J.M.Keynes ir teicis, ka "…there is nothing a government hates more than to be well-informed; for it makes the process of arriving at decisions much more complicated and difficult." Būtu grūti nepiekrist.

"No one will bring back the years; no one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course. It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly. It will not lengthen itself for a king's command or a people's favour. As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing or turning aside. What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that." - Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“transparent, unmediated, undisputable facts have recently become rarer and rarer [and] to offer a public proof, big enough and certain enough to convince the whole world of the presence of a phenomenon or of a looming danger, seems now almost beyond reach – and always was.” - Latour B., From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public

"They may not share the intellectual's or the libertarian's disillusionment with the state as a political form, however much they wish to change the occupants of office or the political institutions of their home governments, or to alter the laws of countries of asylum to improve their chances. Refugees show a strong preference for settlement with the possibility of becoming citizens over a life in holding camps. They know they continue to be vulnerable until they can reestablish themselves as citizens, whether in their own or in some other state" - Colson E., Displacement

"No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain." - Susan Sontag

"Those who are at a distance are as entangled as those who are actively engaged; the former have nothing over the latter, except the insight into their entanglement and the happiness of the tiny freedom, which lies in the recognition as such. Their own distance from business as usual is a luxury, solely spun off by that business as usual. That is why every impulse towards self-withdrawal bears the marks of what is negated." - T. Adorno, Antithesis

"Mēs esam radījuši tādu amorfu sistēmu, kas nodrošina, lai neviens ne par ko neatbildētu." - Prezidents A. Bērziņš

"That these are not dislocated ideas but the two extremes are absolutely interdependent. The price of privilege is poverty. David Cameron said in his conference speech that profit is “not a dirty word”. Profit is the most profane word we have. In its pursuit we have forgotten that while individual interests are being met, we as a whole are being annihilated. The reality, when not fragmented through the corrupting lens of elitism, is we are all on one planet." - Russell Brand on revolution: “We no longer have the luxury of tradition”

«Pensionāru nākotne lielā mērā ir atkarīga no darbaspēka ražīguma.Un te atkal ir atbilde – modernās tehnoloģijas un pareiza darba organizēšana. Mūsdienās pat nabadzīgs cilvēks objektīvi dzīvo daudz labāk nekā bagāts pirms simts gadiem, kas noticis, pateicoties tehnoloģiju attīstībai. Tas nozīmē, ka nākotnē nodrošināt savas elementārās vajadzības – pārtiku, enerģiju – būs arvien vienkāršāk. Mēs jau esam tuvu tam, ka cilvēce savas enerģētiskās vajadzības nodrošinās, nevis dedzinot ogļūdeņražus, bet lietojot saules enerģiju,» saka Repše.

Objektīvi nomierināja.

I have often been asked in recent days if there is any connection between my objection to the military research of the NAS [National Academy of Sciences] and to Chagnon’s election. There is indeed a strong anthropological connection, insofar as the one and the other would impose cognate versions of bourgeois individualism, taken as given and natural, on the rest of humanity.
( tālāk )

"If “mass killings of its own people” constitutes a “crime against humanity” and “mass” in Syria means over a thousand people killed, surely the killing of over a thousand in Egypt must also constitute a serious crime against humanity! But that kind of rational calculation could only occur if there were one ethical standard for all states and an equal value placed on human life."

"Politics is defined in moral terms: it consists of a new war of an axis of good against an axis of evil. By an astonishing paradox, at the very moment when some countries are throwing themselves into a moral crusade against their demonized enemies and appropriating the vocabulary and symbolism of humanitarianism, nongovernmental organizations are distancing themselves while nevertheless casting their discourse in the same rhetorical mold. This remarkable mimetism — which operates in both directions — should nevertheless not lead one into a form of relativism that would set warmongers and humanitarians on the same level. The fact that the rhetoric is reproduced does not mean that the politics are equivalent. While it may be fallacious to reduce the war makers to a consistently barbaric “necropolitics” and humanitarians to a purely altruistic “biopolitics,” it is much more interesting to compare them in terms of the politics of life they effectively engender [...] Thus, within the humanitarian arena itself hierarchies of humanity are passively established but rarely identified for what they are — politics of life that at moments of crisis, result in the formation of two groups, those whose status protects their sacred character and those whom the institutions may sacrifice against their will." - Didier Fassin, Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life

(+)

"Moreover, since facts and events – the invariable outcome of men living and acting together – constitute the very texture of the political realm, it is, of course,factual truth that we are most concerned with here. Dominion (to speak Hobbes’ language) when it attacks rational truth oversteps, as it were, its domain, while it gives battle on its own ground when it falsifies or lies away facts. The chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed; it is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world not only for a time but, potentially, forever. Facts and events are infinitely more fragile things than axioms, discoveries, theories – even the most wildly speculative ones – produced by the human mind; they occur in the field of the ever-changing affairs of men, in whose flux there is nothing more permanent than the admittedly relative permanence of the human mind’s structure." -- Hannah Arendt, Truth and Politics

"When one flies over vast territories of South Asia, from Karachi to Saigon, and once the desert of Thar has been crossed, this land divided up into the smallest plots and cultivated up to the last acre, at first sight seems somewhat familiar to the European. When it is looked at more closely, however, a difference emerges. These faded, washed out shades of pink and green, this irregular formation of fields and rice-paddies constantly appearing in different designs, these boundaries blurred as if in a patchwork – the whole carpet, so to speak, is the same; but because form and colour are less clear, less well-defined than in the landscapes of Europe, one has the impression of looking at it “wrong side up”. This is, of course, merely an image. But it reflects rather well the different positions of Europe and Asia in regard to their common civilization. From the material point of view, at least one seems to be the “reverse side” of the other; one has always been the winner, the other the loser, as if in a given enterprise (begun, as we have said, jointly) one had secured all the advantages and the other all the embarrassments [...]

Comparing itself with America, Europe acknowledges its own less favourable position as regards natural wealth, population pressure, individual output and the average level of consumption; rightly or wrongly, on the other hand, it takes pride in the greater attention it pays to spiritual values. It must be admitted, mutatis mutandis, that Asia could reason similarly in regard to Europe, whose modest prosperity represents, for her, the most unwarranted luxury. In a sense, Europe is Asia’s “America”. And this “Asia” with less riches and more population, lacking the necessary capital and technicians for its industrialization, and seeing its soil and its livestock deteriorating daily while its population increases at an unprecedented rate, is constantly inclined to remind Europe of the two continents’ common origin and of their unequal situation in regard of their exploitation of a common heritage. Europe must reconcile herself to the fact that Asia has the same material and moral claims upon her that Europe often asserts she herself has upon the United States. If Europe considers she has rights vis-à-vis the New World whose civilization comes from hers, she should never forget that those rights can only be based on historical and moral foundations which create for her, in return, very heavy duties towards a world from which she herself was born."

- Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar

"Consevatism is not necessarily found where it is expected: it is undeniable that a certain conservatism of form and language is at the base of all commercial productions adopted with great enthusiasm by generations who want to be anything but conservative. It is a paradox of our times that played or sung protest transmits itself by means of an eminently subornable vocabulary, which does not fail to make itself known: commercial success evacuates protest" - Pierre Boulez

"In psychiatric terms, war memories are often measured by incidence of mental illnesses such as PTSD and depression (and via Western diagnostic standard manuals such as the DSM-IV). Translating what wars leave behind in collective memory onto the sanitized vocabulary of psychiatric diagnostics such as these reduces history to artifacts of clinical symptoms. The question that instead needs to be at the forefront of any discussion about military interventions is what it means for a "liberated" society, as well as for the global community in their relation to them, to live in conditions of constant rupture; to be "liberated" while experiencing enduring loss and grief caused by the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers; or to be children growing up in exploded neighborhoods and looted houses, internalizing and suppressing wartime anxieties."

- Orkideh Behrouzan, The Psychological Impact of the Iraq War

"The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies."
- American Anthropological Association, Statement on Marriage and the Family

A scientist and non-believer, de Waal isn't saying here that religion is required for human morality, only that the two have been entwined throughout human history. Since I have wearied of the Richard Dawkins school of religion-bashing, in which belief is equated with dim-wittedness, I can only applaud de Waal's approach, as when he writes, "The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms ... . The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma."

- Frans de Waal's Bottom-Up Morality: We're Not Good Because Of God