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d20508d
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The one percent get nasty when their assets are threatened.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ffa5f40
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We demand justice," Jeff says. "we don't have it, the world is a mess because of assholes who think they can steal everything and get away with it. So we have to overwhelm them and get back to justice." "And conditions are ripe, is that what you're saying?" "Very ripe. People are pissed off. They're scared for their kids. That's the moment things can tip. If it works like Chenoweth's law says it does, then you only need about fifteen percen..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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44bedac
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a postcarbon landscape, each
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ff82c6e
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It's too bad we only had the courage to live our lives fully in dreams.
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ss
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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0fa3678
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Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government. So that the national governments in trying to restrain the transnats were like the Lilliputians trying to tie down Gulliver.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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bfc91e4
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Any physical action, properly studied and practiced, could no doubt be accomplished with a reasonable amount of skill, if not flair.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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193295e
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A square object was visible at a greater distance than a round object of the same area.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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84e9a8d
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Then it's a matter of troubleshooting, grasping the bull by the horns, seizing the nettle, coping and hoping, damning torpedoes and trying any old thing.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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321a1d5
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It's not so bad to be a prisoner, if you're working on an escape.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4fcba1d
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if one's physical presence made any difference these days! It was an absurd anachronism, but that's the way people were. Another vestige of the savannah. They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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a80e4c2
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All that day he spent distracted, wandering as if still in a dream, wondering from time to time how one told the difference. Wasn't this life dreamlike in every significant respect? Everything overlit, bizarre, symbolic of something else?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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30c1a02
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Thus when Hiroko came up and said, "Nadia, this crescent wrench is absolutely frozen in this position," Nadia sang to her, "That's the only thing I'm thinking of-- baby!" and took the crescent wrench and slammed it against a table like a hammer, and twiddled the dial to show Hiroko it was unstuck, and laughed at her expression. "The engineer's solution," she explained, and went humming into the lock, thinking how funny Hiroko was, a woman w..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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58ac3f5
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Nadia shook her head, marveling at the capacity people had for ignoring what they had in common, and fighting bitterly over whatever small differences existed between them. She
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f6d938d
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causing a refugee crisis rated at ten thousand katrinas. One
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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73ec8ae
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Where there is faction, there is conflict; where there is conflict, there is anger. And anger distorts judgment.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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43d0877
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the crowds just background tapestries for you to play your life against, lurid backdrops providing a fake sense of drama to help you imagine you're doing more than you would be if you were in some sleepy village or Denver or really anywhere else. New
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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074861c
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Life itself is a moment like this, the soul beat down and held to knowledge: you keep on trudging upward, the goal shifts in and out of sight, always further away than you expected, and the work is hard and unremitting. And the questions are the same as always: What are you doing? Is it the right thing? Should you go back? -- Nothing up here but the same answers, stripped bare of all complication: Just walk. Keep hiking. That's all you can ..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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56ba2dd
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not in any single system, but in the stack of all systems, the accidental megasystem. It
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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75bf4e7
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Every age had its losses, they said, even youth, which lost first childhood, then youth too. And all first things were vivid, including losses. "Just keep learning," the old woman said."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e5f95bd
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But at this point the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet's wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the world's wealth. For them it wasn't so bad.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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b1ab02f
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Anyway 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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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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602f12a
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Individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one can parse or understand.
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collective-action
history
individual-action
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4107a00
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The beautiful statue of Ganymede and the eagle looked like they had been molded out of white ceramic, and in Ganymede's outstretched arms it seemed to me a whole world was being embraced, a rushing world of gray sky and gray water where everything passed by so fast that you cnever got the chance to hold it, to touch it, to make it yours. Can't we keep anything?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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c49eb53
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We pretend that democracy is real, and
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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8251a34
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Saint George, a social terrarium in which the men think they are living in a Mormon polygamy, while the women consider it a lesbian world with a small percentage of male lesbians
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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702ec80
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nonviolent civil resistance of various soft kinds is demonstrably more successful than violent resistance when it comes to actually achieving the stated goals of the resistance and changing things for the better. Chenoweth
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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25c8ea9
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If you're in Congress, don't you have to be there sometimes?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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8b45776
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But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages,
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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9d0d8e7
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Only a few people in this world were lucky enough to run into their true partners--it took outrageous luck for it to happen, then the sense to recognize it, and the courage to act.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4c7febc
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The rational reasons were all rationales for an underlying irrationality.
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science
word-plays
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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6b33853
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When you have a strong conservative streak in your society," Zeyk would say, "which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that's when you get the worst kinds of civil wars."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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3fa7172
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All of them were arrayed against the usual resistance of entrenched power and privilege and the economic system encoding these same, but now with the food panic reminding everyone that mass death was a distinct possibility, some progress was possible, for
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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7d5efc9
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No one knows anything. But I know less than that, because I thought I knew something, but it was wrong. So I know negatively. I unknow.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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7035d77
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Because when the crash comes, the government needs to nationalize the banks. No more bailing them out and forcing taxpayers to foot the bill. You
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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fa18146
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Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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a951137
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we are always ourselves, no matter where we go. That's what the poem is saying, I think. We have to recognize it, and make what we can here. This world, great as it is, is only just another biome we have to live in.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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df78812
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What was worry, after all, but a kind of fear? It was fear for the future. And in fact the future was bound to bring its share of bad things, there was no avoiding that. So worry was really a hopeless enterprise, in that it could not do anything. It was an anticipation of grief, a nightmare of the future. A type of fear; and she was determined not to be afraid.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e14ee58
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capital, having considerably more liquidity than water, slid
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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08fd618
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it looked like the centuries-long wrestling match between state and capital had ended in a decisive victory for capital. Possibly
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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eb314da
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The rich, being people too, doing all they could to cope with the night sweats and zombie terrors of making fourteen hundred times as much money as the people working for them, made
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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81fe294
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when you are a small minority and you own the majority's wealth, security is naturally a primary consideration.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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3c38468
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It's a stealth tax imposed on the exchanges by high-frequency trading, by the cloud itself. A rent.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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202e183
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It grew in the dark, it's a stack, a hyperobject, an accidental megastructure. No
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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3d512d7
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They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of civilization went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |