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After structures are damaged or destroyed by wildfire, the victims are sometimes offered state and federal disaster relief. Assistance in the form of low-interest loans, temporary relocation expenses, and other services often supports and encourages people to more easily rebuild in the same location. These actions arise from the natural desire we all feel to help people who have had their lives disrupted by sudden and unexpected catastrophe, but it must be kept in mind that the result may be to perpetuate and subsidize settlement patterns that are inherently dangerous. It is common to require that replacement buildings be constructed with materials and in ways that are more fire safe than the originals. Over the long run, society as a whole might be better off to go a step further and entirely eliminate incentives for living in places where future fire disasters are likely. As city, county, state, and federal budgets become more and more strained and stretched, it is imprudent to allow private landholders to bill the ultimate cost of their private decision to live in a hazardous area to the rest of us. That decision is not private, and it is expensive.

— Introduction to California Chaparral by Ronald D. Quinn, Sterling C. Keeley (California natural history guides ;) (Page 285 - 286)

Proclaiming someone or something's defeat contributes to it. It's a form of sabotage.[...] I remember that we were never going to stop the Keystone XL pipeline—or so said the armchair experts, who, by discouraging participation, essentially campaigned for that outcome, because such speech is itself a form of participation. After more than a decade of organizing and activism, the death blow was delivered to KXL in 2021, but so many campaigns and the climate movement as a whole would be a lot easier without this disparagement, which serves as a brake when we need accelerators.

— No Straight Road Takes You There by Rebecca Solnit (Page 70)

Drug use was never a problem that powerful institutions addressed urgently because they cared about the health and well-being of all people. It was not a problem they viewed as so threatening that they calculated the extraordinary human and financial costs and found mass criminalization worth it. Instead, the expansion of the machinery of state power and profit amid social and racial inequalities was, in many overlapping ways, the impetus to search for policies like what became the war on drugs. The war on drugs was a solution in search of a problem.

— Copaganda by Alec Karakatsanis (Page 274)

[Pro-police editorials] are like copaganda catnip for liberals. They sedate readers with the illusion that they can be progressives while opposing the people who would implement progressive policies in practice. Elite magazines and newspapers commission and publish these pieces during election season to corral people otherwise attracted to more progressive positions back into the carceral status quo. They trick them into thinking their communities' problems don't have root causes that need social and economic investment, but are instead problems that can be solved by slightly tweaking punishment policy and giving more money to the bureaucrats who enforce it.

The fancy think piece, then, is perhaps more like fentanyl than catnip. It's like pumping a drug into the veins of liberals to give them the momentary bliss of thinking that we don't need structural changes to make our society more equal. Consuming stuff like this is killing us fast, and it's often laced with fake ingredients.

— Copaganda by Alec Karakatsanis (Page 223 - 224)

BLM discourse truncates the policing problem as one of endemic antiblackness, and cuts of potential constituencies, treating other communities who have suffered police abuse and citizens who are deeply committed to achieving social justice as merely allies, junior partners rather than political equals and comrades. Moreover, characterizing the problem in terms of antiblackness further undermines the possibility of developing the kind of counterpower that is needed, since it promotes brokerage dynamics via the state-corporate/nonprofit complex set in motion by neoliberalism, converting what should be public concerns into new market opportunities, and revitalizing the black professional-managerial class with new blood and fresh faces. ...The demand to defund police and instead invest in working-class neighborhoods and livelihoods represents the promise of Black Lives Matter as a political force, but that tendency has been crowded out by a mainline and popular contention that sees "race" and racism as the principal motive of police actions, in ways that neglect the very workings of capitalist political economy and its specific consequences for the working poor across urban and rural geographies.

— After Black Lives Matter by Cedric Johnson (Page 162 - 163)

[Jane] Jacobs claims that a "well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city is apt to be unsafe." True enough, but let's try this again with the city as a totality in mind: A city where all residents are guaranteed a modicum of food, clothing and shelter, and where inequality is not vast and considered some natural ordering, is apt to be safe. The deeply unequal and spatially segregated city is apt to be unsafe.

— After Black Lives Matter by Cedric Johnson (Page 117)

There was no pleasure, no I-told-you-so among the hedge-seers who had for so long predicted that the end was on its way. Now that everyone who cared to think about it agreed with them—though they might abjure the insight—those who found themselves suddenly and unexpectedly the advance guard of mainstream opinion were at a bit of a loss. What was the point of dedicating your life to giving warnings if everyone who might have listened—because the majority were still unbothered and would possibly remain so till the sun went out—merely nodded and agreed?

— Kraken by China Miéville (Page 121)