Lucía > Recent Status Updates

la derecha realizaba una serie de acciones estratégicas destinadas a hacer trizas la economía y desprestigiar al gobierno. Tenía en sus manos los medios de difusión más poderosos, contaba con recursos económicos casi ilimitados y con la ayuda de los gringos, que destinaron fondos secretos para el plan de sabotaje. A los pocos meses se pudieron apreciar los resultados.

No pudieron sobornar a los parlamentarios y en el plazo estipulado por la ley la izquierda asumió tranquilamente el poder. Y entonces la derecha comenzó a juntar odio.

Mejor destinamos ese dinero a comprar todos los medios de comunicación. Así podremos manejar a la opinión pública, que es lo único que cuenta en realidad.

Queremos que el marxismo fracase estrepitosamente y caiga solo, para quitar esa idea de la cabeza a otro países del continente. ¿Comprende? Este asunto lo vamos a arreglar con dinero. Todavía podemos comprar a algunos parlamentarios para que no lo confirmen como presidente.

No lo dejaremos en paz ni un minuto. Tendrá que renunciar

Every social change has trade-offs, which are obscured by a simplistic narrative that leaves no space for complexity.

Gary is not wrong—becoming who you want to be is just like anything else. It takes practice. It requires belief that one day, you’ll wake up and be a natural at it.

It is so much easier to sit in things and wait for something to save us.

(...)
If liberty means, therefore, that every individual shall be free, according to his opportunities, to indulge without limit his appetite for either, it is clearly incompatible, not only with economic and social, but with civil and political, equality, which also prevent the strong exploiting to the full the advantages of their strength … freedom for the pike is death for the minnows.»

R. H. Tawney wrote in 1931:
«Equality implies the deliberate acceptance of social restraints upon individual expansion. It involves the prevention of sensational extremes of wealth and power by public action for the public good.
(...)

And now they are back, but they are different, because nobody comes back from the dead the same. You emerge always with a little bit of the underworld on you, the lesion, the scar, having seen unspeakable things.

J. S. Mill’s harm principle: «The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.»

rape isn’t only about power, it’s also about sex

She wonders if her feelings for Gary could be a new form of love, one she’s never known before: love without expectation. Love that you are just happy enough to feel. Love that you don’t try to own like a painting.

To collect is to care more than most. But it is also to hoard. To take things out of the world and make them only yours.

It has to be possible to say simultaneously that rape is reprehensible and that it is OK – in fact, essential – to offer advice that could help to reduce its incidence.

I think we talk about happiness all wrong. As if it’s this fixed state we’re going to reach. Like we’ll just be able to live there, forever. But that’s not my experience with happiness. For me, it comes and goes. It shows up and then disappears like a bubble.

To lose your temper is to lose the battle.

She didn’t understand that this is what happens as you get older—that the same thing that repulsed her when she was young is the same exact thing that draws her near now.

I had no chance, really. The younger woman never has a chance. She’s always doomed to worship, right from the start.

a professor was in a unique position to open students up. They seemed inclined to trust that when Phoebe asked a question, it was leading somewhere worthwhile.

And maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body. Maybe everybody sits up at night and creates arguments in their head for why they are the loneliest person in the world.

How are you supposed to go from being the center of someone’s world to being irrelevant?

And maybe this is just one of the really nice things about getting older. Maybe this is the part of her life when she gets to start saying what she means, for better or worse. Because no amount of truth can be worse than the feeling she got after years of hiding from it.

Phoebe thinks it’s amazing how easily children ask questions. They don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. They know that they don’t know everything, and it’s a little jarring to Phoebe, a woman who spent her entire career pretending that she had been born knowing everything. Bob had suggested it, said it can be precarious for a female scholar to be caught asking too many questions

There are some people in this world who remind you of exactly how you like to speak.

do you like chocolate or citrus desserts, do you like lakes or oceans, cats or dogs, and why does the world always make us choose?
«People love creating false binaries,» Matt said. «It’s clarifying.»

But the unwelcome truth will always remain, whether or not we can bear to look at it: almost all men can kill almost all women with their bare hands, but not vice versa. And that matters.

But that is how it happens, she realizes. One moment of pretending to be great leads to the next moment of pretending to be great, and ten years later, she realizes she’s spent her entire life just pretending to be great.

«We are not ready-made out of somebody’s rib. We are composites of many different legacies, put together from leftovers in an evolutionary process that has been going on for billions of years. Even the endorphins that made my labor pains tolerable came from molecules that humans still share with earthworms.»
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy