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Our world and our civilization would not endure, the man said, because they could not survive the many forces we ourselves had set against it. We, our own worst enemy, had set ourselves up like sitting ducks, allowing weapons capable of killing us all many times over not only to be created but also to land in the hands of egomaniacs,
nihilists, men without empathy, without conscience.
Why were people not outraged by the very idea of surveillance capitalism?
An alien one day studying our collapse might well conclude: Freedom was too much for them. They would rather be slaves.
if there really was a Supreme Being who had to listen to people’s prayers all the time, he would go out of his mind.
I don’t know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.
“Read the science and see what the world is doing about it. Could it be any simpler? Keep releasing carbon into the air and sooner or later—and more and more it’s looking like sooner—we’re fucked. And make no mistake, if there is in fact even a sliver of hope it depends on the survival of liberal democracy. Nothing is going to hasten the end of a livable planet faster than the rise of the far right. And behold, here they are, the two specters marching side by side.”
Why shouldn’t dying people have the right to end their own lives?”
I loved music hour! The teacher would put on a record and we’d listen and then she’d teach us the song and we’d sing it at the top of our lungs, the gifted and the tone-deaf all cheerfully together. It makes a particular kind of sound, if you’ve ever noticed, that mix of unequal voices, no doubt unpleasant to many ears, but all my life it’s given me goose bumps to hear the sound of children singing, especially when they do it badly. When they do it well, when it’s a serious performance, something they’ve rehearsed, they sound like angels, she said, but they don’t sound as free or as happy to
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Totally agree
What does a bucket have to do with anything? And why kick it? And is there supposed to be something in the bucket?
Lol
They weren’t being honest—not with her, not with themselves. Because they could not accept the truth, they had to bury it under a load of BS.
I have tried. Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice— What does it matter if I failed.
