Raw Meat is a quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.

she repeats the “TARP was paid back with interest” (cleverly including only the banks, when half the TARP funds that went to AIG are still outstanding).

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has just released a recklessly bold, 73-page, 10-year budget plan,” he wrote. “At 37 footnotes, it might be the most annotated suicide note in history.

Just before I left, they were gearing up to make a request for CIA officers to recruit foreigners with access to immigration databases,” said the retired NOC. “I’m sure that several people made careers out of just this kind of operation, much as some officers did when the NSA suddenly lost millions of access points to intelligence when the world switched from microwave towers to fiber optic lines — whole departments were formed to recruit telephone company assets in foreign countries.

Human psychology seems to be such that many ambitious people find it far less scary to think about destroying the world, than to think about never amounting to much of anything at all.

When you notice an error in yourself, this signals your readiness to seek advancement to the next level. If you tolerate the error rather than correcting it, you will not advance to the next level and you will not gain the skill to notice new errors. In every art, if you do not seek perfection you will halt before taking your first steps.

Therefore, daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity, the deadly enemy of all matter-of-fact devotion to a cause, and of all distance, in this case, of distance towards one’s self.

…The sin against the lofty spirit of his vocation, however, begins where this striving for power ceases to be objective and becomes purely personal self-intoxication, instead of exclusively entering the service of ‘the cause.’ For ultimately there are only two kinds of deadly sins in the field of politics: lack of objectivity and—often but not always identical with it—irresponsibility. Vanity, the need personally to stand in the foreground as clearly as possible, strongly tempts the politician to commit one or both of these sins.

…The final result of political action often, no, even regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning. This is fundamental to all history, a point not to be proved in detail here. But because of this fact, the serving of a cause must not be absent if action is to have inner strength.

“Will McAvoy says, ‘If we can just change this and this within the reality, we can make things closer to what the great American myth is.’ But it’s all bullshit. You can’t change it—it is so thoroughly in place. There’s an American aristocracy, there’s no democracy; it’s all controlled by money.

“I ignored the reality—the myth was the reality. When you see [the characters in The Newsroom] trying to exist within the myth like it is reality, then you see all the confusion and the lies they have to tell to keep it working because it’s an illusion—everyone’s lying to somehow support the myth.”

You know, anyone who makes it in this life at anything, you always hear, has to go through hell. So I figured, “I’ll just go through hell.

It’s hard not to think ‘death drive’ every time I go on the internet. Opening Safari is an actively destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken away from me. Like the lost time between leaving a party drunk and materializing somehow at your front door, the internet robs you of a day you can visit recursively or even remember. You really want to know what it is about 20-somethings? It’s this: we live longer now. But we also live less. It sounds hyperbolic, it sounds morbid, it sounds dramatic, but in choosing the internet I am choosing not to be a certain sort of alive. Days seem over before they even begin, and I have nothing to show for myself other than the anxious feeling that I now know just enough to engage in conversations I don’t care about.

Basically, the issue here is that for the last four years in the UK, we’ve had an angry mob going “hey! we want to string up some bankers!”, and a banking regulator going “yeah! we feel your pain! we have increased the Basel 3 CET1 ratio requirement by 2.5 percentage points!”

And the mob goes “we want to string up some bankers!”. And the regulator goes “what, wasn’t that enough? OK, we have introduced a 60-day projected outflows minimum funding threshold and we’re requiring liquidity buffer stocks to be held on a solo as well as consolidated basis!”

And the mob goes “string them up and confiscate their bonuses!” and the regulator goes “is there no satisfying you people? well all right, we are going to require a conditional ring-fencing methodology to be applied to the stable funding ratio! surely that’s strict enough!”

And “what do you want, blood? OK we’ll give you blood! We’re changing the netting conventions on positive replacement value of derivatives so that they’re counted against the Basel leverage regulation! Surely now nobody can say we’re being soft on bankers!”