marjaana

"Es zeugt von maÃÃ...¸loser Selbstüberhebung, wenn Politiker, die nicht einmal wissen, wie sich die Anhebung der Mehrwertsteuer um zwei Prozent auf die Wirtschaft auswirkt, den Anstieg der Erderwärmung auf zwei Grad begrenzen wollen. Als Nächstes werden sie sich vornehmen, die Erde etwas schneller rotieren zu lassen, damit die Sonne zweimal am Tag aufgehen kann. Den Rhein bergauf flieÃÃ...¸en zu lassen wäre auch eine extrem erfolgversprechende Idee."
Henryk M. Broder über den Klimagipfel von Kopenhagen.

Stupidly entitled but worthwhile article on how preachers of the prosperity gospel may have contributed to America's current financial woes.

"Vampires are monsters of the right; zombies are monsters of the left. Vampires are toffs; zombies are proles. Vampires are individualists; zombies are the mindless, nameless, faceless mob."

"Recently, various new constructions or new words have been proposed to mitigate perceived English linguistic sexism; these are innovations, and must be evaluated as such. But singular 'their' (etc.) is not an innovation, but old established good usage. So here anti-sexism and traditional English usage go hand-in-hand -- and those who object to singular 'their' can find no support from history, linguistics, or the aim of inclusive language."

Milton Friedman on F.A. Hayek in 1994:
"I'm not a conservative. I never have been a conservative. Hayek was not a conservative. - - We are radicals. We want to get to the root of things. We are liberals in the true meaning of that term - of and concerned with freedom. We are not liberals in the current distorted sense of the term - people who are liberal with other people's money."

"Is it not pitiable that the prose you encounter in some newsmagazine in Nigeria today is better than what you see in Nigerian fiction which is wrongly tilted toward the simplicity of the masses / audience?"

"The new Nigerian novelist who locates his space within the theory of the novelist as a teacher labours constantly to dull his story with backgrounds and commentaries that give the novel an aspect of a pamphlet or a textbook."

"If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today's Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. More generally, when we contemplate Auschwitz and the Gulag, we tend to think of the states that built them as systems, as modern tyrannies, or totalitarian states. Yet such considerations of thought and politics in Berlin and Moscow tend to overlook the fact that mass killing happened, predominantly, in the parts of Europe between Germany and Russia, not in Germany and Russia themselves."