Rules For 2025 Quotes

The great milestones of civilization always have the whiff of utopia about them at first. According to renowned sociologist Albert Hirschman, utopias are initially attacked on three grounds: futility (it’s not possible), danger (the risks are too great), and perversity (it will degenerate into dystopia). But Hirschman also wrote that almost as soon as a utopia becomes a reality, it often comes to be seen as utterly commonplace. Not so very long ago, democracy still seemed a glorious utopia. Many a great mind, from the philosopher Plato (427–347 B.C.) to the statesman Edmund Burke (1729–97), warned that democracy was futile (the masses were too foolish to handle it), dangerous (majority rule would be akin to playing with fire), and perverse (the “general interest” would soon be corrupted by the interests of some crafty general or other). Compare this with the arguments against basic income. It’s supposedly futile because we can’t pay for it, dangerous because people would quit working, and perverse because ultimately a minority would end up having to toil harder to support the majority.

In the Soviet Union under the rule of Joseph Stalin, prosperous farmers were portrayed on propaganda posters as pigs—a dehumanization that in a rural setting clearly suggests slaughter. This was in the early 1930s, as the Soviet state tried to master the countryside and extract capital for crash industrialization. The peasants who had more land or livestock than others were the first to lose what they had.

Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. “I

Frank claimed that law was meant to serve the race, and so what seemed good for the race was therefore the law. With arguments like this, German lawyers could convince themselves that laws and rules were there to serve their projects of conquest and destruction, rather than to hinder them.

Elites and ruling classes are masters in inventing initiatives intended to keep things unchanged...one of the things the ruling classes master best is framing their own needs and agendas as urgent public agendas or crises. [From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]

The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety. When

Beware the one-party state. The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office.

In April 2025, the case of a Salvadoran man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, came to the Supreme Court after the government deported him despite the existence of an order prohibiting them from doing that because he had a credible fear he would face serious persecution. It was an “administrative error,” the government told the Court. The Supreme Court did not go as far as it could have; there was no inquiry into whether the administration intentionally violated the order. But a unanimous Supreme Court—something we don’t see too often these days—ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return from Salvadoran custody to the United States. Ultimately, it falls to the courts to stand for the rule of law when it is under attack. They must do so if it’s to hold.

Moore’s Law, the rule of thumb in the technology industry, tells us that processor chips—the small circuit boards that form the backbone of every computing device—double in speed every eighteen months. That means a computer in 2025 will be sixty-four times faster than it is in 2013. Another predictive law, this one of photonics (regarding the transmission of information), tells us that the amount of data coming out of fiber-optic cables, the fastest form of connectivity, doubles roughly every nine months. Even if these laws have natural limits, the promise of exponential growth unleashes possibilities in graphics and virtual reality that will make the online experience as real as real life, or perhaps even better. Imagine having the holodeck from the world of Star Trek, which was a fully immersive virtual-reality environment for those aboard a ship, but this one is able to both project a beach landscape and re-create a famous Elvis Presley performance in front of your eyes. Indeed, the next moments in our technological evolution promise to turn a host of popular science-fiction concepts into science facts: driverless cars, thought-controlled robotic motion, artificial intelligence (AI) and fully integrated augmented reality, which promises a visual overlay of digital information onto our physical environment. Such developments will join with and enhance elements of our natural world. This is our future, and these remarkable things are already beginning to take shape. That is what makes working in the technology industry so exciting today. It’s not just because we have a chance to invent and build amazing new devices or because of the scale of technological and intellectual challenges we will try to conquer; it’s because of what these developments will mean for the world.

The announcement yesterday follows Obama’s 2011 agreement with automakers to build cars that average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. But as important as fuel efficiency in automobiles may be, power plants are the largest concentrated source of carbon dioxide emissions. The EPA’s new power-plant rules will reduce overall emissions by at least 80 times more metric tons of carbon than the regulations for cars. Almost all credible reports suggest the world is passing the point where it can reverse, or eliminate, global warming. But that only means it’s more urgent than ever to push for historic carbon reductions. Nonetheless, many politicians — including the usual global-warming deniers and those from both parties in fossil-fuel-producing states — rushed to claim the new rules would cause steep economic damage.

A one-year CD will typically charge an early withdrawal penalty of three months or so of interest. For a five-year CD, the penalty might be six to eight months interest. Every CD issuer has its own policy. Be sure you know the rules before you invest. A portfolio of CDs with different maturities can be a smart strategy to increase your overall yield, while reducing the chances you will need to make an early withdrawal. For instance you could invest equal amounts in five different CDs: one-year, two-year, three-year, four-year, and five-year. That way you have some money maturing every year. When the one-year CD matures, invest it in a new five-year. Your two-year CD now has just one more year to go, so it becomes your one-year CD. When it matures, invest that in a five-year CD too. Keep doing this and eventually you will have a portfolio of five-year CDs, with one maturing every year. That will pay you more interest than if you kept all of your money in a one-year CD that you had to reinvest annually. I think the CD ladder can be a terrific option for some of your cash, but if you are aiming for a two-year cash reserve, I would still keep at least six months of that in a simple savings account where

or near Jerusalem. After all this the Mahdi and Jesus will jointly rule over a Muslim planet, and eventually both will pass away.[83]

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I confront the question of whether DEI initiatives are divisive and ineffective. The answer is yes on both counts, but not for the narratives propagated by the American ruling class of oligarchs. Rather, we should consider how DEI initiatives have worked just enough to keep the status quo intact for those at the top, while planting the seeds of division between a significant percentage of marginalized and impoverished white people and every other marginalized and impoverished group in the U.S. and beyond. [From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]

By hiding behind the overarching term “white privilege,” the small percentage of privileged whites have ensured the following: first, they remain disguised behind the veil of whiteness and thus maintain the status quo. Second, they ensure that most marginalized white people remain defensive—and come to their defense—whenever their wealth and power are threatened. Third, through the structure of “whiteness,” privileged whites ensure that a large percentage of disadvantaged white people see other groups fighting against similar socio-economic ills as enemies, not allies to unite with in their battle. As such, the first bold proposal I make, if we are serious about social change, is to replace “white privilege” with “privileged whites” to account for the many whites who are not privileged and distinguish them from those who are. The huge number of disadvantaged white people are allies in this battle against the privileged, wealthy ruling class who utilize countless “isms” and “phobias” as sorting devices, while using the term “white privilege” as a tool to prevent any potential allyship between many white people who are not part of their club, yet are misled to think that the problem is everyone else in society except the privileged whites…Precision in language makes a huge difference to ensure all social groups who need to unite and work together have clarity on what kind of changes are needed, and who exactly is blocking change and transformation. [From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]

It is not a secret that most American and Western institutions and workplaces are very much like mountains: the higher one climbs, the whiter they become. But this whiteness at the top should not be seen as representative of all white people. We must distinguish between the white people who are as marginalized, silenced, and impoverished just like many other groups, and the specific ruling class that is white and that in fact also includes a big percentage of people who only started passing as white in recent history. The latter fact is crucial to understand why the small percentage of privileged whites at the top don’t mind the narratives that bracket all white people together, because in doing so, they continue to use all whites as human shields, while benefiting from framing everyone else as an enemy of white people at large. [From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]

Many DEI trainings and narratives have indeed enabled or produced types of people who seem to be looking for excuses to be offended and to construe, sometimes genuine human slips, as intentional micro and macro aggressions. Even worse, the way things have been done has resulted in people who are quick to play identity cards anytime they are confronted with totally unrelated matters like being incompetent in doing their work or other unrelated professional and personal matters. I am in no way condoning or denying the existence of racism, sexism, and countless other forms of exclusions, marginalization, and even violence against so many vulnerable groups and individuals, but I also can’t in good faith ignore the darker side of this coin. For one side to be true, it doesn’t negate the other darker side. In many workplaces and university campuses, we have armies of people who overuse and even abuse the language of ‘feeling violated’ over things like someone mistakenly not referring to them as “they,” but they remain completely silent and unmoved by countless injustices on campus or at work, let alone about atrocities and genocides in the outside world. We have a type that wastes so much time giving themselves and others the ‘permission’ to indulge in selfish acts of complicity, indifference, and silence under the guise of ‘self-care.’ [From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]

Many people have asked me recently what I make of all the workplaces who were so quick to roll back on their DEI practices. My answer is that these are very likely the kind of workplaces that have abused, misapplied, and co-opted DEI initiatives all along. It is proof that they were never serious about such initiatives in the first place. For them, DEI work was just playing the game, and the game they play is quick to change when the rules of that game are changed. [From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]