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«Always remember, mine Sadie: life is very long, unless it is not.» Sadie knew this to be a tautology, but it also happened to be true.

We humans are evolved for sharing, co-operation and community. We flourish in contexts that enable us to express these values, and we suffer in contexts that stifle them.

The way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened.Even if we are present at some historic event, do we comprehend it—can we even remember it—until we can tell it as a story? For events in times or places outside our own experience, we have nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us.Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination.

Alberto Brandolini publicó el siguiente tuit: «The bullshit asimmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it».
El comentario fue bautizado como el principio de asimetría de Brandolini, también llamado el principio de asimetría de la estupidez.

she had the kind of cleverness that verged on the unkind

When people live in a fair, caring society, where everyone has equal access to social goods, they don’t have to spend their time worrying about how to cover their basic needs day to day – they can enjoy the art of living. And instead of feeling they are in constant competition with their neighbours, they can build bonds of social solidarity.

La financiarización supone la expansión del sector financiero mediante la creación de nuevos activos (deuda) y nuevas formas de inversión que permiten extraer beneficios financieros directamente de la renta personal de los trabajadores, lo que Lapavitsas denomina la nueva forma de expropiación financiera del salario.Es decir, la financiarización confiere al sector financiero una mayor capacidad de captura del salario

We keep buying more stuff in order to feel better about ourselves, but it never works because the benchmark against which we measure the good life is pushed perpetually out of reach by the rich (and, these days, by social media influencers). We find ourselves spinning in place on an exhausting treadmill of needless over-consumption.

If you get a raise at work it’s bound to boost your happiness. But what happens when you discover that your colleagues got a raise that was twice what you received? Suddenly you’re not happy at all – you’re upset. You feel devalued. Your sense of trust in your boss takes a hit, and your sense of solidarity with your colleagues falls apart.

strangely enough, when we look at measures of overall happiness and well-being, it turns out that even these indicators have a tenuous relationship with GDP. This rather puzzling result is known as the Easterlin Paradox, after the economist who first pointed it out.

A sister is someone you fight with and fight for. Tooth and nail.

Plutarch seems happy, saying he’s going to be able to edit the clips together into some fine propos.He sighs when he mentions the tools that were abolished and incapacitated in the past, ones deemed fated to destroy humanity because of their ability to replicate any scenario using any person.“And in mere seconds!” He snaps his fingers to emphasize their speed. “I guess it was the right thing to do, given our natures”

Public opinion is driven by emotion. People have an emotional response to something, then they come up with an argument for why it logically makes sense

if you can get people to laugh at someone, it makes them look weak

Incompetence. You can’t ignore it, or it spreads.

«There are ways out», as the poet Charles Bukowski puts it, «there is light somewhere, it may not be much light, but it beats the darkness».

The marriage system that prevailed in the West up until recently was not perfect, nor was it easy for most people to conform to, since it demanded high levels of tolerance and self-control. Where the critics go wrong is in arguing that there is any better system. There isn’t.

The critics of marriage are right to say that it has historically been used as a vehicle for the control of women by men, and they’re right to point out that most marriages do not live up to a romantic ideal. They’re right, too, that monogamous, lifelong marriage is in a sense ‘unnatural’ in that it is not the human norm.

«All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing, and why.»
George Orwell

This is the solution to what anthropologists have called ‘the puzzle of monogamous marriage’. How is it that a marriage system that does not suit the interests of the most powerful members of society –high-status men– has nevertheless come to be institutionalised across so much of the world? The answer is that, although monogamy is less satisfactory for these men, it produces wealthy, stable societies that survive.

Birth rates and crime rates both fall, which encourages economic development, and wealthy men, denied the opportunity to devote their resources to acquiring more wives, instead invest elsewhere: in property, businesses, employees, and other productive endeavours.

But while the monogamous marriage model may be relatively unusual, it is also spectacularly successful. When monogamy is imposed on a society, it tends to become richer. It has lower rates of both child abuse and domestic violence, since conflict between co-wives tends to generate both. (...)

«A truth that’s told with bad intent, Beats all the lies you can invent.»
William Blake

two of the thirteen chapters in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman were devoted to bemoaning the lack of chastity in men – the sex with the higher sex drive – and thus – to Wollstonecraft’s mind – the greater responsibility for containing their passions. ‘Votes for women, chastity for men’ was a real suffragist slogan, now forgotten.

When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.»
David Hume

«Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.
(...)

«That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.»
David Hume

What might nowadays be interpreted as ‘slut shaming’, or a fear of female sexual agency, in fact had a very urgent purpose. That purpose is now somewhat anachronistic in an age of contraception, but only somewhat. Illicit affairs do still end in trauma and tragedy because sex is still just as consequential as it ever was.