“In modern politics, liberal leaders are forgiven for drone bombing as long as they’re cool with gay marriage, while on the right, enacting policies that devastate families and stable communities was cheered on at any cost as long as it dealt a satisfying blow to the trade unions, as we saw during the Reagan and Thatcher years.”
― Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right
― Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right
“In the wake of the Neoliberal proclamation of the end of class struggle, the only social categories remaining are winner and loser. No more capitalists and workers; no more exploiters and exploited. Either you are strong and smart, or you deserve your misery. The establishment of capitalist absolutism is based on the mass adhesion...to the philosophy of natural selection. The mass murderer is someone who believes in the right of the fittest and the strongest to win in the social game, but he also knows or senses that he is not the fittest or the strongest. So he opts for the only possible act of retaliation and self assertion: to kill and be killed.”
― Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide
― Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide
“In the last twenty-five years, the borderline patient, who confronts the psychiatrist not with well-defined symptoms but with diffuse dissatisfactions, has become increasingly common. He does not suffer from debilitating fixations or phobias or from the conversion of repressed sexual energy into nervous ailments; instead he complains "of vague, diffuse dissatisfactions with life" and feels his "amorphous existence to be futile and purposeless." He describes "subtly experienced yet pervasive feelings of emptiness and depression," "violent oscillations of self-esteem," and "a general inability to get along." He gains "a sense of heightened self-esteem only by attaching himself to strong, admired figures whose acceptance he craves and by whom he needs to feel supported." Although he carries out his daily responsibilities and even achieves distinction, happiness eludes him, and life frequently strikes him as not worth living.”
― The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations
― The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations
“Money is thus the general overturning of individualities…
and adds contradictory attributes...for the entire objective
world of man and nature, from standpoint of its possessor
[money] it therefore serves to exchange every property for
every other, even contradictory property and object...It makes
contractions embrace.
Assume man to be man and his relationship to
the world to be a human one: then you can exchange
love for only love, trust for trust… your real individual…
evoking love in return… does not produce reciprocal love…
then your love is impotent— a misfortune.”
―
and adds contradictory attributes...for the entire objective
world of man and nature, from standpoint of its possessor
[money] it therefore serves to exchange every property for
every other, even contradictory property and object...It makes
contractions embrace.
Assume man to be man and his relationship to
the world to be a human one: then you can exchange
love for only love, trust for trust… your real individual…
evoking love in return… does not produce reciprocal love…
then your love is impotent— a misfortune.”
―
“Despite its affective packaging, the disposition to catalogue and aggregate neatly rounded-off identities is in no meaningful way radical. Not only is it evocative of nineteenth-century essentialisms, it also reproduces the mindset of the mass information industry, which, though public opinion and market research, sorts the population into the demographic equivalent of sound bites—market shares, taste communities—all in service to the corporate sales effort and management of the national political agenda.”
― Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene
― Class Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene
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