Political Nihilism

"Here is the ultimatum of our camp. What can be smashed must be smashed; whatever will stand the blow is sound, what flies into smithereens is rubbish; at any rate, hit out right and left, no harm will or can come of it."

-Dmitri Pisarev
Russian Nihilis
Link

"Forty thousand rats placed end to end..."

“Let's see,” the doctor murmured to himself, “supposing the length of a rat to be ten inches, forty thousand rats placed end to end would make a line of...”

           

He pulled himself up sharply. He was letting his imagination play pranks, the last thing wanted just now. A few cases, he told himself, don't make an epidemic; they merely call for serious precautions.

Albert Camus

The Plague

Beautiful-and Deadly-Decadence

Webster sat at the desk and held his hands in front of him, staring at them. Hands that had skill, held knowledge. Hands that could save a life if he could get them to Mars. Hands that could save for the solar system, for mankind, for the Martians an idea-a new idea-that would advance them a hundred thousand years in the next two generations. But hands chained by a phobia that grew out of this quiet life. Decadence-a strangely beautiful-and deadly-decadence.

-Clifford D. Simak
City

Real Tragedies

And the worst part about it is that you can't even feel that bad for me, because the Pity Jar of this nation is basically empty; its remaining crumbs reserved for families of five who lost it all when their mortgage imploded, hospital patients who can't pay to keep themselves breathing and the people who've been without power for weeks, or lost their house in a tornado, or are watching their entire livelihood wither under the sun. These are the types of poor souls that get worried about. Those of us lucky enough to have created our own misfortune by allowing our helicopter parents to get under our skin and pump us full of dreams, pursuing misguided MFAs and resisting minimum-wage labor – get out of the way and make room for the real tragedies.

-  "Job interviews are fun"
Unemployment Stories Vol 13

Committee

"A committee is a group of the unprepared, appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary."

--Fred Allen,
American comedian

Prisons

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
— Attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881); it’s often falsely cited as from House of the Dead.

Link.

Sentimental & Realistic

"Whenever people say we mustn't be sentimental, you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, we must be realistic, it means they are going to make money out of it."

--Brigid Brophy,
British writer

Fred Says

Fred says:

[D]emocracy works best when the population consists of near-catatonic morons drifting in a dense Prozac-induced fog, preferably in drumming circles where they process their issues—boomathump, bongeddybongo. Hypnotic video games like Sergeant Hemorrhage the Avenging Splattermeister help. These keep the public from interfering in public policy. The schools produce these cretins with the profusion of breeding oysters.

Surveys show that half the public never reads a book, and probably wouldn’t recognize one. If you ask these mouth-breathing suet globules “What are the three departments of government?” they say, Uh, JC Penneys, Monkey Wards, and, well, I think, Office Depot. The whole ingenious machinery of democracy aims at keeping them calm, calm, calm, since cattle, even Elsie the Borden Moo-cow, can fall into an uproar, or perhaps climb into a downroar—these are mysterious matters—and trample their trainers.

Bloat is control.

On Voting

“It’s painful to submit to our bosses; it’s even more stupid to choose them!”
-May 1968 graffiti

Beyond Voting by Ken Knabb succinctly describes the degrees of freedom with respect to governments:

Roughly speaking we can distinguish five degrees of “government”:

(1) Unrestricted freedom
(2) Direct democracy
(3) Delegate democracy
(4) Representative democracy
(5) Overt minority dictatorship

The present society oscillates between (4) and (5), i.e. between overt minority rule and covert minority rule camouflaged by a facade of token democracy. A liberated society would eliminate (4) and (5) and would progressively reduce the need for (2) and (3). . . .

In representative democracy people abdicate their power to elected officials. The candidates’ stated policies are limited to a few vague generalities, and once they are elected there is little control over their actual decisions on hundreds of issues — apart from the feeble threat of changing one’s vote, a few years later, to some equally uncontrollable rival politician. Representatives are dependent on the wealthy for bribes and campaign contributions; they are subordinate to the owners of the mass media, who decide which issues get the publicity; and they are almost as ignorant and powerless as the general public regarding many important matters that are determined by unelected bureaucrats and independent secret agencies. Overt dictators may sometimes be overthrown, but the real rulers in “democratic” regimes, the tiny minority who own or control virtually everything, are never voted in and never voted out. Most people don’t even know who they are. . .

I've always gotten a chuckle when a politician or some some other invested interest describes the current system as the pinnacle of the possible.  Maybe for them.  For the rest of us, it isn't even close.

Project Management

"Plan the work then work the plan."

-Project Management (PMI) truism.

This approach works fine if something has never been done before (or long term where the project team may change over time), but for something short term and having been done before it is a complete waste of time and money.  If you know what you're doing, there is generally less need for formalism.  For instance, I recently completed the design of a $1.6M paving project, in a location I had done two others, for 2% of the cost of construction: on time and way under budget.The tax payers were saved about $125K.    (Of course, I already had the surfacing recommendations in hand, which would have added about $20k to the cost due to the high expense of sending out a drill crew for coring.)  A Project Management Plan (PMP), which would typically have been required had we not been able to talk management into waiving it, would have cost more about 1.5 times more money than we spent (albeit still under budget) and delayed the project (which may have over-ran the construction budget as it would have been too late in the season thus requiring the contractor to mobilize twice the crews to complete the work in the time stipulated by the contract).

The construction phase should be even more fun: now I get to verbally abuse the contractor.  Fun times.  Fun times. ..

(And all this time you just thought I was a cranky philosopher with a physics degree...)

The New American Dream

"The new American Dream is to get very rich and still be regarded as a victim."
                              - Charles Simic

"I returned to the Holiday Inn — where they have a swimming pool and air-conditioned rooms — to consider the paradox of a nation that has given so much to those who preach the glories of rugged individualism from the security of countless corporate sinecures, and so little to that diminishing band of yesterday's refugees who still practice it, day by day, in a tough, rootless and sometimes witless style that most of us have long since been weaned away from."

- Hunter S. Thompson (1937 – 2005).  Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (1979)

"I look at the world and see a rainbow of people who all suck in different ways." --Jim Goad.

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote." --Benjamin Franklin

"Out of every 100 men, ten shouldn't even be there, Eighty are just targets, Nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, One is a warrior, And he will bring the others back." -- Heraclitus