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Do you know what it's like to run spellcheck for six hours? It's like a party in purgatory. A party in purgatory where all they have to drink is sugar-free Kool-aid, and the only game to play is Monopoly, and none of your friends show up.
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Patrick Rothfuss
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The question we need to ask ourselves is: what is success to us? More money? That's fine. A healthy family? A happy marriage? Helping others? To be famous? Spiritually sound? To express ourselves? To create art? To leave the world a better place than we found it?
What is success to me? Continue to ask yourself that question. How are you prosperous? What is your relevance?
Your answer may change over time and that's fine but do yourself this favor – whatever your answer is, don't choose anything that would jeopardize your soul. Prioritize who you are, who you want to be, and don't spend time with anything that antagonizes your character. Don't depend on drinking the Kool-Aid – it's popular, tastes sweet today, but it will give you cavities tomorrow.
Life is not a popularity contest. Be brave, take the hill. But first answer the question.
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Matthew McConaughey (Greenlights)
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It is time to stop drinking the Kool-Aid, get off the cruise-ship church, jump into the battleship Church and start moving into the purpose and destiny that God has for you.
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John Ramirez (Conquer Your Deliverance: How to Live a Life of Total Freedom)
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Well, are you going to motivate people to bring peace to war-torn nations, or are you going to motivate people to join a cult and drink the Kool-Aid?
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Libba Bray (Beauty Queens)
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When the government does the job of a parent, that's socialism.
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Marybeth Hicks (Don't Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left's Assault on Our Families, Faith, and Freedom)
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The uncomfortable reality is, the diversity agenda isn't about honoring and cherishing all racial, ethnic and religious traditions. It's about apologizing for our Western, Judeo-Christian foundations while pretending not to notice that we're elevating in the eyes of our children the very cultures that hold America in disdain.
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Marybeth Hicks (Don't Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left's Assault on Our Families, Faith, and Freedom)
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They might all be drinking laced Kool-Aid in there, but she had a good head on her shoulders. Things like vampires and past lives and immortality just didn’t exist in the real world. And Schuyler was a card-carrying member of the real world. She didn’t want to check into CrazyTown any time soon.
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Melissa de la Cruz (Blue Bloods (Blue Bloods, #1))
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Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line.
There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.
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Christopher Hitchens (Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays)
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I didn't drink they Kool-Aid of patriotism, nor did I drink the moonshine of anarchy.
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Penny Reid (Love Hacked (Knitting in the City, #3))
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The political correctness of diversity as a core value essentially cheats some children out of their right to be fully engaged in American society.
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Marybeth Hicks (Don't Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left's Assault on Our Families, Faith, and Freedom)
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Stupid girl. The guy terrorized me over the course of a half hour, and instead of running for cover, I was drinking the Kool-Aid.
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Penelope Douglas (Kill Switch (Devil's Night, #3))
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Gus wasn’t ready to drink the Kool-Aid yet, but he was ready to commit to the final leg of this journey.
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Guillermo del Toro (The Night Eternal (The Strain Trilogy, #3))
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What was that Shannon girl saying about teenage marriage?” Dad crossed his arms. Oh sweet baby Jesus. This couldn’t be more embarrassing. “Don’t worry. I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid.” As I said that, Mr. Dawson and Dastien walked into the cafeteria. The room felt ten degrees hotter as I watched Dastien. Boy did he make the Kool-Aid appealing.
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Aileen Erin (Becoming Alpha (Alpha Girl, #1))
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Eric Leeds said at one point Prince wanted the band to all be vegan. Alan told his brother that to survive being in Prince’s band you had to at least pretend to drink the Kool-Aid, so, Eric said, you had guys being vegan when Prince was around and eating whatever they wanted when he wasn’t around. “He attached some spiritual component to it but looked at it as another way for him to exercise control,” Eric said. “If you’re gonna work for me then you have to conform to my ideal.
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Touré (I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon)
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Today, few Americans born after 1980 are familiar with the Jonestown tragedy, although anyone with an Internet connection can listen to the haunting tape of the community’s mass extinction. And while the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” has entered the cultural lexicon, its reference to gullibility and blind faith is a slap in the face of the Jonestown residents who were goaded into dying by the lies of Jim Jones, and, especially insulting to the 304 murdered children. As the FBI files clearly document, the community devolved into a living hell from which there was no escape.
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Julia Scheeres (A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown)
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But the truth is, the multicultural movement, especially as presented in our educational institutions, isn't really about fostering greater respect among people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. It's about building the self-esteem of certain ethnic groups while shaming those who have the audacity to prefer a distinct American culture. And most of all, it's about manipulating the expectations of an entire generation so they'll abandon our nation's heritage of American exceptionalism and benevolent hegemony and instead go marching into the glorious sunset of our republican form of government toward unambitious, unmotivated, uninspired, unexceptional socialism.
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Marybeth Hicks (Don't Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left's Assault on Our Families, Faith, and Freedom)
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It is clear that the left is winning the battle of ideas with America's young people, and doing so with some decidedly mediocre political dogma. If our children are both demonstrably uneducated and measurably indoctrinated, and if we're fully aware that these things are true, we can't just stand around clucking and griping about all that is wrong. We need to offer more of what is right.
If we want our children to experience the liberty and opportunity uniquely available to us as American citizens, we need to raise a new generation of leaders who will shore up the republican form of government handed down to us by our Founders. We need to counter the Left's messages about dependency and entitlement with a vision of patriotic citizenship to which our youth can aspire.
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Marybeth Hicks (Don't Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left's Assault on Our Families, Faith, and Freedom)
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It’s time to introduce a new fallacy that we have coined the Kool-Aid Fallacy. It goes like this: “You disagree with me and I’m in the majority while you’re in the minority. Therefore you’re a cult. Jim Jones led a cult and all of his followers drank poisoned Kool-Aid. Therefore, you’re a suicide cult and I am entitled to say, ‘Keep drinking the Kool-Aid.’” It’s unbelievable how many times this fallacy appears on social media. It is now so common that we can validly refer to a Kool-Aid version of Godwin’s Law. Any strong-minded minority with ideas that challenge the common herd will automatically be called a cult and then it is inevitable that Kool-Aid will be mentioned. Whenever any troll refers to “drinking the Kool-Aid”, they should immediately be labeled as having committed the Kool-Aid fallacy.
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Thomas Stark (Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason (The Truth Series Book 8))
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When it comes to our current fears regarding unsupervised children, we see both versions of folk wisdom at work. In the sixties or seventies, a child could walk to school or wait in a car because people were better, the world less violent, we say. But also, parents were dumber. They simply didn’t know. Sure, parents used to leave kids on their own, but they also let them drink Kool-Aid by the vat and play with toy weapons the NRA might find a touch aggro. They let them build forts in the trunks of station wagons careening down the freeway or swim without sunscreen until their skin blistered. Parents let kids wait in cars because they were idiots. But also, on average, because it was safer, because people were better then, gentler, less monstrous. It sounds so nice and pleasant, this safer, simpler past. It sounds almost too good to be true.
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Kim Brooks (Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear)
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The Internet and social media are like the ocean: good for surfing and fishing, but never drink any Kool-Aid made with the water.
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M.T. Bass
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When faced with mass lunacy, you have one of three choices. You can drink the Kool-Aid, along with the rest, you can shake your head and walk away or you can mock the morons. I hate Kool-Aid and I’m in a mocking mood...
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Terence Thirteen (Alaska Space Center)
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I see you’re drinking the Kool-Aid
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Lisa Scottoline (One Perfect Lie)
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Cyrus is heading to the parking lot. “He drinks his own Kool-Aid,” I say to Jules, stating the totally obvious, which is that Cyrus is the smartest person in the world—except when it comes to getting rejected.
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Tahmima Anam (The Startup Wife)
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The addict drinks the Kool-Aid® of his own propaganda every single day.
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Dave Scriven (The Pursuit of Porneia: a review of the culture of sexual addiction and a biblical pathway to recovery)
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This is how capitalist patriarchy works. It depends on us drinking the Kool-Aid, or in this case the rosé, and not questioning it.
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Holly Whitaker (Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol)
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So.” I give a half grin. “What are we playing? Spin the bottle? Seven minutes in heaven? Drink the Kool-Aid?
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Justin Arnold (Wicked Little Things)
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And President Janney made sure this was a request they couldn’t refuse. So lucky us. We now have a polygraph system that is unbeatable. Today we get to find out, once and for all, who is ready to stab us in the back. Who is ready to drink the Kool-Aid that Edgar Knight is serving. Who wants to sabotage us and help this madman build a global government and take the helm.” “Assuming the mole is in our Inner Circle, of course,” added Joe Allen from beside him. “Right,” said Cargill. “Which I hope like hell isn’t the case. But either way, we’ll finally be confident we can trust each other, and we can move forward on that basis.” Cargill’s face hardened. “So none of you are leaving this room until all of you are tested. You should be honored to know that this will be the first use of the new test under field conditions.
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Douglas E. Richards (Split Second (Split Second, #1))
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She was a tall drink of water, and I was a glass half full kind of guy—half full of lust. Actually, my glass was half full of Kool-Aid powder, which is why I lusted for her.
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Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
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I hate this whole damn place. I hate the fact that you have live toilet paper and that you eat dog crap and bug guts for dinner and drink woo that looks like blue Kool-aid and tastes like somebody lit a blowtorch in your mouth. I hate the fact that it’s so damned cold outside I can’t get away. So I’m trapped here with your aunt and uncle, who can’t stand me, because the live clothing they gave me to wear made a fool of me in front of their entire community. And now I’m stuck with a pet I don’t want for…how long do they live?” Sylvan cleared his throat. “The average tharp can live as long as its owner.” “For life.” Sophia threw up her hands. “I’m stuck with a horrible, badly behaved pet I don’t want for the rest of my life! I hate it, Sylvan. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. And I just…just want to go home.” The last word ended on a sob and she buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking with the force of her tears. “Talana…” Sylvan put a hand on her shoulder but she shrugged it off. “Just go away and leave me alone,” she whispered brokenly. “Go back to Feenah—that’s where you want to be.” “That isn’t true,” Sylvan said in a low voice. “Of
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Evangeline Anderson (Hunted (Brides of the Kindred, #2))
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I hate this whole damn place. I hate the fact that you have live toilet paper and that you eat dog crap and bug guts for dinner and drink woo that looks like blue Kool-aid and tastes like somebody lit a blowtorch in your mouth. I hate the fact that it’s so damned cold outside I can’t get away. So I’m trapped here with your aunt and uncle, who can’t stand me, because the live clothing they gave me to wear made a fool of me in front of their entire community. And now I’m stuck with a pet I don’t want for…how long do they live?” Sylvan cleared his throat. “The average tharp can live as long as its owner.” “For life.” Sophia threw up her hands. “I’m stuck with a horrible, badly behaved pet I don’t want for the rest of my life! I hate it, Sylvan. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. And I just…just want to go home.” The last word ended on a sob and she buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking with the force of her tears. “Talana…” Sylvan put a hand on her shoulder but she shrugged it off. “Just go away and leave me alone,” she whispered brokenly. “Go back to Feenah—that’s where you want to be.” “That isn’t true,” Sylvan said in a low voice. “Of course it is.” She looked up, her eyes red from crying. “I saw the way you two were looking at each other. Not that I can say anything, I know. But still…still…” “Still what?” Sylvan’s heart gave a strange little thump. Could it be that she was jealous? That she cared for him after all? Enough that he didn’t want him to see Feenah? But Sophia only shook her head. “Never mind. Just…go. Leave the tharp and go.” Sylvan wanted badly to stay and comfort her. To cuddle her in his arms and whisper that everything would be all right. But from the look on her tearstained face his comfort wasn’t wanted right now. In fact, he was fairly sure that Sophia wouldn’t want anything to do with him or any of the rest of Tranq Prime for some time to come. “Very well, Talana. Maybe we can speak later.” Sighing, he dropped the tharp at the foot of her sleeping platform and left the room. What
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Evangeline Anderson (Hunted (Brides of the Kindred, #2))
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drinking that Kool-Aid again. Not in a million years. And in any case, they’d known each other for about five minutes. She was ridiculous to be thinking of anything with Noah Bradford, even in the negative. He was a helpful stranger, nothing more. Noah paid for his groceries, his expression grim, and they walked out in silence back to the Land Rover. Claire thought she could piece enough of the story together from Noah’s phone call; his ex had asked him to take care of their daughter unexpectedly, for Christmas. His terse words echoed through her mind. ‘It’s Christmas, Dani. It’s an important
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Kate Hewitt (A Yorkshire Christmas (Christmas Around the World Series, #2))
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I wanted to drink the Kool-Aid he was serving, but by then my taste buds had matured and I preferred the vinegary truth.
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Kathy Hatfield (The Girl on the Moon: A Novel About Endless Time)
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If I had my life over again, I would form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice the remembrance of death.
There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs. You might as well drink Kool-Aid
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Steven Salaita
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Drink kool aid and eat fried chicken like you're black,
jump borders and wear sombreros like a Mexican,
snort cocain and dance salsa like a Colombian,
surf big ass waves like a Hawaiian,
ride on fluffy lamas like a Peruvian,
drink tea like a British muhfucka,
be sexy like a Brazilian Chic,
nuke motherfuckers like an American,
and don't give a fuck like a Drunk Russian!
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Papi Chulo
“
And for every crackpot prophet, there were a thousand followers willing to drink the Kool-Aid.
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Michael Wallace (Mighty and Strong (Righteous Book 2))
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Like mad scientists, we experimented with citrus, soda, juices and drink mixes. Watered-downed citrus worked best: two parts water to one part juice. Double strength Kool-aid took down zombies pretty good, too. Plus, it had the added advantage of giving you an excuse to yell, "Oh yeah!
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M.J.A. Ware (Super Zombie Juice Mega Bomb (A Zombie Apocalypse Novel Book 1))
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We all try to explain away the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, or the Sabra Massacre by denying that we could ever do anything so horrible. The committers of those crimes are evil, other, bad apples; something in the German or American psyche makes their people susceptible to following orders, drinking the grape Kool-Aid, killing indiscriminately. You believe that you’re the one person who wouldn’t have delivered the electric shocks in the Milgram experiment because those who did must have been emotionally abused by their parents, or had domineering fathers, or were dumped by their spouses. Anything that makes them different from you.
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Rabih Alameddine (An Unnecessary Woman)
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Just don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” sniggered Chuck, nodding toward the hot tub. He leaned down and
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Matthew Mather (CyberStorm)
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Twelve years later the memories of those nights, of that sleep deprivation, still make me rock back and forth a little bit. You want to torture someone? Hand them an adorable baby they love who doesn’t sleep. Badge of honor? Necessary evil, yes. Pain in the ass, yes. Badge of honor? Are you freaking kidding me? Who believes that crap? Who is drinking THAT crazy Kool-Aid? But a lot of people are. MOST people are. I don’t think it ever occurred to me before how much and how often women are praised for displaying traits that basically render them invisible. When I really think about it, I realize the culprit is the language generally used to praise women. Especially mothers. “She sacrificed everything for her children . . . She never thought about herself . . . She gave up everything for us . . . She worked tirelessly to make sure we had what we needed. She stood in the shadows, she was the wind beneath our wings.” Greeting card companies are built on that idea.
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Shonda Rhimes (Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person)
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Twelve years later the memories of those nights, of that sleep deprivation, still make me rock back and forth a little bit. You want to torture someone? Hand them an adorable baby they love who doesn’t sleep. Badge of honor? Necessary evil, yes. Pain in the ass, yes. Badge of honor? Are you freaking kidding me? Who believes that crap? Who is drinking THAT crazy Kool-Aid? But a lot of people are. MOST people are.
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Shonda Rhimes (Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person)
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These men developed a kind of Freudian-Marxism, or “Freudo-Marxism,” integrating the extraordinarily bad but influential twentieth-century ideas of Sigmund Freud with the extraordinarily bad but influential nineteenth-century teachings of Karl Marx. This was no match made in heaven. The noxious Marx had conjured up the most toxic ideas of the nineteenth century, whereas the neurotic Freud had cooked up the most infantile ideas of the twentieth century. Swirling the insipid ideas of those two ideological-psychological basket cases into a single malevolent witch’s brew was bound to uncork a barrel of mischief. The Frankfurt School was the laboratory and the distillery for their concoction, and the children of the 1960s would be their twitching guinea pigs and guzzling alcoholics. The flower-children, the hippies, the Yippies, the Woodstock generation, the Haight-Asbury LSD dancers, the sex-lib kids would all drink deep from the magic chalice, intoxicated by lofty dreams (more like hallucinations and bad acid-trips) of fundamental transformation of the culture, country, and world. And a generation or two still later, they would become the nutty professors who mixed the Kool-Aid for the millennials who would merrily redefine everything from marriage to sexuality to gender, wittingly or not serving the Frankenstein monster of cultural Marxism by doing so.
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Paul Kengor (The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration)
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Trump saved the crappiest jobs for me, a fact that I took pride in; I was given the dirty work because I was willing to get dirt on my hands—and blood if necessary. If that seems bizarre to you, think about it like being under the spell of a cult leader. I don’t mean that as a cliché or an accusation: I mean literally. How did Jim Jones get his followers in Guyana to drink the poisoned Kool-Aid (actually, it was a cheap knockoff called Flavor Aid) and commit mass suicide? The answer was that Jones took control of the minds of those drawn to him, not all at once but gradually, over time, by luring them into his mind. “Stop drinking the Kool-Aid,” we would say to each other at the Trump Organization all the time.
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Michael Cohen (Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump)
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Trent Meyer @meyer_the_fire No he didn’t. Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody has seriously believed the earth is flat for the last 2,500 years. Not until you lot started drinking the Kool-Aid RT 3 L 41 Dennster @true_earth_matters Please. It’s a documented fact that Columbus had to try and persuade the Council of Salamanca that the earth was round, but they didn’t buy it. And none of his sailors wanted to go on the voyage because they thought he was a globularist nutter RT 9 L 124 Trent Meyer @meyer_the_fire It’s not documented fact. It’s pure fiction. It was made up by the writer Washington Irving in the 1820s to create an origin story for the United States. The Council of Salamanca was never even a thing RT 1 L 27 Dennster @true_earth_matters Washington Irving? Right. Another white guy RT 3 L 46 Mekell King @pointymekell I’m black. It doesn’t upset me if anyone says the earth is round. I’m comfortable with basic facts RT 5 L 64 Dennster @true_earth_matters Have you ever heard of internalised racism? RT 0 L 14 Mekell King @pointymekell Seriously? You’re going there? You, a white dude, are actually calling me, a black woman, racist?? RT 7 L 89 Dennster @true_earth_matters How do you know I’m white? RT 0 L 65 Mekell King @pointymekell You are, though, aren’t you? RT 1 L 75 Dennster blocked Mekell King
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Simon Edge (The End of the World is Flat)
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How could an authoritative leader waste his own time like that? It’s because the cult of overwork had made him drink the Kool-Aid.
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Juliet Funt (A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work)
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To make it in professional sports, you have to drink your own Kool-Aid. You have to invent your winning narrative and never question it. That puck isn't going into the net if I don't believe it will. The game can't be won unless I believe it's possible.
In denver, I believe.
And I'm en fuego. Now that I'm back to believing that the puck can find my stick and then the net, it does. Twice. I feel unstoppable in the thrid period.
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Sarina Bowen (Overnight Sensation (Brooklyn, #2))
“
Given that she had been raised by churchgoing folk, it was a bit odd that this hadn’t occurred to her before. No aspect of what was going on seemed as though it might be improved by communication with a deity. With the possible exception, that is, that it might make her feel better. That, as far as she could tell, was the purpose of the religion she had been brought up in: it made people feel better when really horrible things happened, and it offered a repertoire of ceremonies that were used to add a touch of class to such goings-on as shacking up with someone and throwing dirt on a corpse. None of which especially bothered Zula or made her doubt its worthwhileness. Making sad people feel better was a fine thing to do. That kind of religion did not have the power to make one give all of one’s money to a charlatan, drink poison Kool-Aid, or strap explosives to one’s body, but at the same time it did not seem equal to the challenges imposed by a situation such as this one. Since it had seemed perfectly acceptable to her before, she didn’t feel that it was entirely proper, at a moment like this, to suddenly change over into something more fervent.
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Neal Stephenson (Reamde)
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One, it makes Black folks, not the racist systems, the problem. Two, it makes assimilation more appealing for Asians. They drink the ‘white Kool-Aid.’ Three, it divides oppressed people so we won’t unite against our oppressors.
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Joanna Ho (The Silence That Binds Us)
“
To go back to the game metaphor from before, there exists a component of storytelling where it is you and the reader (or viewer, or whoever) sitting on opposite sides of a chessboard. You’re always trying to outwit each other. And sometimes you need them to outwit you—the audience needs that power, needs to be invested. They want to do work, and they want (sometimes) to be victorious. Other times, they want the shock of loss, the joy at being outplayed. And at those times you misdirect and distract, and as they’re thinking you’re moving your piece one way, you move it another and shock them with your prowess. But the trick is making all of this organic. It has to unfold naturally from the story—it’s not JUST you screwing with them. It’s you fucking with them within a framework that you built and agreed upon, a framework you’ve shown them, a place of rules and decorum. In this context, consider the game space. Like, say, a chessboard, or a D&D dungeon. The game space is an agreed-upon demesne. It has rules. It has squares. Each piece or character moves accordingly within those squares. It has a framework that everyone who has played the game understands. And yet, the outcome is never decided. The game is forever uncertain even within established parameters. Surprises occur. You might win. Maybe I win. That’s how storytelling operates best—we set up rules and a storyworld and characters, and you try to guess what we’re going to do with them. We as storytellers shouldn’t ever break the rules. Note: Breaking the rules in this context might mean conveniently leaving out a crucial storyworld rule (“Oh, vampires don’t have to drink blood; they can drink Kool-Aid”), or solving a mystery with a killer who the audience couldn’t ever have guessed (“It was the sheriff from two towns over who we have never before discussed or even mentioned”), or invoking a deus ex machina (“Don’t worry, giant eagles will save them. It’s cool”). You can still have chaos and uncertainty within the parameters—creating a framework, like building a house, doesn’t mean it cannot contain secrets and surprises—but you stay within the parameters that you created. Again, it’s why stage magic works as a metaphor when actual wizard magic does not. With stage magic—tricks and illusions!—you can’t really violate the laws of reality. But it damn sure feels like you do. Stories make you believe in wizard magic, but really it’s just a clever, artful trick. The storyworld is bent and twisted, but never broken. And, of course, your greatest touchstone for all of this is the characters, and their problems and places inside the storyworld. The characters will forever be your guide, if you let them. They are the tug-of-war rope, the chess pieces, the D&D characters that exist as a connection between you and the audience. They are your glorious leverage.
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Chuck Wendig (Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative)
“
Much of what keeps the ego’s lies in place now is the fear of being different from the crowd, of stepping beyond convention and going against how most people think. Once there is less of a stigma around questioning your programming, because more people are not drinking the ego’s Kool-Aid, people will awaken to the truth—to reality—much more easily.
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Gina Lake (Beliefs, Emotions, and the Creation of Reality: New Teachings from Jesus)
“
We cannot afford to drink our culture’s Kool-Aid and believe we are superior to an omnipotent and omnipresent King. Scripture reminds us, time and time again, the humbling truth of God’s access to even the deepest depths of our darkened souls—after all, it is that very access that enables Him to reach deep into our self-dug pits and resuscitate our hardened hearts. We are only fooling ourselves if we truly believe the Creator of the universe does not have holy night vision in the most shadowed places of our stories.
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Mo Isom (Sex, Jesus, and the Conversations the Church Forgot)
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Those who lack a basic understanding of science will likely drink the kool-aid served by Charlatans and deniers.
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Don Rittner
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What Stare called the “lead gift” of $1,026,000 came from the General Foods Corporation, the maker of the very carbohydrate-rich Post cereals, Kool-Aid, and Tang breakfast drink. Over the next decade, Stare became the most public defender of sugar
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Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease)
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Just because I work there doesn't mean I have to drink all the Kool-Aid. - Veronica Knox
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David Baldacci (The Escape (John Puller, #3))
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I once had a foreign exchange trader who worked for me who was an unabashed chartist. He truly believed that all the information you needed was reflected in the past history of a currency. Now it's true there can be less to consider in trading currencies than individual equities, since at least for developed country currencies it's typically not necessary to pore over their financial statements every quarter. And in my experience, currencies do exhibit sustainable trends more reliably than, say, bonds or commodities. Imbalances caused by, for example, interest rate differentials that favor one currency over another (by making it more profitable to invest in the higher-yielding one) can persist for years. Of course, another appeal of charting can be that it provides a convenient excuse to avoid having to analyze financial statements or other fundamental data. Technical analysts take their work seriously and apply themselves to it diligently, but it's also possible for a part-time technician to do his market analysis in ten minutes over coffee and a bagel. This can create the false illusion of being a very efficient worker. The FX trader I mentioned was quite happy to engage in an experiment whereby he did the trades recommended by our in-house market technician. Both shared the same commitment to charts as an under-appreciated path to market success, a belief clearly at odds with the in-house technician's avoidance of trading any actual positions so as to provide empirical proof of his insights with trading profits. When challenged, he invariably countered that managing trading positions would challenge his objectivity, as if holding a losing position would induce him to continue recommending it in spite of the chart's contrary insight. But then, why hold a losing position if it's not what the chart said? I always found debating such tortured logic a brief but entertaining use of time when lining up to get lunch in the trader's cafeteria. To the surprise of my FX trader if not to me, the technical analysis trading account was unprofitable. In explaining the result, my Kool-Aid drinking trader even accepted partial responsibility for at times misinterpreting the very information he was analyzing. It was along the lines of that he ought to have recognized the type of pattern that was evolving but stupidly interpreted the wrong shape. It was almost as if the results were not the result of the faulty religion but of the less than completely faithful practice of one of its adherents. So what use to a profit-oriented trading room is a fully committed chartist who can't be trusted even to follow the charts? At this stage I must confess that we had found ourselves in this position as a last-ditch effort on my part to salvage some profitability out of a trader I'd hired who had to this point been consistently losing money. His own market views expressed in the form of trading positions had been singularly unprofitable, so all that remained was to see how he did with somebody else's views. The experiment wasn't just intended to provide a “live ammunition” record of our in-house technician's market insights, it was my last best effort to prove that my recent hiring decision hadn't been a bad one. Sadly, his failure confirmed my earlier one and I had to fire him. All was not lost though, because he was able to transfer his unsuccessful experience as a proprietary trader into a new business advising clients on their hedge fund investments.
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Simon A. Lack (Wall Street Potholes: Insights from Top Money Managers on Avoiding Dangerous Products)