#cs

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing. ↗

— Neil Postman

#elections #irrelevance #media #nate-silver #news

It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#achievements #concentration #electronics #information #reality

The race will find that capitalists and communists modify themselves so much during the ages that they end by being indistinguishable as democrats... ↗

— T.H. White

#communism #democrats #humor #politics #age

I am sometimes asked, "How do you know there won't be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism) that will refute your whole thesis?" The question misses the point of this book. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them. Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#genocide #ideology #politics #society #terrorism

But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple. ↗

— John Kenneth Galbraith

#politics #age

Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written. ↗

— Dan Simmons

#leadership #politics #zeitgeist #age

The possibility of somebody emerging as a nuclear power or events happening that surprise us on the nuclear age is still a possibility. It always will be because there's an awful lot going on behind the scenes. Our intelligence just has to get better on that score. Peter Goss ↗

— Joel C. Rosenberg

#politics #age

The fate of the Right in the late modern age is to destroy what remains of the past in a vain attempt to recover it. ↗

— John Gray

#politics #right #age

If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there's no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage. We're averaging fifty-dollar checks in our campaign, and trying to ward off these seven- or eight-figure checks on the other side. That disparity is pretty striking, and so are the implications. In many ways, we're back in the Gilded Age. We have robber barons buying the government. ↗

— David Axelrod

#democrats #donations #fund-raising #gilded-age #government

There are no perfect leaders. ↗

— Max McKeown

#leadership-characteristics #age