"I'm probably only going to post quotes here"

-Me (actually Ryan)

[philosophybits]

“Life begins on the other side of despair.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

[azspot]

“Stage one, the generic concept in John’s letters — an amorphous spirit of the age. Stage two, you give it the definite article and a face. Stage three, you smash every bad guy in the entire Bible together like Play-Doh remnants — Daniel’s beasts, the man of lawlessness in Thessalonians, the beast from the sea in Revelation, Gog and Magog — into one Voltron-level super-villain. And stage four, which is where Peter Thiel lives … you take everything in stage three and invert it. The Roman Empire becomes good. Greta Thunberg becomes suspect. The Pope becomes suspect. The resistance to technological progress is the Antichrist.”

— Tripp Fuller

[azspot]

“Thus the formerly strutting Trump is forced to fly to Beijing as a supplicant, hoping that Xi Jinping will offer concessions that will extricate him from the domestic and international trainwreck he has wrought. Yes, Xi might offer some soybean purchases for failing American farmers and some deals to the executives traveling with Trump as a face-saving sop. But rest assured that the Chinese will use Trump’s debilitated status to their ultimate advantage, pressing for concessions on Taiwan while letting Trump bleed away what’s left of U.S. credibility on a failed war.”

— A Failing, Flailing President Supplicates Xi

[liebesverlangen-blog]

“I didn’t say I liked it. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.”

— Oscar Wilde, adapted from The Picture of Dorian Gray (via lifeinpoetry)

[perfectfeelings]

“Don’t be the reason someone feels insecure. Be the reason someone feels seen, heard, and supported.”

— Cleo Wade

[thirdity]

“You write the beginning and then you go back and rewrite the beginning, and you never got off page one. It’s kind of a syndrome, and I have a rash piece of advice which is — Go on, page two, page three, and never look back. Get something finished, no matter how lousy it is. […] Perfectionists cannot get going unless they kind of do violence to their own instincts, and just blast ahead.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Last Interview and Other Conversations

[minimalistquotes]

Don't go above and beyond for people anymore. Meet them as far as they meet you. Speak to them as much as they speak to you. Include them as much as they include you.

[azspot]

“Social fascism is the entire system of social relations characterized by extreme power inequality, in which the stronger party holds a veto over the weaker party’s opportunities for life and survival.”

— The Fascism of the Antichrist: From Mussolini’s Political Religion to Peter Thiel’s Apocalyptic Silicon Valley

[azspot]

“Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.”

— Everyone Into The Grinder

[quietlotus]

“Plant seeds of joy,

nurture them with gratitude,

gather the kindness that blossoms.

Let your words and actions be honey.

Share the simple sweetness of love.”

— Quiet Lotus

[azspot]

“Denominations will continue to endure because they have structure in place to carry you over the chasms of uncertainty. Non-denominationals have no structure. It’s all based on who the pastor is. It’s the Substackification of American religion. You start your own thing. You go outside the ecosystem, you don’t need all the structures. That’s almost exactly what these non-denominational churches are doing. You’re not here for Methodism or Lutheranism. You’re here for my flavor of American Christianity and the way I preach it. And people are drawn to that by the tens of thousands. It’s the only major segment of American religion that’s growing.”

— The Substack-ification of American Religion

[georgesantosapologist-deactivat]

[diagnosed-overthinker]

love it when people link wikipedia pages instead of explaining the point. The url alone conveys so much disdain and contempt. Here is the information you desire, i found it with ease.

[azspot]

“Edmund Burke didn’t write Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 because he coincidentally felt that an intellectual defense of hierarchy needed to be written. He wrote it in direct response to the radical nature of the French Revolution, which asserted something even more existential than the American Revolution, which challenged a particular king, and a particular relationship. It asserted that the entire social order was in fact not natural and thus could be overthrown by the people on the grounds of natural rights. Conservatism as an ideological framework emerges not ex nihilo, but in the process of the defense of its underlying structures.”

— It Was Fascism All Along

[azspot]

“Nietzsche’s hope was for the Übermensch unshackled from what he called the “slave morality” of Christian love to create a new mankind willing itself to heroic greatness. But Nietzsche’s fear was that instead of producing the superman, a world without God would only produce the Last Man—Nietzsche’s description of a final and failed stage of human development. Nietzsche’s Last Man is an incurious, bored, oversedated, entertainment-addled dolt muttering “we have invented happiness” as he stupidly blinks. Might we begin to think that Nietzsche’s experiment of a world without God doesn’t lead to the godlike superman but to the endlessly scrolling screen-man? As the evidence mounts, we can see the writing on the wall—mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. Atheism has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

— A World Without God

[azspot]

“The bottom line is that in our English Bibles, Acts 15 quotes Amos 9 and our version of Amos 9 doesn’t say what Acts says it says. And in the simplest terms, this conflict between those passages may be due to Jesus’s brother reading from a different translation of Amos than the one used for our Bibles. The one James had plugged in one set of vowels — DM as “adam,” while our version of Amos is based on a different translation that plugged in different vowels — DM as “Edom.””

— Team Everybody Sliding Into Our DMs

[azspot]

“The Trumpafucks are already fighting street insurrections with their ICE Gestapo. Let me remind them what it was like in Vietnam toward the end. We did drugs, whoo-ee, a lot of drugs. We committed war crimes, and not to any tactical purpose, but because we’d lost the moral thread. Sometimes, we killed our own officers.”

— 42 & draft

[azspot]

“Roger Olson and I are not identical and simpatico on every point of our theology or hermeneutics or doctrine. But there is one thing we both agree on wholeheartedly here, which is that the mass-slaughter of children is a Bad Thing. It is immoral and deplorable, wicked and evil, sinful and depraved and contrary to the will of God. And, therefore, any text that argues the opposite — that it is sometimes God’s will and God’s command — is a text that we both have problems with.”

— You Have Heard It Said, But I Say This Instead