I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure,
that had long appeared dead, revive within me.
Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations,
I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and
forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be
happy. Soft tears again bedewed my cheeks, and
I even raised my humid eyes with thankfulness
towards the blessed sun, which bestowed such joy
upon me.

----------

'Wretch!' I said, 'It is well that you come here to
whine over the desolation that you have made.
You throw a torch into a pile of buildings, and
when they are consumed you sit among the ruins,
and lament the fall.
Hypocritical fiend! If he whom you mourn still lived,
still would he be the object, again would he become
the prey of your accursed vengeance.
It is not pity that you feel; you lament only because
the victim of your malignity is withdrawn from your
power.'

...in the realm of morals the role of Christianity
has been, at best, ambivalent.

Even leaving out of the account the remarkable
arrogance that assumed that the ways and morals
of others were inferior to those of Christians, and
that they therefore had every right, and could use
any means, to change them, the collision
between cultures - and the schizophrenia in the
mind of Christendom - had rendered the domain
of morals as chartless as the sea once was,
and as treacherous as the sea still is.

It is not too much to say that whoever wishes
to become a truly moral human being (and let us
not ask whether or not this is possible; I think
we must believe that is is possible) must first
divorce himself from all the prohibitions,
crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church.

If the concept of God has any validity or any use,
it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more
loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we
got rid of Him.

I have never really had any clear idea why I
wanted to get tattooed except that I find tattoos
profoundly beautiful, alluring, joyful, strange and
interesting. In getting tattooed, we participate
(often unwittingly) in fascinating complex,
controversial, suppressed and entwined histories.
The meanings of tattoos may be deeply personal,
but they are also more than personal: signs in an
ancient and continually expanding network of signs.

Tattooing has been around for over five thousand
years and has developed across the extent of the
globe from the Artic to the Tierra del Fuego. Behind
the tattoo renaissance are long standing and culturally
significant practices involving magic, medicine,
community, ritual and spirituality. Tattoo history is also,
since at least the eighteenth century, a colonial history
in which tattoo practices have been subjected to
repression, as well as becoming caught up in less
violent global processes of cultural exchange. Today,
many indigenous tattoo traditions, especially in the
Pacific, have become resurgent after being demonised
and outlawed by imperial regimes, though there are
now also anxieties about the appropriation of socially
specific designs in our globalised mass culture.

----------

To be normal is to live with an unmarked skin;
to mark the skin is to announce yourself as a
deviant, quite possibly with criminal tendencies.

By comparison to the pre-neoliberal trend,
the bottom 90 percent lost $47 trillion between
1975 and 2018. Conversely, between 1990 and 2020
the wealth of US billionaires, adjusted for inflation,
increased roughly twelvefold. There's a similar story
in other nations. In the UK, wages have stagnated,
while the costs of living - especially housing - have
soared. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic,
the world's ten richest men have doubled their wealth,
while an additional 163 million people have been
pushed below the poverty line.

----------

"Neoliberalism ... has generated economic growth
by pushing workers to the limit, accelerating
resource extraction, and inflating asset values and
household debt. It is an incendiary device - burning
through human relationships and the fabric of our
planet, faster and more ruthlessly than Keynesianism
did. For while neoliberal capitalism continues to loot
the South to enrich the North, it also loots the future
to enrich the present.

'It's the complete physiological equivalent of fear and
rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona
and being murdered by Othello, without any of the
inconveniences.'

'But I like the inconveniences.'

'We don't,' said the Controller.
'We prefer to do things comfortably.'

'But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want
poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I
want goodness, I want sin.'

'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming
the right to be unhappy.'

'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly,
'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly
and impotent; the right to have syphilis and
cancer; the right to have too little to eat;
the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant
apprehension of what may happen tomorrow;
the right to catch typhoid; the right to be
tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.'

There was a long silence.
'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last.

...you were born after the Revolution, but they
haven't put you in prison. Well, have you lost your
faith in socialism, or haven't you?'

Kostogolotov smiled vaguely.
'I don't know. Things got so tough out there, you
sometimes went further than you wanted to, out of
sheer fury.'

Shulubin freed the hand he had been using to prop
himself up on the bench. With this hand, now
enfeebled by disease, he clung to Oleg's shoulder.
'Young Man,' he said, 'don't ever make this mistake.
Don't ever blame socialism for the suffering and the
cruel years you've lived through. However you think
about it, history has rejected capitalism once and for
all!'

'Well, out there, out there in the camps, we used to
argue that there was a lot of good in private enterprise.
It makes life easier, you see. You can always get
everything. You know where to find things.'

'You know, that's a philistine's way of reasoning. It's
true that private enterprise is extremely flexible, but
it's good only within very narrow limits. If private
enterprise isn't held in an iron grip it gives birth to
people who are no better than beasts, those
stock-exchange people with greedy appetites
completely beyond restraint. Capitalism was doomed
ethically before it was doomed economically, a long
time ago.'

Vimes nodded at the woodwork, and went out to
stretch his legs and get some lunch. It was waiting
for him, on a tray, around the neck of a man.
Quite a young man, now, but there was something
about his expression, as of a rat who was expecting
cheese right around the corner, and had been
expecting cheese around the last corner too,
and the corner before that, and, although the world
had turned out so far to be full of corners and yet
completely innocent of any cheese at all, was
nevertheless quite certain that, just around the corner,
cheese awaited.

----------

The Sam Vimes "Boots" Theory of Economic Injustice runs
thus: At the time of Men at Arms, Samuel Vimes earned
thirty-eight dollars a month as a Captain of the Watch,
plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots,
the sort that would last years and years, cost fifty
dollars. This was beyond his pocket and the most he
could hope for was an affordable pair of boots costing
ten dollars, which might with luck last a year or so
before he would need to resort to makeshift cardboard
insoles so as to prolong the moment of shelling out
another ten dollars. Therefore over a period of ten
years, he might have paid out a hundred dollars on boots,
twice as much as the man who could afford fifty dollars
up front ten years before. And he would still have wet feet.

Democracy for an insignificant minority,
democracy for the rich: this is the democratise
of capitalist society. If we look more closely
into the mechanism of capitalist democracy, we
shall see everywhere, both in the 'petty'
- supposedly petty - details of the suffrage
(residential qualification, exclusion of women, etc.)
and in the techniques of the representative of
institutions, in the real obstacles to the right of
assembly (public buildings are not for 'beggars'!)
as well as in the purely capitalist organisation
of the daily press and so on and so forth, we shall
see restriction upon democracy. These restrictions,
exclusion, exceptions, obstacles for the poor, seem
petty, especially in the eyes of anyone who has
never known want himself and never been in close
contact with the oppressed classes in their mass
life (and nine-tenths, if not ninety-nine hundredths,
of bourgeois publicists and politicians are of such
a kind); but the sum total of these restrictions
excludes and shoves out the poor from politics,
from active participation in democracy.

Marx graded the essence of capitalist democracy
magnificently when in analysing the experience of
the Commune, he spoke as follows: the oppressed
are allowed once every few years to decide which
particular representatives of the oppressing class
shall represent and repress them in parliament!

Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods.
I do not know how far my experience is common.
At times I suffer from the strangest sense of
detachment from myself and the world about me;
I seem to watch it all from the outside, from
somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time,
out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of
it all. This feeling was very strong upon me
that night.

----------

I went to a box-room at the top of the house
and locked myself in, in order to be alone
with my aching miseries.

Perhaps, in some places, this enemy science
really does have the means of escaping sabotage,
and reckoning what we are capable of, here and now,
as wage workers, implementing an alien will.
But it has no idea of what we would or could do in
its place, on our own account.

Our sabotage is nothing other than a refusal to give
away our knowledge and experience: the form which
it takes is to falsify them. But can one still talk of
being scientific when the workers see science as
their enemy? ... We reduce the effectiveness of new
technology as much as we can, and we sabotage its
further development.
My workmates don't think much of measures taken to
alleviate work, because they're always accompanied by
an increase in production, or at least a reduction in
pay. The technology of norms has absolutely no place
for methods which lessen the compulsion to produce
without also cutting back wages. If they could invent
a new machine that was less demanding, the worker
would have to service three at the same time;
when an apparatus is introduced which only requires
half an hour's work, someone will have to do this
half-hour as part of what he's doing already. The
eight hours must be worked without rest or respite.
The first goal of a technical science under the
control of workers would be an increase in production
that reduced the amount of work necessary to bring it
about. Of course, that would be possible only if what
happens to profits also came under their control.

Time after time, the villain in Hollywood
films will turn out to be the 'evil corporation'.
Far from undermining capitalist realism, this
gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it.
Take Disney/ Pixar's Wall-E (2008). The film shows
an earth so despoiled that human beings are no
longer capable of inhabiting it. We're left in
no doubt that consumer capitalism and corporations
- or rather one mega-corporation, Buy n Large -
is responsible for this depredation; and when we
eventually see the human beings in offworld
exile, they are infantile and obese, interacting
via screen interfaces, carried around in large
motorised chairs, and supping indeterminate slop
from cups.
What we have here is a vision of control and
communication much as Jean Baudrillard understood
it, in which subjugation no longer takes the form
of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but
rather invites us to interact and participate ...
But this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges
capitalist realism. A film like Wall-E exemplifies
what Robert Pfaller has called 'interpassivity':
the film performs our anti-capitalism for us,
allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.
... So long as we believe (in our hearts) that
capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to
participate in capitalist exchange.