People From Buffalo

"Objectivism's philosophy of man begins with the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness: man is the one animal who has to choose to be conscious, to use his mind. Man is a rational animal, and reason is his only guide to knowledge, reason being that faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses."

"Taxation is by definition legalized robbery. Clearly, it is initiated coercion. As such, no Objectivist can in good conscience support it. So, naturally, most of them don't. Ayn Rand, in her essay in The Virtue of Selfishness entitled "Government Financing in a Free Society," states emphatically that the financing of the state in a free society would be voluntary. But can it be?"

"To a large degree it has been and remains big businessmen who are the fountainheads of American statism."

"The only logical attitude that any Objectivist should take toward the present government and constitution is one of uncompromising hostility. And since one does not sanction evil in any capacity, that means that every Objectivist should withdraw his sanction from the political establishment immediately and in every possible way."

"The new anticapitalist are, in spirit and motive, deontologists, and thus criticized not so much the consequences of capitalism (though this teleological elements is present), but motives, e.g., the profit motive, acquisitiveness, ‘materialism’ and the like."

"Now, state socialism, by objecting to one form of ownership, mainly the right of individual ownership over the means of production, in effect, placed the lives and liberty of all its citizens in the hands of a government clique and does this very simply because no liberty could be achieved in society. If the state apparatus alone has control over means of production like printing presses and the broadcast medium of the airwaves, this control of the means of production is a control over the ends that people in society can seek."

"The choices allowed the people are artificial and superficial at best, and are always determined by the state itself."

"The more complex the faculty of awareness or consciousness is in an organism, the more discriminations are possible to it, i.e., the more differentiating and integration between and of aspects of reality it is capable of engaging in."

"Conservatives propose to oppose the growth of the state by supporting politicians. And what do politicians do? They support the growth of the state. Conservatives would have you believe that you can dehydrate a plant by watering it, or get rid of rats by feeding them."

"And more: by rushing into politics, what principles are the conservatives abandoning, and which are they accepting? Voting and political action itself implies a sanctioning of the state, and hence of its basis — the rule of man by man. The conservatives would fight the principle by adopting it. They oppose the state — by sanctioning the entire governing process. What will be the result? The growth of the state."

"If news organizations learned anything after the campaign, they should have learned that groupthink has a tendency to miss the point and journalistic myopia requires some extra-strength corrective lenses. Do something different. Represent the interests of a broader, more ideologically diverse population. Figure out what they’re thinking and feeling — and why."

"In the wacky new world of fake news, conspiracy theories, es — and social media’s unthinking participation in spreading all of that — facts and truth get lost in the noise. A responsible media needs to be especially careful not to unwittingly spread lies by amplifying them. Some early coverage of Trump’s recent unwarranted, evidence-free blasts about the illegality of some of the popular vote fell into that trap. It’s depressing but a fact of life that a lot of people don’t know the difference between fake news and conspiracy bilge and verified fact. Nor do they seem to care."

"After spending the first three decades of my career at one of Buffett’s papers, the Buffalo News, I’m not willing to accept that. Even now, my former newsroom — down by about half from its peak — is doing critically important work, not just crucial watchdog journalism (insider trading by a congressman) but cultural coverage (memories of a concert venue) that knits the community together. Amid this nightmare financial scenario, what can be done? [Philip] Napoli, for one, thinks that American citizens and our big thinkers need to buckle down — fast — about substantial policy changes that could involve both direct and indirect public funding for local journalism. It "would take us in a more European direction," he said. That notion, once radioactive in journalism because it seems to threaten the independence of news organizations, must now be taken seriously."

"Trump is, of course, a master of distraction and . It’s possible to resist being his chump, but it takes continued self-regulation."

"We — the traditional, the legacy, the mainstream media — have to change."

""Fair and balanced" was the original Fox News lie, one of the rotten planks that built the foundation for Wednesday's democratic disaster. Over decades, with that false promise accepted as gospel by millions of devotees, Fox News radicalized a nation and spawned more extreme successors such as Newsmax and One America News. Day after day, hour after hour, Fox gave its viewers something that looked like news or commentary but far too often lacked sufficient adherence to a necessary ingredient: truth. Birtherism. The caravan invasion. Covid denialism. Rampant election fraud. All of these found a comfortable home at Fox. In the Trump era, the network — now out of favor for not being quite as shameless as the president demands — was his best friend and promoter. So to put it bluntly: The mob that stormed and desecrated the Capitol on Wednesday could not have existed in a country that hadn’t been radicalized by the likes of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, and swayed by biased news coverage."

"Often it has been that reporter who has most skillfully played the access game — the one who has curried just enough favor with the powerful newsmaker to be smiled upon, without giving up basic credibility and integrity. That’s access journalism. Accountability journalism, by contrast, is often performed off to the side, by those who don’t have to deal with the news provider on a regular basis."

"[O]ne key to running Twitter is the tricky matter of "managing up". Anyone who's ever worked in a corporation or big agency, especially as a manager, knows that you have to handle the boss. You have to keep them informed, hold off their worst instincts, tactfully set boundaries and, most of all, somehow convince them that every move you make is really their brilliant idea – or at least a fulfillment of their underlying vision. And there's the rub. Twitter’s problems are solvable. But the volatile and narcissistic Elon Musk|Musk]] may be the boss that can’t be managed."

"[[Tucker Carlson|[Tucker] Carlson]] has never been a stickler for the truth, as he proved in the run-up to this interview, when he claimed that he was the only western media figure who cared enough to get [[Vladimir Putin|[Vladimir] Putin]] on the record. That's absurd. Many American reporters have tried unsuccessfully to sit down with Putin, especially since the invasion of Ukraine. But the Russian president was waiting for the right stooge. With Carlson, he got just that."

"Food in these poems is a connection to the natural world, to what Lucille Clifton calls "the bond of live things everywhere" in her poem, "cutting greens.""

"I would also suggest that everyone read the poetry of Lucille Clifton, a black heterodox Christian woman who seems to me the most important spiritual poet in America today."

"Lucille stayed late, singing the song of/carrying on, admitting the truth.../"Things don't fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect/in thin ways that last and last . . ."/Lucille gave everything she had."

"People I read a lot to my son were people like Robert Bly and Lucille Clifton, Frank O’Hara for some reason, Chinese poems, Japanese poems."

"Lucille Clifton is able to do something difficult: take the strengths of poetry and apply them in such a way that you have first-rate prose."

"One thing poetry teaches us, if anything, is that everything is connected…There is so much history that we have not validated."

"One of my favorite poets is Lucille Clifton, author of a good number of fine books, including Blessing the Boats, Quilting, and Two-Headed Woman."

"(The book that...shaped my worldview:) Lucille Clifton’s poetry collection Good Woman. I have long considered her the secret godmother of my writing since I was 15, and this was the first collection of hers I owned."

"born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself?"

"Other than “the unanswerable question”… It’s the heart speaking, maybe that, maybe the human heart speaking."

"… A lot of women have borne a lot of things; a lot of people have borne a lot of things. There’s a certain kind of human that I want to be. There is not shame in my life. There is certainly misfortune, but I’m not the only one. I do know that. And sometimes, one of the things poetry can do is say to an audience: you are not alone. It can also speak for those who have not yet found their voice to speak. That’s part of the human condition. And if we’re going to talk about humans, why are we just going to talk about the pretty ones."

"… I am a grown-up, sensual woman, even at this age and size. People would think you wouldn't be. I'm open to the whole of human experience."

"Assigning central importance to the aesthetic in human experience may seem to be a radical inversion, placing what is usually considered secondary and peripheral at the center of the human world as its nourishing source. Isn’t this an ingenuous simplification of the vast range and complexity of experience?"

"Crowds of silent voices whisper in our ears, transforming the nature of what we see and hear. Some are those of childhood authorities and heroes; others come from family and peers. The strangest emerge from beyond the grave."

"The ultimate repository of herd influence is language—a device which not only condenses the opinions of those with whom we share a common vocabulary, but sums up the perceptual approach of swarms who have passed on."

"Almost every reality you "know" at any given second is a mere ghost held in memory."

"Reality is a fabrication slapped together by an often bumbling inner team. ...The proclamation that "there can be no such thing as an objective fact" has a great deal of validity."

"Individual perception untainted by others' influence does not exist."

"In the Vienna of the late 1020s and 1930s there throve an internationally famous philosophical bunch called the logical positivists. ...They said that a key ingredient of knowledge was "sense data," and proclaimed emphatically, in the words of... J.S.L. Gilmour, that sense data are "objective and unalterable." …Good guess, but no cigar!"

"Through our sentences and paragraphs long-gone ghosts still have their say within the collective mind."

"A collective learning machine achieves its feats by using five elements... (1) conformity enforcers; (2) diversity generators; (3) inner-judges; (4) resource shifters; and (5) intergroup tournaments."

"By 1999, over 880 studies suggested that some mutations might... be genetic alterations "custom tailored" to overcome emergencies."

"If entemologists have things backward, their errors have spawned a host of others central to modern evolutionary science. ...E. O. Wilson is... the founder of a rich and fruitful discipline—sociobiology. And sociobiology has... helped lay the groundwork for the dogma of the "selfish gene.""

"Remember a networked learning machine's most basic rule: strengthen the connections to those who succeed, weaken them to those who fail."

"The microbial brain—gifted with long-range transport, data trading, genetic variants... and the ability to reinvent genomes—began its operations some 91 trillion bacterial generations before the birth of the Internet. Ancient bacteria, if they functioned like those today, had mastered the art of worldwide information exchange. ...The earliest microorganisms would have used planet-sweeping currents of wind and water to carry the scraps of genetic code..."

"The notion that individualism came first runs against the very grain of cosmic history. ...grouping has been inherent in evolution since the first quarks joined to form neutrons and protons. Similarly, replicators—RNA, DNA, and genes—have always worked in teams... The bacteria of 3.5 billion years ago were creatures of the crowd. So were the trilobites and echinoderms of the Cambrian age."

"Primordial communities of bacteria were elaborately interwoven by communication links. ...These turned a colony into a collective processor... The resulting learning machine was so ingenious that Eshel Ben-Jacob has called its modern bacterial counterpart a "creative web.""

"When Richard Dawkins first published his idea of a meme, he made it clear he was speaking of "a unit of imitation"… Memes were supposed to be exclusive triumphs of humanity. But memes come in two different kinds—behavioral and verbal. ...behavioral memes began brain-hopping long before there were such things as human minds."

"We must build a picture of the human soul that works. ...a recognition that the enemy is within us and that Nature has placed it there. ...for a reason. And we must understand that reason to outwit her."

"Men and animals do not merely struggle to maintain their individual existence; they are members of larger social groups. And, all too often, it is the social unit, not the individual, whose survival comes first."

"From our best qualities come our worst. From our urge to pull together comes our tendency to pull apart. From our devotion to higher good comes our propensity to the foulest atrocities. From our commitment to ideals come our excuse to hate. Since the beginning of history, we have been blinded by evil's ability to don a selfless disguise. We have failed to see that our finest qualities often lead us to the actions we most abhor—murder, torture, genocide, and war."