Category: Thought

No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.

William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (2000; 2016).

I never know whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses.

William Makepeace Thackeray, The Virginians (1857-1859).

No paper with a past like the Gray Lady’s can be trusted to deliver “all the news that’s fit to print,” or to identify “fake news.”

Mark Crispin Miller, foreword to Ashley Rindsberg’s The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History (2021).

I’m sick of hearing about China and ‘their’ censorship. OK? Our censorship is China’s censorship now. Dragonfly and Google were the same thing. I warned you then. It’s over.

Jason Bermas, “Is This the End of Joe Rogan at Spotify?” on Rokfin (February 5, 2022).

Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end.

Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Part Two: “Metaphysics of Virtue.”

Image incorporating aquatint silhouette by J.T. Puttrich, 1793. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark

Olympic corporate sponsors are sportwashing genocide. The Beijing Games are a referendum on the Chinese government’s atrocities. Do you ignore the ongoing genocide, or do you take a stand?

Omer Kanat, Executive Director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, as quoted on Senator Rick Scott’s website, “Communist China Cannot Whitewash Genocide with Olympic Games” (January 24, 2022).