Jeff Scott > Recent Status Updates

“Dwelling” in a kentuki, thought Alina, was a much more intense experience. If being anonymous online was the maximum freedom for any user—and, what’s more, almost impossible—how would it feel, then, to be an anonymous actor in someone else’s life?”

“It would have needed a very stalwart young woman in 1828 to disregard all those snubs and chidings and promises of prizes. One must have been something of a firebrand... I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

“Now what food do we feed women as artists upon?”

“there was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually... any girl could read them for herself; and the reading, even in the nineteenth century, must have lowered her vitality, and told profoundly upon her work. There would always have been that assertion—you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that—to protest against, to overcome”

“For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?”

If I stopped writing, I would feel there was nothing left; it would be like demolishing a bridge that I haven’t yet crossed.

Reading a book is, of course, an experience too, and the sum of books that a person has read makes him or her unique as a reader.

At my age, it's impossible to contemplate the eternities of time that I wasted in my youth without a certain horror. The lack of method, the capricious detours, the waiting for nothing. The hours, the days, the years, the decades squandered. And it is poetically just, in a way, that the apparent victim should have been the moon, that poetic reminder of wasted time.

Recall, moreover, that the US Supreme Court and other constitutional tribunals that have the last word on constitutional issues in the various Western countries have often shown themselves to be extremely conservative on social and economic issues. Wherever the constitution leaves a crack through which they can inject their partisan views, justices are quick to pass their opinions off as law.

A just society is one that allows all of its members access to the widest possible range of fundamental goods. Fundamental goods include education, health, the right to vote, and more generally to participate as fully as possible in the various forms of social, cultural, economic, civic, and political life.

Everything depends on equipping groups of different origins and identities with the institutional, social, and political tools they need to recognize that what unites them out-weighs what divides them.

Basic changes in the admissions policies of both private and public universities are needed, including common rules to improve the chances of currents disadvantaged groups. In general, without bold and clearly comprehensible reforms it is hard to see how the disadvantaged classes, always somewhat alienated from politics in the United States, can be brought back into the process.

Today's neo-proprietarian ideology relies on grand narratives and solid institutions, including the story of communism's failure, the "Pandorian" refusal to redistribute wealth, and the free circulation of capital without regulation, information sharing, or a common tax system.

...the very high level of inequality that existed before World War I was in no way necessary for growth, as much of the elite claimed at the time. Everyone should also agree that the conservative Reagan revolution of the 198os was a failure: growth in the United States fell by half, and the notion that it would have fallen even more in the absence of conservative reforms is not very plausible.'

“I’m a patient person and hesitant to alienate anyone who might have fifteen dollars lying around to buy my books, but it dawned on me the other day that, for me, the Internet has to be a meticulously curated digital space in which your uncle’s vaguely racist tweets have no place.”

...the transformation of trifunctional and slave societies into ownership societies requires the formation of a centralized state capable of guaranteeing property rights; exercising a monopoly of legitimate violence; and establishing a relatively autonomous legal, fiscal, and justice system—otherwise local elites will continue to wield power and maintain subaltern classes in a state of dependence

The sacralization of private property is basically a natural response to fear of the void... new ways of ensuring social stability had to be found. Absolute respect for property rights acquired in the past offered a new form of transcendence, which made it possible to avoid widespread chaos and fill the void left by the end of trifunctional ideology. (Nobility, Clerical, and the People)

“Everyone is so vulnerable and the rules for what constitutes civilized behavior—well, they’re coming apart so quickly I’ve decided those rules were illusions all along. We have stopped seeing each other as people, as fellow travelers on this dying earth; we just see a gig or an economy”

...evil rarely looked like evil when it first arrived... it looked, to some, like a solution—a solution to the secret problem they believed had gone too long unaddressed. They felt as though they had been speaking a hidden language among themselves, and then a man or a woman in a suit stood on a stage and addressed cheering masses in that very same language, hidden no longer.”

...evil rarely looked like evil when it first arrived... it looked, to some, like a solution—a solution to the secret problem they believed had gone too long unaddressed. They felt as though they had been speaking a hidden language among themselves, and then a man or a woman in a suit stood on a stage and addressed cheering masses in that very same language, hidden no longer.”

From OF THE EMPIRE

And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

I’ve always loved that phrase for birthing:
dando a luz giving to light.

You do not let your words stunt unknown possibilities.

You do not let words stunt unknown possibilities.

That you were not born
but crawled, headfirst—
into the hunger of dogs.
My son, tell them the body
is a blade that sharpens
by cutting