Quote Of The Day

 

From "A Terrified Teacher At Ghoul School" (Episode 9).

Quote Of The Day

Democracy triumphs over long running democratic experiment.

- The Onion (November 6, 2024).

Quote Of The Day

Love is not earned—it’s something we crash into. Being flattered that someone has fallen in love with you is sort of like being flattered by an automobile collision. Really, most of the time it’s an impersonal accident.

From bookbear express.

Quote Of The Day

You can become a shut-in when you become an adult.

- A teacher trying to get a student to show up to school in "A Terrified Teacher At Ghoul School" (Episode 1).

Quote Of The Day

From the anime movie Akira (1988).

Quote Of The Day

 From Go Away Romeo (Episode 65).

Quote Of The Day

I can't say if I'm in love with him or not, but I won't let you have him. 

He's mine! 

From "Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings In Russian" (Episode 6) (as translated from Japanese in the official subtitles).

About Nextdoor

I don't go there often but when I do, I think I am living in Mogadishu or Port-au-Prince.

- Doug Newman on Facebook.

Quote Of The Day

N must have been likeable, because he had been married several times.

- Dan Danbom on Facebook (June 7, 2024).

Quotes About SCOTUS

I don’t need a black robe to hand down a judgment on the Supreme Court. It’s corrupt, rotten and hurting America.

From Maureen Dowd, "The Verdict Is In on the Supreme Court" New York Times (June 4, 2024).

The Roberts Court also has a history of embracing legal arguments that were widely viewed as risible by the legal community after those arguments were adopted by the Republican Party.

From Ian Millhiser, "Trump wants the Supreme Court to toss out his conviction. Will they? It’s hard to see how they’d do it legally, but this Court has a history of reading the law creatively." Vox (June 5, 2024).

Quote Of The Day

Some people's caution signs are other's instruction manuals.

- Eric W. Olsen (on Facebook today).

Quote Of The Day

If you are unable to slam your hand in a car door to cause great pain, may I suggest you call Verizon Tech Support?

- Dan Danbom, Facebook, October 26, 2023.

Quote Of The Day

The journalist, along with the demagogue in general, the lawyer — and the artist as well — has no fixed social position. He belongs to a kind of pariah caste that “society” always judges socially by its least ethical members. As a result, the most outlandish ideas about journalists and their work are common currency.

- Max Weber’s lecture on politics, originally delivered in 1919 (translated from the original German).

Of Tragedies and Statistics

A great many documentary films have used the generalized method, that is, the showing of a condition or an event as it affects a group of people. The audience can then have a personalized reaction from imagining one member of that group. I have felt that this is the more difficult observation from the audience's viewpoint. It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving. In The Forgotten Village we reversed the usual process. Our story centered on one family in one small village[.]

- John Steinbeck, from the preface to the book version of the 1941 documentary film, The Forgotten Village. 

The title of this post, of course, recalls the quote often attributed to Stalin, which is an attribution of questionable authenticity (the source first making this attribution may actually have been paraphrasing Steinbeck and inaccurately attributing it to Stalin). This famous quote says:

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.

Steinbeck, in turn may have been referencing an earlier statement in 1916 from a California anarchist publication called The Blast, which stated:

There is double the pathos for us in the death of one little New York waif from hunger than there is in a million deaths from famine in China.

Quote Of The Day

There is somewhat of an intellectual void in Republican leadership over the past 20 years. Occasionally that void creates space for a uniquely good idea that doesn’t align too well with ideology. When the Democrats are in charge, there are plenty of mainstream Democratic ideas to fill up the agenda, so nothing too unusual happens.

The low ideological alignment also explains why these ideas are underrated later, because they have no deep well of partisans to promote their successes.

From here.

Quote Of The Day

[H]e looked at me as if I had said "What is the square root of Naugahyde?"

- Dan Danbom (on Facebook on August 16, 2023). An honorable mention from the same post appears below:

the most interesting visitor to Printed Page today came all the way from Peru. It was his second time in the store. We started talking about the political situation, and he told me that now matter how turbulent ours is, it's nothing compared to most of the countries in South America. Drug lords and other criminals control governments, democracy is a battered concept, and assassination is as near as last week. He said that he came to the US in the Eighties to study. He thought the nature of American politics had deteriorated, but compared to South America? Hold my beer. I didn't know whether to conclude that we're lucky in America, or that we're becoming more like South America.

Quote Of The Day

[H]e was of an age he had never consciously expected to reach, and was finding it full of unpleasant surprises.

- Charles Stross, "Dark State" (2017).

Second Quote Of The Day

[O]ne thing that I think is so important, but so under-appreciated in media coverage is what weak, conflicting, and sometimes downright non-sensical attitudes people have on abortion. People who pay attention to politics have strong opinions on abortion, but most people don’t pay a lot of attention to politics and for many of them, I think their opinion on abortion can best be summed up by some version of: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Or, “ehhh, I don’t love it, but I think it should probably be legal and if you are going to ask me about specific policy proposals, I will show little thought or coherence.”

- Steven Greene, at his blog Fully Myelinated, on June 20, 2023. 

This isn't the only issue where this is the case either.

Quote Of The Day

Distinguishing between untrustworthy hearsay and really untrustworthy hearsay would be akin to distinguishing between objecting and strenuously objecting. See A Few Good Men (Columbia Pictures 1992) (After her objection is overruled, Lieutenant Commander Joanne Galloway persists by “strenuously” objecting. The judge overrules her objection again, this time more emphatically. During the next recess, Lieutenant Sam Weinberg, Galloway’s co-counsel, remarks to Galloway, “‘I strenuously object?’ Is that how it works Hm? ‘Objection.’ ‘Overruled.’ ‘No, no, no, no, I strenuously object.’‘Oh, well, if you strenuously object, then I should take some time to reconsider.’”).

People v. Jacob Vanderpauye, 2023 CO 42, Footnote 1.

Quote Of The Day

"They ambushed us and they didn't fight fair."

"Despicable. We must cultivate a better class of assailants."

- Kelley Armstrong, "The Poisoner's Ring" (2023).