Pithy aphorism time #2

"Peace is just.  Without justice, all you've got is quiet."

I composed that, but it sounded familiar.  Which I realized is because it's a paraphrase of something MLK said, repeatedly and in a variety of formulations:

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."
—written on the memorial in DC, it seems like this may be a phrase or paraphrase from a sermon entitled "When Peace Becomes Obnoxious", March 18, 1956

"There can be no justice without peace. And there can be no peace without justice."
—from a speech to Vietnam protesters, January 14, 1968 (audio here, partial transcript here)


It turns out my other pithy aphorism was a knock-off as well (also not that pithy).  At least I'm unoriginally retreading the thoughts of worthy thinkers.

Cobain's Sarcoma

Why does the idea of heroin addiction affect me so strongly?  I don’t really know.  I mean, there are people in my family with cancer, too, but somehow that doesn’t get to me in the same way.

Possibly it’s because I have so much invested, philosophically and emotionally, in the idea of freedom, and heroin goes in and attacks the will like almost nothing else.  I tried a while ago to figure out whether “cancer of the will” was a phrase that people use to describe addiction.  It seemed like the answer was “yes, but not widely”, so I don’t know if I heard/read it or came up with it myself.  But it seems apt to me.  Heroin addiction isn’t an external force overpowering the will, but a malignancy of the will itself.  How do you fight something like that?

Fuck heroin.  It makes me so sad and so angry.


And now here are a few songs about heroin, some of which sometimes make me cry…

A debate I recently had in my head, highly condensed

Question: Better to be locked-in, or dead?

Point: What?  Are you insane?  Dead!

Counterpoint: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." ^[1] 


Postscripts:

1. From a risk-assessment perspective, the case for life is harder to make.  The person busy finding joy in the absurdity of being alive but so far divorced from the world probably wouldn't be too bothered by the idea of moving on to the next thing, but someone who arrived at a different outlook on the whole experience might be extremely upset not to.
2. I'd be curious to know how answers to this question line up with those to the question of afterlife.  I feel like all four combinations make sense to me, though the "I believe in an afterlife but I'll stick around, thanks" camp might be a lonely place.  But I guess if we're serious about our choice we'd better not be daunted by a little loneliness.

Pithy aphorism time

If your business model doesn't work without externalizing massive harms, it's a bad business model. If a new regulation or a cultural shift is going to make it stop working, that's a feature, not a bug. (Thinking at the moment of business models built on exploitative labor practices like low minimum wage and unpaid internships. Obviously the fossil fuel industry is another among the many to which this idea could apply. And of course the worst part is that in a lot of cases the business model would actually still work fine, just with slightly lower margins.)

UPDATE: Turns out this is basically a rephrasing of something FDR said:
"It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country."