Detour'd

Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it.

[colorful-detournement]

"In the middle of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer." - Albert Camus

[technofeudalism]

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“The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are.

The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Some people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to question, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride."

And we … kill those people. "Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real." It's just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok … But it doesn't matter, because it's just a ride.

And we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love.

The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one.

Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.”

Bill Hicks

[liberatingreality]

Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

[angelprickandholysemen]

There is no conscious participation in biopolitical democracy without unconscious participation in a terrible community, and vice-versa. Because the terrible community is not just the community of social or political protest, the militant community, but also tends to be everything that seeks to exist as a community within biopolitical democracy (the company, the family, the association, the group of friends, the adolescent gang, etc.). All such communities tend to be terrible communities to the extent that all sharing without purpose, all endless sharing (in both senses of ‘without end/to no end’) is an effective threat to biopolitical democracy, which is based on such total separation that its subjects are not even individuals anymore, but simply dividuals, split between participating in two necessary, yet contradictory things; their terrible community and biopolitical democracy. And one or the other of those must inevitably be participated in clandestinely, basely, incoherently.

Tiqqun, Theses on the Terrible Community

[howieabel]

“Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

[howieabel]

“The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.” ― Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

[beljar]

The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve. Indeed, the story of Palestine has been told before: European settlers coming to a foreign land, settling there, and either committing genocide against or expelling the indigenous people. The Zionists have not invented anything new in this respect.

Noam Chomsky, from On Palestine, March 23, 2015

[didion-official]

But Israel succeeded nonetheless, with the help of its allies everywhere, in building a multilayered explanation that is so complex that only Israel can understand it. Any interference from the outside world is immediately castigated as naive at best or anti-Semitic at worst.

— Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

[hyperions-fate]

People usually associate creativity with works of art, but what are works of art alongside the creative energy displayed by everyone a thousand times a day: seething unsatisfied desires, daydreams in search of a foothold in reality, feelings at once confused and luminously clear, ideas and gestures presaging nameless upheavals. All this energy, of course, is relegated to anonymity and deprived of adequate means of expression, imprisoned by survival and obliged to find outlets by sacrificing its qualitative richness and conforming to the spectacle's categories. Think of Cheval's palace, the Watts Towers, Fourier's inspired system, or the pictorial universe of Douanier Rousseau. Even more to the point, consider the incredible diversity of anyone's dreams - landscapes the brilliance of whose colors qualitatively surpass the finest canvases of a Van Gogh. Every individual is constantly building an ideal world within themselves, even as their external motions bend to the requirements of soulless routine.

Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967)

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

...there is a big difference between stopping a refinery from poisoning your town, or stopping a pipeline, and stopping climate change. Where the goal is to protect the habitat of an endangered animal, as it was when ELF saboteurs burned down part of the Vail ski resort, sabotage is a relatively direct means to an end. But you can’t blow up climate change, except by blowing up so many things that you’d basically be at war. And even then, a solution to the problem of climate change and ecological collapse more broadly requires acts of creation as much as destruction. It is far easier to plan a bank robbery than the abolition of ecocidal class society. Pipelines and the forms of life they support will have to be replaced by new ways of living, new ways of doing things. Such a movement, a revolutionary, communist movement, would need to be against pipelines but, even more importantly, for these new ways of life.

Jasper Bernes, Deeds and Propaganda

[alienerad-deactivated20240304]

To maintain their power, dominant groups create and maintain a popular system of 'commonsense' ideas that support their right to rule. In the United States, hegemonic ideologies concerning race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation are often so pervasive that it is difficult to conceptualize alternatives to them, let alone ways of resisting the social practices that they justify.

/ Patricia Hill Collins

[witchgrindergeneral]

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream – a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought – a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

– Mark Twain

[howieabel]

“What can we do? How can we do it? With whom? What tactics should be used? How should we define a strategy that is accessible to everyone, including a general public that has reached levels of depoliticization that can make atrocities seem acceptable? What is our vision? How can we make sure “we” are talking to “everyone”?” ― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

[howieabel]

“Movements are most powerful when they begin to affect the vision and perspective of those who do not necessarily associate themselves with those movements.” ― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle

[howieabel]

“And when you look, most of the time these authority structures have no justification: they have no moral justification, they have no justification in the interests of the person lower in the hierarchy, or in the interests of other people, or the environment, or the future, or the society, or anything else—they’re just there in order to preserve certain structures of power and domination, and the people at the top.” ― Noam Chomsky, On Anarchism

[anarchistin]

When Lenin advocated the replacement of the “bourgeois state” by the “proletarian state,” he thought he was engaging in honest and accurate reasoning, but there simply cannot be a “proletarian” version of the state as a social form.

Many since Spartacus have attempted this, but they have all failed. Even the Soviet experiment could not avoid collapse, despite the fact that it was carried out in roughly a third of the world.

The main reason being that the state form exists essentially to serve the lifestyle of the oppressive and exploitative groups and classes. That is why it was created. It cannot provide the form for equality and freedom for those groups and classes who are subjected to oppression and exploitation. Not only is its essence not suitable, its form also contradicts freedom and equality.

— Abdullah Öcalan, Beyond State, Power, and Violence

[howieabel]

“Well, it's been obvious for centuries that capitalism is going to self-destruct: that's just inherent in the logic of system―because to the extent that a system is capitalist, that means maximizing short-term profit and not being concerned with long-term effects. In fact, the motto of capitalism was, "private vices, public benefits"―somehow it's gonna work out. Well, it doesn't work out, and it's never going to work out: if you're maximizing short-term profits without concern for the long-term effects, you are going to destroy the environment, for one thing. I mean, you can pretend up to a certain point that the world has infinite resources and that it's an infinite wastebasket―but at some point you're going to run into the reality, which is that that isn't true. Well, we're running into that reality now―and it's very profound. Take something like combustion: anything you burn, no matter what it is, is increasing the greenhouse effect―and this was known to scientists decades ago, they knew exactly what was happening. But in a capitalist system, you don't care about long-term effects like that, what you have to care about is tomorrow's profits. So the greenhouse effect has been building for years, and there's no known technological fix on the horizon―there may not be any answer to this, it could be so serious that there's no remedy. That's possible, and then human beings will turn out to have been a lethal mutation, which maybe destroys a lot of life with us. Or it could be that there's some way of fixing it, or some ameliorating way―nobody knows.” ― Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

[prole-log]