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Mechanism Quotes

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Mechanism Quotes

“Back in the really early days, the men went out hunting, the women stayed home with the kids, and would hold the kid in one arm against the heart, so that's the left, and with the right arm they would throw. And it turns out you cannot make that calculation in real time. You have to have an algorithm set up. So these brain mechanisms evolved in order to do that, and when they evolved, the thing is that where there is a useful capability it often adapts to places it wasn't evolved for.”

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Author:Howard Rheingold
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“Even the best of us have certain psychological mechanisms that can suddenly kick in and turn us into monsters. That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that good people do bad things. It's distressingly easy for those mechanisms to be triggered, either consciously by demagogues, or naively by people who think they're trying to do the right thing. Which is why I think it's more akin to tic-tac-toe.”

PeopleThinkingTryingCertainTurnsEasyEventsMessagesMonstersTrialsPsychologicalRight ThingKicksBad ThingsWitchGood PeopleMechanismToesBad PeopleNazismTicsSalemWitch TrialsSalem Witch TrialsTic Tacs
Author:Neal Stephenson
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“There is less pressure on abandoning native communities: what for? There is nothing to be gained by it. On one hand, there are plenty tempting opportunities of experimenting with identities - being one kind of person today and a different the next day. On the other hand, there is little pressure to include the ethnic identity or religious identity into this mechanism, because now everybody is in a kind of Diaspora today.”

KindLittlesPersonsDifferentHandsTodayNextOpportunityCommunityReligiousIdentityPressurePlentyNativeMechanismNext DayTemptingDiasporaEthnic IdentityReligious Identity
Author:Zygmunt Bauman
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“This is where I think policies do need to be somewhat race-specific, is making sure that institutions are not discriminatory. So you've got something like the FHA [Federal Housing Administration], which was on its face a universal program that involved a huge mechanism for wealth accumulation and people entering into the middle class.”

PeopleThinkingNeedsFacesWealthRaceClassMiddlePolicyHugeInvolvedProgramUniversalInstitutionsAdministrationMiddle ClassMechanismEnteringHousingAccumulation
Author:Barack Obama
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“I watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees. In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.”

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Author:William Gibson
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“To some degree, the critic arises out of that negativity bias in that our brains are oriented towards threat and toward survival. The critic really started as a survivor mechanism in early infancy and childhood when we were trying to navigate our early family system and culture; when we're learning how to fit in so we could optimize that flow of love and affection. It was an internal voice telling us to shut certain patterns and reactions down, that negativity bias that's always looking for what's wrong, looking for the threat.”

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Author:Mark Coleman
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“If I had the good fortune of having the ability to influence people all over the world every time I spoke, I would do my best to make sure people understood why the United States of America is special, and then I would suggest that everybody who wants to come here, "I don't blame you, fine and dandy, there's a legal mechanism for this. We're not denying people the right to come to our country. There's a legal way to do it." That's another thing people forget.”

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Author:Rush Limbaugh
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“The family today counts for less and less. Why? Who knows - the growth of science, the Cold War, the atomic bomb, the world war we've made, the new philosophies we've created; certainly something is happening to man, so why go against it, why oblige this new man to live by the mechanisms and regulations of the past?”

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Author:Michelangelo Antonioni
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“We are made up of an entire parliament of pieces and parts and subsystems. Beyond a collection of local expert systems, we are collections of overlapping, ceaselessly reinvented mechanism, a group of competing factions. The conscious mind fabricates stories to explain the sometimes inexplicable dynamics of the subsystem inside brain. It can be disquieting to consider the extent to which all of our actions are driven by hardwired systems doing what they do best while we overlay stories about choices.”

MindMadeSometimesStoriesActionChoicesBrainPiecesGroupsConsciousDrivenLocalsExpertsCollectionsMechanismCompetingParliamentOur ActionsDynamicsFactionsInexplicableConscious MindOverlappingFabricate
Book:Incognito: The Secret Lives of The Brain
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“When the U.S. asks for the extradition of a terrorist, if Turkey doesn't have that individual on the terror list, what do we say, what do we respond? Now, the individual might not be on your terror list or terrorist list. But if he is on my list, and if we have an agreement on the extradition of criminals, if I make the request, then, well, you should extradite that person. And there has been numerous examples of that mechanism working with many other nations as well, not just the U.S.”

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Author:Recep Tayyip Erdogan
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“The Fed needs to adopt new tools, on its own and perhaps in cooperation with the other parts of the US government, to improve the economy from the bottom up. This includes increasing facilities for debt forgiveness for under-water mortgages and excessive student loans; increased credit facilities for small businesses and cooperatives; helping to underwrite mechanisms for creating affordable housing in cities; and more restrictive enforcement of financial regulatory rules to help rein in excessive banker risk and pay.”

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Author:Gerald Epstein
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“It is irrational to charge high prices for socially valuable innovations as this guarantees that they will be underutilized. It is much better to sell them at cost and then to reward the innovator in some other way. This is not always possible, because in some cases the value of an innovation is in the eye of the beholder; it's very difficult to value how much a new Madonna song is worth, for example. But in the case of medicines, green technologies and seeds in agriculture, such an alternative reward mechanism is fairly straightforward.”

WayEyeValuesSongDifficultCasesTechnologyExampleCostInnovationGreenSellsMedicineRewardsValuableSeedsAlternativesGuaranteesMechanismAgricultureIrrationalStraightforwardInnovatorsGuarantees ThatBeholderHigh PricesEye Of The BeholderGreen Technology
Author:Thomas Pogge
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“You can think of the Health Impact Fund as a mechanism that would keep the benefits and burdens of pharmaceutical innovation for the affluent roughly as they are while massively reducing the burdens presently imposed upon the poor. This sounds like magic. But it really works because the current system is not Pareto efficient. It's a system that generates hundreds of billions of dollars in litigation costs and deadweight losses that HIF-registered medicines would sidestep. By avoiding these losses, the HIF reform can bring improvements all around - including for pharmaceutical innovators.”

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Author:Thomas Pogge
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“Can we say that the constitutional monarchies in Spain, Belgium or England are democratic? Those with superior chambers like the House of Lords in England, that still represent the English feudal nobility in terms of positions above regional representatives, who are in the end the representatives supposedly elected by the population. Many mechanisms exist, but they are mechanisms to preserve the power of the wealthy classes, of the bourgeois classes that hold the power and rights above the rest of the society.”

StillsEndsHouseTermLordClassRightsPositionEnglandDemocraticPopulationSuperiorsPreservesWealthyMechanismRepresentativesSpainNobilityChamberMonarchyBourgeoisBelgiumConstitutional MonarchyHouse Of Lords
Author:Alejandro Castro Espin
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“The Goldstone Report establishes the credibility of the accusations directed at Israel with respect to its tactics used during the 2008 - 09 attacks on Gaza, but was not able to facilitate the next step that would have involved activating accountability mechanisms either within Israel or at the level of international society.”

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Author:Richard A. Falk
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“The weaknesses and biases of the international mechanisms of accountability make it seem desirable to extend the domain of accountability by empowering domestic courts to act as agents of the world legal system. Even if there is no consistent application of Universal Jurisdiction, it still leads those who might be prosecuted to alter their travel plans to avoid even the complication of waiting for a complaint to be dismissed.”

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Author:Richard A. Falk
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“The evolution of social media into a robust mechanism for social transformation is already visible. Despite many adamant critics who insist that tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are little more than faddish distractions useful only to exchange trivial information, these critics are being proven wrong time and again.”

LittlesSocialMediaInformationEvolutionToolsTransformationCriticsSocial MediaDespiteVisibleDistractionMechanismProvenYoutubeRobustWrong TimeAdamantProven WrongSocial TransformationLike Facebook
Author:Simon Mainwaring
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“For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.”

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Book:Psycho-Cybernetics Deluxe Edition: The Original Text of the Classic Guide to a New Life
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