Gnomon
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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between February 15 - March 16, 2019
8%
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otiose
10%
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When they cashed out I have no idea, but they are now a smallish subset of the Orthodox religion with the kind of money more usually held by people who create search engines or new ways to smuggle heroin.
12%
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If you are going to get distracted by your computer, you don’t deserve your job.
20%
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But it seems he believes me. Oooooh, spooky! I have penetrated his disguise with my special uterus magic.
30%
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Where my generation reached for philosophy and the virtue of suffering, they reached instead for science and technology and they actually did something about the beggar in the street, the woman in the wheelchair. They got on with it. It wasn’t that they had no sense of spirit or depth. Rather they reserved it for the truly wondrous, and for everything else they made tools.
30%
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“We have to think about this stuff now, before we build it, otherwise we’ll just find it happening around us. If it’s a bad thing and it’s already invested, money and power on the line, it’s much harder to roll something back.
35%
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It resonated with a population increasingly aware that “liberty” does not in fact mean “micro-policing” and that they had bartered away their historical legal rights in the name of keeping out a fifth columnist jihadi Muslim army that did not exist in the way they had been told.
37%
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“Free” came to mean not “unchained” but “unpaid”—a conflation that no doubt delighted authoritarians across the globe.
42%
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I’ve spent a certain amount of time thinking about this recently, and I have concluded that a doctor who attends the victim of a torture chamber and does not object to the torture is a wanker.
42%
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The right to avoid self-incrimination, the right to die, the right to live, the right to freedom from slavery, freedom of conscience and religion, of opinion, and the right not to be tortured—all these exist as subheadings of that one, simple statement: I am me and I am not yours.
43%
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Lying is impossible if nothing is real.
46%
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haruspex
70%
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If you knew what to demand of me you would not require my help.
79%
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Perhaps he ran across it when he was looking for modern things of which to disapprove.