On 2019 Jul 02 07:34:56, you wrote to Bj”rn Felten:
The reason so many new, strange political crackpots are elected into
office all around the world nowadays is simply that WE HAVE HAD IT!!!
ANYTHING BUT THIS!!!
Don't vote - it only encourages the buggers!
Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable. Where men are not acquainted with each other's principles, nor experienced in each other's talents, nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. In a connection, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the public. No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
-Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 82-83 (1770) in: Select Works of Edmund Burke, vol. 1, p. 146 (Liberty Fund ed. 1999).
)\/(ark
And to this end they built themselves a stupendous super-computer which was
so amazingly intelligent that even before its data banks had been connected
up it had started from "I think therefore I am" and got as far as deducing
the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn
it off.
... Photons have mass? I didn't even know they were Catholic.
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* Origin: (1:3634/12.73)