“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, July 6, 2015

...and now I've heard it all...

BBC Radio 4, you just quoted the dominant (Thatcherite, austerity-addicted) political class of the Baltic in support of the status quo against those "stupid" southern people who might be tainted by the "middle East."

I had an awesome lunch with the finance minister of Lithuania (thanks to Gediminas, our architectural host! Hi! Learning Lithuanian--really badly!) in which he couldn't have made it clearer that he was a philistine no-nothing with an axe, and I in turn made it quite clear exactly why austerity was the daftest and most destructive drill bit of a daft destructive system. Difficult even in that situation to speak up: it gets a bit personal when you're having to tell someone to their face...and you have passion...

Can you imagine a US senator, even a Republican one, saying “There are too many universities” at a university? Even if you believe it, you don't say it out loud, dude.

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