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“A man cannot govern a nation if he cannot govern a city; he cannot govern a city if he cannot govern a family; he cannot govern a family unless he can govern himself; and he cannot govern himself unless his passions are subject to reason.”

By understanding many things, I have accomplished nothing.”

Hugo Grotius”
― Hugo Grotius

“The Cheery and the Damned
Why are drugs, prostitution, gambling and suicide illegal, when they clearly give so much relief to suffering people? I think it is because, at a societal level, we are deluded into thinking that happiness is possible, maybe even easy or likely, without these things. I have called this "cheery social policy.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“There's a reason that education sucks.
And it's the same reason
that it will never ever, ever be fixed.

It's never going to get any better,
don't look for it,
be happy with what you got.

Because the owners of this country don't want that.

I'm talking about the real owners now.
The real owners.
The big, wealthy business interests that control things
and make all the important decisions.

Forget the politicians.
The politicians are put there
to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice.

You don't.

You have no choice.
You have owners.
They own you.
They own everything.

They own all the important land.
They own and control the corporations.
They've long since bought and paid for the Senate,
the Congress, the state houses, and city halls.
They got the judges in their back pocket.
And they own all the big media companies
so they control just about
all of the news and information you get to hear.
They got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying,
lobbying to get what they want.
Well, we know what they want.
They want more for themselves and less for everybody else.

But I'll tell you what they don't want.
They don't want a population
of citizens capable of critical thinking.
They don't want well-informed, well-educated people,
capable of critical thinking.

They're not interested in that.
That doesn't help them.
That's against their interest.
That's right.

They don't want people who are smart enough
to figure out how badly they're getting fucked
by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
They don't want that.

You know what they want?
They want obedient workers.
Obedient workers.
People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork
and just dumb enough, to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs,
with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits,
the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension
that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

And now, they're coming for your Social Security money.
They want your fucking retirement money.
They want it back,
so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.

And you know something, they'll get it.
They'll get it all from you, sooner or later,
because they own this fucking place.

It's a big club, and you ain't in it.
You and I are not in the big club.”
― George Carlin, Life Is Worth Losing

“The more I have studied disparities in multicultural societies, the more I have found the language of “overrepresentation” and “underrepresentation” to be fundamentally misleading. These words assume that there is something normal or “to be expected” about seeing different ethnic groups represented at precisely their share of the total population in every domain, statistic, and occupation, when in fact nothing is more normal than for different subcultures to specialize in particular sectors and occupations and experience very different group-wide statistics as a result. The vast majority of such disparities are not plausibly explained by bigotry, systemic racism, or unfairness but by demographic and cultural differences between the groups in question at a particular time.”
― Coleman Hughes, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America