欧宝娱乐

“At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelievers and in any case contemptuous of Christianity. I have my own differences with both of these savants, but is the Republican Party really prepared to disown such modern intellectuals as it can claim, in favor of a shallow, demagogic and above all sectarian religiosity?

Perhaps one could phrase the same question in two further ways. At the last election, the GOP succeeded in increasing its vote among American Jews by an estimated five percentage points. Does it propose to welcome these new adherents or sympathizers by yelling in the tones of that great Democrat bigmouth William Jennings Bryan? By insisting that evolution is 'only a theory'? By demanding biblical literalism and by proclaiming that the Messiah has already shown himself? If so, it will deserve the punishment for hubris that is already coming its way. (The punishment, in other words, that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson believed had struck America on Sept. 11, 2001. How can it be that such grotesque characters, calling down divine revenge on the workers in the World Trade Center, are allowed a respectful hearing, or a hearing at all, among patriotic Republicans?).

[. . . And Why I'm Most Certainly Not! -- The Wall Street Journal, Commentary Column. May 5, 2005]”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Absolutely nothing is as important as knowing who to trust.”
― Radovan Kavick媒

“Faith is for sissies who daren't go and look for themselves. That鈥檚 my basic position. Magic is based upon gnosis. Direct knowledge.”
― Alan Moore, Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths

“Time is weird. That much is obvious. Sometimes I think everything happens at once, which is anything but obvious and even weirder. I feel sorry for people who brag about 'living in the moment'; they're like people who come into the cinema after the film has started or people who drink Diet Coke鈥攖hey're missing out on the best part. I think time is like the dial on a radio. Most people like to settle on a station with a clear signal and no interference. But that doesn't mean you can't listen to two or even three stations at the same time; it doesn't mean synchrony is impossible. Until quite recently, people believed it was impossible for a universe to fit inside two atoms, but it fits. Why dismiss the idea that on time's radio you can listen to the entire history of humanity simultaneously?”
― Marcelo Figueras, Kamchatka

“I'm sorry, anal sex," Beavers continued, embarrassed by her slip of the tongue.”
― Dale Carpenter, Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas

“When you're a kid, the world can be bounded in a nutshell. In geographical terms, a child's universe is a space that comprises home, school and鈥攑ossibly鈥攖he neighbourhood where your cousins or your grandparents live. In my case, the universe sat comfortably within a small area of Flores that ran from the junction of Boyac谩 and Avellaneda (my house), to the Plaza Flores (my school). My only forays beyond the area were when we went on holiday (to C贸rdoba or Bariloche or to the beach) or occasional, increasingly rare visits to my grandparents' farm in Dorrego, in the province of Buenos Aires.

We get our fist glimpse of the big wide world from those we love unconditionally. If we see our elders suffer because they cannot get a job, or see them demoted, or working for a pittance, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the world outside is cruel and brutal. (This is politics.) If we hear our parents bad-mouthing certain politicians and agreeing with their opponents, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the former are bad guys and the latter are good guys. (This is politics.) If we observe palpable fear in our parents at the very sight of soldiers and policemen, our compassion translates our observations and we conclude that, though all children have bogeymen, ours wear uniforms. (This is politics.)”
― Marcelo Figueras, Kamchatka

“No. 2鈥檚 infamous opening line is a double gambit: the Village does not really want information, of course, only obedience. (From their point of view, information is an exchange-value, not a use-value). In fact, it is No. 6 who truly wants information: information on who No. 1 is, where the Village really is, which side runs it, and how it might be possible to escape.”
― Dennis Redmond, The World is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 1968-1995

“This is the problem about thinking about something else to take your mind off something. It works for a little while, but in the end you always come back to the thing you were trying not to think about, only now whatever it was is worse.”
― Marcelo Figueras, Kamchatka

“But remember 2003, though, when girls wore those miniskirts that were like six floaty napkins stapled to a scrunchie, with perhaps an Edwardian waistcoat sewn of cobwebs as a top? Where at any moment a baby鈥檚 sneeze across campus might expose Kaylee鈥檚 entire bunghole and even the slouchy Western belt she wore over her three layers of different-colored camisoles couldn鈥檛 save her? In case you鈥檝e repressed the memory, 2003 was the kind of year where Jessica Simpson might wear rubber flip-flops to the Golden Globes, and Nicole Richie was nearly elected president on a platform of 鈥渟traight blonde hair on top, long curly dark brown extensions underneath, one feather.鈥� The 2003 vibe鈥攃ulturally, socially, politically, spiritually鈥攚as very 鈥渆nergy drink commercial directed by Mark McGrath, and not Mark McGrath in his prime, either.鈥� Millions of Americans were forced to mourn Mr. Rogers while wearing a hot-pink corduroy train conductor鈥檚 hat. Never again! Bad Boys II is a 2003 movie.”
― Lindy West, Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema

“Or take a vacation. Everywhere in America is pretty much the same, and I don't recommend going overseas, not with the way the world regards us. It's just not safe now, safe being one of those words like free or clean or sincere that can never be said without the invisible quotation marks anymore, but still. You should get away.”
― Dave Mountain, Timewaste

“Snakes shed their skin, cats their fur, manta rays their teeth. Man sheds used-up objects: he leaves an open Nesquik tin and a dirty glass on the kitchen counter, an open toothpaste tube, unmade beds, their sheets stained with urine; he leaves grandfather clocks, cigarette burns in the ashtrays, comics that have been scrawled on and books borrowed from the school library; he leaves clothes in the wardrobes and food in the fridge.”
― Marcelo Figueras, Kamchatka

“There is a tendency in the academic study of magic to characterise magical belief and practice as irrational. This tendency is the result of a misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the nature of magic and of its historical role in Western culture. This misrepresentation is dependent upon two erroneous interpretations of magical practice and belief. The first interpretation is derived from a religious view of the world and the second from an apparent scientific view of the world. Early biblical religion provides us with some of the first written documents that deal with magic. In this forum magic is depicted as evil and forbidden yet, most importantly, it is portrayed as being quite real. This understanding of magic prevailed in the Middle Ages when unorthodox and deviant religious practices were classified by the Church as magical. The scientific viewpoint dismissed magic in favour of the more objectively verifiable applications of scientific practices and beliefs. The Age of Enlightenment furthered this early scientific approach by characterising magic not only as inefficient but also as irrational when placed under the scrutiny of newly established scientific and empirical methods. These two understandings of magic, one as terrible and real, and the other as inefficient and wrong, continue to taint the western comprehension of magic.”
― Alison Butler, Magical Beginnings: The Intellectual Origins of the Victorian Occult Revival

“鈥he end of the Cold War has brought not prosperity for all but a pitiless economic struggle for pole-position on the food chain of information capitalism. The neoliberalism and neocolonialism of the 1990s are the direct heir of the Manchester liberalism and colonialism of the 1890s, the only difference being that whereas Victorian rentiers extracted their Imperial textile-rents from the labor of the Great Unwashed, their postmodern analogues on Wall Street speculate on the viewing-rents of the Great Unwatched.”
― Dennis Redmond, The World is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 1968-1995

“Secondly, there鈥檚 no question but that the speculative drive of the post-structuralisms and postmodernisms harmonized, on some deep level, with the real life financial speculations of Wall Street. At their best, the postmodernisms were the critical meditation and reflection upon those speculations (as with 闯补尘别蝉辞苍鈥檚 classic essay on postmodernism); at their worst, they were little more than the media-chatter of academic superstars shielded from the grim realities of economic austerity, skyrocketing tuition and rampant privatization 鈥� realities which had begun to undercut the very existence of autonomous national literary, philosophical and cultural departments, as tenured and full-time positions were slashed to make way for vast pools of contingent and adjunct academic workers.”
― Dennis Redmond, The World is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 1968-1995

“The most direct critique [in the TV series The Prisoner] of what might be called the politics-industry of late capitalism, however, is undoubtedly [the episode] 鈥淔ree for All鈥�, both the funeral dirge for the national mass party and the unofficial founding charter of the New Left. In many ways, 鈥淔ree for All鈥� is the logical complement to the visual innovations and luminous mediatic strategies of 鈥淎., B. & C.鈥�; whereas the latter identifies the space of the editing room as a new kind of cultural zone, and thus transforms a certain visual recursion into a protomorphic video library of images, the former concentrates not on the image per se but on the messages and texts transmitted by such鈥攐r what Derrida would identify as the thematic of a dissemination which is never quite identical with what is being disseminated. But where deconstruction and post-structuralism promptly sealed off this potentially explosive insight behind the specialized ghettos of linguistics or ontological philosophy, and thus unwittingly perpetuated precisely the authoritarian monopoly over theory authorized by the ontologies in the first place, the most insightful intellectuals of the New Left (most notably, Adorno and Sartre) would insist on the necessarily mediated nature of this dissemination, i.e. the fact that the narrative-industries of late capitalism are hardly innocent bystanders in the business of accumulation, but play an indispensable role in creating new markets, restructuring old ones, and ceaselessly legitimating, transacting and regulating the sway of the commodity form over society as a whole.”
― Dennis Redmond, The World is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 1968-1995

“The political version of this was the seemingly clearcut choice before the New Left, to either transform the Establishment from within (the Long March through the institutions envisioned by the Prague Spring reformers and Western social democrats alike), or else to instigate an actual revolution in the streets. History teaches us that both options were illusory; national social democracy could temporarily flourish in the hothouse export-platform economies of Central Europe, but a resurgent neoliberalism was about to strangle the effective global demand this model depended on and thus reactivate the latent class tensions smoothed over by the golden age of state-monopoly Keynesianism; meanwhile the national-democratic and anti-colonial revolutions in the Second and Third Worlds could defeat the US Empire鈥檚 rampaging armies with guerilla tactics, but could hardly be expected to counter the far more insidious enemy of falling raw materials prices on world markets. Neither international solidarity actions nor neo-national political disruptions were, by themselves, really capable of challenging the henceforth global habitus of multinational capitalism; only truly transnational labor and political movements would be able to do that.”
― Dennis Redmond, The World is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 1968-1995

“Repression in late capitalism does not typically involve the absolute expropriation of the subject typical of liberal or monopoly capitalism (the nationalism which violently excludes other nationalities, the sexism which expropriates women鈥檚 household labor on behalf of masculinized national corporations and power-bureaucracies, the racism by which the colonies and colonized are held in subjection to the colonists, and so forth) but what might be termed its relative immiseration on the multinational marketplace of identity: thus the celebrated media superstar whose very existence depends on the implicit devaluation of non-celebrities; the CNBC-style telejournalism which reduces the global economy to the chatter of wealthy white male stockholders retailing the retailing of retailing on behalf of even wealthier (and whiter) male stockholders; or the business culture of the giant multinationals or multis, which is open to any cultural group just as long as they swear fealty to the commodity form.”
― Dennis Redmond, The World is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 1968-1995

“Heiner M眉ller zeroed in on this contradiction by noting ascerbically that the main economic activity of the Eastern regimes was always the production of state enemies (in other words, the system produced vast numbers of literate, well-educated workers who could not fail to notice the yawning gap between the ideal of a people鈥檚 democracy and the despotism of the one-party state).”
― Dennis Redmond, The World is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 1968-1995

“Il n鈥檈st jamais mauvais de redire que ce n鈥檈st pas la th茅orie de Marx qui 芦 r茅duit 禄 tout 脿 l鈥櫭ヽonomie, mais 芦 la soci茅t茅 marchande qui constitue le plus grand 鈥渞茅ductionnisme鈥� jamais vu 禄 ; et que 芦pour sortir de ce 鈥渞茅ductionnisme鈥�, il faut sortir du capitalisme, non de sa critique 禄.”
― Jaime Sempr煤n

“The movies were just kind of figuring out how to use computers in 2003, and nobody was just kind of figuring out how to use computers harder than Michael Bay. It鈥檚 tempting to say that every frame of Bad Boys II looks like a TV commercial, but truly every frame looks like a print advertisement, like those Candies ads where Jenny McCarthy鈥檚 taking a shit, shallow and glossy and tinged acid green. There are four car chases, one of which is at least fifteen minutes long. Even the most passing transitions are giddily tasteless: the camera EXPLODES out of the speedboat鈥檚 tailpipe and ZOOMS across Biscayne Bay and WHAMS down the ventilation shaft in the backward sunglasses factory and SHOOMPS into the buttcrack of a raver鈥檚 low-rise jeans and SPROINGS across her transverse colon and SQUEAKS through her appendix and AIRHORNS out her belly button and PLOPS into the Cuban drug lord鈥檚 mojito as he shoots his favorite nephew in the head while saying, 鈥淎dios, kemosabe,鈥� or something fucking cool like that.

When faced with a choice, Bay picks 鈥渁ll of the above鈥� every time. He鈥檚 like a dog in one of those obedience trials who鈥檚 like, 鈥淥bedience? I don鈥檛 know her,鈥� and just goes buck wild on the sausages. Except instead of 鈥渙bedience鈥� it鈥檚 鈥渉aving a coherent plot that holds the audience鈥檚 attention鈥� and instead of 鈥渟ausages鈥� it鈥檚 鈥渆xplosions, Ferrari chases, and how many different cool kinds of box could a gun come in.”
― Lindy West, Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema

“I had big fun and big opportunities; we pulled out the extensions on business and made it do more for life.”
― Gordon Roddick