Civic powerlessness can be overridden by good gossip.
~ Doreen St. Félix via The New Yorker
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Category Archives: 0747 – Quote Unquote
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By 1985, the threat of highly restrictive legislation became acute. In July, Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, future Senate Finance Chairman and vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen, and future House Majority Leader and presidential candidate Richard Gephardt introduced legislation imposing a 25 percent surcharge on imports from any country that maintained both a large bilateral trade surplus with the United States and unfair barriers to imports, with mandated reductions in the bilateral deficit.
~ Michael Starr via American Affairs
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Wolfgang Streeck may be best known for his essays in New Left Review, including a dazzling series on the cascade of financial crises that followed the crash of 2008. He resembles Karl Marx in his conviction that capitalism has certain internal contradictions that make it unsustainable — the more so in its present “neoliberal” form. His latest book, “Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism,” published this month, asks whether the global economy as it is now set up is compatible with democracy. He has his doubts.
~ Christopher Caldwell
via This Maverick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time
published by The New York Times on November 28, 2024
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I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions.
~ Emmanuel Radnitzky
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Pragmatism, in politics, is a practice of working backward from desired outcomes, rather than forward from abstract ideals.
~ Nathan Heller via The New Yorker
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Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded.
~ Ted Chiang via The Atlantic
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Canadians may be intellectually curious about the prospect of European Union membership and angry at Donald Trump’s America -— which, according to a recent Pew poll, they now view more negatively than they do China —- but they may not be eager to accept the sweeping transformation of their country’s laws and regulations that E.U. membership would entail.
~ Ishaan Tharoor via The New Yorker
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Whatever the social effects of talk radio or the partisan agendas of certain hosts, it is a fallacy that political talk radio is motivated by ideology. It is not. Political talk radio is a business, and it is motivated by revenue. The conservatism that dominates today’s AM airwaves does so because it generates high Arbitron ratings, high ad rates, and maximum profits.
~ David Foster Wallace
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You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing.
~ Iain Banks
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Japan in the 1980s pioneered the type of export-led, low-consumption development model later adopted by China and other Asian nations. A heavily managed financial market steered cheap financing toward manufacturers, and an extensive web of explicit and implicit subsidies and industrial policies directed taxpayer funds toward the promotion of exports. This was the institutional background for Japan’s high savings rate, which in the postwar period initially financed Japanese corporate investment in rebuilding domestic productive capacity, then financed Japan’s sizable budget deficit in the 1970s.
~ Michael Starr via American Affairs
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