Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

Involution...suggests that rather than experiencing progress, or evolution, societies and social actors use old ideas, behaviours, and social logics to adapt to new conditions.

So according to your theory...Walt Disney World would be the holiest place In America.

They say this was built by Frank Lloyd Wright's evil twin...Frank Lloyd Wrong.

This is the only country that worries about what it is.

He sang of the nine days that the all-father hung from the world tree, his side pierced and dripping... Odin/Christ

"This accounts for the obsession with social origins in Central Europe." - it's actually an obsession with social connections.

"Moreover, like the medieval clergy, this estate [the Communist party] recruited broadly from all ranks of society in Central Europe, and it appears to have had difficulty reproducing itself intergenerationally" - there was no vow of celibacy, was this why Communism failed?

"As state socialism neared its end, however, education and diligence mattered more and more, and politics less and less." - I arrived at peak cultural capital?

post communist capitalism is distinquishable .... because it is a system in which cultural capital (education, skills, credentials) is more important than economic capital (property ownership) or social capital (social network ties). - it was?

Tell him we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam.

The Age of information....not, of course, that there has ever been any other kind of age. Information and knowledge: these are the currencies that have never gone out of style.

":the whole image simply reminded me of somebody.
My mother. Death"

Another one for my anthology of Hungarian quotations on motherhood.

The logic is that if comminism got it wrong, we go back to the way tjings were done before communism, especially if those ways of thinking and behaving were rejected by comminism. - the Fidesz plan?

is it conceivable that post-communist elites will take a hostoric short cut and move directly to the most 'advanced' state of coroporate capitalism, never sharing their managerial power (even temporarily) with a class of individual owners.

"...sty? Are you thirsty, dear?"

Thought he'd made a breakthrough in literary punctuation, but no - just missed the "Thir-" at the very end of the first line. :(

"This danger lay in the dissemination of a new religion, which, if it had gained the upper hand... Spiritually the Greeks might have been annexed to the people's of the orient." - He"s writing about the Orphic religion, with its core of mystery and preoccupation with the afterlife strikes me as a forerunner of Christianity - something that we now see at the core of Western experience.

One good thing the tyrants had done: they had obliterated the class distinctions which had existed before them, and thus the cities could now start afresh on the basis of political equality for all.

But in both these cases the policy of Felon strikingly displayed the prejudice of his class...he sold the mass of the commons in the slave market. In abolishing cities and transplanting populations... - a regular Stalin.

...the western Greeks had been called upon to defend themselves against that Asiatic power which had established itself in the western Mediterranean. - In what sense was Carnage an Asiatic power?

In the sixth century the Athenians were a considerable naval power, as Greek naval powers then went, but the fleet was regarded as subsidiary to the army. The idea of Thermistocles was to sacrifice the army to the navy and make Athens a sea-state - the strongest sea-state in Greece. - when and who had this idea for England/Britain?

Closer to home, the Confederacy was a case study in shared values and cultural identity, whose foundation, of course, was slavery...

...ghostly warriors moved among the ranks. - LotR?

The world may well have been surprised to see the greatest despotism of all favouring the institution of democracy: it was a concession to the spirit of the Greeks, which reflects credit on the wisdom of Darius.

A great struggle between Asiatic autocracy and European freedom.

"the new Iranian kingdom fell under the relaxing influences of corrupt Semitic civilisation of Babylonia and Assyria" - is there an Aryan supremacist agenda here?

The court of Sardis was in truth more oriental than Hellenic, not only in wealth and luxury, but also in its customs - for instance polygamy and the infliction of cruel punishments.

...the burgess list of the place, in which was solemnly entered the name of each citizen when he reached the age of eighteen. - is this where the fetishisation of eighteen began?

Everywhere Sparta exerted her influence to maintain oligarchy, everywhere she discountenanced democracy;

Better late than never

It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.