Academics From The United States

"When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are."

"I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people… To me, that’s what the emerging game is all about."

"The ways in which these economic processes, largely originating in the US, have, in short order, flowed around the world is breathtaking and, unfortunately, well illustrates this book's major themes."

"Of course, it remains to be seen what the effect of the Great Recession will be on resistance to globalization. It seems clear, however, that if the recession grows deeper and extends over a long period of time, it will spur much greater resistance to globalization."

"Globalization reinforces preexisting gender structures, barriers, and relationships, only now on a global scale."

"It is also often argued that neo-liberalism, especially neo-liberal economics, helps those in the advantaged categories and hurts, often badly, those in the disadvantaged categories."

"It is increasingly difficult to find examples of warfare that are unaffected by globalization."

"What defines Web 2.0 is the fact that the material on it is generated by the users (consumers) rather than the producers of the system. Thus, those who operate on Web 2.0 can be called prosumers because they simultaneously produce what they consume such as the interaction on Facebook and the entries on Wikipedia."

"Globalization can also be seen as flow of "nothing" (as opposed to "something"), involving the spread of non-places, non-things, non-people and non-services."

"The system is run by the few with the few as the main beneficiaries. Most of the people in the world have no say in these systems and are either not helped or are adversely affected by them."

"If states themselves are less able to handle various responsibilities, this leaves open the possibility of the emergence of some form of global governance to fill the void."

"While the US was hegemonic in the era of geopolitics, it is greatly weakened as globalization competes with, and gains ascendancy over, geopolitics."

"It was the mass sale and distribution of novels and newspapers that was critical to the rise of the imagined nation."

"Free markets induce a natural collective reaction by society."

"One cannot understand globalization, and many of its problems, without understanding neo-liberalism."

"In the end, the key point is that in gaining a better understanding of these processes, we gain a more nuanced and sophisticated sense of the fundamental nature of globalization."

"Cultural imperialism involved, among many other things, exploration, missionary and humanitarian missions, travel, and the use of education and publishing to disseminate European ideas."

"The polar view, as it was for Marx, is that it was not material factors, but rather ideal factors, that are the main drivers of globalization."

"One important point about the idea that there are multiple globalizations is the fact that it further complicates the whole idea of finding a point of origin for globalization."

"Marx's insight of a century-and-a-half ago was not only highly prescient, but is far truer today than in Marx's day."

"I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system than as a technology."

"The long campaign against Julian and WikiLeaks is a window into the collapse of the rule of law, the rise of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of "inverted totalitarianism," a form of totalitarianism that maintains the fictions of the old capitalist democracy, including its institutions, iconography, patriotic symbols and rhetoric, but internally has surrendered total control to the dictates of global corporations"

"Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash."

"While the versions of totalitarianism represented by Nazism and Fascism consolidated power by suppressing liberal political practices that had sunk only shallow cultural roots, Superpower represents a drive towards totality that draws from the setting where liberalism and democracy have been established for more than two centuries. It is Nazism turned upside-down, “inverted totalitarianism.” While it is a system that aspires to totality, it is driven by an ideology of the cost-effective rather than of a “master race” (Herrenvolk), by the material rather than the “ideal.”"

"Weber... formulated the idea of methodology to serve, not simply as a guide to investigation but as a moral practice and a mode of political action."

"Digital information is really just people in disguise."

"There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory."

"The greatest crime of Marxism wasn't simply that much of what it claimed was false but that it claimed to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality."

"There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility."

"The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates."

"The problem is that in every example we know, a layer that can change fast also can't change very much."

"Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow."

"Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics."

"If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources."

"There has been over a decade of work worldwide in Darwinian approaches to generating software, and... nothing has arisen from the work that would make software in general any better."

"People are demonstrably insane when it comes to assessing human sentience."

"The quest to rationally prove the possibility of sentience in a computer (or perhaps in the Internet) is the modern version of proving God's existence. ...eventually a cybernetically minded twenty-first century version of Kant will appear in order to present a tedious "proof" that such adventures are futile."

"We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people. Information is alienated experience. Information is not something that exists. Indeed, computers don't really exist, exactly; they're only subject to human interpretation. This is a strong primary humanism I am promoting. As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value, our creativity, our sense of reality, then all of our work with computers will be worthwhile and beautiful."

"The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It's really precious, and it's really easy to lose."

"We're over protecting our children offline and under protecting them online."

"First, kill all the math classes beyond algebra. Stop wasting so much of our students’ time learning math. It’s not useful, it’s not helpful."

"I think we went through — in America, at least, we went through a period in the ’60s and ’70s when the education establishment became extremely liberal, and part of that is a flirtation with relativism. And a resistance — it’s horrible to think of — of adults telling kids what’s right and wrong. What a terrible thing. That’s oppression. And so we created these sort of value-free spaces, which conveys a value, which is that there’s no right or wrong, everyone decides for themselves. Uh, everyone’s opinion is equal. You should say your opinion and then you get a lot of incivility. What I would like to see is a revamped civics curriculum where we teach very explicitly the long tradition of left-right. Um, we teach what each side is. You can’t say right about it, that’s my language. But, um, you teach what each side is concerned about. You know, very much like the line here. Uh, both are essential. One without the other creates an unbalanced American civic order."

"So, we’ve reached the state that George Will described. He said there’s a certain kind of liberal that wants diversity in everything, except thought. And so, we do need certain kinds of diversity. But the key to remember is that, diversity by its very nature is divisive, and so, what’s the function of your group? If your group needs cohesion, you don’t want diversity. If your group needs good, clear thinking and you want people to challenge your prejudices, then you need it. So in the academic world, we need that kind of diversity, and we don’t have it."

"I know this is the question period, but there’s a quote here which is just so relevant. I hope I can — I hope I can read it. It’s from an article by, uh, Yossi Klein Halevi on Pesach Jews versus Purim Jews. So he talks about these — there’s these two threads, these two strands among — among — among Jews in — actually, there’s more in Israel. But it’s here, too. So he — I just love this, and it fits so well with — with — with The Righteous Mind. He says, uh, Jewish history speaks to our generation in the voice of two Biblical commands to remember."

"And so, uh, uh, a wonderful book, um, American Grace by, uh, Putnam and Campbell, um, uh, is the ultimate authority on this. What they find is that, um, it doesn’t matter what religion you are, and it doesn’t matter what you believe, if you are part of a religious community, then on average, you’re a better citizen, you give more to charity. Religion does bring out the good in people. Now, secular people can be perfectly good, too, but on average, they give less and they give less of their time. So, I’d like to think that I simply, as a secular atheist scientist, followed the evidence, and it showed me that I was wrong in thinking that religion was evil."

"Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say."

"Religions are moral s. If you live in a religious community, you are enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions that […] influence your behavior. But if you are an atheist living in a looser community, you might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass […] That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for —Durkheim's word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order. (It means, literally, "normlessness.") We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago.Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don't really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few)."

"Egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se."

"Republicans understand moral psychology. Democrats don't."

"Sports is to war as pornography is to sex."