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bbfebbe
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this gave her the confidence to start speaking more explicitly about the left wing of the Democratic Party, a burgeoning national movement, and how they intended to usurp the business chickenshits among them once and for all, and see if government could go back to being the people's company.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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90d3895
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Not to have a correct political view is like having no soul.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d2c4af6
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It's just I finally get what revolution means. It's maximum volatility with no hedging. And it's insider trading too! Because, since I know in advance you're going to default your people, I can buy put options up the wazoo before the IPPI goes down! It's totally illegal! I finally get why revolution is illegal.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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00647de
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It was that ocean heat that caused the First Pulse to pulse, and later brought on the second one. People sometimes say no one saw it coming, but no, wrong: they did. Paleoclimatologists looked at the modern situation and saw CO2 levels screaming up from 280 to 450 parts per million in less than three hundred years, faster than had ever happened in the Earth's entire previous five billion years (can we say "Anthropocene," class?), and they s..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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fb854f3
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Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and therefore existential nausea must be to a certain extent a universal experience, and something that must be dealt with by one mental strategy or another. Most people appear to learn to ignore it, as if it were some low chronic pain that has to be e..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f4978e3
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At this point justice and revenge are the same thing! Justice for people would be revenge on the oligarchs.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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1e338df
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Buddhism begins in personal experience. Observation of one's surroundings and one's reactions, and one's thoughts.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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07ef42b
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If democracy came to China they would end up electing idiots, as in America.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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fd71603
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Some people get lucky and partner up with someone the same age, they know the same songs, have the same references and all that, good for them! But for the rest of us it's catch-as-catch-can.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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62185c3
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The Americans lost all the battles but won the war. Because when they lost they were still here. It was their home. They would go off and regroup, and the British would follow them and beat on them again somewhere else. There were a couple American victories along the way, but mostly not. Mostly the British won, but even so they eventually wore down, and in the end the Americans surrounded them and kicked them out. The Brits were going to r..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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bf409d9
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Anticipation worse than the act itself, as with so many things.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f593618
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But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages, the age of fascisms both home and abroad. Since the floods they had learned better, hadn't they?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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db00936
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If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches' tits and the like,
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d900997
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How many cameras do you have deployed now?" "It's a few million. The limiting factor these days is the analysis. I'll" --
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e71a89d
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They were just like the Swiss on Mars, like Jurgen and Max and Priska and Sibilla, with their sense of order, of appropriate action well performed, with a tough unsentimental love of comfort, of predictable decency.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f702365
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Well," Amelia said, "basically my polar bears have taken over my airship."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ab0112b
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first a wind ensemble playing a transcription of the Appassionata piano sonata; then Beethoven's opus 134, which was his own transcription for two pianos of his Grosse Fugue for string quartet, opus 133. Lastly a string quartet was to play a transcription of their own for the Hammerklavier sonata.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ad0ed9a
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Live for the future. A cosmic history read out of signs so subtle and mathematical that only the effort of a huge transtemporal group of powerful minds could ever have teased it out; but then those who came later could be given the whole story, with its unexplored edges there to take off into.
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human-story
progress
science
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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11238ec
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Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism, Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it,
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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aaf8eda
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It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was the basic law of diplomacy.
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politics
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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c8c7de3
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There have been mass delusions larger than this," I said, "following a fanatic leader."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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73cca7f
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Why don't you like it when you can't say why?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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3afd27d
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It was hard for her not to feel that a person loving her was making a big mistake. Because she knew herself better than they did, so knew their love was given in error.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f85270e
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he was a sort of dully furious Soviet bureaucrat, a petty man used to giving orders and being obeyed.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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6a225c8
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Depressed people did not usually engage in criminal conspiracies, Gen had long ago concluded.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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7a8976f
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I must trust my spacesuit not to fail. And i must remember, if i can, that really we are always in a spacesuit of one sort or another. We just don't usually see it so clearly.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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c407bee
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That's a large part of what economics is--people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.
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economics
power
power-structure
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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62ad7ad
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There's all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn't do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money--that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money..
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bullshit-jobs
business
capitalism
corruption
executives
money
parasitism
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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61b32f3
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You always know economists are in deep shit when they start talking about trust and value. Usually when you say fundamentals to them they're like interest rates and price of gold.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d9843b7
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No, we're the two old Muppets on the balcony, cracking lame jokes." "Lame-ass jokes," says Mutt. "I like that." "Me too."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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0fa221f
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The Minister for Natural Health asked about a stack of extremely slender volumes, and Zhu smiled happily. As a reaction against these endless compendiums, he explained, he had gotten into the habit of buying any books he came across that seemed required by their subject matter to be short, often so short that their titles would scarcely fit on their spines. Thus "Secrets to Successful Marriage," or "Good Reasons to Have Hope for the Future,..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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8360982
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As a species they were therefore probably doomed. And so the only real adaptive strategy, for the individual, was to do one's best to secure one's own position. And sometimes that meant a little strategic defection.
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humanity
species
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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108f913
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This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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84a7b61
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Tell me how,' Charlotte said, eyes alight with the notion of destroying civilization.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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fe61143
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I can paint that fucking cave.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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cfc1789
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So what's the point? Why do it all? Why not be content with what you've got? Who were they, that they were so discontent? Who the fuck were they?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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3aa255e
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The so-called risk of the capitalist is merely one of the many privileges of capital
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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9bfc762
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For paralyzed people the fitting and integration of an exoskeleton was a complicated affair, they told him, stretched out over months of tests, and a certain amount of surgical fusion of electrodes and nerves. For a normal person it was much simpler. It was like a bra fitting
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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079c322
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Revolution suspends habit as well as law. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.
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law
revolution
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2568cfd
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What use was utopia without joy, after all? What was the point of all their striving if it did not include the laughter of the young?
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utopia
young
youth
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e31230d
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Arguments, speculation-- conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated any more. Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory--not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.
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conspiracy-theories
facts
narrative
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2c1ed6e
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Revolution meant shattering one structure and creating another one, but shattering was easier than creating, and so the two parts of the act were not necessarily fated to be equally successful. In that sense, building a revolution was like building an arch; until both columns were there, and the keystone in place, practically any disruption could bring the whole thing crashing down.
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destroying
keystone
revolution
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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b700bb0
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Charlotte poured a stiff Irish coffee for herself, wanting both stimulation and sedation. It didn't work, in fact it backfired, making her antsy but confused. An anti-Irish coffee, must be an English coffee.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d87ef7b
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But the problem of utopia, of collective meaning, is to find an individual meaning. --Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia
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Kim Stanley Robinson |