Tag: quotebag

“Employers have no goddamn business in the exam room with an employee and their doctor. Per-i-od.”—Brittany-Ann Wick

“The only thing that matters is who has the power when the next age of technology rolls out. When nanotechnology, perfect lie detectors, quantum computers, advanced AI, and advanced electronics surveillance comes out within the next 10-20 years, I sure hope someone who respects civil liberties is in power, because if they aren’t, there will never be another chance to turn the tide. It will be too late.”—LaughingCat

“Who cares that the ‘homeowners’ don’t own any percentage of their ‘homes’? They are still more responsible, valuable and attention-worthy than all those renters who are rootless, unreliable lazy layabouts. Thus, the myth that everybody needs to shoulder a humongous mortgage because that’s the truly American thing to do gets perpetuated.”—Clarissa

“Thinking that an invisible hand is going to lead to a stable solution, let alone an appropriate one or an optimal one, is based on magical thinking.”—Tom Hickey

“France is a hybrid. Day to day operations are run by a prime minister who works out of parliament… but the president is strong. Russia has oscillated between these two, depending on which office happens to be occupied by Putin.”—David Brin

“But in capitalism, no wage is ever low enough. And there is always someone poorer than you, somewhere, who can be exploited.”—Purple

“I don’t understand it at all. It’s almost like a prisoner’s dilemma, where if nobody ‘networked’, or if everybody ‘networks’, the end result is the same. But if only a few do it, more people know them (superficially) thus giving them a very slight advantage.”—B. Hrebec

“A quick search — I’m not going to link to them because they don’t need any more traffic — will turn up any number of blogs about blogging about blogging, internet businesses about starting internet businesses to sell internet businesses, and so on and so forth. There’s a whole subculture around it, in fact. Some of them even make a great deal of money, and insist that you too can be just like them. Self-help at its finest.”—Brian

“As a policy matter, austerity measures are nothing but a kind of pseudo-scientific bloodletting, treating as a treatment the weakening of the weakest. As a moral matter, austerity measures are nothing but a kind of brutal bullying, treating as a treat the weakening of the weakest.”—Dale Carrico

“I’m not sure what ‘skin in the game’ is supposed to mean, and I’m uneasy with the way it’s used in the empire’s political discourse. It gets used to suggest that those who have been dispossessed should be disenfranchized — I mean disenfranchized from society, not only disenfranchized from the voting ritual.”—Marja Erwin

“Commerce is not debatable: it is organized pillage; it legally robs both those who produce and those who consume.”—Joseph Déjacque

“If I didn’t do some compromising at my job and refused to support ideas that were against mine, I would be unemployed.”—Jimmy Abraham

“We need a really well written piece that utterly destroys the ECA in as few words as possible.”—Bob Howes

“Oh boy, the DOD is the world’s largest employer. And they said we couldn’t create jobs. Bonus, those jobs also kill potential job seekers, so it’s like doubly helpful to the unemployment rate.”—Broadsnark

“Few employers want to hire workers who have experience and have already commanded decent salaries and know their rights. It’s like the desire to fuck virgins in hopes they’re so ignorant they won’t realize you’re lousy in bed.”—Jennifer Kesler

“A ‘big player’ potentially can hamper and harm the market almost always. Even in an anarchic context.”—Silvano Fait

“Ron Paul, like all market libertarians, declares market exchanges and contractual arrangements ‘non-violent’ by fiat, whatever the misinformation and duress that actually prevail over their terms; he believes that the contingent historical artifact of regulations, treaties, pricing conventions, provincial customs, norms, infrastructural affordances that passes for ‘the market’ here and now is somehow an eternal and natural and spontaneous order; and he believes that the contingent historical artifact parochially construed by him as a reasonable responsible resourceful possessive individual subject is likewise given and natural. Like all market libertarians (and I do suspect all libertarians, always, even those who imagine themselves to be of the left) his is a vision of freedom and dignity that requires the treatment of key assumptions and institutions of the status quo as natural and inevitable rather than as artificial and historical, and hence his is a profoundly reactionary viewpoint at its base.”—Dale Carrico

“Not everything has, or should have a price.”—Juliet Schor

“Anyway, the discussion of whether any particular nation was ‘invented’ is kinda pointless, since nationality is intrinsically a myth. All nations are invented.”—Ricketson

“Libertarians are propertar-ians and seem to have major problems with social minorities as well. The ownership class is, sui generis, important to them and the rest, not so much. They will NOT be the solution to the future society of anywhere.”—Radha Smith

“Everyone should be free to decline the labor time or goods of another. But that freedom to decline must never ever threaten the life of that other. The legal definition of assault is an act that puts a reasonable person in fear for life or limb. So in a money-based economy, a layoff is an act of assault.”—Kellia Ramares-Watson

“How can a man who regards success as a goal of life be a true artist?”—Oscar Wilde

“The existent of a tax advice profession is a strong indicator of a tax system that is too complex.”—ejoftheweb

“Illegal immigration is not a crime; it’s an offence made up by nationalists. For there to be a crime, there needs to be a victim. Lines on a map are not people. Grow up.”—Marcel Dubois

“A capitalist class, by the way, that has an interest in you being ashamed of being poor, to induce you to accept more than a free person would normally accept.”—Marcel Dubois

“You see, the argument that will be made to point out that the choice between ‘work with taxation or no work’ is an artificial one, is the same one I will use myself to point that ‘work for a boss or don’t work’ is an artificial choice just as well. You want the option to live in a society where nobody has to pay taxes, I want the option to work in a society where nobody has to work for a boss.”—db0

“Obfuscation is just another marketing tool.”—KenG_CA

“I don’t see the moral or ethical distinction between a rich person paying a lawyer to pay less tax and a poor person not declaring his cash work to the benefits office because if he did they’d cut his benefits pound for pound. One is lawful because it is lawyered, the other technically criminal, both are the result of a broken tax system.”—ejoftheweb

“I too had to practically flog myself to read Atlas Shrugged. It is grossly repetitive and pedantic. It’s like being whacked with a hammer again and again and again while being asked ‘did you get the point?’… when you could hardly have missed it the first time around.”—anne.ominous

“First impressions matter, and a failed first impression is hard to overcome. One of the most important factors in a first impression, from future employers to prospective lovers, is a winning smile. In fact, a good smile has become so important over the last thirty or so years it has become ‘a test’ for whether someone is part of the middle class.”—John Robb

“Doing business, even small business, requires mystification.”—Jack Crow

“The phrase ‘commercial in confidence’ implies a conspiracy; a conspiracy that should be unlawful.”—ejoftheweb

“You folks in the 53% movement are being played.”—Kevin Carson

“Yes there are kooks on the left, there are kooks on the right too and as far as I’m concerned all moderates are kooks.”—Skex

“I’m never shocked when powerful people abuse others. I’m shocked when they don’t.”—Mel

“Interaction can be divided into competitive and cooperative. Competition is transacted through power plays, cooperation is free of free of power plays.”—Claude Steiner

“I think property is like power, Soma. If you don’t use it, defend it, teach it and perhaps most of all, prevent others from having it — it loses not only the value determined by exclusivity, but [its] ability to grab hold of the minds of those without it. ”—Jack Crow

“Exchangeable value requires coercion and creates hierarchies.”—Anatole David

“The RIAA’s political strategy in the war on piracy has been alternately to oppose and support government regulation of the Internet, depending on what’s expedient. I wonder if rights owners and the trade groups that represent them experience any sense of cognitive dissonance when they advocate against something at one moment and for it a little while later—to the same audience, on the same issue.”—Annemarie Bridy

“If you want freedom and justice, then work towards equality and solidarity.”—Marja Erwin

“It’s worth asking, largely rhetorically, how many jobs are created by requiring public schools students to take a loyalty oath first thing in the morning.”—Eric B.

“The fact that music and the arts is argued for inclusion in our schools primarily as a way to raise math scores shows you how useless the whole exercise in education ‘reform’ is.”—Purple

“If I somehow manage to come into the classroom every day and keep my religion to myself, I don’t understand why a politician, a judge, a doctor, anybody else cannot do the same.”—Clarissa

“Well, there are plenty of historical societies that dealt in people rather than money. I personally believe that printed money maintains a separation — a boundary, if you will — between the individual and the work that the money symbolizes. Money, as a result, allows us to look past the humanity and excuse atrocious behavior like layoffs and cut benefits as ‘only business.’ When in fact it is extremely personal and inhumane.”—Academic Monkey

“If I sell my TV and other ‘gadgets’ that are always used to show how rich poor people are compared to earlier days, it will get me exactly nowhere today as far as paying my rent.”—Isabel