Quotes

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.

Frederick Douglas

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Nietzsche

Here is the hard political reality: You can't expect to support and finance political candidates who preach that government is menacing and wasteful, that public employees are incompetent and corrupt, that taxes are always too high and destroy jobs, and then turn around and expect that the government will respond to your demands to hold down the cost of health care, or fund basic research, or provide good schools, efficient courts and reliable transportation systems.

Amen, Steven Pearlstein

I just picked up "Free the Market: When Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive" by Gary L Reback. It starts with this quote by George Will (from this column):

It will remind everyone -- some conservatives, painfully -- that a mature capitalist economy is a government project. A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as dandelions spring from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores...

Bingo.

As I continue to plow through the magazines I set aside during my sports shooting season, I wanted to note the 2009 October issue of The Atantic. It focused mostly on media issues, but also featured one of the best discussions of U.S. Torture Policy in Andrew Sullivan's letter to former-President Bush that offers perhaps the only real solution for moving forward on this important issue.

I was struck by a quote from Mark Bowden (an author I almost always enjoy reading, regardless of subject matter) in his "The Story Behind the Story" that really gets to the heart of why Fox News bothers me so much:

Journalism, done right, is enormously powerful because it does not seek power. It seeks truth.

Fox News has blazed a path of subverting what journalism should be. They weren't the first - but they have blown away the competition. And it bothers me to the extent that other networks copy that approach in an attempt to gain viewers rather than educate viewers.

I was pleasantly surprised by Robert D. Kaplan's "Why I Love Al Jazeera," (which was about Al Jazeera English, not the arabic sister-channel). AJE is basically a BBC-style program if Howard Zinn ran it - it focuses intently on the perspective of the powerless.

And Kaplan also zinged Fox News - noting:

I have spent the past two years reporting from the Indian Ocean region, dealing predominantly with Muslims and indigenous nongovernmental organizations; watching Al Jazeera is the vicarious equivalent of engaging in the kinds of conversations I have been having. One of the multitude of problems I have with Fox News is that even its most analytically brilliant commentators, such as Charles Krauthammer, seem to be scoring points and talking to their own ideological kind rather than engaging in dialogue with others. Watching Fox, you have to wonder whether many of its commentators have ever had a conversation with a real live Muslim abroad.

History from the Daily Beast:

Conservatives delude themselves that the Bush tax cuts worked and that the best medicine for America’s economic woes is more tax cuts; at a minimum, any tax increase would be economic poison. They forget that Ronald Reagan worked hard to pass one of the largest tax increases in American history in September 1982, the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, even though the nation was still in a recession that didn’t end until November of that year. Indeed, one could easily argue that the enactment of that legislation was a critical prerequisite to recovery because it led to a decline in interest rates. The same could be said of Clinton’s 1993 tax increase, which many conservatives predicted would cause a recession but led to one of the biggest economic booms in history.

For the most part, the world's religions are strongest in those areas where people are poor, uneducated, without hope for a decent future, and influenced by the vision of the wonderful afterlife thta all the orthodoxies give promise to.

from an article called "Perhaps, My Swan Song" David Koven in Social Anarchism issue 39 in 2006.

Nonetheless, I think it wise to be familiar with religion - or at least catch phrases. One of the things I respect about daddYman is that though he is strongly opposed to Christianity as practiced in America, he also knows the Bible. This fascinating clip from NPR's On the Media suggests many of the folks at the NY Times don't know the Bible. Pretty hilarious, really.

I have yet to fully read the Bible, but I have read large parts of it and I find it quite handy in talking to people and understanding their thought process. Such knowledge is important in these United States - where so many claim to be inspired by an internally contradictory book from which they can find passages to justify damn near anything.

I have been shepherding a disastrous web site migration at work - moving from a large static HTML site to a content management system. We're a year late, over budget, and sick of the whole damn thing.

Over the weekend, our contractors put a patch up that was supposed to resolve a problem but it seems to have only made things worse. As I was explaining it to my boss, I said

In web development, it is always darkest before dawn and it always gets darker than you could possibly imagine

This has probably been said before, but it was an original thought to me (I think).

From the Dhammapada - Sayings of the Buddha

Anger is like a charioteer careering wildly.
He who curbs his anger is the true charioteer.
Others merely hold the reins.

It has been too long since I put up some quotes.

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman - From lecture "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society", given at the Galileo Symposium in Italy, 1964 - Source.

I think this really applies to how we have to live in this post-fact society.