Rory Stewart:

When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. This misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.

It is a language that exploits tautologies and negations to suggest inexorable solutions. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable. It does this so well that a more moderate, minimalist approach becomes almost impossible to articulate. Afghanistan, however, is the graveyard of predictions.

It is unlikely that we will be able to defeat the Taliban. But the Taliban are very unlikely to take over Afghanistan as a whole.

My First Dictionary:

Today's word is disillusioned.

Ira Glass:

If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super-lucky.

From the archive:

The average Afghan spends one-fifth of his income on bribes.

Nir Rosen:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Graeme Wood:

“Is the boy a Talib?” I asked. “Future Talib,” he said.

Elizabeth Rubin, from the Korengal Valley:

It didn’t take long to understand why so many soldiers were taking antidepressants.

Nora Johnson, from 1961:

An Englishman said to me recently, "You Americans live on a much higher plane of expectancy than we do. You constantly work toward some impossible goal of happiness and perfection, and you unfortunately don't have our ability just to give up. Really, it's much easier to accept the fact that some things can't be solved." He is right; we never accept it, and we kill ourselves trying.

Rory Stewart, from today:

Americans are particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble.

The Irresistible Illusion

Malcolm Gladwell:

Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power.

The expensive part of making drugs has never been what happens in the laboratory.

On price points:

Generally, the farther away a country from the main producers and the more isolated it is, the higher the price charged.

James Surowiecki:

Consumer finance, in other words, is an industry in which keeping customers confused often seems to be a business strategy.

Anderson responds to Gladwell:

It's now clear that the bane of my next year will be questions about the future of the newspaper industry from journalists.

Priced To Sell

D. Graham Burnett and Jeffrey Andrew Dolven:

Irony is a powerful and incompletely understood feature of human dynamics. A technique for dissimulation and "secret speech," irony is considerably more complex than lying and even more dangerous. Ideally suited to mobilization on the shifting terrain of asymmetrical conflict, inherently covert, insidiously plastic, politically potent, irony offers rogue elements a volatile if often overlooked means by which to demoralize opponents and destabilize regimes. And yet while major research resources have for forty years poured into the human sciences from the defense and intelligence community in an effort to gain control over the human capacity to lie (investments that led to the modern polygraph, sodium pentothal-derived truth serums, "brain fingerprinting," etc.), we have no comparable tradition of sustained, empirical, applied investigation into irony. We know very little about its specific manifestations in foreign cultures; we understand almost nothing about the neurological basis of its expression; we are without forward-looking strategies for its mastery and mobilization in the interest of national defense. This project-a sustained three-year, three-pronged, interdisciplinary investigation, drawing on social scientists, engineers, and neurobiologists--will position Lockheed Martin for field leadership in a crucial new area of strategic and commercial growth.

H.P. Lovecraft:

From the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.

Justine Cooper:

What we offer people here is a certain vision, Mr. Rydell. A certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality.

We do quite a good business with the more affluent residents of South Central. They, at least, have a sense of irony. I suppose they have to.

John Gray:

The irony of the current phase of globalization is that it universalizes the demand for a better life without providing the means to satisfy it.

On Barbara Kruger:

By using familiar images and text from modern advertising, she forcefully exposes the misleading and aggressive lies of pop media. Her works involve humor and irony, though they are often disturbing at the same time.

Recently, ubernoir on Decius:

An accusation that I have heard repeatedly leveled at Americans is that they have no sense of irony. I think I might bookmark [a post by Decius] as Exhibit A in my case for the defence.

Marc Siegel:

We live temperature-controlled, largely disease-controlled lives.

And yet, we worry more than ever before.

The ironic cloud

Robert Lee Hotz:

The flypaper of an unfocused mind may trap new ideas and unexpected associations more effectively than methodical reasoning. That may create the mental framework for new ideas. "You can see regions of these networks becoming active just prior to people arriving at an insight," she says.

Carolyn Johnson:

Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries.

David Lynch:

Trillions and Zillions of Ideas.

Consciousness is a Ball.

Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.

Richard Sennett:

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

Freeman Dyson:

It's rather important not only to be not orthodox, but to be subversive.

Kevin Kelly:

Upcreation is my term for the peculiar, profound, and still mysterious way by which complex structures appear in the universe.

A large part of the difficulty lies in our lack of a good understanding of what happens during emergence. What does it mean to make a new level, how do we recognize one, and what are its preconditions?

From TED:

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius.

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

A Wandering Mind Heads Toward Insight

As the sharp, stabbing pain, fear, and panic associated with rapid and visible blood loss is superseded by a panoply of chronic ailments and a general sense of unwellness, Robert Skidelsky reviews Martin Wolf's "Fixing Global Finance":

After the collapse of the dot-com boom in 2000, the US became a much less desirable place for direct foreign investment. So East Asian countries, especially China, started to buy US Treasury bonds.

In short, it was via their impact on the financing of the federal deficit that Chinese savings made it possible for the US consumer to go on a spending spree.

The fact is that the present system has suited the United States -- specifically the power holders in the United States -- just as much as it has those in China. The phrase "it has enabled the Americans to live beyond their means" is too vague to be useful. One needs to ask: which Americans? Certainly many middle- and low-income American households have been given opportunities to borrow beyond their means.

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Decius:

Sometimes the market drives off a cliff.

John Lanchester:

It's becoming traditional at this point to argue that perhaps the financial crisis will be good for us, because it will cause people to rediscover other sources of value. I suspect this is wishful thinking, or thinking about something which is quite a long way away, because it doesn't consider just how angry people are going to get when they realize the extent of the costs we are going to carry for the next few decades.

I get the strong impression, talking to people, that the penny hasn't fully dropped.

Recently:

I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

Louis Kahn:

A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all.

The World Finance Crisis & the American Mission

Michael Chabon:

Childhood is a branch of cartography.

James Akerman:

The "Gospel Temperance Railroad Map" is an example of an allegorical map.

Joseph Epstein:

Children have gone from background to foreground figures in domestic life, with more and more attention centered on them, their upbringing, their small accomplishments, their right relationship with parents and grandparents. For the past 30 years at least, we have been lavishing vast expense and anxiety on our children in ways that are unprecedented in American and in perhaps any other national life. Such has been the weight of all this concern about children that it has exercised a subtle but pervasive tyranny of its own.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

Michael Chabon:

The thing that strikes me now when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure there. A very grave, very significant shift in our idea of childhood has occurred since then. The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past.

Decius:

I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality. Paradoxically, I think I was better at escaping reality when I was younger.

From the archive:

Rewilding: the process of creating a lifestyle that is independent of the domestication of civilization.

Michael Chabon:

Once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

Jeff Goldblum, in Jurassic Park:

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Matthew Crawford:

One of the hottest things at the shopping mall right now is a store called Build-a-Bear, where children are said to make their own teddy bears. I went into one of these stores, and it turns out that what the kid actually does is select the features and clothes for the bear on a computer screen, then the bear is made for ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The Wilderness of Childhood

John Lanchester:

It isn't hard to know how to slay the zombies.

Nobody in power wants to do that. Nobody with power in the banking system, and nobody with power in government. Both the British and the American plans to help the banks are very, very, very expensive variations on the theme of sticking their fingers in their ears and loudly singing 'La la la, I'm not listening.'

The average British household owes 160 per cent of its annual income. That makes us, individually and collectively, a lot like the cartoon character who's run off the end of a cliff and hasn't realized it yet.

We in Britain are, to use a technical economic term, screwed.

The German economy is fucked off a cliff.

The consequences for Britain are going to be horrific.

There needs to be a general acceptance that the current model has failed.

It's becoming traditional at this point to argue that perhaps the financial crisis will be good for us, because it will cause people to rediscover other sources of value. I suspect this is wishful thinking, or thinking about something which is quite a long way away, because it doesn't consider just how angry people are going to get when they realize the extent of the costs we are going to carry for the next few decades.

I get the strong impression, talking to people, that the penny hasn't fully dropped.

Taleb on hedge fund managers:

They are just picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And sometimes the steamroller accelerates.

Louis CK:

When I read things like, "The foundations of capitalism are shattering," I'm like, "Maybe we need that." Maybe we need some time ... because everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy ...

It's Finished

John Lanchester:

If I had to pick a single fact which summed up the cultural gap between the City of London and the rest of the country, it would be that one. I have yet to meet a single person not employed in financial services who was aware of it; I wasn't aware of it myself. I think if I had been, there are two questions I would have wanted answered: how did that happen? And is it a good thing?

This is one of those points of stock-market logic which seems surreal, nonsensical and wholly counter-intuitive to civilians, but which to market participants is as familiar as beans on toast.

Sometimes, when you eat chili-hot food, the first few mouthfuls tell you nothing other than that the food contains chili. It takes a moment or two to detect the presence of other flavors. Bank bail-outs and collapses are a bit like that.

Most of us have had a few drinks at a party and done something embarrassing, usually along the lines of I've-always-fancied-you-isn't-it-time-we-did-something-about-it, but let's take comfort in the following truth: none of us has ever done anything as embarrassing as buying HBOS.

That feeling you get when you've eaten something, and a few minutes later you think, oh-oh, I think that my dinner just said that was a case not of adieu but au revoir? That would be AIG.

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Nouriel Roubini:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

It's Finished

Emily Gould:

The Internet is a chimera that magically manifests in whatever guise its viewer expects it to. If you are looking at the Internet and expecting it to be a source of fleeting funniness, unchallenging writing, attention-span-killing video snippets, and porn, then that is exactly all it will ever be for you.

Writing for free feels, to me, sometimes like a vice and sometimes like a privilege. Sometimes I wonder whether, if I organized my thoughts in a more palatable way, I mightn’t be able to knead and pat many of my blog posts into little women’s-magazine-personal-essay-shaped molds. And per the logic that giving away the blog-milk for free devalues not just one’s own personal cow but also the cow of anyone who might ever have a cow to sell, I suppose that is what I ought to have done.

These manifestations of culture are sometimes genuinely shallow, but sometimes they’re only deceptively shallow-seeming, like those places at the ocean’s edge where you’ll wade in a few feet and then lose your footing in suddenly cool, deep water.

Clifford Geertz:

Having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, he asked, what did the turtle rest on?

Another turtle.

And that turtle?

"Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down."

John Lanchester:

If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.

Benjamin Kunkel:

The truth is that we are often bored to death by what we find online—but this is boredom on the installment plan, one click a time, and therefore imperceptible.

Virginia Heffernan:

Swampy, boggy, inescapable connectivity: it seems my middle-class existence has stuck me here.

Why I write for free

John Allspaw and Paul Hammond:

Communications and cooperation between development and operations isn't optional, it's mandatory. Flickr takes the idea of "release early, release often" to an extreme - on a normal day there are 10 full deployments of the site to our servers. This session discusses why this rate of change works so well, and the culture and technology needed to make it possible.

A recent presentation at Velocity 2009.

See also, Lexically Sparse Slides Improve Recall of Taught Material.

10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr