Tuesday, December 13, 2016

And you have nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you.

"I'll tell you what you did with Atheists for about 1500 years. You outlawed them from the universities or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, banned or burned their books or their writings of any kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy. You dehumanised them with beatings and exquisite torture, gouged out their eyes, slit their tongues, stretched, crushed, or broke their limbs, tore off their breasts if they were women, crushed their scrotums if they were men, imprisoned them, stabbed them, disembowelled them, hanged them, burnt them alive. And you have nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you."
― Madalyn Murray O'Hair

Friday, December 09, 2016

"Behind every great fortune there is a great crime." -- HonorĂ© de Balzac

Tuesday, October 04, 2016

Thursday, June 30, 2016

Table-flipping as Political Action

From Cory Doctrow via BoingBoing:
There's a classic behavioral economics experiment called the ultimatum game in which one subject is asked to divide a pool of money, and the other subject can choose to take whatever the first one offers (no matter how little that is), or reject the offer and both of them get none. The "economically rational" approach is to take whatever you're given, even if it's just one penny, because one penny is more than you'd get if you rejected the offer. But in experiments, subjects confronted with "unfair" splits overwhelmingly choose to punish themselves in order to punish the person making the unfair offer. 
Neoliberal politics have been a long-term, iterated form of the ultimatum game: the capital class arrogates more wealth to itself while it offers less and less to working people, with fewer prospects for advancement, but points to an opposition that would give workers even less, and expects that they'll go on winning as the lesser of two evils. 
Brexit shows that in such a circumstance, table-flipping is a viable alternative to playing the game at all.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Tuesday, May 24, 2016