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Birnam Wood

Book by Eleanor Catton · 2 quotes · Billionaires, Rich, Wealth

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Birnam Wood Quotes

“There’s something so joyless about the left these days,’ Tony continued, ‘so forbidding and self-denying. And policing. No one’s having any fun, we’re all just sitting around scolding each other for doing too much or not enough--and it’s like, what kind of vision for the future is that? Where’s the hope? Where’s the humanity? We’re all aspiring to be monks when we could be aspiring to be lovers.”

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“Any conversation on the left these days, it's always so competitive, it's always each person trying to outperform the person before them in terms of their oppression or their lack of privilege or their personal trauma or, like, the fact that actually they’re Jewish or actually they’re bisexual, or guess what, they’re a quarter this or that ethnicity, which gives them the right to speak or the right to take offence or whatever. It’s a marketplace! Yet again! You can dress it up in the language of sensitivity and social justice and blah blah blah, but the point of intersectionality isn’t to learn how to transcend our differences, or eliminate them, the point isn’t solidarity, it’s about shoring up your brand, cornering the market, everyone out for themselves, maximising profit and minimising risk—' ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this,’ Amber said. ‘It locks us into our differences,’ Tony said, ‘it’s segregationist. And it’s also just advertising. It’s brand management. That’s my point. We’re still inside the fucking paradigm!”

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