Mukur Biswas

“The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but
what in each case is given. Thus hell is not
something that awaits us, but this life here and now.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

“There is no point in lingering on the fallacies of the revolutionaries of unrepression; one could go on and on, but everything would come back to the same basic thing: the impossibility of living without repression.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“Instead, the lesson is that false beliefs, once they’ve become culturally entrenched—once they’ve become tribal badges of honor—are very difficult to change, and changing them is no longer simply a matter of educating people.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“If there are so many successful public enterprises, why do we rarely hear about them? It is partly because of the nature of reporting, whether journalistic or academic. Newspapers tend to report bad things – wars, natural disasters, epidemics, famines, crime, bankruptcy, etc. While it is natural and necessary for newspapers to focus on these events, the journalistic habit tends to present the public with the bleakest possible view of the world. In the case of SOEs, journalists and academics usually investigate them only when things go wrong – inefficiency, corruption or negligence.Well-performing SOEs attract relatively little attention in the same way that a peaceful and productive day in the life of a ‘model citizen’ is unlikely to make front-page news. There”
― Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism