Anusar > Anusar's Quotes

“When the well-disciplined soldier emerged from the mud of the trenches, he let himself be led to an anonymous death, meted out on an industrial scale. If an element of heroism could be recognized in this, it was simply on account of his capacity to slavishly endure the dehumanized horror, when the mutilated bodies of the veterans and the minds destroyed by trauma haunted a Europe fascinated by the spectacle of its own decline. The Arab warrior, on the other hand, was as capable of hatred as he was capable of love; his explosions of anger could follow his most magnanimous gestures. For him, war was still romantic, an ‘excitement’ whose tragic outcomes he accepted as a fatality inherent to life. In short, the Arabs were different from us, so different that ‘they have no objection to being killed’, as Hugh Trenchard, head of the RAF general staff, explained to the sensitive souls of the British Parliament.49 Arabs loved war precisely because it involved a confrontation with death, and as opposed to the effeminate Europeans, they did not make the flabby distinction between combatants and non-combatants. If you thought about it properly, not bombing them would almost amount to insulting their values.”
― Thomas Hippler, Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing

“As spaces of promiscuous proximity, often lit poorly if at all, where existential fear suddenly was converted to the euphoria of being still alive and no longer having anything to lose, bunkers were also places of uncontrolled sexual encounters. The concern to discipline sexual conduct seems to have played a greater role in Great Britain than in Nazi Germany. Contrary to an idea born in the 1950s, according to which Nazism was marked by sexual repression, the anti-bourgeois dimension of the Volksgemeinschaft implied certain possibilities of sexual liberation.37 The British ‘people’s war’, on the other hand, was based far more strongly on a community founded on the bourgeois family and the need to repress sexual deviance, imputable both to women and the lower orders. As a clear sign of the particular role played by the family, the British authorities were initially against the idea of collective shelters, fearing that, in this mixing of classes, bourgeois virtue might be contaminated by the bad habits of the ‘lower orders’, leading to moral dissolution followed by a challenge to the social order. The middle classes were thus encouraged to build shelters in their gardens, which had the additional advantage of privatizing part of the costs bound up with air-raid precautions – something unthinkable in Germany, where the collective ideology of the Volksgemeinschaft was paramount.”
― Thomas Hippler, Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing

“Richard Dawkins called bits of cultural information memes and treated them as transmitted and inherited in the same way as genes. But whereas genes can be understood in terms of chromosomes and the ACGT bases that form DNA, memes cannot. For example, is each technounit in a well-made arrow a meme or is the entire implement? Is it possible to regard the belief system of the Catholic Church as a super meme? Trying to reduce culture to bits of information is to miss the point of its agency in human activity.”
― Clive Gamble, Settling the Earth: The Archaeology of Deep Human History

“In France, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, the chief figure of French anthroposociology, led a comprehensive research programme in the 1890s, gaining sympathisers all over the Western world and some degree of academic legitimacy in his home country.96 His German colleague Otto Ammon, in contrast, met with strong opposition from the German anthropological establishment when he began putting forward his ideas in the late 1880s and 1890s. After the turn of the century, however, the roles were reversed, with Ammon winning increasing scientific acclaim in Germany and Lapouge being ostracised from the French scientific community.”
― Jon Røyne Kyllingstad, Measuring the Master Race: Physical Anthropology in Norway 1890-1945

“Engels had read The Origin of Species and wrote to Marx about the book in December of 1859. Engels praised Darwin for his theoretical triumph over teleology in the organic sciences, but at the same time also cautioned Marx against Darwin’s ‘clumsy’ style and apparent lack of sophistication in philosophical matters.2 The following year, Marx himself read Darwin’s book, whereupon he immediately accepted the theory of natural selection as a scientific confirmation of his own ideas about human history. Darwin’s theory, he felt, with its emphasis on struggle and evolution in the natural world, was the perfect complement to his own theory of class struggle and historical development. Writing to Ferdinand Lassalle in January, 1861, Marx explained that ‘Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.’ Of course, he added, echoing Engels’ comments of the previous year, ‘one [had] to put up with the crude English method of development.”
― Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism

“The mapping uncovered widespread deep valleys below the ice sheet, many of which lie below sea level. Many valleys also originate far inland and end at the sea. Out of 123 marine-terminating glaciers, “60 drain 88 percent of the ice sheet in area and are grounded below 300m depth at their termini, meaning they are deep enough to interact with subsurface warm Atlantic waters and undergo massive rates of subaqueous melting.”32 Under the right conditions, this could lead to a rapid meltdown that would affect a substantial portion of Greenland.”
― Vivien Gornitz, Vanishing Ice: Glaciers, Ice Sheets, and Rising Seas

“Laws and regulations that corporate lobbyists are unable to persuade national democratic legislatures to enact can be repackaged and hidden in harmonization agreements masked as lengthy trade treaties, which are then ratified by legislatures without adequate scrutiny. Whatever its minor benefits, legislation by treaty represents a massive transfer of power from democratic legislatures to corporate managers and bankers. Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of the tax haven Luxembourg who became the president of the European Commission from 2014 to 2019, described how the European Council systematically expanded its authority by stealth: “We decree something, then float it and wait some time to see what happens. If no clamor occurs . . . because most people do not grasp what had been decided, we continue—step by step, until the point of no return is reached.”
― Michael Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite

“while the impact of social class, ethnicity, and religious socialization on marital choice has been diminishing, educational homogamy has been increasing.35 In general, the college-educated population (which encompasses the upper-middle class as defined in the present study) continues to show a high degree of similarity in its cultural practices and attitudes over a wide range of areas.36 The fact that a college degree remains the best predictor of high occupational status suggests that the boundaries that this population builds between itself and others are particularly significant.37 These boundaries are likely to be more permanent, less crossable, and less resisted than the boundaries that exist between ethnic groups, for instance. They are also more likely to survive across contexts, i.e., to be carried over from the community to the workplace, and vice versa. We see again, therefore, the importance of studying in a systematic fashion the boundaries produced by college-educated people.”
― Michèle Lamont, Money, Morals, & Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class

“As Betsy Leondar-Wright put it in her 2005 book, Class Matters: Few middle-class people would say we have prejudices against working-class or low-income people, of course. Our classism is often disguised in the form of disdain for Southerners or Midwesterners, religious people, patriotic people, employees of big corporations, fat or non-athletic people, [heterosexual] people with conventional gender presentation (feminine women wearing make-up; tough, burly guys), country music fans, or gun users. This disdain shows in our speech.”
― Barbara Jensen, Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America

“Although few research projects have addressed the relationship between class origin and level of academic employment, the existing research shows, not unsurprisingly, that the higher the level of academic employment, the higher the socioeconomic origin. Working-class teachers will generally be found at the elementary and secondary levels (with women notably overpopulating the former). Academics with professional/managerial-class origins disproportionately constitute the professorate. Further, the more elite the institution, the higher the percentage of professors who come from the professional and managerial classes; working-class teachers who have managed to slip into the professorate will be more frequently found in community and state colleges than they will at Berkeley or Harvard.4”
― C.L. Dews, This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class

“The increase in deaths of despair was almost all among those without a bachelor’s degree. Those with a four-year degree are mostly exempt; it is those without the degree who are at risk. This was particularly surprising for suicide; for more than a century, suicides were generally more common among the educated,1 but that is not true in the current epidemic of deaths of despair. The four-year college degree is increasingly dividing America, and the extraordinarily beneficial effects of the degree are a constant theme running through the book. The widening gap between those with and without a bachelor’s degree is not only in death but also in quality of life; those without a degree are seeing increases in their levels of pain, ill health, and serious mental distress, and declines in their ability to work and to socialize. The gap is also widening in earnings, in family stability, and in community.2 A four-year degree has become the key marker of social status, as if there were a requirement for nongraduates to wear a circular scarlet badge bearing the letters BA crossed through by a diagonal red line.”
― Anne Case, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

“Coming to terms with pain—and convincing themselves that transcending pain promises a moral reward—does a tremendous amount of work in organizing their identities. On their own, they create imaginative bridges between painful experiences and political identity in ways that make their suffering feel productive and honorable.”
― Jennifer M. Silva, We're Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America

“It did, however, fail to appreciate that scientific and other forms of liberal reasoning (such as arguments in favor of democracy and capitalism) are not so much metanarratives (though they can adopt these) as imperfect but self-correcting processes that apply a productive and actionable form of skepticism to everything, including themselves.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“The backlash against populism typically comes down to us from the citadels of higher learning—from think tanks, university presses, and academic conferences—but it is not a disinterested literature of social science. Although they don’t like to acknowledge it, the anti-populists are combatants in this war, defending themselves against a perceived assault on their authority. Which is to say that anti-populism is an adversary proceeding. Our thought leaders relate to populism not so much as scholars but as a privileged class putting down a challenge to itself.”
― Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy

“The practice of excluding working-class and other cultures from the discussion and of assuming ‘people like us’ are the singular norm is what Benjamin DeMott (1990) has called ‘middle-class imperialism.”
― Michele Fazio, Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies

“The Third World debt crisis that erupted in 1981–1982 was a near catastrophe for the global economy. It was also a golden strategic opportunity. Over nearly a decade, Washington tied the provision of new lending and, eventually, debt relief to the enactment of pro-market reforms. The debt “can and should be used as leverage,” U.S. officials wrote.”
― Hal Brands, The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great-Power Rivalry Today

“The first was to secure uninterrupted control of the sea-lanes supplying the British Isles, the great future base for the Allied invasion forces, but that had meant the defeat of the U-boat menace, which came only in the summer of 1943. The second was to attain command of the air, not just over France but also over the Reich, and that was properly secured, interestingly enough, only by early 1944.23 The third and absolutely critical prerequisite had been of course the entry of the United States into the war and the commitment by the American government to a Germany First strategy, for only its vast productive power could guarantee that the Allies would be strong enough to push their way into France. Yet there was also a fourth great factor at work, though it was far to the east, namely, the vast Nazi-Soviet struggle that sapped so much of the Third Reich’s resources and was still pinning down the majority of the German Army’s divisions in 1944.”
― Paul Kennedy, Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II

“Had the US Navy somehow not existed, this British Navy with its enhanced Fleet Air Arm would have been the most powerful naval force the world had ever seen. Yet that hypothetical condition did not exist in 1945, and America’s giant power was evident to all. The Royal Navy was far, far larger than any other naval service in the world apart from that of the United States; the badly battered French Navy was way behind in third place, and perhaps Australia or Canada was in fourth.”
― Paul Kennedy, Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II

“Thus, in 1950 it still had twelve carriers and twenty-nine cruisers, while the pages of Jane’s Fighting Ships for, say, 1952 still show a very considerable navy. It was not to be until after Suez (1956) and the defense-policy revolution of 1957 that the further drastic erosion occurred, and by 1970 the Royal Navy’s surface fleet had shriveled to three carriers and three cruisers.”
― Paul Kennedy, Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II

“Scientists believe that species evolve primarily via interorganismic competition because these scientists live in highly competitive, individualistic societies? But so do you. Perhaps this is why you think that social forces determine the beliefs that scientists happen to have.”
― David L. Hull, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science

“Again, the Tiwi are the classic case; old men retained a virtual monopoly over nubile women. Rather like Hamadryas baboons (Rummer, 1968), they took them on as children. As a result, they not infrequently widowed them. Older, widowed women were the only wives of which a young Tiwi man was generally able to avail himself. Until he was in his late thirties, it was unlikely that any father-in-law would consider him worthy of being bequeathed a younger daughter (Hart and Pilling, 1960).”
― Laura L. Betzig, Despotism, Social Evolution, and Differential Reproduction

“Given the recent remarkable advances in artificial intelligence, scouting will probably involve “algorithmic warfare,” with competing AI systems plowing through vast amounts of data to identify patterns of enemy behavior that might elude human analysts. Identifying enemy operational tendencies may also aid commanders in employing their forces more effectively, similar to the way the introduction of operations research aided the allies in identifying effective convoy operations during the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II.30 AI could potentially assist efforts to develop malware, which could be used to erase or corrupt enemy scouting information, including the enemy’s AI algorithms themselves. If these efforts are successful, enemy commanders may lose confidence in their scouts, producing a “mission kill,” in which much of the enemy’s scouting force continues to operate but where its product is suspect.”
― Andrew F. Krepinevich, The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers

“Either the nation of the dead will come to be seen as an isolated phenomenon of the twentieth century – in which case history will want to know more and more about its make-up and characteristics. Or it will grow by fits and starts as an ever-increasing menace to the idea of civilization – and the sooner history identifies the nature of that threat the better. Or, through some cataclysm in the future it will swell in numbers to obliterate in significance any nation of the living. In that case it will be the final phenomenon of our history. There are no other possibilities.”
― Gil Elliot, The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead

“America has all the ingredients for sustained economic and military strength over many generations. But a fight for leadership in Asia will require not only massive resources but also a measure of national will that is difficult to summon unless the stakes are existential. And the problem for those who want to see America take on this contest against China is that the United States is one of the most secure nations on earth, and therefore has no powerful motivation to do so.”
― Sam Roggeveen, The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace

“If it is costly to resist a change in the balance of power, and if the consequences of such a change are bearable, then it is likely such a change will happen. Such is the basic logic of my argument that America will decline as a great power in the Asia Pacific. When it comes to taking on China, the costs are too high and the stakes too low.”
― Sam Roggeveen, The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace

“For an Asian concert to be even remotely acceptable to its great-power members, we must rule out the idea of it being built on liberal principles.”
― Sam Roggeveen, The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace

“there is a temptation to think that policy and capability only work in one direction: first, we set the policy, then we develop the capability to match the policy. But it is a perverse aspect of defence policy that, once a capability exists, it will to some degree determine policy.”
― Sam Roggeveen, The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace

“It is a vital necessity for Australia to remain on friendly terms with Jakarta as Indonesia fulfills its potential as a great power. Failure to do so would be strategically disastrous. An Indonesia that is both wealthy and hostile to Australia would represent the biggest challenge to our security since World War II, much more serious than the threat China presently poses. If Indonesia was our enemy, we would join Israel, South Korea and the central European states bordering Russia as some of the least secure in the world, with the highest risk of conflict.”
― Sam Roggeveen, The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace

“What China cannot ignore is how the narrative of the CCP as the champion and redeemer of a victimised China could dangerously narrow China’s options if an accident with the US or Japan should occur. War is not in China’s interest, and Beijing may for all the reasons I have earlier set out, want to contain the incident. But Beijing could be trapped by its own historical narrative, and the highly nationalistic public opinion that the CCP both cultivates and fears may force China down paths it does not really want to travel. I think Chinese leaders are aware of this danger but cannot abandon or tone down the narrative they have chosen to legitimate their right to rule because they have no convincing replacement.”
― Bilahari Kausikan, Dealing With An Ambiguos World