What I'm reading 1/11-1/18

2016-01-18

Political Correctness is a More Dangerous Form of Totalitarianism - Slavoj Žižek

  1. "I hate this politically correct respect, oh, what is your food, what are your cultural forms. No, I tell them tell me a dirty joke about yourself and we will be friends and so on. It works."

  2. "The only thing I know is that when I was in Missoula, Montana, I got engaged in a very friendly conversation with some Native Americans. They hate the term and they gave me a wonderful reason. They told me Native American and you are a cultural American so what, we are part of nature. They told me we much preferred to be called Indians. At least our name is a monument to white men's stupidity who thought they are in India when they come here."

Harold Brodkey, The Art of Fiction No. 126 - James Linville

  1. "Ideals are for greeting cards. I am trying to change consciousness, change language in such a way that the modes of behavior I am opposed to become unpopular, absurd, unlikely. You try to work toward a culture that takes time and conscience seriously in a real way and not as part of a tidal flow of hype."

  2. "You really spend an awful lot of your time in New York just being confused about how to act."

  3. "I stopped trying, because I got this sense, you see, that there was this trap, that you had to merchandise yourself, be cute on cue. And then you'd be stuck with producing that effect, that personality, all your life; you'd never escape."

  4. "It was something about being a young man and being part of the society of the time. I wasn't prepared to assert myself as an independent voice arguing and howling."

  5. "But the cruelest to bear is the beginning, the confrontation with the blank sheet of paper, where you have the chance to get up and turn your back on being a writer. You think, 'I'll quit, I'll live a real life as a citizen; I'll belong to the PTA and love my children. And have a country house.'"

  6. "There is a movement away from ordinary life, from statistically normal life, the kind of life that most people of your class lead, into this other specialization that is really only bearable at the beginning."

Private messages at work can be read by European employers - Kevin Rawlinson, BBC News

  1. "The worker, an engineer in Romania, had hoped the court would rule that his employer had breached his right to confidential correspondence when it accessed his messages and subsequently sacked him in 2007."

The Reductive Seduction of Other People's Problems - Courtney Martin

  1. "While thousands of the country's best and brightest flock to far-flung places to ease unfamiliar suffering and tackle foreign dysfunction, we've got plenty of domestic need."

  2. "There's a social dimension to this: the 'likes' one gets for being an international do-gooder might be greater than for, say, working on homelessness in Indianapolis."

  3. "They drop technology without having a training or maintenance plan in place, or try to shift cultural norms without culturally appropriate educational materials or trusted messengers."

  4. Thanks to Brandon Hirdler for the link

People call me Aaron - Noah Swartz

  1. "I watched as he was turned into a figurehead for American injustice and the open access movement, as every nuanced part of him — the parts that I loved to chat about with the people close to him — were stripped away and he was made a banner of the exceptional being crushed by dumb laws like the CFAA."

  2. "I started being unable to control when I cried. Tears would stream from my eyes if I stayed up too late, or if I was feeling especially socially anxious or rejected."

Requiem For a Trijet Masterpiece – The Lockheed L-1011 - Peter J.M. Harrington-Cressman

  1. "History has often dictated that airlines don't purchase the aircraft; they purchase the manufacturer."

  2. "Whereas the DC-10 had a rather simple interior design, the TriStar had its entire interior concept conceived by the industrial design firm of Sundberg-Ferrar."

What I Believe - E.M. Forster

  1. "No, I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper."

  2. "Love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the State. When they do - down with the State, say I, which means that the State would down me."

  3. "The evidence of history shows us that men have always insisted on behaving creatively under the shadow of the sword; that they have done their artistic and scien- tific and domestic stuff for the sake of doing it, and that we had better follow their example under the shadow of the aeroplanes."