As sterile as it is absorbing
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 18 years ago, in 2006, on the World Wide Web.
Depending on how you follow the posts here, you may or may not have noticed the box at the top of the front page, which features a randomly-selected, rotating epigraph. Well, in any case, I have a new one to put into heavy rotation. This one is thanks to Roderick’s belated Bastille Day oration; it’s from Proudhon’s General Idea of the Revolution:
[W]e must understand that outside the sphere of parliamentarism, as sterile as it is absorbing, there is another field incomparably vaster, in which our destiny is worked out; that beyond these political phantoms, whose forms capture our imagination, there are the phenomena of social economy, which, by their harmony or discord, produce all the good and ill of society. … Know well that there is nothing more counter-revolutionary than the Government. Whatever liberalism it pretends, whatever name it assumes, the Revolution repudiates it: its fate is to be absorbed in the industrial organization.
–Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1851), The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, Second Study § 1 ¶ 27 and First Study § 3 ¶ 48
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Oooh, that’s some good geekin’. I’d be tempted to imitate, but I’ve done enough template tweaking in the last 24 hours to hold me for another week, at least.
P.S. Are you the individual whose mercies I should beg, in my continuing quest to fix my feed settings at feministblogs.org? (Have sent a few inquires via the web form and email over the last week, with new/correct feed URL, etc.) Needless to say, my migration to WordPress wasn’t especially well-planned… (& feel free to modify or delete this comment as needed… Certainly, I don’t mean to clog your comments form with the add-on personal request :)