“You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”
— Octave Mirbeau, Torture Garden (via uglyuglyugly) (via pussy6ftdeep)
11:02 am • 31 July 2010 • 10 notes
“If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, nor as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one’s country, one’s fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those principles.”
—
Howard Zinn
To all those who still wish for independence this July 4th.
(via newleft)
8:22 am • 9 July 2010 • 120 notes
http://www.inthewake.org/draffan1.html
AM: What are the “three faces of power”? GD: Power structure theories have offered three faces of power. The first face of power is described by the theory of pluralism, which says that society is an open system composed of various interest groups of more or less equal power who compete to get what they want. The second face of power is described by the elitist theory, which says that in reality, some individuals and groups have more power than others, and that the powerful control society’s agenda. Some issues get addressed, while other issues do not. The powerful have their needs met, while the powerless do not. The powerless are excluded, and their silence or inaction is not necessarily the result of their consensus and conscious choice, as the pluralists imply. The third face of power shows how over time unequal power structures become invisible as people internalize the agenda set by the powerful. Eventually people don’t even notice that some things aren’t on the agenda. People believe the poor are poor and the powerless are powerless because there’s something wrong with them, or because that’s the way God (or karma, or fate) arranges the universe. The powerless themselves internalize their subservient role in order to escape the subjective sense of powerlessness, of being responsible for their own subservience. George Bernard Shaw wrote that monarchs are not born; they are made by artificial hallucinations. It’s no longer a conspiracy when everyone thinks the same, when everyone has the same hallucination.
6:34 am • 9 July 2010
Yugi/Yugi’s Uncle Fanfic
conversatron:
if(yugi != there)
{
cout « “your voice mail sounds like you picking up the phone” « endl;
cout « “it gets me every time” « endl;
}
“Hey Uncle! What are you doing there on the computer?”
“Wh— oh! Yugi, it’s you. You startled me. You gotta stop sneaking up on me like that… it’s peeving me. I don’t have a lot of peeves but that…” Yugi’s uncle’s voice trailed off.
“Sorry Uncle,” Yugi said, looking down at the floor apologetically.
“Listen, it’s… it’s fine,” Yugi’s uncle said. ”Water under the bridge. Now, er, what did you come in here for, hmm?”
“I wanted to know what you were doing on the computer. To be honest I didn’t think you even knew how to use one!” Yugi said as he grinned and gave his uncle a playful jab.
“Yeah, yeah, make all the jokes you want, kid, but just remember who’s the one with the keys to the car that we can take to McDonalds!” Yugi’s uncle said in a sing-song voice. ”Whatddya say, sport?”
”Yes. I would like that very much.”
The End
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2:22 am • 9 July 2010
