zmkccommonplace

[zmkccommonplace]

How many things there are that I do not want.

Socrates

[zmkccommonplace]

The drastic drop in babies being born doesn't just mean fewer children, but fewer grandparents, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, cousins, and siblings.

People can shrug and say 'whatever' but I think it's profoundly sad. There is less joy, love, and even responsibility to go around. More loneliness and despair.

Not everything important can be precisely quantified and explained by data. But it doesn't mean they're unimportant.

"Show me the studies!"

No. Some things are just human.

Someone on Twitter

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Mick Numerari Tjapaltjarri

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No culture before ours has so willingly abjured procreation, so enthusiastically practised abortion, so demonised those who demurred & so refused to understand the demographic consequences of "no consequences".

The Devil's Pleasure Palace, Michael Walsh

[zmkccommonplace]

If there is such a thing as a Southern way of life, part of it has to do with not speaking of it.

Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome

[zmkccommonplace]

La rage des phrases t’a desséché le cœur.

Your passion for rendering life into sentences has dried up your heart.

Flaubert's mother to her son. Quoted in Correspondance. II, p. 584, lettre à Louis Bouilhet du 27 juin 1855.

[zmkccommonplace]

Making energy expensive does not save the planet, it just drives up prices.

Eugyppius

[zmkccommonplace]

The relentless and highly concentrated stupidity of our rulers is a very great weight to bear.

Eugyppius

https://open.substack.com/pub/eugyppius/p/in-the-latest-leftoid-failure-to?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1z6vbu

[zmkccommonplace]

Don’t let the AI win: write and publish your own unreadable mess.

Someone on Twitter.

[zmkccommonplace]

Calling swimming outdoors "wild swimming" is a bit like calling lawn mowing “wild vacuuming”.

Someone called Tom Cox on Substack

[zmkccommonplace]

Decline and collapse can often become embedded institutionally.

A Twitter thread:

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'Woke' isn’t ill-defined: it is the maximalist exploitation of American civil rights law, which renders almost any citizen sue-able for violations of others’ rights to equality.

Christopher Caldwell

[zmkccommonplace]

A government of redistributionists when there is nothing to redistribute.

Someone on Twitter describing the current UK Labour government, in response to someone else's comment that "Labour MPs came into politics having built their whole political careers on the assumption that the central problem with Tories was that they spent too little. They were therefore totally unprepared, emotionally or intellectually, for coming into government after Tories had spent too much"

[zmkccommonplace]

It seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet any more, ever.

David Foster Wallace, 2003

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It is always important to recognise that there is no view from nowhere.

Emily Bender, sceptical about AI

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Don't think that pleasing God lies so much in doing a great deal as in doing it with good will, without possessiveness and the approval of men.

St. John of the Cross

[zmkccommonplace]

She looks as if she never had to wash her own gloves.

Ivy Compton-Burnett on the novelist Elizabeth Taylor