valixt

“[Q: "Have you ever said 'I love you' and not meant it?"]

[A:] All the time. When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses political and diplomatic engagement and deception to gain control and expand China’s spheres of influence without going to war. This echoes the brilliant central idea of both Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Unrestricted Warfare: to get what you want without going into battle.”
― Robert Spalding

“Raphael Samuel, a citizen of India, said he would sue his parents for giving birth to him … Samuel is telling people, especially Indian kids, that they don’t owe their parents anything; he also claims that putting a child through institutions like school and the job market without their consent is wrong. We should not reject Samuel’s complaint as ridiculous – there is a deep insight in it, but we have to avoid the confusion between the empirical and the transcendental level. Empirically, I am of course “thrown into the world,”. However, to become a Self, there has to be a transcendental act of self-positing ...”
― Slavoj Žižek, Hegel in a Wired Brain

“There is, simply, no way, to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have to hide anything – including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. You’re assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences. Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor – or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling.”
― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record