Max Seltzer > Recent Status Updates

“American downtowns are not declining mysteriously, because they are anachronisms, nor because their users have been drained by automobiles. They are being witlessly murdered by deliberate policies of sorting out leisure uses from work uses”
So many highlights on this one

“Being the object of overreaction means being treated in a way that one does not deserve, which is the centerpiece for injustice. Yet protesting that overreaction is often the excuse for even more injustice. There is a continuation of pathology in blame... as substitutions for our better selves and avoid the work of self-acknowledgment required for resolution and positive change.”

“Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals... When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by internal or external forces.”

"When that distance across time and space collapses, the concept of 'the other' loses clarity, confusing our moral distinctions."

"Modern technology has robbed us of the sorts of virtue that depend on such ignorance, for ignorance is all too avoidable today. Information technology has multiplied our opportunities to know, and our traditional ethical doctrines overwhelm us by turning these opportunities into newfound obligations to know."

"Disasters always feel like a thing of the past. We want to believe that better technology, better engineering will save us. That the more info we have, the safer we can make our technology. But we can never have all the information... progress changes the parameters of possibility... we can't even hold onto what we already know."

“California street was a long cobblestone point, and to me, at ten, the waves that broke along its shelf seemed like they were arriving from some celestial workshop, their glowing hooks and tapering shoulders carved out by ocean angels. I wanted to be out there, learning to dance on water.”