Sidelights 9

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I'm rechristening these sideblog roundups to something...slightly more dignified.

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"England isn’t a country, it’s an American aircraft carrier."
- Gore Vidal

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The only difference between simple bullshit and nuanced bullshit is the nuance.

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“Someday the slaves will rush to put on their chains.”
- Jean Jaques Rousseau

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"Serious matters seldom break through to cliché-ridden minds."
- Gore Vidal

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"No society so marinated in falsity can long survive in a real world."
- Gore Vidal

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Postmodernism was a passing fashion within modernism.

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I get more pleasure out of downloading a film than I do from watching it.

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The twentieth century devides neatly into two parts - pre-WW2, which started around 1880, and post-WW2, which started around 1945 and continues today.

In the first there was the atom theorised, national empires, Freud, Jack the Ripper, Esperanto, class war and hope. In the second there is the atom split, globalisation, McLuhan, Vietnam, binary, class consciousness and perplexity.

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"Fiction is a branch of neurology."
- JG Ballard

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RealDoll: What we think we want, until we get it.

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"The psychopath never dates."
- JG Ballard

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In a totalitarian state, a single mediocre mind decides the eternal truth of the moment, punishes and rewards arbitrarily, and tries to make its delusions real. In a bureaucracy, a thousand identical mediocre minds do the same.

The difference is, you can't love a bureaucracy.

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Paranoia, like fame, is easy to create but hard to control.

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"The taboos of a society may well reveal its deepest preoccupations."
- JG Ballard

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One can only be obsessed with fucking the same way one can be obsessed with a pop song - as something brief, pleasant and inoffensive with its simplicity and unimportance hidden by vast hype.

But one can be obsessed with sexuality the same way one can be obsessed with music - as something eternal, protean, barely understood and somehow necessary to life being worth living.

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I try to not be a hypocrite, but I've a nasty feeling the only people who aren't hypocrites are paranoid scizophrenics.

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