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Whatever late capitalism is, it seems to be careening into this embrace of growth by negation. Through that prism, it’s hard not to see the advances in something like artificial intelligence less driven by technological breakthroughs as by a society that has, over years, over decades, become normalized to a greater and greater magnitude of both loneliness and theft, such that a sputtering algorithm badly trained on the stolen work of real human beings might be celebrated with a straight face as something approximating humanness. Under this ordering, it is not some corporation’s increasing capacity for better that drives the extractive world, but everyone else’s increasing tolerance for worse. Unconfronted, this kind of negation will not remain confined to widgets or labor or even the economic world. When the bigger wildfires come—as they already have—the industries whose callous disregard helped bring this about will depend on our ever-growing tolerance for calamity. When climate change upends the lives of billions, our governments will depend on our ever-growing tolerance for violence against the hordes of nameless others to enact its cruelest, most violent fortressing. In time, negation becomes all there is. To walk away from this system is to speak the only language the system will ever understand. Otherwise, there will be nothing left under this way of living. In the end we will be asked to normalize not just unlimited extraction and unlimited suffering but total absence, a hollow that will look an awful lot like the one we were asked to overlay onto the minimum-wage workers and the climate refugees and the victims of endless colonial wars and, yes, even those dead Palestinian children who, had they been allowed to live, might have done something terrible.

— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (duplicate)

One of the hallmarks of Western liberalism is an assumption, in hindsight, of virtuous resistance as the only polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism. While the terrible thing is happening—while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed—any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight.

— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (duplicate)

It was at about the time that Kepler left Latin school to enter Adelberg that he first became aware of a potentially explosive rift in the Protestant world. He heard a sermon in Leonberg given by a young deacon who spoke vehemently and at length against the Calvinists. Twelve-year-old Kepler went away deeply worried about this harsh controversy between those who adhered to slightly different confessions of the same faith. At the age of thirteen, he wrote a letter requesting that the University of Tübingen send him copies of Martin Luther's disputations. Kepler decided to make it a practice, whenever he heard a preacher or lecturer argue about the meaning of the Scriptures, to consult the passages himself rather than take anyone's word for what they meant. He usually decided that both interpretations had good points. This was not a healthy attitude for a young man who was hoping someday to find himself in a Lutheran pulpit - indeed for anyone wanting to survive unscathed in the political/religious milieu of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Rather than win friends in both camps, it was likely to make enemies all round. As Kepler recalled his youthful inclination to see all sides of an argument: "There was nothing I could state that I could not also contradict." It was a gift, and sometimes a curse, that would remain with him all his life.

— Tycho and Kepler by Kitty Ferguson (24%)

Å være blind for sitt driftsliv er fatalt, fortsetter [Freud], for det forsvinner ikke, slutter ikke å virke, tvert imot, så menneskets oppgave er å lære seg å leve med sine drifter, på en klok måte.

Det er vanskelig ikke å ha dette i mente i møte med krigene vi opplever for øyeblikket, at det er driftsliv i spill, særlig hos aggressorene, men jeg får også følelsen av at det er driftsliv i spill når mine egne ledere snakker, og det er foruroligende, når vestlige ledere bruker et språk som til tider virker mer krigshissende enn dempende, når jeg får følelsen av at enkelte av dem kjenner en slags lyst over dramatikken, over liksom endelig å være i nesten-nærkamp med fienden, når lederne mine bruker talemåter og tonefall som ikke kan skjule en slags iver bak ordene om beslutnings-, handlings- og slag-kraft, og som skaper stor avstand til min frykt og min forvirring og min skam over min handlingslammelse, over at jeg, selv om jeg som nå, gjør små forsøk på å protestere mot all verden, får følelsen av at jeg med mine ledere i spissen, er med på ferden - mot hva?

(Vigdis Hjorth: Prolog)

— Stopp våpenkappløpet by Roy Pedersen, Sigurd Allern (Page 13)