Generic beauties are disgusting.

Utilitarianism

G.K. Chesterton once wrote, "The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his mother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man." It's the qualifier "necessarily" that shows Chesterton possessed a truly philosophical mind.

The Pianist

Wladyslaw Szpilman 

Alvin is working in his store when he hears a booming voice from above that says, "Alvin, sell your business!" He ignores it. the voice goes on for days saying, "Alvin, sell your business for three million dollars!" After weeks of this, he relents and sells his store.

The voice says, "Alvin, go to Las Vegas!"

Alvin asks why. 

"Alvin, just take the three million dollars and go to Las Vegas."

Alvin obeys, goes to Las Vegas, and visits a casino. 

The voice says, "Alvin, go to the blackjack table and put it all down on one hand!"

Alvin hesitates but gives in. He's dealt an eighteen. The dealer has a six showing. 

"Alvin, take a card!"

"What? The dealer has..."

Alvin tells the dealer to hit him, and gets an ace. Nineteen. He breathes easy. 

"Alvin, take another card."

"What?"

"TAKE ANOTHER CARD!"

Alvin asks for another card. It's another ace. He has twenty.

"Alvin, take another card!" the voice commands. 

"I have twenty!" Alvin shouts. 

"TAKE ANOTHER CARD!" booms the voice. 

"Hit me!" Alvin says. He gets another ace. Twenty-one!

And the booming voice says, "Un-fucking-believable!"

Determinism Versus Free Will

Moses, Jesus, and a bearded old man are playing golf. Moses drives a long one, which lands on the fairway but rolls directly toward the pond. Moses raises his club, parts the water, and the ball rolls safely to the other side.
Jesus also hits a long one toward the same pond, but just as it's about to land in the center, it hovers above the surface. Jesus casually walks out on the pond and chips it onto the green.
The bearded man's drive hits a fence and bounces out onto the street, where it caroms off an oncoming truck and back onto the fairway. It's headed directly for the pond, but it lands on a lily pad, where a frog sees it and snatches it into his mouth. An eagle swoops down, grabs the frog, and flies away. As the eagle and frog pass over the green, the frog drops the ball, and it lands in the cup for a hole-in-one.
Moses turns to Jesus and says, "I hate playing with your dad."

節錄自Werner Herzog - Of Walking On Ice

寒鴉定居村子裡。兩匹馬啃食著一棵樹的樹皮。腐爛的蘋果躺在樹下泥濘的土地上，沒人收成。其中一棵—從遠處看去像是唯一一棵還有葉子的樹—仍神奇地掛滿一叢叢蘋果。這棵濕答答的樹上沒有半片葉子，只有濕答答、拒絕掉落的蘋果。我摘了一個，味道頂酸，但可以解渴。我把果核往那棵樹一丟，蘋果如雨般紛紛落下。當那些蘋果再次完全靜止，我心想，沒有人可以想像這樣了無人煙的孤寂。這是最孤寂的一天，所有日子中最孤絕的一天。於是我上前去搖那棵樹，把蘋果搖到一棵不剩。在靜止的環境中，那些蘋果一顆顆搥打著地面。結束時，一種陰魂不散的靜謐包圍住我。我環顧四下，不見任何人影。我獨自一人。我在一個荒廢的洗衣間裡渴水，但那是稍後的事了。

No Ordinary Joe - SLAM

by Evin Demirel | portraits Ahmed Klink

He’s the very definition of a big fish in a small pond.

Grown men bounce off 6-7, 240-pound Joe Johnson on a hot, humid June day in downtown Little Rock. One skinny 6-3 guy ricochets off Johnson as he corrals a rebound and barely jumps to lay it through the hoop of a collapsible goal. No whistle from the ref, as the courtside announcer yells: “This is a big boy game!” You can almost imagine Bill Clinton, who catches some of the action from his penthouse apartment in the nearby presidential center named in his honor, nodding in agreement.

For the last two summers, Nets guard Joe Johnson has been the honorary chairman of his hometown’s Hoop Jams 3-on-3 Tournament. During the event, though, there’s about as much chance of finding him sitting in a chair as seeing him rocking a Boston Celtics Tam o’Shanter at a Toby Keith concert. Johnson, a six-time All-Star, has insisted on playing in the top division of his own tournament with a team of three childhood friends. “I’m too passionate. I just can’t go out there and watch them guys play, because I want to play,” he says. “Not only am I hosting this tournament, but I’m gonna win it as long as I’m hosting it.”

So far, so good. Johnson’s Team Jordan—which includes Carl Vault, Brandon Greenwood and Patrick Walker—is 8-0 over the last two years. It’s easy to understand how a player of JJ’s caliber can trounce opponents who played at the likes of University of West Alabama and Arkansas-Little Rock, even while giving 70 percent effort. What’s more perplexing is why a $124-million man would risk even the slightest injury as one of the few—only, as far as he knows—modern NBA players participating in his own summer tournament.

The first answer is simple: Johnson loves the game and likes sharing it with fellow Arkansans. When his uncle Tracy Johnson, who helped raise Joe, told him the Clinton Foundation wanted him on board before the inaugural 2011 event, Johnson didn’t hesitate. “I immediately jumped on it. I wanted to make it an annual thing, to come out and have things for kids to do.”

Johnson also wants to help Arkansas Baptist College, which along with the non-profit Clinton Foundation, receives some of Hoop Jams’ proceeds. Tracy Johnson attended the Little Rock college and often took his young nephew to its basketball games. As a child, Johnson also frequented its gym to play Vault, losing each time. The breakthrough didn’t happen until Johnson began attending nearby Dunbar Junior High in ’93.

This brings us to perhaps the most important reason Johnson lends his name, and game, to the Hoop Jams fundraiser. In 1993, a darkness enveloped whole communities within Little Rock, nearly bringing them to their knees. It’s taken two decades, but these communities are regaining balance. Given this, Johnson has a chance at an assist much greater than the 3,480 he’s so far accumulated in the NBA, for a turnaround resonating far longer than anything he could have accomplished on the court as the Atlanta Hawks’ former cornerstone. Or, for that matter, any best-case scenario with the Brooklyn franchise he joined in a July 11 trade.

—

“Unless we do what the old African proverb says—it takes a village to raise a child—unless we as a society start doing that, we could hire all the cops and build all the prisons in the world, and as long as somebody’s hungry and hopeless, they’re also dangerous.”—Former Pulaski County Coroner Steve Nawojczyk, Gang War: Bangin’ in Little Rock

For a sickening while, the downtown neighborhood Johnson spent his early teen years in might have been the nation’s most dangerous. By ’93, a 20-block radius around his future alma mater Little Rock Central High had essentially become a war zone as clashing gang factions staked out territory. The cost was high: murders spiked to 76, more than double the numbers seen only three years before. With 177,000 people, Little Rock had a higher per capita homicide rate than some of the cities from which its original gangsters and drug traders had arrived in the late 80s—places like New York, Chicago and especially Los Angeles. They found a city with relatively lax gun laws and a new market for crack cocaine.

“L.A. Moe” arrived in ’87 and was credited with forming the area’s first Crip affiliate gang, according to the documentary Gang War: Bangin’ in Little Rock. “It’s a little L.A. out here now,” he said in the ’94 film. “When I first got here, it was real country. They would fight on weekends, but they’d be friends again that coming Monday. Now they don’t fight no more. They just go there and shoot.”

Residents slept in cast-iron bathtubs for fear of catching stray bullets from a drive-by. One of the film’s most harrowing interviews takes place in Centennial Park, a few blocks west of Arkansas Baptist College. Seventeen-year-old Bobby Banks, already the leader of a local Crip gang, lauds his lifestyle while sitting on a swing. He claims to own a home, three cars and plenty of cash. Banks’ supreme confidence was the exception. As rural Southerners, Arkansans had long dealt with disadvantages that consistently put them at the bottom of national income and education rankings. But the 80s brought a new layer of problems, mostly urban, to deal with. Many of Little Rock’s young black males, already grappling with poverty and increasingly broken homes, felt trapped and frustrated.

Even in elementary school, Joe Johnson saw another option. Compared to many children growing up in the “war zone,” he had a few advantages: a safer home neighborhood and a tight-knit family including his uncles and mother, Dianne Johnson. Still, violence touched Joe. He was shocked one evening when his mother returned home from her stint as a state psychiatric hospital nurse, fresh stitches in the side of her head. A patient had gone on a rage, grabbed a chair and attacked her and some colleagues. She was hit above her ear. “I was heartbroken,” Johnson says. “I never wanted to see her hurt in any fashion…I didn’t want her to work there but I understood that she had to do whatever it took to get the bills paid.”

By junior high, Johnson decided his calling was basketball, and he knew staying focused on it would help him navigate the land mines lurking outside Dunbar’s walls. Even on the weekends, he says, “I stayed in the gym.”

After school, he and his friends sometimes walked a couple blocks to the west, toward Arkansas Baptist College, to grab cheeseburgers at the Wheels and Grills carwash. Young teenage gang members, some of whom Johnson had befriended, also frequented there. Especially at night, the trash-infested spot was a bane for police. There were robberies, assaults, stolen cars and drug possessions. Nobody tried to pull Johnson into that world, though. “My mindset was a lot different. I was inspired at a young age to try to be somebody, to try to be somebody special. Not only for myself, but for the likes of my mother, who worked so hard for me and her. I didn’t want her to have those worries.”

Thanks to Arkansas Baptist College, Wheels and Grills and its crime problems no longer exist. In its place stands a pristine carwash named Auto Baptism, a crown jewel of a community revitalization project in which ABC has taken a leading role. In ’07, the historically black college bought the property where Wheels and Grills stood, renovated the structure and turned it into a student-run business. Ten cents out of every dollar of profit is invested into a fund that allows ABC to continue buying some of the condemned and dilapidated properties surrounding its campus. It has bought nearly 30 boarded-up homes to renovate or tear down, says Larry Bone, the school’s former director of institutional advancement.

This proactive approach toward breeding grounds for crime has been part of the master plan of ABC president Fitz Hill since he assumed the post in ’06. By that time, violent crime had waned. Still, Dr. Hill strongly believed crime could be further reduced by attacking a key root: lack of education. With this correlation in mind, Hill has marketed Arkansas Baptist College as an inclusive institution geared at inner-city black men. ABC even welcomes high school dropouts and has developed classes covering study skills, personal finance, time management, interview skills and speech to help them succeed. Money made from Hoop Jams helps cover tuition costs for those who otherwise couldn’t afford it, Hill said.

In the last six years, ABC student enrollment rose from 287 to 1,193; total revenues increased from $2.5 million to more than $20.2 million. Hill and his team have nurtured ties to local companies, churches and government organizations to sustain the community revitalization project. Hill, a former Arkansas Razorback football coach, has also used his connections in the athletic world. Besides Johnson, other Hogs involved in Hoop Jams include Pat Bradley, Blake Eddins, Reggie Merritt and Anthony Lucas. Hill’s friend Mike Anderson, Arkansas’ head basketball coach, attends the event’s opening reception each year. He enjoys catching up with Johnson, one of his players from a previous assistant coaching stint at Arkansas. “I’m so proud of him,” Anderson says. “He has become a tremendous player, but I think he’s still a humble guy. It’s reflected in what he’s doing in the community.”

Johnson shows that desire through more than Hoop Jams. This summer, like in previous summers, he’s playing in a basketball league at the Dunbar Community Center. There, he often sees former Central High teammates like Jarrett Hart and Mark Green, guys who have invested in renovating homes in the area. Johnson has chipped in to clean up the area, too. He gave $60,000 to help renovate Central’s football field and wants to start the remake of Central’s decrepit gym. “I’m sure I’m gonna be a part of that,” he says.

Johnson has two faint tattoos on top of his wrists. Both are Hindi script, and together they translate to “Incredibly blessed,” he says on a Saturday evening outside Central High. It’s a place he still gets goosebumps while visiting. He knows much of his success stems from this neighborhood, where he got plenty of opportunity to discover and hone his unique gifts.

Opportunity itself is a gift, too. That’s why Johnson joined a team to provide it.

有些人空有理想，卻不知道如何生活
有些人從沒理想，卻很清楚應該怎過

前者比後者，差的層次太多了

Why even spare time to think.

It's about effin' time to play!

Lucian Freud - Man In a Chair [1985]

John Berger - a life in writing

On Good Friday in 2008 John Berger went to the National Gallery in London to look at, and to draw, Christ Crucified by the early renaissance artist Antonello da Messina, a work he describes as "the most solitary painting of the scene that I know. The least allegorical." Berger placed his small shoulder bag on the attendant's chair in the corner of the room and began to draw with ink, wetting his index finger to smudge the lines and correct mistakes. Before long the attendant returned and asked Berger to remove his bag. Berger placed it on the floor at his feet and resumed drawing. The attendant said he couldn't leave it on the floor. Berger explained that if he held it he would be unable to draw. The dispute escalated, and at some stage Berger exclaimed "fuck". A supervisor was called who told Berger he had insulted a member of staff doing his job and had "shouted obscene words in a public institution". He was escorted from the building: "I take it you know the way out, sir."

Berger tells the anecdote in his new book published next month, Bento's Sketchbook (Verso), which also contains his, hastily completed, drawing of the crucifixion. In the book the episode has a palpably allegorical tinge that – with all the correcting of the drawing – hints at wider notions of human error. But at face value it is emblematic of Berger's career as combative art critic, radical writer and consistent challenger of institutional power. Here you have a snapshot not only of his relationship with art and the art world, but also of his relationship with society and authority in general.

Recounting the story at his home in Haute-Savoie in the French alps, Berger smiles at the comic aspects of the grand old man of British art being summarily booted out of the National Gallery. But he nevertheless displays a lingering anger at what he sees as the underlying reasons for the confrontation. "They kept saying it was a matter of security," he says, sneeringly elongating the word in the idiosyncratically French-inflected accent he has acquired after living there for almost 50 years. "Security. A word that these days seems simultaneously both to conceal so much and to reveal so much."

Bento's Sketchbook is a characteristically sui generis work, combining an engagement with the thought of the 17th-century lens grinder, draughtsman and philosopher Baruch Spinoza with a study of drawing and a series of semi-autobiographical sketches, through which Berger attempts to explore the world around him and his place within it. We observe the bullishly fit and active octogenarian Berger climbing peach trees in his alpine village, talking to immigrants in Parisian suburbs and municipal swimming pools, attaching himself to a guided tour of the Wallace collection and reflecting on the physical and political similarities between the American folk radical Woody Guthrie and the Russian writer Andrei Platonov: "both lent their voices to those without a voice, and both confronted rural poverty".

"Spinoza has been in my head for a very long time," he explains. "Reading Marx as an 18-year-old, I remember him responding to a game in which he was asked to name his favourite philosopher. He said 'Spinoza'. It is in some ways a strange book – it is not directly a study of Spinoza or directly a book about drawing. I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible. It's no coincidence that Spinoza worked in the then new science of optics."

The book's design elegantly incorporates text, drawings and extracts from Spinoza and is "as complicated as Ways of Seeing was 40 years ago," Berger says. "We had long conversations about the layout, about not using illustrations as they are traditionally used but rather letting them speak for themselves. In a way it was about jiggling with the conventions of what makes a book, all of which were things we talked about, albeit in a different spirit, with Ways of Seeing. So in a funny way I see it as possessing a family likeness. Its character is different, but it is definitely related."

Ways of Seeing, Berger's 1972 book and TV series, was a Marxist riposte to Kenneth Clark's patrician Civilisation. It exposed Berger and the ideas that underpinned the programmes – both then known only in left-wing and art circles – to a mass audience. The same year his experimental novel, G, won the Booker prize and he was further thrust into the limelight when he donated half the prize money to the Black Panther movement as a protest against Booker's long history of involvement in Caribbean trade. (The gesture, "typical of him", says his friend the writer and critic Geoff Dyer, "annoyed the right because he gave them half the money, and it annoyed the left because he only gave them half the money".) Since then he has produced novels, plays, poetry, translations, criticism and journalism as well as collaborating with film-makers, photographers, actors, directors and other artists and activists across a range of artistic and political projects.

In a sense Bento's Sketchbook is a collaboration with Spinoza, and Berger says he hopes the reader will regard the Spinoza that emerges "as a companion, in some ways a contemporary, to us. We're not facing the same world as him, but in many ways it is similar, and his precise rejection of the Cartesian distinction between the physical and the spiritual seems to me more and more relevant to the crisis the world is now going through. Without wishing to idealise or simplify too much, we see some signs of its manifestation at the moment in north Africa, where the uprisings are, of course, concerned with the material conditions of the people. But there is also a more elevated spiritual vision. The two combined in Egypt and Tunisia to give the people their extraordinary sense of calm."

In Berger's kitchen is an etching of the angel announcing to the shepherds the birth of Christ, which he made when he was a teenage militant left-wing activist. He says he has never practised any religion but over the years has had close friendships with many people who do, including the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's brother, who was a monk in a nearby monastery in France. "And from about the age of 14 two things have coexisted within me. On the one hand a kind of materialism, which includes the Marxist view of history. On the other a sense of the sacred, the religious if you like. This duality never felt contradictory to me, but most other people thought it was. It is beautifully resolved by Spinoza, who shows that it is not a duality, but in fact an essential unity."

Berger was born in London in 1926. His father, of Hungarian origin via Trieste, went on to become an early proponent of management theory, but his experiences in the first world war cast a pall over the home. His mother was from a working-class Bermondsey family and had been a suffragette in her youth. Berger was sent away to boarding school – "monstrous and brutal" – where he found comfort in art. "When I was about seven, one or two people encouraged me and art became an enormous and important refuge. By adolescence I was absolutely passionate about it and felt those paintings and those painters, whether they lived a few hundred years ago or were still alive, were somehow my companions." And with his interest in art came the development of his critical faculties. "I absolutely detested the pre-Raphaelites. Unjustly, I now think. It was something to do with their religiosity as I saw it. But Rembrandt was very important to me and what were then the moderns – Matisse, Modigliani."

At 16 Berger left school and enrolled at the Central School of Art, where he encountered "older painters and teachers". Lucian Freud was there briefly at the same time. "I'm not saying we predicted what would happen with his career, but equally it is not that much of a surprise. He was an outstanding student, and it was clear that he was very gifted and also very confident."

In 1944 Berger was conscripted into the army for two years, after which he returned to art school at Chelsea, where he studied and then taught. His move into art criticism came when he was invited to give a series of short presentations about paintings from the National Gallery to the west African section of the BBC radio service. "I enjoyed writing, so I went to Tribune, then being edited by George Orwell, with these BBC scripts as my references." He went on to write for the New Statesman, where he was taken under the wing of editor Kingsley Martin, who "was a kind of ally against opposition both inside and outside the office. But I had realised very early on that if you are attacking the status quo, whether that be the art world or the political and social status quo, then you expect to be attacked back. In a certain sense it is confirmation that you are on the right track."

Over the years since Berger has been involved in many public debates and controversial political campaigns. "But I actually think of myself as quite a shy person, although I know I give the impression of someone much more confident. I think what I do have is a capacity to listen to the other, even if the other is an opponent. That leads, in all senses of the word, to an engagement. From the outside that might look like confidence, but from the inside it feels like something different."

In the mid 1950s, Berger made the decision to abandon painting to write full time. "Painting is something that you need to do if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist, if you stop you lose something. The phrase 'Sunday painter' is not often a compliment. I was attracted to the novel form because I was attracted to the mystery of a person's subjectivity and behaviour, their destinies and choices. The things that can't be schematised. The challenge is to try not just to explain the mystery, but to ensure the mystery is shared and doesn't remain isolated."

He has gone on to write a dozen novels, most recently the Booker-longlisted A-X in 2008, but his career almost ended after his first novel. A Painter in Time (1958), about a Hungarian émigré returning to Budapest in 1956, received such condemnation for being apparently too much of an apologia for Stalin's invasion of Hungary that Stephen Spender even urged Berger's publisher to withdraw it. The row had a traumatic effect on Berger, "although it also toughened me up as to what I might expect in the future".

He had, he says, never felt entirely comfortable in England, and his first book – a monograph published in German about the Sicilian communist painter and friend of Picasso, Renato Gattuso – had seen him introduced to the European left. So in the early 1960s he moved to France. He met Beverly Bancroft in the early 70s when working on Ways of Seeing, and they have lived in Haute-Savoie ever since. He has two children from previous relationships and, with Beverly, a son, Yves, who lives with his family in the same village. At the time there was some scoffing at Berger going off to play at being a peasant, but while in France he wrote the Into Their Labours trilogy of novels, addressing practical, political and personal aspects of peasant life. He then devoted the other half of his Booker prize money to funding a collaboration with the photographer Jean Mohr that became their 1975 polemic about immigrant workers in Europe, The Seventh Man.

"At art school most of my friends had been older than me and most of them were political émigrés from fascism. So as a young man I would spend my evenings with them, and although I have more often written about economic migration, this whole question of what is home and what is homelessness, and how it can be transcended or not, was all around me." He says he and Mohr were aware that economic migration was a growing global issue and is delighted that after over 30 years the book has just been published for the first time in Mexico, "the place of emigration, which gives me a gratifying feeling that the book has at last returned to what it was originally about."

In Mexico Berger met, wrote about and drew the Zapatista rebel leader Subcomandante Marcos. Other causes with which he has been associated include fighting political repression in Turkey and the plight of the Palestinian people. In 2009 he co-translated, with Rema Hammami, and illustrated Mahmoud Darwish's epic poem Mural. These days, he says, he collaborates as much as he works alone. In the Bergers' garden in the Alps is a small, rather decorative outside lavatory that houses a photographic gallery of visitor-collaborators including Simon McBurney of Complicite Theatre Company (who is also godfather to one of Yves's children), Tilda Swinton and Michael Ondaatje.

"The only rule in collaborations is that one should never strike deals and never compromise," he says. "If you disagree on something you shouldn't yield and you shouldn't insist on winning. Instead you should just accept that the solution is not right and carry on until it is right. The temptation to say 'you can have this one and I will have the next one' is fatal."

Another recent visitor to the house was an archivist from the British Library manuscripts department, to which he has donated his papers. (The deal was that the archivist would have to help with the harvest while he was in the village sorting through the box files that Beverly has kept for the last 40 years.) With his 2009 Golden PEN award for a lifetime's distinguished service to literature, there is a sense of a new, semi-official acceptance and recognition.

"I just keep on writing and thinking and drawing, which I continued even after I stopped painting. I don't know whether this is true for other people, but it is certainly true for me, that after years and years of drawing it does become a little easier. Unlike writing, which remains as difficult as ever. So while I'm at the stage of a new writing project where I am vaguely hearing, rather deafly, the demands of a new train of thought, the drawing goes on every day. It is that rare thing that gives you a chance of a very close identification with something, or somebody, who is not you. So maybe it is not so different from storytelling after all."

The Pianist

示威與示弱

七月一日的大遊行，警方說高峰期有六萬三千人遊行，主辦者民陣說有四十萬人。年年的官方報數和民間報數都有很大差異，主辦者卻叫人到指定地方集合出發，沿途經過幾個統計點，以便官方和大學研究機構計數。警方將數目報細，而且限制參與示威的市民進入會場或依時出發，往往用收緊布袋口的方法，令人群鼓譟、暈倒，製造一點緊湊氣氛，也報銷幾十瓶胡椒噴霧。中共和大財閥見到，會心微笑——九七之後，統治香港的意識形態，是上層的吞噬式資本主義（predatory capitallism），中層和下層的官僚理性主義（bureaucratic rationalism）。這是互相依存的牢固關係。


不滿警察限制遊行，卻偏偏仍要向警察報數，按照警方的指示行動。等如不滿中共逼死李旺陽，卻偏偏要向共產黨請求調查。 同理，警察封路，大家就央求他們開路，卻不會留在原地，靜坐不走。為何求他們開路？大家靜坐，警察開路也來不及。這叫做不合作主義。你與暴政的執行者合作，還搞什麼示威遊行？
慢慢大家就會明白，為何即使五十萬人上街，威懾力也極有限，甚至弄巧反拙，引來中共更為嚴密的箝制。


大家想一想，這種警民合作的示威遊行方式，是誰搞出來的？他們三十年都不改變，又是為了什麼？我去年也隨便提議過同樣的事，叫遊行的人坐到天光，癱瘓中環，不要在黑夜坐馬路，要在白天坐馬路。我甚至教過大家窮人，集體在中環行乞，羞辱那些有錢人。大家以為我在講笑。香港的左翼要佔領中環，就要坐爆皇后大道，不是坐在匯豐銀行總行地下的無人地帶，幾個月來，就等銀行清場。香港為什麼失敗？就是抗爭者預設了失敗。無人設想成功、願意成功。


帶定紙皮，幾十萬人坐在街上不動，坐到天光，坐到天黑。警察夠不夠膽拘捕幾十萬人呢？大家不設想成功，就是大家仍未覺得絕望，仍留戀現時的制度安排和公共秩序。


由於缺乏行動後續，我認為七一示威遊行依然要和平與溫文，但態度要堅決。目前用武力抗爭是不可行的，因為武力抗爭必須要有行動提升的民眾願望和政治部署來做後盾的，盲目的武力抗爭只是宣洩憤恨、破壞團結而已。行動升級的準備條件，是民眾知道自己身處的境況而感到絕望，另一方面，有替代性的理論和行動組織出現。One door closes, the other door opens. 目前民眾並未意識到自己被困鎖住，等待大財閥的煎熬。至於民主黨、左翼、社運組織，都是上世紀的產物遺留，阻礙前進。


大家連剷除民主黨派都不能下決心的。因為大家依然眷戀這種曖昧的示威，這種極為有限公民責任的安全地帶。這個安全地帶，有其階段性的必要，然而，長此以往，人數起起落落，有什麼意義？股市的起落，還可以炒賣獲利，七一遊行的人數起落，大家有何獲利？




幾十萬人遊行，就是一個流動的國家在遊行啊！在外國，人民隨時可以宣布，人民制定憲法和推翻政府的。膽怯的組織者，如果認識到這點，就會怕得要死，到達終點就要解散了。人群多留一會，也不過是等記者拍攝或自己拍照留念而已。


示威之前，請問一下自己，你對這個制度有多留戀？想改變多少，付出多少？憑人數嚇一下政府，等他們自己搞掂？這樣逃避思考和責任的人民，全體走出來也沒有用，因為他們都依賴現行制度的領導。


為何東歐、埃及的廣場聚集人群，會革命成功？而六四民運就不成功？香港就年年七一都失敗一次？大家想一想，就會悲從中來。

ATL for life?

So the going rate for a 6 time All Star shooting guard (one of the 5 best in the entire world right now) who’s still in his prime is a package full of scrubs (has been’s and never will be’s). And yet we’re supposed to be happy about this trade because the Joe contract (at least at the price we paid, which was some $30 million over his market value) never should have happened in the first place? I guess so. This is what it’s like to be a Hawks fan: you lose your (overpaid) best player for NOTHING, and you’re supposed to be happy. You’ve been one of the top 10 teams in the NBA for the past 4 seasons, yet because your ceiling is limited, you’re supposed to be thrilled because we can now rebuild again for the FOURTH time in the past 13 years (the Shareef and Jason Terry era, the Al Harrington era, the Joe Johnson and Josh Smith and Al Horford era, and now this). Seriously. This is life as a Hawks fan.


Yes, we are pathetic.

7.1. 記事

心情有點複雜和朋友坐在政府總部外望著那紙錢兒緩緩的飛和那嘗試著粉飾太平的煙火感受著台上主持的力竭聲嘶凝視著強燈打在牆上的倒影聽進耳的的是抗戰二十年心裡卻不爭氣的想著last flowers 和 fake plastic trees和 我在伊朗長大 那式式樣樣的情節要說不感動是很難的這畢竟是一年以內難得感受全民熱血的時節可惜熱血背後 就好像所剩無幾了只要發覺人龍停下 就直嚷要警察開路只要有任何疑似民主黨的存在 就急急予其一隻堅挺的中指到最後 宣泄完一輪久存在心底的鬱悶大家只求以最快速度到達政府總部打個卡 唱個歌 算是完成任務乙個大聲討伐過大財團壟斷後去吃個海富大家樂相約三五知己一條龍為歐國盃喝彩又一個七一 又一年完結 又一年等待確確切切 曾有這麼的一個日子我們為自己能在馬路上的車與車之間穿插而驕傲而在這些日子過後我們卻又縮化成連街邊石壆都不敢亂坐的一個個人在窄小的天橋和行人道上擠過重重人流直至另一個七一的來臨歸途上沒有半輛巴士 唯有步行回家一路上想著很多問題 但沒一個能得到解答直至終於回家 洗了個澡 喝了鮮牛奶那堆疑惑卻一絲也沒離開過甚麼是信念?甚麼是認知?甚麼是希望?我連一個譜也沒有“Too much, too bright, too powerful”“She looks like the real thing, she tastes like the real thing, my fake plastic love”兩句歌詞以相伴一個深宵 希望來得有價值