Recent kwiples

Tuesday 30th of July 2024

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Autocracy Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only in a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources — the troll farms that promote one dictator's propaganda can also be used to promote the propaganda of another — and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America. Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, December 2021 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Beliefs Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. attributed to Voltaire © 2022 Kwiple.com
Books Wherever books will be burned, men also, in the end, will be burned. Heinrich Heine © 2021 Kwiple.com
Bullshitters say In the pandemic, it was C.E.O.s in many, many cases all over the world who were the heroes. They’re the ones who stepped forward with their financial resources, their corporate resources, their employees, their factories, and pivoted rapidly — not for profit, but to save the world. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce © 2022 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus Just between June and November [2021], 163,000 Covid-19 deaths in the US alone could have been prevented by vaccination, estimates the Kaiser Family Foundation.  That’s nearly double all the American deaths in war in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined — and the unvaccinated continue to die, pointlessly. Simon Kuper, Financial Times, January 13, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Democracy Democratic revolutions are contagious. If you can stamp them out in one country, you might prevent them from starting in others. Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, December 2021 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Democracy To a small “d” democrat, process matters more than ideology. The fairness of an election is more important than who wins it. There is not, on most questions of policy, a single democatic answer. Concerns arise only when leaders try to augment their power through means that could cause permanent damage to democratic institutions. Madeleine Albright © 2021 Kwiple.com
Elections  So, I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered? At consequential moments in history, they present a choice: Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis? This is the moment to decide to defend our elections, to defend our democracy. Joe Biden, January 11, 2022, after which Mitch McConnell, speaking for  Republican lawmakers everwhere, said, in effect, “Silly of Joe to ask. Of course, we're with George, Bull and Jeff of sacred memory.” © 2022 Kwiple.com
Energy Nuclear power’s biggest environmental challenge is the waste it produces, which requires thousands or tens of thousands of years of safe storage. But there isn’t a lot of it: All of the nuclear produced in the U.S. since the 1950s adds up to about 85,000 tons of material. Compare that with the tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide that would have been produced had that electricity come from fossil fuels instead. Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Fascists There are two kinds of fascists: those who give orders and those who take them. A popular base gives fascism the legs it needs to march, the lungs it uses to proclaim, and the muscle it relies on to menace — but that's fascism from the neck down. To create tyranny out of the fears and  hopes of average people, money is required, and, so too, ambition and twisted ideas. It is the combination that kills. In the absence of wealthy backers, we likely would never had heard of Corporal Mussolini or Corporal Hitler. Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning © 2021 Kwiple.com
Filibusters But what is the legislative filibuster other than a tool that requires new federal policy to be broadly supported by Senators representing a broader cross-section of Americans — a guardrail, inevitably viewed as obstacle by whoever holds the Senate majority, but which in reality ensures that millions of Americans represented by the minority party have a voice in the process? Kyrsten Sinema, spouting, yet again, white supremacists' bullshit about the role of their favorite legislative tool — the filibuster — in a speech claiming she supports voting rights, but not enough to let the Senate debate or vote on them © 2022 Kwiple.com
Filibusters While I continue to support these [voting rights] bills, I will not support  separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country. We must address the disease itself, the disease of division, to protect our democracy, and it cannot be achieved by one party alone. Kysten Sinema, bullshitting about being a proponent of voting rights while sacrificing them on the altar of the anti-democratic filibuster, which she unashamedly loves far more, as do the similarly afflicted Joe Manchin and  all Republican senators and white supremacists, who showered her with heartfelt huzzahs © 2022 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say Count votes in Congress by: 1. Calculating a Member's Proportional Vote (MPV) for each member, as follows: MPV = SPNP / NLRS where: SPNP = State's Percentage of the National Population NLRS = Number of Legislators Representing the State (in that legislature) 2. Totaling “yes” MPVs and “no” MPVs 3. Passing if total MPV is more than 50 OTHERWISE Abolish the Senate © 2019 Kwiple.com
Lies Falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead. Jonathan Swift, The Examiner No. XIV (Thursday, November 9th, 1710) © 2021 Kwiple.com
Lies A lie cannot live forever. Martin Luther King, Jr., March 14, 1968, before creation of the Internet or social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, FoxNews, or Donald Trump's cult of personality © 2022 Kwiple.com
News News today, news is gossip, that's what it is. Cindy Adams, gossip columnist,  quoted in New York Times, December 26, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Post-2020 Senate shituation 15 states (Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming) 2020 population: 40,085,414 Senators: 30 Republicans 1 Senator per 1,336,180 people — 1 state (California) 2020 population: 39,368,075 Senators: 2 Democrats 1 Senator per 19,684,037 people 19,684,037 / 1,336,180 = 14.7, therefore: average 15er's vote is worth nearly 15 times a Californian's, a Californian's vote is worth less than 7% of an average 15er's — 1 state (Wyoming) 2020 population = 582,328, therefore: 1 Senator per 291,164 Wyomians, a Wyomian's vote is worth 68 times a Californian's, a Californian's vote is worth 1.5% of a Wyomian's  © 2021 Kwiple.com
Public discourse The most effective form of persuasion is when you are not aware of being persuaded. Joseph Goebbels © 2021 Kwiple.com
Punt returners say Yes, but he prefers to be called Ron Desantis. Stephen Colbert, responding to Gizmodo's January 14, 2022, headline, “Sadly, 'Covid Dick' Is Real” © 2022 Kwiple.com
Racists say The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white you don’t get the vaccine or if you’re white you don’t get therapeutics. … In New York state, if you're white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical health. Donald Trump, January 15, 2022, at a rally in Florence, Arizona, a town which was 82.2% white in 2015 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Slavery The true evil of American slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude. It was the narrative of racial difference, the ideology of white supremacy that we made up to justify slavery. That’s the true evil. Bryan Stevenson, 2017 Tanner Lecture on Human Values, Harvard Univrsity, December 7, 2017 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Snapshot He can't see a belt without hitting below it. Lloyd George portrayed by Margot Asquith © 2021 Kwiple.com
Social welfare A person is a person through other persons.  Desmond Tutu © 2021 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say Lets not fuck around. We've descended into civil war. Stewart Rhodes, founder of Oath Keepers © 2021 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say You guys need to be publicly executed … on pay per view. Email received by a 52-year-old member of the election board in Fulton County, GA, which Biden won and Trump accused of stealing the election © 2021 Kwiple.com
Voter suppression It's a vicious cycle — which is exactly the point. First gin up fear about fraud, then use that fear to aggressively prosecute voting infractions, then use those prosecutions to create stricter laws, then use the stricter laws to induce more examples of fraud, then use those examples to gin up even more fear.  The potential impact on turnout is bad enough. But the cumulative effect of restrictive laws corrodes the democratic process itself. Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic, January/February 2022 © 2021 Kwiple.com
 
Whites Whites, it must be frankly said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to re-educate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so littile to learn. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here:  Chaos or Community?  © 2022 Kwiple.com