I avoid all political complications," said Cloche, with a severe expression. "Of whatever stripe. I only wish that political complications would simi… - Adam Roberts

It could be any one of a dozen things. Experience has taught me that we much more often see connection where there is only random copresence. Pattern-seeking consciousness, you know. Great plains ape, you know.

You must register your disagreement, must you Monsieur?" he said, in a level voice. "Consider it registered. Consider it simultaneously disregarded.

She thought of the multitude.
Trillions of human beings, wrappend like a fog about their home star. The mind collapsed at the scale and the numbers. But if ethics meant anything at all, it meant not letting the largeness of the human population overwhelm our moral knowledge that life is lived individually, and that even when agglomerated into billions and trillions individual human beings deserve better han being used as tools. That the overwhelming majority of this vast mass of humanity was poor, living precariously and subsistence lives in leaky shanty bubbles, eating ghunk and drinking recycled water—this made this more, not less, true. These were the people least able to help themselves. Thery should be helped, not exploited.