“Nothing kills the elastic, life-giving spirit of humor more quickly—have you noticed?—than political correctness, with its agendas of rightness, perfection, enforcement, and moral superiority.”—Tony Hoagland
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“To breed an animal that is entitled to make promises—surely that is the essence of the paradoxical task nature has set itself where human beings are concerned? Isn’t that the real problem of human beings?”—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
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We laugh at Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), which depicts a dystopian future wherein even love letters are written by paid professionals, but we’re practically there already.
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“If you do not travel you are likely to suppose your own cultural assumptions to make up human reality – for you can only recognize what those assumptions are if you have lived in a place that runs on different ones. Travel is as important for learning about yourself and your own culture as it is for understanding others.”
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“The algorithms are watching you right now.”
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“Castaway (2000) is an interesting movie but it gets the wilderness isolation part all wrong.”
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Powerful people who see themselves as underdogs in a world where instability and inequality are rampant fail to realize that they have a moral responsibility.
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“The Trumpist Right habitually applies the jibe snowflake to disparage the supposedly overtender feelings of modern youth. Yet no group of Americans complains more about microaggressions than the Trump base and Fox News audiences.”
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“American meritocracy has become precisely what it was invented to combat: a mechanism for the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth, privilege, and caste across generations.”
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“You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices, Finkle-McGraw said. It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticize others—after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?”
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“The problem with economic inequality is not, as progressives commonly propose, that elites use force or fraud or some other form of bad faith to inflate their incomes in excess of their merit.”
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“Private schools and universities should lose their tax-exempt status unless they draw at least half of their students from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution.”
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“Progressives cannot answer because they remain under meritocracy’s thumb. They are captives who embrace their captor, through a sort of ideological Stockholm syndrome. As a result, progressives exacerbate problems that they do not even see.”
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“There is a long and honorable history, dating back to the Royal Society, of the gentleman scientist. And now the lady scientist. We don’t like to acknowledge it because we wish to maintain a polite facade of egalitarianism. But there’s a reason why so many important theorems are named after members of the titled nobility of Europe.”
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“The tragedy—and the entire point—of being a parent was the moment when the story stopped being about you.”
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“Under present demographic conditions, DC statehood would promptly add two Democratic senators, with a high likelihood that one or both would be African American. This would help to redress both the partisan and racial unrepresentativeness of the Senate.”
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“I miss the friendship with the pine tree and the birds I had when I was ten.”
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“Let old people be fucking old, right? They’ll be dead soon enough, right? Stop fucking making everyone move as fast as you’re fucking moving, all right? People are trying.”
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Fossil fuels, like Happy Dolls, cause damages as well as yield benefits. The difference is that the CO2 from fossil fuel burning is much less visible than is black sludge; and that fossil fuel producers and users don’t yet have to pay the costs of the harm that they cause to other people, whereas doll manufacturers do.
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“How did we get to the situation we see today, where it’s considered perfectly natural for free citizens of democratic countries to rent themselves out in this way, or for a boss to become indignant if employees are not working every moment of ‘his’ time?”
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