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[...] we have contraptions like computers that cheat you out of becoming. Bill Gates says, "Wait till you can see what your computer can become." But it's you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer. What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do.
(I assume that by work he doesn't necessarily mean that which is exploited by the capitalist, but rather, what you accomplish in your life)
I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favourite joke.
oh man I remember this from when I first read it!!! memory lane etc
i think i actually read this book BEFORE he died which makes it even harder to read this passage now
So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called In These Times.
I CAN'T BELIEVE I DIDN'T LOOK UP IN THESE TIMES BEFORE. OMG. TALK ABOUT WASTED OPPORTUNITY. I COULD HAVE READ IT + WRITTEN SOMETHING FOR THEM AGES AGO
There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity--the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, "Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end."
When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, "You're a man now." So I killed him. Not really, but I felt like doing it.
[...] He conveyed Marx's view of the process of holding elections in a sentence that would not have been out of place in New York or Madrid: 'The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in Parliament.'
Occupy demonstrates the malaise more than it suggests any remedy. Its diagnosis of representative democracy was correct, but the alternative was weak. [...]
this aligns with Inventing the Future's thoughts on Occupy and other folk-political struggles
[...] Electoral fundamentalists refuse to regard elections as a means of taking part in democracy, seeing them instead as an end in themselves, as a holy doctrine with an intrinsic, inalienable value.
drift I tell you!
When the supporters of the American and French revolutions proposed elections as a way of getting to know 'the will of the people', there were as yet no political parties, no laws regarding universal franchise, no commercial mass media, let alone social media. In fact the inventors of electoral-representative democracy had no idea that any of these things would come into existence. [...]
this is so drifty i'm crying
[...] Imagine having to develop a system today that would express the will of the people. Would it really be a good idea to have them all queue up at polling stations every four or five years with a bit of card in their hands and go into a dark booth to put a mark, not next to ideas but next to names on a list, names of people about whom restless reporting had been going on for months in a commercial environment that profits from restlessness? Would we still have the nerve to call what is in fact a bizarre, archaic ritual 'a festival of democracy'?
drift drift drift
(basically it needs refactoring)
[...] 'The basis of a democratic state is liberty . . . One principle of liberty is for all to rule and be ruled in turn'. [...]
quoting Aristotle