#tell

I feel that I, and the people under my command, tried to use all the traditional methods of recruiting agents which were also used by other intelligence services; adopting also means like pressure, money, sex - but that did not characterize my service. ↗

— Markus Wolf

#agents #also #characterize #command #did

Most of the results of using technical bugging devices were of little importance for my service. It may have been different in counter-intelligence, where bugs in flats, etc., were used to obtain a lot of information about what counter-intelligence was interested in. ↗

— Markus Wolf

#been #bugging #bugs #counter-intelligence #devices

Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying," Van replied, with surprisingly little anger. "It's a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#anger

Is my paranoia getting completely out of hand, or are you mongoloids really talking about me? ↗

— John Kennedy Toole

#ass #attitude #contempt #curmudgeon #hilarious

Why give a robot an order to obey orders—why aren't the original orders enough? Why command a robot not to do harm—wouldn't it be easier never to command it to do harm in the first place? Does the universe contain a mysterious force pulling entities toward malevolence, so that a positronic brain must be programmed to withstand it? Do intelligent beings inevitably develop an attitude problem? (…) Now that computers really have become smarter and more powerful, the anxiety has waned. Today's ubiquitous, networked computers have an unprecedented ability to do mischief should they ever go to the bad. But the only mayhem comes from unpredictable chaos or from human malice in the form of viruses. We no longer worry about electronic serial killers or subversive silicon cabals because we are beginning to appreciate that malevolence—like vision, motor coordination, and common sense—does not come free with computation but has to be programmed in. (…) Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem! ↗

— Steven Pinker

#artificial-intelligence #ethics #malevolence #robots #attitude

The boy thought, How powerful a story is, and how by a kind of magic it compels the imagination; there was nothing in the world, it seemed to him, so mysteriously strong; and he began to wonder if he would ever have anything as beautiful to tell. ↗

— Glenway Wescott

#beauty

The enormity of problems like hunger and social injustice can certainly motivate us to act. We can be convinced logically of the need for intervention and change. But it is the story of one individual that ultimately makes the difference—by offering living proof. ↗

— John Capecci and Timothy Cage

#activism-inspiration #advocacy #personal-story #story #storytelling

Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies?...At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook. ↗

— Stuart Hall

#cultural-studies #intellectualism #theory #change