Great Quotes II: Source and Context are Key

[Gucumatz]

Any plan considered in moderation will fail when circumstances are set to the extremes

- Metternich

No one likes a radical of any sort

 

[Traitorfish]

Any plan considered in moderation will fail when circumstances are set to the extremes

- Metternich

No one likes a radical of any sort

Do you actually know anything Metternich?

 

[Borachio]

As if happens, I don't. Not really.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemens_von_Metternich

 

[Gucumatz]

I was going to respond to your shooting protestors with - which ones . But responding to your new post of course. Metternich is probably the only reason Austria was able to maintain its power for as long as it did relative to Europe. Sure his causes are often seen as "backwards", but it was his duty to serve his rulers.

 

[Traitorfish]

My point was that he was by no imaginable reckoning a "moderate", in his time or any other.

 

[Gucumatz]

I have to disagree with that. Sure he was a monarchist and at times hated by the people, but I tend to view him more from the international scene. Compare the Tsar and Napeoleon - the revolution vs. the monarchies he was able to keep a relative balance while ensuring that his nation, Austria, which the underlying forces would have seen insurmountable to its own destruction for nearly any other leader he brought a balance between the extreme monarchists and the revolutionaries and rebels within Austria and abroad.

Sure he could act heavy, but every step of his was calculated - he was in the center of several European poles that could have easily ripped Austria apart during his time in power and instead he actually somewhat strengthened Austria's position and reputation.

 

[bhsup]

"I don't need luck, I have ammo." - If you don't already know, you don't deserve to know

 

[Traitorfish]

Spoilered to avoid obstruction.

Spoiler :

I have to disagree with that. Sure he was a monarchist and at times hated by the people, but I tend to view him more from the international scene. Compare the Tsar and Napeoleon - the revolution vs. the monarchies he was able to keep a relative balance while ensuring that his nation, Austria, which the underlying forces would have seen insurmountable to its own destruction for nearly any other leader he brought a balance between the extreme monarchists and the revolutionaries and rebels within Austria and abroad.

Sure he could act heavy, but every step of his was calculated - he was in the center of several European poles that could have easily ripped Austria apart during his time in power and instead he actually somewhat strengthened Austria's position and reputation.

You're missing the point. My issue is not that Metternich was bad. My point is that Metternich was not moderate. Looking from the perspective of the Vormärz, he was a reactionary, and looking from the perspective of 1660, he was a radical absolutist. There were, maybe, a few decades in the early 18th century when his politics could have been described as "moderate", but even then I'm sceptical. Metternich, wily bugger that he was, would be aware of this, and would have justified his politics in wholly different terms.

 

[Borachio]

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

Joseph Campbell

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

"I like to imagine what would have happened had the Arabs won at Poitiers and gone on to conquer and Islamise Europe. No doubt we should all be admiring Ibn Weber's The Kharejite Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism which would conclusively demonstrate how the modern rational spirit and its expression in business and bureaucratic organization could only have arisen in consequence of the sixteenth-century neo-kharejite puritanism in northern Europe. In particular, the work would demonstrate how modern economic and organisational rationality could never have arisen had Europe stayed Christian, given the inveterate proclivity of that faith to a baroque, manipulative, patronage-ridden, quasi-animistic and disorderly vision of the world."

- Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society, 1981

 

[Borachio]

That's very clever! I'm impressed.

 

[bhsup]

"Back in my day, son, a man had to answer for the wicked that he done. Take all the rope in Texas, find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys, hang them high in the street for all the people to see..." - Pappy's grandpappy

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

"But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It higgles over a meal-time, incorporating it where possible with the process of production itself, so that food is given to the labourer as to a mere means of production, as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery. It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment of the bodily powers to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential. It is not the normal maintenance of the labour-power which is to determine the limits of the working-day; it is the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power, no matter how diseased, compulsory, and painful it may be, which is to determine the limits of the labourers’ period of repose. Capital cares nothing for the length of life of labour-power. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power, that can be rendered fluent in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility."
- Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1

 

[ReindeerThistle]

"Technocrats are better hold-up artists than marines."

-- Eduardo Galleano, Open Veins of Latin America

 

[Borachio]

<Dickensian quote.>

- Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1

It's a good quote. And to some extent it's still true today. But there do seem to be signs that the general condition of the working class is improving.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

It's a good quote. And to some extent it's still true today. But there do seem to be signs that the general condition of the working class is improving.

It is not. But even if it were, its mere existence would be enough to warrant permanently corrective action.

 

[Flying Pig]

Surely a fluid working class - that is, distinct from a fixed one in which one inevitably remains after being born into it - is an inevitable corollary to a society which requires things to be produced?

 

[Borachio]

It is not. But even if it were, its mere existence would be enough to warrant permanently corrective action.

Well, some of it resonated with me and my real experience of having worked long hours in life-shortening industries. I kid you not. But it's a matter of degree.

 

[Traitorfish]

Well, I just spent ten hours standing at a single spot in front of a conveyor belt in an airless, windowless box, and that's what's considered a fairly light-weight job, so I can certainly say I grokked what old Cherlie was driving at.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Surely a fluid working class - that is, distinct from a fixed one in which one inevitably remains after being born into it - is an inevitable corollary to a society which requires things to be produced?

As distinct from another class? Absolutely not.