“There is something about being forcibly exposed to someone else’s choice in loud music that makes me lose my shit as well. It got so bad a few years back that I talked to my shrink about it. I wasn’t just irritated, annoyed, or put out by it. I was instantly full of blind, hateful rage. My rational faculties would desert me, and I’d find myself yelling at strangers in public, which is something I usually only do online.”
“Bigness can only be checked by bigness. A healthy economy was one in which these countervailing powers balance each other. An unhealthy economy is one in which one or more of these powers was left to run roughshod.”
“Over the next four years, the Civil War would take more than 620,000 lives and cost the United States more than $5 billion. By 1865, two-thirds of the assessed value of southern wealth had evaporated; two-fifths of the livestock— horses and draft animals for tilling fields as well as pigs and sheep for food— were dead. Over half the region’s farm machinery had been destroyed, most factories were burned, and railroads were gone, either destroyed or worn out. But by the end of the conflagration, the institution of human enslavement as the central labor system for the American South was destroyed.”
“So did Bin Laden use Foundation as a kind of imaginative sounding-board for the creation of al-Qaida? Perhaps reading the book in his pampered youth, and later on seeing his destiny in terms of the ruthless manipulation of historical forces? Did he realise much earlier than anyone else that the march of globalisation would provide opportunities for those who wanted to rouse and exploit the dispossessed?”
“The extent to which people begin clustering in one of the three cities—the extent to which they isolate, fortify the walls, and close the gates—is the extent to which our culture suffers. Nobody can remain isolated in one city for long without losing perspective. Self-styled rationalists hostile to religion close themselves off from millennia of embedded wisdom (or they merely invent their own form of cult or religion, based on reason). Religion that doesn’t respect reason is dangerous because it denies a fundamental part of our humanity, and the detachment can result in extremism that, at its worst, can justify unreasonable or even violent practices in the name of God. And Silicon Valley’s excesses—like the now defunct company Theranos, the cult-building of Adam Neumann, or the technology bubble of the late ‘90s—are characterized by a detachment from reason and a failure to recognize the secular forms of religiosity that led to those things happening in the first place.”
“How can anyone hope to find the truth when it’s so elusive, trapped behind so many toll gates?”
“The existence of stealth editing means that it’s difficult to trust that the version of an article you click on at any given moment is the article as it was originally published. That’s why it’s critically important that there be an authoritative database, publicly accessible, that tracks versions at a given point in time and that is trusted to possess authentic records.”
“Whether the subject is Ukraine, Biden’s so-called corruption, or NATO, Putin seems to have pulled off the most successful foreign influence operation in American history. If Trump were being blackmailed by Putin it’s hard to imagine how he would behave any differently. And though it started with Trump, it has not ended there. Putin now wields more power over the GOP than anyone other than Trump. GOP propagandists indulge fictions that even many Russians can see through: Ukraine is governed by Nazis; Russia is a religious, Christian nation; Russia is fighting “wokeness.” Republicans are not so much isolationist as pro-authoritarian. They’ve made Hungary’s Viktor Orbán a pinup and they mouth Russian disinformation without shame. Putin must be pinching himself.”