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Quent Cordair

@QuentCordair

Mar 18, 2021

It was a year ago today that officials of the State of California and the County of Napa issued the shelter-in-place order that prohibited us from opening our gallery's doors, a condition that would come to be extended indefinitely. The forced closure posed a threat to our lives

a threat that would worsen with each passing day of the lockdown, as there can be no art gallery without art buyers, no artists without art sales, no art without artists, no consumption without production, no life without livelihood, no being without doing. No us without ours.

As the quiet days turned into silent weeks, it would become increasingly evident that officials had found themselves in the position of high priests overseeing and orchestrating an orgy of self-sacrifice to the "greater good."

Read 14 tweets

Quent Cordair

@QuentCordair

Nov 7, 2020

Penned it in July, 2017. It's as true, and even more important today. "Check your emotions: if you find that your hatred of the left or of the right is more strongly felt than your love for individualism, and if your life is your standard of value,
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consider reexamining your premises and your approach. If your political thoughts, words, and actions are essentially reactive, driven primarily and most often by emotions of loathing or fear—you've conceded to playing your enemy's game, and by his rules.
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That's a game you'll lose, even if you destroy him, for with destruction comes a vacuum, and while nature may abhor a vacuum, evil adores one. Evil is ever reborn where innocence is left unprotected, where freedoms are left poorly protected.
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Read 8 tweets

Quent Cordair

@QuentCordair

Oct 21, 2020

"Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. ... a zero cannot hold a mortgage over life.
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"You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death we wish to avoid, but life we wish to live.
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"You, who have lost the concept of the difference, you who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal power - and secretly add that fear is more 'practical' - you do not wish to live, and only fear of death holds you to the existence you have damned.
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Read 12 tweets

Quent Cordair

@QuentCordair

Sep 7, 2020

"Observe the snarling, hysterical hatred with which they greet any suggestion that sacrifice is not necessary ..."
We've observed it -- we've been the target of it -- from the day we announced we were reopening the gallery.

We’ve observed it from neighbors, complete strangers, even from formerly close friends. Altruism's moral standard of sacrifice runs much deeper and wider in the culture than many realize or most would want to admit openly.

The only real disagreement, politically and ideologically, is over the what and how of the sacrifice, over which collective entity is the rightful recipient – the nation, all of mankind, a particular race, tribe, sex, the elderly, the poor, those susceptible to a disease, ad inf.

Read 7 tweets

Quent Cordair

@QuentCordair

Aug 31, 2020

"When we say that we hold individual rights to be inalienable, we must mean just that. Inalienable means that which we may not take away, suspend, infringe, restrict or violate—not ever, not at any time, not for any purpose whatsoever.

"You cannot say that “man has inalienable rights except in cold weather and on every second Tuesday,” just as you cannot say that “man has inalienable rights except in an emergency,” or “man’s rights cannot be violated except for a good purpose.”

"Either man’s rights are inalienable, or they are not. You cannot say a thing such as “semi-inalienable” and consider yourself either honest or sane. When you begin making conditions, reservations and exceptions, you admit that there is something or someone above man’s rights,

Read 5 tweets

Quent Cordair

@QuentCordair

Aug 28, 2020

@WSJ

The root problem is that altruists have no problem with this. To the altruist, sacrifice is good, and the more sacrifice to the "greater good," the better. ''The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.''~Ayn Rand wsj.com/articles/covid… via @WSJ

"Reason destroys fear; egoism destroys guilt. More precisely: reason does not permit man to feel metaphysically helpless; reason does not permit him to accept unearned guilt or to regard himself as a sacrificial animal.

But a man indoctrinated with the notion that reason is impotent and self-sacrifice is his moral duty, will obey anyone and anything. "If sacrifice is equated with virtue, there is no stopping the advance of the totalitarian state.

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