Quotes

A $250 billion per year loss would be almost $800 for every man, woman, and child in America. And 750,000 jobs – that’s twice the number of those employed in the entire motion picture industry in 2010. The good news is that the numbers are wrong. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures ‘cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,’ which is polite government-speak for ‘these figures were made up out of thin air.’

The Freakonomics guys call bullshit on the MPAA’s piracy numbers (via theyoungradical)

What kind of person immigrated to the New World? Not counting slaves, there were only four types, really: people who didn’t think Europe was religious enough, people who thought they could make a lot of money, antisocial failures with no other option, and fruitcakes who thought risking their lives on an alien shore might make for an interesting adventure. Those are the four components of the American gene pool.

Chuck Klosterman, The Visible Man (via kayfabe)

Magicians used Sanskrit in the India of the Prakrits, Egyptian and Hebrew in the Greek world, Greek in Latin-speaking countries and Latin with us. All over the world people value archaisms and strange and incomprehensible terms.

Marcel Mauss – A General Theory of Magic (via cartesiannightmare)

In chaos magick we call this sleight-of-mind

There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven’t noticed already.

Robert Anton Wilson
The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) (with Robert Shea)

Still true.

(via chaotrix)

This is an oversimplification, but for the eighty percent or whatever they are, the main thing is to divert them. To get them to watch National Football League. And to worry about “Mother With Child With Six Heads,” or whatever you pick up on the supermarket stands and so on. Or look at astrology. Or get involved in fundamentalist stuff or something or other. Just get them away. Get them away from things that matter. And for that it’s important to reduce their capacity to think.

Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)

Although most boys figure out how to bring themselves to orgasm by age thirteen, half of girls don’t have their first orgasms until their late teens, twenties, or beyond. Teenage girls widely agree that they get the message loud and clear that masturbation is something boys do, but girls don’t, can’t, or shouldn’t. The cultural focus on intercourse tells young women to expect they’ll begin to experience sexual pleasure once they have sex with a man (whether or not they’re even interested in sex with men). Nearly all teen boys, on the other hand, experience sexual pleasure long before they get their hands—or other body parts—into a partner’s pants. Despite the massive advances in women’s equality, young women’s sexuality is stuck in a surprising paradox. Young women are sold provocative clothes but aren’t taught where to find their own clitoris. Many girls give their boyfriends oral sex, but are too uncomfortable with their own bodies to allow the guys to return the favor. It’s still a radical act to say that women need and deserve access to information about their own sexual pleasure—not just about the risks and negative consequences of sex.

Dorian Solot, I Love Female Orgasm: An Extraordinary Orgasm Guide. (via feministhistorian)

It’s an essential feature of human nature that people should be free, should be able to participate, and should be uncoerced.

Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)

I love Noam because he often reminds us what democracy really means.

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

Bertrand Russell (via chaotrix)

Growth is a funny sort of concept. For example, our GNP increases every time we build a prison. Well, okay, it’s growth in a sense…

Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)