#evolution

Anarchy is like custard cooking over a flame; it has to be constantly stirred or it sticks and gets heavy, like government. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#cuba #government #passivity #revolution #anarchy

Critical pessimists, such as media critics Mark Crispin Miller, Noam Chomsky, and Robert McChesney, focus primarily on the obstacles to achieving a more democratic society. In the process, they often exaggerate the power of big media in order to frighten readers into taking action. I don't disagree with their concern about media concentration, but the way they frame the debate is self-defeating insofar as it disempowers consumers even as it seeks to mobilize them. Far too much media reform rhetoric rests on melodramatic discourse about victimization and vulnerability, seduction and manipulation, "propaganda machines" and "weapons of mass deception". Again and again, this version of the media reform movement has ignored the complexity of the public's relationship to popular culture and sided with those opposed to a more diverse and participatory culture. The politics of critical utopianism is founded on a notion of empowerment; the politics of critical pessimism on a politics of victimization. One focuses on what we are doing with media, and the other on what media is doing to us. As with previous revolutions, the media reform movement is gaining momentum at a time when people are starting to feel more empowered, not when they are at their weakest. ↗

— Henry Jenkins

#media-studies #optimism #revolution #pessimism

Existing political philosophies all developed before evolutionary game theory, so they do not take equilibrium selection into account. Socialism pretends that individuals are not selfish sexual competitors, so it ignores equilibria altogether. Conservatism pretends that there is only one possible equilibrium—a nostalgic version of the status quo—that society could play. Libertarianism ignores the possibility of equilibrium selection at the level of rational social discourse, and assumes that decentralized market dynamics will magically lead to equilibria that yield the highest aggregate social benefits. Far from being a scientific front for a particular set of political views, modern evolutionary psychology makes most standard views look simplistic and unimaginitive. ↗

— Geoffrey Miller

#politics #nature

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin. ↗

— Henry Adams

#darwin #evidence #evolution #grant #president

Evolution is fascinating to watch. To me it is the most interesting when one can observe the evolution of a single man. ↗

— Shana Alexander

#fascinating #interesting #man #me #most

Among those people lucky enough, if you will, to have actually been brought to trial as a political prisoner, several historians have said there has not been one acquittal since the Bolshevik Revolution. ↗

— Barbara Amiel

#actually #among #been #bolshevik #brought

The smartphone revolution is under-hyped, more people have access to phones than access to running water. We've never had anything like this before since the beginning of the planet. ↗

— Marc Andreessen

#anything #before #beginning #had #like

Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming. ↗

— Marc Andreessen

#coming #companies #every #industry #need

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions. ↗

— Aristotle

#equal #equals #inferiors #may #mind

I trust that the president will try, just give it one more shot, some revolutionary way of not doing this, of bringing all those kids back home safely. ↗

— F. Murray Abraham

#bringing #doing #give #home #i