“Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.”
Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (1928), Essay, XIII: Freedom in Society, p. 103
“Hey Trump voters! Yesterday Trump had a press conference in the Oval Office. He said, ‘You know, our country was the strongest, believe it or not, from 1870 to 1913. You know why? It was all tariff-based. We had no income tax. Then in 1913, some genius came up with the idea of let's charge the people of our country, not foreign countries that are ripping off our country. And the country was never relatively—was never that kind of wealth. We had so much wealth, we didn't know what to do with our money. We had meetings. We had committees. And these committees worked tirelessly to study one subject. We have so much money. What are we going to do with it? Who are we going to give it to?’
Did you know that you know an actual expert on the period of 1870 to 1913?
It's me. I am.
I've been studying this time period for two decades and I don't mean reading a Doris Kearns Goodwin book every few months. I am a trained scholar of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
There's a lot of us actually who study this period. In fact, I was in a room with many of them over the weekend. We stared at Trump Tower in Chicago while we met. It was... motivating.
Do you know what happened between 1870 and 1913? There were two economic panics. Huge ones. Deep, scarring panics where many working people went hungry and jobless. Do you know who was ‘rich’ in that period? The Carnegies. The Vanderbilts. JP Morgan, who almost singlehandedly controlled the nation money's supply. Wild swings occurred in the stock market. Working people were paid pennies. Middle-class people made money, bought homes, and lost them with regularity. There was no economic stability.
There was no regulation. Between 1880 and 1905 there were well over 36,000 strikes involving 6 million workers. Do you know what they were striking for? The biggest ask was an 8 hour work day.
Do you know what Congress focused on instead? Passing obscenity law, obsessing about sex and white women's purity. Creating instability in the Phillipines, the Carribbean and Latin America via colonialist, eugenic-based projects. Enriching themselves on kickbacks from industries like the railroads. Rejecting appeals for women's suffrage and anti-lynching laws. State governments doubled-down on segregation law and passed laws to try to control what was taught in classrooms.
Sound familiar?”
Lauren Thompson
“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
George Washington
“The world is sick & yes it can be cruel, but it would be a whole lot sicker and a whole lot crueler if it were not for painters & filmmakers & songwriters, the beauty-makers, wading through the blood & muck of things, whilst reaching skyward to draw down the very heavens themselves.”
Nick Cave
“Graveyards are libraries. Lots of people there reading. Born when, died then, and all that comes between. Short stories. Large print.”
John Paul Lyon, The Time and Place from With Ravens Passing the Moon
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“Self-identifying as a centrist is perhaps the most cynical and amoral political identity you can have because you're just openly admitting your beliefs aren't really beliefs they're just strategic positions that only exist relative to others in the room you happen to be in.”
Gillian Branstetter (@gbranstetter.bsky.social)
“A recent episode of @thewaroncars.bsky.social introduced me to the very useful term "pluralistic ignorance" for a situation in which people mistakenly believe that others predominantly hold an opinion different from their own, often because the minority is loud.”
< en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurali... >
Erika Hall (erika.hall.bsky.social)
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
The Great Gatsby (1925)
"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability."
~Arundhati Roy
“Be suspicious of simple answers, that shit’s for fascists and maybe teenagers.”
-Frank Turner
"If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If some one maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you should feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction.
The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants!”
~Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish (1943)
Socialism is what they called public power.
Socialism is what they called social security.
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
-Harry Truman, 1952
“The Internet was touted as “the information superhighway” but is actually a stupidity distribution system”
Andy Borowitz
