If everyone had adequate life support. If the work of human civilization was devoted to biosphere rectification. If their systems of exchange promoted these projects.
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What do the people want? The Six Demands articulate those wants, which in quite a few cases come down to this: they want what they need. Which is to say many of their desires are basic needs in the Maslovian hierarchy of needs and wants, and therefore nothing can proceed in a successful human history until these needs are met. Food, water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education: these all need to be adequate for everyone alive, before anything else good can happen.
❤️🧡💛💚💙💜
The interpenetration of people and planet being so complete as to be determinative of every living thing’s shared fate, meeting basic needs for all the living creatures in the shared biosphere is also required to secure the general health and welfare of humanity and its fellow creatures.
❤️🧡💛💚💙💜
