Sergey

“Looking back now, what I experienced in the wake of the Goldman piece was a lesson in the subtle truth about class politics in this country. Which is this: you can pick on the rich in an ironic, Arrested Development sort of way, you can muss Donald Trump's hair, you can even talk abstractly about class economics using clinical terms like "income disparity." But in our media you're not allowed to just kick the rich in the balls and use class-warfare language. The taboo isn't so much the subject matter, the taboo is the tone.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“So no one was surprised that they didn't make admissions; that would have been tantamount to surrendering in the lawsuit. But it was the tone that startled most people. If your wife catches you with another woman, every man knows, even if you're not sorry, you have to act sorry. You can't just stare back at her and say, "I don't get what you're so upset about."

And that's exactly how the Goldman executives behaved. It wasn't so much that they lied, it was that they seemed to think they were telling the truth. They seemed to really believe they were right.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited