> If I was in a room with someone who said "I think the world would be better off if everyone in this room except me were dead", I think you'd understand my nervousness around and dislike of the person.
> It requires 200m litres of water to allow the passage of a single vessel along the canal, water that is largely generated from Lake Gatun in the centre of the waterway, which is drying up fast.
> The historical weight of what happens next cannot be overstated; it is time to put a stop to this relentless targeting of Assange and act instead to protect journalism and press freedom.
Assange is not a journalist, nor Wikileaks a legitimate news organization.
> 77. Not everyone in industrial-technological society suffers from psychological problems. Some people even profess to be quite satisfied with society as it is. We now discuss some of the reasons why people differ so greatly in their response to modern society.
> 97. Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what might be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a “free” man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual. Thus the bourgeois’s “free” man has economic freedom because that promotes growth and progress; he has freedom of the press because public criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders; he has a right to a fair trial because imprisonment at the whim of the powerful would be bad for the system. This was clearly the attitude of Simon Bolivar. To him, people deserved liberty only if they used it to promote progress (progress as conceived by the bourgeois). Other bourgeois thinkers have taken a similar view of freedom as a mere means to collective ends. Chester C. Tan, “Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century,” page 202, explains the philosophy of the Kuomintang leader Hu Han-min: “An individual is granted rights because he is a member of society and his community life requires such rights. By community Hu meant the whole society of the nation.” And on page 259 Tan states that according to Carsum Chang (Chang Chun-mai, head of the State Socialist Party in China) freedom had to be used in the interest of the state and of the people as a whole. But what kind of freedom does one have if one can use it only as someone else prescribes? FC’s conception of freedom is not that of Bolivar, Hu, Chang or other bourgeois theorists. The trouble with such theorists is that they have made the development and application of social theories their surrogate activity. Consequently the theories are designed to serve the needs of the theorists more than the needs of any people who may be unlucky enough to live in a society on which the theories are imposed.
> 116. Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society’s requirements: welfare leeches, youth-gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds.
Not really. It's a lot of disorganized nonsense with a high noise-to-signal ratio. Random excerpts:
> 14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.
> 15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
> 22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
> 35. Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical necessities of life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are made necessary by the climate. But the leisured aristocrat obtains these things without effort. Hence his boredom and demoralization.
Fun fact: Kissinger has lived for so long that Commodore BASIC, SQL, Apple DOS, and the TCP/IP protocol were all created after he retired from government service. Not after he was born, but after he retired.
> Chairman Mao: They shouldn’t have attacked Moscow or Kiev. They should have taken Leningrad as a first step. Another error in policy was they didn’t cross the sea after Dunkirk.
> Dr. Kissinger: After Dunkirk.
> Chairman Mao: They were entirely unprepared.
> Dr. Kissinger: And Hitler was a romantic. He had a strange liking for England.
> Chairman Mao: Oh? Then why didn’t they go there? Because the British at that time were completely without troops.
> Dr. Kissinger: If they were able to cross the channel into Britain… I think they had only one division in all of England.
> Prime Minister Chou: Is that so?
> Dr. Kissinger: Yes.
> Prime Minister Chou: Also Sir Anthony Eden told us in Germany at that time that a Minister in the Army of Churchill’s Government said at that time if Hilter had crossed the channel they would have had no forces. They had withdrawn all their forces back. When they were preparing for the German crossing, Churchill had no arms. He could only organize police to defend the coast. If they crossed they would not be able to defend.
Mao making fun of the idea of the USSR invading China and getting the Chinese treatment:
> Chairman Mao: If there are Russians going to attack China, I can tell you today that our way of conducting a war will be guerrilla war and protracted war. We will let them go wherever they want. (Prime Minister Chou laughs.) They want to come to the Yellow River tributaries. That would be good, very good. (Laughter.) And if they go further to the Yangtse River tributaries, that would not be bad either.
Redditors: The more you tighten your grip on third party apps, the more users will slip through your fingers.
Reddit: Not after we demonstrate the power of this ban hammer. In a way, you have determined the choice of the alternative platform that'll be censored first.
> Say something the majority dont like and you're downvoted into oblivion
So? That's how every society works everywhere. Don't disturb the peace. You are an adult. You're entitled to your opinion, but you should have the courage of your convictions. Reddit is no different from other social media platforms in this regard, even HN.
That's not what I said. Bye.