Quote Only Thread

[liminalOyster]

The new atheists, such as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, or social critics Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris—the worst of all ghostbusters—demand the universe, however physically massive, be as small and legible as possible. They would do well to consult some better empiricists. Willard Van Orman Quine, a twentieth-century American logician and philosopher, had little time for ghosts, but even less time for the sort of bad thinking that organizes the world into stable, immovable categories that could never allow for ghosts. Quine thought our theories of the world should be considered webs of belief, with centers and peripheries. At the center of the web are propositions we might call analytically true, or a priori—for instance, 2 + 2 = 4; or all bachelors are unmarried. On the periphery are beliefs that can be changed based on some recalcitrant experiences; for example, if one believes there are no red-haired French people, but then meets a few red-haired French people, the original belief is easily revised. Quine rejected that these are actually two different types of truth, epistemologically (i.e., really). Given the right, albeit dramatic, alterations to a belief web, 2 + 2 = 4 could be false, and not just by swapping around the meaning of words.

[chump]

"It's incorrect to call Cambridge Analytica a purely sort of data science company, or an algorithm company. It is a full service propaganda company. Steve Bannon was the editor of Breitbart. He follows this idea of the Breitbart Doctrine; which is that if you want to fundamentally change society, you first have to break it, and then it's only when you break it [that] you can remold the pieces into your vision of a new society."

[liminalOyster]

"You and I have to ask a subversive question: are there really three branches of government, or is there a fourth branch of government—these intel services?"

[liminalOyster]

"I've condemned [violence] across the board," / "If we were in high school, I'd take [Trump] behind the gym and beat the hell out of him,'"

[Cordelia]

My paintings know more than I do.

Gerhard Richter

[Grizzly]

I needed that Cordelia! Thank you.

[Cordelia]

You're welcome Griz!

I needed that too. (Danke schön Herr Richter.)

[Elvis]

"It seems to be what we have now is a political system which has essentially become, for the last thirty or forty years, a war on the human imagination."

— David Graeber, at the Royal Society for the Arts, 2015

[dada]

What is it to the imagination whether the war has been waged against it for the last thirty or forty years, the last three or four hundred, or three or four thousand. Or thirty or forty minutes, thirty or forty seconds. In the imagination, time works differently.

The war on the imagination is finally decided on the battlefield of the imagination, where it must become imaginary. Logic dictates this.

The imagination cannot be defeated on its own ground. A source of endless frustration for any army that rebels against it.

[dada]

To take it one step further, we could say that it's the human imagination who started the war. The imagination creates a world for the express purpose of being invaded. A trap world, made of bug zappers and super-sticky glue-paper.

These are very old ideas.

[Elvis]

Graeber completes his above thought:

"...to convince us there are no new ideas."

[dada]

Who can be convinced that there are no new ideas? Only those who don't have any.

Maybe the opposite of a new idea isn't an old one, but a used idea, bought second-hand. A very old idea can cost as much as a brand new one.

[Grizzly]

@dada

Did you write that? it's awesome.

Bravo everyone! Thought food, yum!

[dada]

I wrote it. My words know more than I do, though. They tell me what to write, I pretty much just take dictation at this point.

[Cordelia]

Life asked death, 'Why do people love me but hate you? '

Death responded, 'Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth.

Author Unknown