hopelessly hopeful
“And the new word to have is revolution”
—Gil Scott Heron “Comment #1”
February 2011
20 posts
January 2011
72 posts
“You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.”
—Noam Chomsky, via silas216←fuckyeahnoamchomsky←donghyunsuh
“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
—Richard Feynman
“Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
—Gandalf the White
“Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.”
—Romans 12:19
“To oppose something is to maintain it.”
—from The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
“You have confused the true and the real”
—from Dhalgren by Samuel Delany
“I know that astrology isn’t a science… Of course it isn’t. It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis…. The rules just kind of got there. They don’t make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden. The graphite’s not important. It’s just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do with people thinking about people.”
—from Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams
“
I mean, this is a situation where — I mean, people don’t — they really need to realize that the rhetoric and firing people up and, you know, even things, for example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list. But the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district.
When people do that, they’ve gotta realize there’s consequences to that action.
” —Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), March 25th, 2010
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“This is America, where a white Catholic male Republican judge was murdered on his way to greet a Democratic Jewish woman member of Congress, who was his friend. Her life was saved initially by a 20-year old Mexican-American gay college student, and eventually by a Korean-American combat surgeon, all eulogized by our African-American President.”
—Mark Shields
“But there, my friends, songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way: and sometimes they are withered untimely.”
—Treebeard
“Of course, it is likely enough, my friends, likely enough that we are going to our doom…. But if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. That thought has long been growing our hearts; and that is why we are marching now. It was not a hasty resolve…. Aye, we may help the other peoples before we pass away….”
—Treebeard
“
‘You lie,’ said Wormtongue.
‘That word comes too oft and easy from your lips,’ said Gandalf.
” —
“He could have been helped; I don’t know how, I just know yes. Maybe he needed to be told that nothing in the past defines you. “Ever since, I haven’t been able to ___.” The horrible truth is that you probably still can. You won’t— this isn’t a criticism and I don’t blame you— but you can.”
—The Last Psychiatrist
“Always remember that science is an evolving, changing field. One study or one case is not proof of anything. There are no wonder drugs. There are few (or no) simple answers to complex questions in life.”
—Toni Brayer, M.D.
“
Which is not to suggest that resistance is futile. It sounded pretty dark what I just said there, now that I reconsider it in my own head: “Crazy people rule us all.” I don’t think that’s true, and I do think it’s important for us to watch our rhetoric. I do think it’s a worthwhile goal not to conflate our political opponents with enemies.
If for no other reason, than to draw a better distinction between the manifestos of paranoid mad men and what passes for acceptable political and pundit speak. It would be really nice if the ramblings of crazy people didn’t in any way resemble how we talk to each other on TV. Let’s at least make troubled individuals easier to spot.
Again, to see good people like this hurt, it is so grievous, and it causes me such sadness, but again, I refuse to give into that feeling of despair. There is light in this situation.
I urge everyone, read up about those who were hurt, or killed in this shooting. You will be comforted by just how much anonymous goodness there really is in the world. You read about these people and you realize that, that people that you don’t even know, that you have never even met, are leading lives of real dignity and goodness, and you hear about crazy, but it is rarer than you think.
” —Jon Stewart
“We are not, though, a nation of the goodhearted people Obama presented us as. We have become a nation where there’s so much noise that only the screams get heard. We fall into a couple of camps: in one, the vast majority of the country, the apathetic who have decided that it’s all white noise and just want to be left alone while they try to get or keep a job, pay the bills, and live a life that doesn’t suck; in the other, that small tincture bottle’s worth of Americans who engage, who understand that democracy is a responsibility and not just a term that you might learn for a high school social studies test. And in that bottle, there’s the drops of poison, the people who do not seek to better the nation at large, who see only individuals rather than a society, who, in essence, hate the concept of a more perfect union.”
—The Rude Pundit
“Of course, he was immediately attacked for politicizing the event (even though he specifically honored a Republican federal judge, even mentioning John McCain, which got applause). The crowd was criticized for clapping and cheering too much (the mourning police demand silence). The t-shirts that were given out for free were criticized for being too blue or something. (To be “fair,” there are conservatives who have praised the speech.)”
—The Rude Pundit
“Suicide is the ninth leading cause of death among Asian Americans across all age groups, compared to tenth among White Americans (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2006). Previous research has suggested that Asian American college students are more likely to think about suicide and attempt suicide than European American students (Kisch, Leino, & Silverman, 2005; Muehlenkamp, Gutierrez, Osman, & Barrios, 2005). Moreover, Asian Americans are less likely to seek professional help for psychological distress, and they are less likely to self-disclose suicidal thoughts without the clinician’s prodding.”
—Asian Am J Psychol. 2010 Mar;1(1):18-30. Lifetime Suicidal Ideation and Suicide Attempts in Asian Americans. Cheng JK, Fancher TL, Ratanasen M, Conner KR, Duberstein PR, Sue S, Takeuchi D.
