Quote of the Day

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

John Steinbeck

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On the trading floor knowledge is no longer distanced, invisible, authoritative: it springs into presence on the waiting screens, always connected to a keyboard. Coercion has not disappeared from society, but at the desks it’s not an issue: communication networks exist to suggest and transmit every decision. No internalization of the law is achieved or even demanded by the flickering screens. What happens is a multiplication of self-reflections, an outpouring of subjectivity into electronic connections. Communication produces infinite variations on a single theme: an explosion of pulsating terminals that build cities around themselves, the mirror-architecture of contemporary capitalism. The screen-relation spreads throughout the globalized societies, at a pace with megagentrification. At each stop it releases smiling wizards into the expanding trap of their own creativity.

via The Philosophy of Finance at Continental Drift

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“Never to be yourself, yet always.” – Virginia Woolf

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I am the Jesus Christ of Italian politics. I’m a patient victim. I put up with everything. I sacrifice myself for everyone.

- Silvio Berlusconi, campaigning during the 2006 election

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Unruly, booze-fuelled mobs also broke into Sears at Robson and Howe. One looter managed to break into Chapters bookstore, but apparently no one bothered entering.

The Province newspaper reporting on rioting in Vancouver (taken from Riot brought under control but looting, damage across Vancouver’s downtown widespread)

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Tom Smith, a professional clown who has lived in a three-bedroom co-op on Riverside Drive in Hamilton Heights for seven years, is torn about the new campus. He said he did not like the institution’s use of eminent domain to get its hands on some key parcels. “I’m not really an eminent-domain kind of guy,” he said.

Yet he thinks Columbia will help curb street crime, which in turn may make the area a more pleasant place to walk. “There will be a lot less chicanery and hustling going around,” he said.

Via the New York Times: Hamilton Heights: Awaiting a Bounce

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Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too.”

Ulrike Meinhof in From Protest to Resistance

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