Ted Gioia’s eight techniques for evaluating someone’s character. A solid list. Perhaps the most interesting to me is his first: “Forget what they say—instead look at who they marry.” Also, his second and fifth are common enough ideas but I believe that’s because they are indeed revealing.
Paul Kingsnorth, saying something similar to my post from yesterday: The alternative [to living for the Machine] has always been the same, for millennia, across the world. The alternative is self-denial. It is living within limits, refusing to consume for the Machine, refusing to give the Total System what it wants. It is planting your feet on the ground, living modestly, refusing technology that will enslave you in the name of freedom.
One of the main goals of the functionaries of Empire is to bring everything and everyone into the imperial system. Totalization is, in fact, the motivating impulse behind Empire. Empire has a remarkable ability to assimilate threats to the system. Protest movements turn into think tanks. Rebels become a marketing segment. Empire will validate your criticism as a healthy expression of free speech and award you with a position guaranteed to shut you up by paying you off.
Three great apps I learned about from the micro.blog community that I now use every day:
Everyone now knows that the state is an instrument, a pointy stick which one group of grudgeful weirdos can use to poke at another, and democracy is when the biggest group of weirdos gets to hold the stick. Usually it’s not even about bringing a desired form of society into being; instead, the point is simply to remind your political enemies that you’ve got the stick.
New motto: Anachronism forever!
So Cory Doctorow’s new book is about an accountant?? I’m in. To be fair, it’s a book about a forensic accountant, those Humphrey Bogarts of the accounting world that the rest of us can only admire.
I made very mediocre caramel cookies to celebrate Robinson Jeffers’ birthday. Get it? Because he lived in Carmel!
Happy 136th birthday to Robinson Jeffers, irascible inhumanist.
I’ve added my mailing address to my bio so, you know, send me a letter or something!