Recent kwiples

Friday 29th of March 2024

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Authoritarianism In fact, strongmen do not vanish with their exit from power, but instead remain as traces within the body of their people. The muscle memory to salute and sing the songs can be hard to shake, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen © 2022 Kwiple.com
Authoritarianism The strongman's project of national greatness  is the glue of his government. It justifies his claims of absolute power and his narratives of risking everything to save the nation from domestic crisis and hostilities by foreigners. Strongman national projects generally leverage three time frames and states of mind: utopia, nostalgia, and crisis. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen © 2022 Kwiple.com
Cocks of the walk say  I can love four women at the same time. Rodrigo Duterte © 2022 Kwiple.com
Cocks of the walk say If I sleep for three hours, I have the energy to make love for three hours after that.  Silvio Berlusconi © 2022 Kwiple.com
Democrats So this is what I have become certain of:  Democrats spend too much time and energy imagining the policies that a capable government could execute and not rearly enough time imagining how to make a government capable of executing them. It is not only markets that have failed. Ezra Klein, New York Times, May 31, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Fear  Those who won our independence believed … that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; Louis Brandeis, Whitney v. California © 2022 Kwiple.com
Globalization Yes, our most recent round of globalization produced more wealth than the world has ever known. Unfortunately, as economist Dani Rodrik has pointed out, for every $1 of efficient gain from trade, there is typically $50 worth of redistribution towards the rich. The economic and political consequences of that are the key reason that we are now in a period of deglobalisation. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, May 22, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Government The problem isn't government. It's our government. Government isn't intrinsically inefficient. It has been made  inefficient. And not just by the right. Ezra Klein, New York Time, May 31, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Government Yet lawyers, not managers, have assumed primary responsibility for shaping administrative law in the United States. And if all you’ve got is a lawyer,  everything looks like a procedural problem. y Nicholas Bagley, “The Procedure Fetish” © 2022 Kwiple.com
Gun violence ‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens Headline at theonion.com every time there's a mass shooting in the United States © 2022 Kwiple.com
Gun violence One study found that Americans ages 15 to 19 are 82 times as likely to be shot dead as similar-age teenagers in our peer countries. Americans ages 18 to 20 account for 4 percent of the population but 17 percent of those known to have committed a murder. Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, May 25, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Gun violence [S]ince 1975, more Americans have  died from guns — including suicides, murders and accidents —  than in all the wars in United States history, going back to the American Revolution. [W]e continue to lose 45,000 lives a year to guns. That's 123 lives lost a day. Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, May 25, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Influencers There are three ways of influencing a person:  blackmail, vodka, or the threat of murder. Vladimir Putin © 2022 Kwiple.com
Infrastructure [T]he United States is notable for how much we spend and how little we get. It costs about $538 million to build a kilometer (about 0.6 mile) of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $287 million. Canada gets it done for $254 million. Japan clocks in at $170 million. Spain is the cheapest country in the database, at $80 million. All those countries build more tunnels than we do, perhaps because they retain the confidence to regularly try. The better you are at building infra- structure, the more ambitious you can be when imagining infrastructure to build. Ezra Klein, New York Time, May 31, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Internet The average person is online for six hours 58 minutes a day, or 40 per cent of their waking time, estimates a report by GWI,  Hootsuite and We Are Social.  You can do your job, conduct relationships and entertain yourself online, all for the cost of a phone.  And that's before virtual reality takes off. Beat that, so-called “real” life. Simon Kuper, Financial Times, May 19, 2022 © 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
Kwiplers say The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “Authorities say the gunman had obtained the weapons legally” © 2022 Kwiple.com
Looks It's like we're twins. Donald Trump to Viktor Orbán, Hungary's pudgy strongman  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Los Angeles It’s strange — all this lovely weather and yet you never see any washing out. Laura Hockney, artist David Hockney's mother, after visiting him for two or three days in Beverly Hills from her home in Bradford in northern England © 2022 Kwiple.com
Nukes We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races (January 22, 2022) [The signatories are China, France, Russia, United Kingdom and United States. Currently, India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan also have nuclear weapons.] © 2022 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
Resisters say NO+ Symbol used by Chile's Art Actions Collective (CADA) to signify "no more torture" by Pinochet's government  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Russia Back then, in the 1990s, people like [Irina] Frige [a leader of the Leningrad Memorial Society that preserves facts, images and objects related to the Gulag and its victims] were talking about "de-Communization,” which they imagined  would be like de-Nazification [in Germany]. But twenty years later, she was telling me that I was wrong to talk about forgetting because forgetting presupposesremembering — and remembering had not happened, or had not happened yet. Masha Gessen, Never Remember  [2018] © 2022 Kwiple.com
Selfie Illness, insanity and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompanied me throughout life. Edvard Munch © 2022 Kwiple.com
Snapshot Here's three words no one ever has to say to Marjorie Taylor Greene: Dumb it down. Marjorie Taylor Greene portrayed by Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher, June 3, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Snapshot I understand why he has to do this, to prove he's a man. He's afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this. Vladimir Putin portrayed by Angela Merkel, who he forced to wait for hours before starting their scheduled meeting, took a long call during it and then unleashed a huge dog next to her, knowing she was afraid of dogs © 2022 Kwiple.com
Ukraine To stand up for Ukraine now, one must be willing to knock the halo off a lot of countries. It means wading against half a century of postcolonial theory about where moral authority lies in the world. It is easy, and right, to implore the likes of France and Germany to do more for Ukraine. It is more transgressive to suggest that poorer nations are being cavalier in their attitude to the global order or selective in their opposition to imperialism. But transgress we must. It is the truest egalitarianism. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, June 3, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com