Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of [mass media manipulation], the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn’t call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more. It appeals to both the left and the right, because, in the end, it requires so little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination, asking only that you enjoy the company of people whose fear of the future aligns comfortably with your own. Left or right, the radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism has itself contributed to the unravelling of the liberal state and the weakening of a commitment to political pluralism.

From A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction by Jill Lepore.

In a broader sense, there's nothing to be gained by despairing at the current situation, assigning blame, reacting instead of acting. Create, don’t disparage. Don’t get tangled up in petty debates, have a vision and convince people by laying the groundwork.

Neoliberalism is a kind of statecraft. It means organizing state policies by making them appear as if they are the consequences of depoliticized financial markets. It involves moving power from public institutions to private institutions, and allowing governance to happen through concentrated financial power. Actual open markets for goods and services tend to disappear in neoliberal societies. Financial markets flourish, real markets morph into mass distribution middlemen like Walmart or Amazon.

[…] [Greta Krippner’s] thesis is that the liberal democratic system was dismantled because it was too explicit about who was making choices. People would get mad at politicians when they didn't have, say, mortgage credit, or when the price of milk went up too high. The answer came to be neoliberalism, or creating a veil of financial markets to make all those decisions seem apolitical. […]

Neoliberalism is not faith in free markets. Neoliberalism is not free market capitalism. Neoliberalism is a specific form of statecraft that uses financial markets as a veil to disguise governing policies.

Matt Stoller trying to define the word everyone tends to project their hate onto.

[Some dipshit] quits working and writes spammy blog shit for a living. Hackernews decides people don't like to work because all work is either meaningless or evil, but it's definitely everyone else's fault. Also the entire monetary system is worthless, we should envy the impoverished, capitalism will kill us all, and they all quit jobs they loved because someone was mean to them. The unanimous consensus: take a couple years off and just fuck around.

n-gate on 'cutting ties with the evil corporate world and pursuing your passion' types

Traveling, writing, photographing, ESL teaching etc. is just, to borrow the phrase, ‘fucking around’ and will not make a positive impact on the world. Do what makes you happy in your spare time and start shouldering some responsibility.

Noam Chomsky about the powerful’s infatuation with Niebuhr:

The inescapable “taint of sin on all historical achievements,” the necessity to make “conscious choices of evil for the sake of good”—these are soothing doctrines for those preparing to “face the responsibilities of power,” or in plain English, to set forth on a life of crime, to “play hardball” in their efforts to “maintain this position of disparity” between our overwhelming wealth and the poverty of others, in George Kennan’s trenchant phrase as he urged in a secret document of 1948 that we put aside “idealistic slogans” and prepare “to deal in straight power concepts.” Herein lies the secret of Niebuhr’s enormous influence and success.

From Jeet Heer’s article on Niebuhr ideology

Richard David Precht is a dunce. That’s all.

If procrastination is anxiety towards the imperfection of creation, maybe the best way around it is to adopt the idea that all creation are iterative steps towards perfection - even failed steps.

Apocryphon on squandering time

Mircea Popescu on payment anonymity

Buying a home is stupid. It may make sense in a strictly financial sense, but I think people who recommend buying your own house completely ignore opportunity cost of that money, and the fact that it locks you into the same career, house and area for many years. In my opinion, buying a home isn’t worth it.

Gabriel on The Hustle

If it makes you feel better about yourself, go ahead and let your toilet stink or take shorter showers, but don't pretend that will have any kind of measurable effect. It's nearly as pointless a placebo as separating your trash is. All aggregate personal use can't hope to even compare to what is done at industrial scales. Remember: the damage that BP did in the Gulf every five seconds completely obviated all the recycling you personally ever did in your life.

Jamie Zawinski during the California drought

Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

Alan Perlis