A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls— with no principles, rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictatorship. A mixed economy has no principles to define its policies, its goals, its laws— no principles to limit the power of its government. The only principle of a mixed economy— which, necessarily, has to remain unnamed and unacknowledged— is that no one’s interests are safe, everyone’s interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it.
Ayn Rand in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
Crowds of isolated individuals
The disappearance of conscious personality and the turning of feelings and thoughts in a definite direction, which are the primary characteristics of a crowd about to become organised, do not always involve the simultaneous presence of a number of individuals on one spot. Thousands of isolated individuals may acquire at certain moments, and under the influence of certain violent emotions — such, for example, as a great national event — the characteristics of a psychological crowd. It will be sufficient in that case that a mere chance should bring them together for their acts to at once assume the characteristics peculiar to the acts of a crowd. At certain moments half a dozen men might constitute a psychological crowd, which may not happen in the case of hundreds of men gathered together by accident. On the other hand, an entire nation, though there may be no visible agglomeration, may become a crowd under the action of certain influences.
Gustave Le Bon in the book The Crowd
At the end of the 1980s, Theodore Dalrymple sensed that the communist regimes around the world were on the verge of collapse. So he decided to visit these countries as soon as possible to see them before the likely changes to come. His impressions are collected in the book The Wilder Shores of Marx. An excerpt from the book that I remember often is the following:
"I came to the conclusion that the purpose of propaganda in communist countries was not to persuade, much less to inform, but to humiliate and emasculate. In this sense, the less true it was, the less it corresponded in any way to reality, the better; the more it contradicted the experience of the persons to whom it was directed, the more docile, self- despising for their failure to protest, and impotent they became."
Every time I see the blatant lies told by the powerful and by the legacy press, that snippet comes to my mind.
Was space conceived by the atomists of antiquity as an unbounded extension, permeated by all bodies and permeating all bodies, or was it only the sum total of all the diastemata, the intervals that separate atom from atom and body from body, assuring their discreteness and possibility of motion?
Max Jammer in Concepts of Space
As there is no way into get notes vanishing
I am going to ressurect them
Is there some Greek speaking person here who can tell me what this guy is saying? I like the music but I don't know whether the lyrics are good to the same extent.
Sleeping is not always easy.
Good night #nostr.
From doubt into despair.
Who am I?