What's Inside This Mental Breakdown of Writing? Here, you'll find my wandering thoughts on economics, geopolitics, culture, technology, and daily ideas. Plus, I'll be dropping little peeks behind the curtain on my novel and nonfiction projects.
"Tribalism never prospers, for when it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will dare call it tribalism." ~ Ernest Gellner
"Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience." ~ Christopher Hitchens
Human history is competing tribes, with survival, power, and dominance drives defining the courses of civilizations.
Tribalism is profoundly human, a force that has driven…
The holiness of the kingdom of God must be preserved. If Jesus refused to acknowledge and fight for Israel as God's favored nation- even though it was the one nation in history that actually held this status at one time- how much more must his followers refuse to acknowledge and fight for America as God's favored nation" To say it another way, if Jesus was committed solely to establishing a kingdom that had no intrinsic nationalistic or ethnic allegiances- not even with Israel- how much more should his followers be committed to expanding this unique, non-nationalistic kingdom? Gregory A.…
We see threats to liberal democracy coming from lots of directions. We have to create something new, a common response, because in so many places - the UK, France, Germany - ultranationalists and the far left threaten the free market and liberal democracy. Garry Kasparov
"The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war." ~ Sydney J.…
"The leading student of business propaganda, Australian social scientist Alex Carey, argues persuasively that “the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." ~ Noam Chomsky
"Americanism not globalism will be our credo as long as we are led by politicians who will not put America first, then we can be assured that other nations will not treat America with respect, the respect that we deserve."…
The inability to grasp the pathology of our oligarchic rulers is one of our gravest faults. Chris Hedges
Democracy appears to be safer and less liable to revolution than oligarchy. For in oligarchies there is the double danger of the oligarchs falling out among themselves and also with the people; but in democracies there is only the danger of a quarrel with the oligarchs. No dissension worth mentioning arises among the people themselves. And we may further remark that a government which is composed of the middle class more nearly approximates to democracy than to oligarchy, and is the…
"To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy." ~ Thomas Jefferson
"The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is a democracy." ~ Aristotle
"When economic power became concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an…
"Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited." ~ Robert Kennedy
"The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not." ~ Christopher Hitchens
"I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system." ~ Noam Chomsky
Use of mass…
"Autocracy cannot do without its twin agents: a hangman and a priest, the first to suppress popular resistance by force, the second to sweeten and embellish the lot of the oppressed with empty promises of a heavenly kingdom." ~ Vladimir Lenin
"I would have to point out in the strongest terms the autocracy of the Liberal structure and the cowardice of its members. I have never seen in all my examination of politics so degrading a spectacle as that of all these Liberals turning their coats in unison with their Chief, when they saw the chance to take power." ~ Pierre Trudeau
"Watching both…
"If you wish the sympathy of the broad masses, you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things." ~ Adolf Hitler
"Political populism always poses a great danger because it disorients people, creates excessive expectations or, on the contrary, prioritises objectives that are clearly not priorities or are simply impossible to achieve." ~ Vladimir Putin
"As a rule, [populism] is done for the sake of political expediency by those who do not care about the consequences, who do not think even one step ahead, who do not want to think and do not intend to honour their commitments." ~ Vladimir…
"Respecting the sovereignty means preventing coups, unconstitutional actions and illegitimate overthrowing of the legitimate government. All these things should be totally prevented." ~ Vladimir Putin
"The purpose of the United Nations should be to protect the essential sovereignty of nations, large and small." ~ Nikita Khrushchev
"We believe that big nations should not bully smaller nations, and that the sovereignty of nations must be respected. And we have long urged that disputes be resolved peacefully, including through mechanisms like international arbitration." ~ Barack…
"Leave those vain moralists, my friend, and return to the depth of your soul: that is where you will always rediscover the source of the sacred fire which so often inflamed us with love of the sublime virtues; that is where you will see the eternal image of true beauty, the contemplation of which inspires us with a holy enthusiasm." ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference-the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the…
"Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt" ~ Immanuel Kant
"Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything, will really do." ~ Aldous Huxley
"What can be more excellent than prayer; what is more profitable to our life;…
Nation state as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state. Zbigniew Brzezinski
The competitive nation-state system, with all its capacity for good and evil, is spreading in the Third World and is transforming that world. Robert Gilpin
Globally, as the nation-state becomes increasingly less meaningful - a provider of positive goods and more and more just an army and some domestic enforcement…
"In 10 years, this sleepy Canada will be ripe for annexation - the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves. Besides, the country is half annexed already socially - hotels, newspapers, advertising, etc., all on the American pattern." ~ Friedrich Engels
"There are probably 400 to 500 people, water protectors, north of the 1889 boundary, that was the result of an illegal annexation of treaty territory by the United States against not just the Standing Rock Nation, but the entire Lakota Nation and members of the Great Sioux Nation, the Oceti Sakowin. And so, other tribal…
I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful...With artificial intelligence we're summoning the demon. ~ Elon Musk
We, the great American nation, decided that we've got 138 military bases around the world and we've now figured out that we can buy these drones from the Israelis, and we've decided that the way to proceed is to use this new technology to go and kill anybody that we don't like or who disagrees with us or who we might perceive as making an…