“Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.”— Profit Over People - Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky did not write this. It was written by Robert McChesney as noted previously.
(See also: misattribution tag)
“People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.”— Abraham Lincoln
Obviously this is a dumb and immoral attitude, but some of the context is funny. The statement is first of all a slight misquotation of words attributed to Lincoln by the early self-help author Orison Swett Marden in a 1917 book called How to Get What You Want. Marden was part of a movement espousing the idea that all disease is mental in origin and anybody can get what they want by thinking the right thoughts. He claimed that Abraham Lincoln said “folks are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Whether or not Lincoln really said it, that more measured statement has been altered and made more extreme and also much more widely circulated by the usual process, while the always dubious attribution to Lincoln has of course been preserved. Perhaps capping off the joke is the fact that much of this sloppiness is riding the coattails of someone whose real words include such gems as: “I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
““Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless…In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will be for the foreseeable future.””— Noam Chomsky (via graceisred)
Noam Chomsky did not write this. It was written by Robert McChesney. By now the wrong attribution has spread to the point where top google search results repeat the error.
It’s kind of an interesting (though relatively minor) problem: how to get a handle on the proliferation of these errors as the technology speeds up their proliferation.
Found this post at etmarciniec.com about misattribution of quotes. I’ve been thinking about this same topic (1, 2) and she does a good job of explaining it.
This might seem like the truth to a pathologically shy person or anyone deeply invested in a lie. In less bizarre circumstances the statement is simply false. To think for oneself aloud is sort of the minimum standard and a prerequisite for meaningful discussion - nothing heroic.
It’s also not clear that Coco Chanel really said this. Misattribution of quotes has become a bigger problem as quotes proliferate on the internet. Searching for documentation of this one yields Armand Eisen’s book Believing in Ourselves, published in 1992, but there too the quote appears with no context, no date, no way to verify its authenticity.
(Source: observando, via allybis)
“Any problem in the world can be solved by dancing.”
— James Brown (via thatluciegirl)
Obviously the statement is false. And it’s doubtful that James Brown ever said it. The internet has enabled unprecedented circulation of quotations, mostly without evidence of authenticity. Among the many people who attribute this obviously false statement to James Brown, someone ought to show persuasive evidence that he said it. I can’t find any such evidence. It’s possible that the obviously false statement about dancing was originally made in jest, in which case it should be presented specifically as jest if at all. But it’s also possible that it was entirely invented, along the usual racist lines, to make light of James Brown’s contribution to music and culture.
(Source: caryrandolph)
zuky:
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
author, activist, professor
Her book “The Woman Warrior” is probably one of the first books I read in high school to ever fully get me to be aware of being a woman, an Asian woman at that and being comfortable in my own skin and struggle as a double minority. (awkward sentence, i know)
This is a beautiful woman to me. Probably if given an acting role would only be suited as that crazy old Asian lady into that voodoo stuff the White protagonist gets to either “tame” or kill at the end. But I think she exudes the beauty the silver screen portrays. Her strength, wit, and womanhood is something that Hollywood isn’t ready for and probably never will be.Maxine Hong Kingston was the first Chinese American novelist whose writing I fell in love with, in my teens, starting with The Woman Warrior and Tripmaster Monkey. She’s still my favorite.
“In The Woman Warrior, Kingston takes a childhood chant, ‘The Ballad of Mulan,’ which is as popular today as ‘London Bridge is Falling Down,’ and rewrites the heroine, Fa Mulan, to the specs of the stereotype of the Chinese woman as a pathological white supremacist victimized and trapped in hideous Chinese civilization… Kingston, Hwang, and Tan are the first writers of any race and certainly the first writers of Asian ancestry, to so boldly fake the best-known works from the most universally known body of Asian literature and lore in history.” (Link)
- Frank Chin
(via zuky)
