“Big Brother, it turns out, is a capitalist who wants to sell you blue jeans.” – “The everywhere stores,” The Economist, October 28th, 2017
Category: Politics & Law
“There are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions. The first is that we will get our asses kicked. The second is that we will win.” – Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions
“The public interest in preserving the sanctity of the family is a significant public interest.” — Judge Stephan C. Hansbury, Superior Court of New Jersey, in K.A. and K.I.A v. J.L.
“Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.” – Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (trans. Ted Humphrey)
“The Chicago accent was most widespread during the city’s industrial heyday. Blue-collar work and strong regional speech are closely connected: if you graduated from high school in the 1960s, you didn’t need to go to college, or even leave your neighborhood, to get a good job, and once you got that job, you didn’t have to talk to anyone outside your house, your factory, your tavern, or your parish. A regular Joe accent was a sign of masculinity and local cred, bonding forces important for the teamwork of industrial labor. A 1970s study of steelworker families on Chicago’s East Side by linguist Robin Herndobler found that women were less likely than their husbands to say ‘dese, dem, and dose,’ because they dealt with doctors, teachers, and other professionals. After the mills closed, kids went to college, where they learned not to say ’dat,’ and took office jobs requiring interaction with people outside the neighborhood.” – Edward McClelland, How to Speak Midwestern
“Civilised society is insane. Money and so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“The physical sense of injustice is a dangerous feeling, once it is awakened. It must have outlet, or it eats away the one in whom it is aroused.” – D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
“The truly moral thing to do during a raging financial inferno is to put it out.” – Timothy Geithner, United States Treasury Secretary (quoted in The Economist, October 14th, 2017)
“In one’s dealings with the young it behoves one to display the scientific spirit, to exhibit the principles of enlightenment—not only for purposes of mental discipline, but on the human and individual side, in order not to wound them or indirectly offend their political sensibilities; particularly in these days, when there is so much tinder in the air, opinions are so frightfully split up and chaotic, and you may so easily incur attacks from one party or the other, or even give rise to scandal, by taking sides on a point of history.” – Thomas Mann, Disorder and Early Sorrow (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“The capacity for self-surrender . . . for becoming a tool, for the most unconditional and utter self-abnegation, was but the reverse side of that other power to will and to command. Commanding and obeying formed together one single principle, one indissoluble unity; he who knew how to obey knew also how to command, and conversely; the one idea was comprehended in the other, as people and leader were comprehended in one another.” – Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician (trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
“All people being equally oppressed is not equality.” – Angela Ross, Facebook, June 14, 2019
“When a democracy sends riot police to beat old ladies over the head with batons and stop them from voting, something has gone badly wrong. . . . A well-run democracy must abide by the rule of law. That is what protects democratic liberties, not least the freedom of minorities to express discontent. . . . Democracy rests on the consent of the governed.” – “How to Save Spain,” The Economist, October 7th, 2017
“Whatever else may or may not be open to him on appeal, a defendant who elects to represent himself cannot thereafter complain that the quality of his own defense amounted to a denial of effective assistance of counsel.” – Justice Potter Stewart, Faretta v. California, 1975
“The interest of the State in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” – Justice Harry Blackmun, Faretta v. California, 1975
“Even the intelligent and educated layman has small and sometimes no skill in the science of law. If charged with crime, he is incapable, generally, of determining for himself whether the indictment is good or bad. He is unfamiliar with the rules of evidence. Left without the aid of counsel he may be put on trial without a proper charge, and convicted upon incompetent evidence, or evidence irrelevant to the issue or otherwise inadmissible. He lacks both the skill and knowledge adequately to prepare his defense, even though he have a perfect one. He requires the guiding hand of counsel at every step in the proceedings against him. Without it, though he be not guilty, he faces the danger of conviction because he does not know how to establish his innocence. If that be true of men of intelligence, how much more true is it of the ignorant and illiterate, or those of feeble intellect.” – Justice George Sutherland, Powell v. Alabama, 1932
“An assistant, however expert, is still an assistant.” – Justice Potter Stewart, Faretta v. California, 1975
“The plaintiff was incarcerated with the Department of Corrections beginning in 1982. Upon admission, he was given a medical examination. The examination revealed the plaintiff was in good health and had no communicable diseases or infections. In March of 1989, the plaintiff was diagnosed with hepatitis B. One year later, he tested positive for tuberculosis.” – McNeil v. Carter, Appellate Court of Illinois, 2001
“We may rest assured that it is the nature of truth to force its way to recognition when the time comes, and that it only appears when its time has come, and hence never appears too soon, and never finds a public that is not ripe to receive it.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. J. B. Baillie)
“Examination of New Mexico statutes reveals a strong public policy that defendants have a duty to appoint and retain only mentally stable police officers.” – Judge Apodaca, Narney v. Daniels, Court of Appeals of New Mexico, 1992
“It is a dangerous thing to see anything in the sphere of a vain blusterer, before the vain blusterer sees it himself.” – Charles Dickens, Hard Times
“There is only one word for a woman who has sex without belonging to a man or without acquiescing to the burden of motherhood, and that word is witch. Or perhaps it is slut. Either way, it is terrifying, for it means that perhaps women don’t need men; and if we merely choose them, they might just owe their existence not to necessity or fate, but to the will of a woman. Suddenly there is nothing more lethal in the world, nothing as unbearable as the black flame of women’s desire. No, you were not meant to be; yes, your mother could just as well have dispensed with you—she could have simply not felt like it. Now do you see why we are hated so? Do you understand the smell of singed flesh burning at the stake, the breaking voice of the lawmaker as he screams out what our bodies should and should not do? The hatred of women for themselves, for others? Now do you see why we so fear the free? Yet rambunctious, light-headed sex alone does not a witch make. Where the traditional slut inspires hate and pity, the witch shines by eliciting fear and rage. One becomes a witch by way of discovering, inside herself, a thing that wants independence and freedom more than it wants water or air, a thing that wants to tell the world: ‘look at me, it is I, the self.’ ” – Marie Baleo, “Desert Animals” (emphasis in original)
“1857, March 3: James Birch wins a government contract to deliver mail from San Antonio, Texas to San Diego, California via El Paso. Because mules pulled his wagons, the service becomes known as the Jackass Mail.” – Leon Metz, El Paso Chronicles
“1849, November 10: Texas Judge Spruce M. Baird arrives in Santa Fe and declares Santa Fe part of Texas. The natives ignore him, so after a brief period he returns to Austin and argues that New Mexico is in rebellion.” – Leon Metz, El Paso Chronicles
“1848, March 15: On paper, the Texas Legislature creates Santa Fe County. It includes the Big Bend, Texas Panhandle, West Texas, a third of Oklahoma, most of New Mexico, half of Colorado, and chunks of Wyoming and Kansas. Santa Fe is the county seat.” – Leon Metz, El Paso Chronicles
“1841, June 20: The Texas-Santa Fe Expedition leaves Austin for Santa Fe. Historians argue over whether it was a trading force or an armed invasion. Anyway, General Hugh McLeod commanded 300 Texans. Three Texas commissioners tagged along to carry out the political aims of the invading/trading caravan. However, the expedition lost its way and was starving near modern-day Tucumcari, New Mexico, when it surrendered in October to a much smaller Mexican force. A death march then started toward El Paso, Chihuahua. Texans who died along the road had their ears cut off and strung on a piece of rawhide as proof that none had escaped.” – Leon Metz, El Paso Chronicles
“A hypothetical analogy, based on American history, may help to shed light on the historicity of Exodus. Imagine a book based on the following outline: first, a section on the American Revolution, with some biographical material on a few of the Founding Fathers, focusing mostly on the outbreak of the war and the key battles; second, a description of the Constitutional Convention, including some of the more important speeches and discussions; third, the test of the Constitution itself; and finally, L’Enfant’s original blueprints for the building of the new capital, Washington, D.C., interspersed with accounts of the first few presidents’ inaugural addresses. What would be the underlying message of such a book? We are certainly dealing here with more than a straight journalistic description of the events, more than a legalistic discussion of constitutional law, and more than a technical presentation for architects. Such a book would actually be presenting the ideals of America’s self-image: a nation founded on the willingness to fight for particular rights against Old World tyranny, established under democratic laws based on reason and providing governmental checks and balances, and whose ideals would be embodied in the construction of a brand-new, centrally located capital city that used classically grounded forms of architecture to express grace and reason as the basis for the new society.” – Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses
“Trial, by Jury, of facts, where they arise, is one of the greatest securities of the lives, liberties, and estates of the people.” Delaware Const. (1776), Declaration of Rights, Art. 13.
“Whatever else we may think of Her, God has a deft hand for the plot twist.” – Charles P. Pierce, “Trump’s New Lawyer Is Someone I Remember Well”
“To suggest that a creative writer, in a time of conflict, must split his life into two compartments, may seem defeatist or frivolous: yet in practice I do not see what else he can do. To lock yourself up in an ivory tower is impossible and undesirable. To yield subjectively, not merely to a party machine, but even to a group ideology, is to destroy yourself as a writer. We feel this dilemma to be a painful one, because we see the need of engaging in politics while also seeing what a dirty, degrading business it is. And most of us still have a lingering belief that every choice, even every political choice, is between good and evil, and that if a thing is necessary it is also right. We should, I think, get rid of this belief, which belongs to the nursery. In politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is the lesser, and there are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic. War, for example, may be necessary, but it is certainly not right or sane. Even a General Election is not exactly a pleasant or edifying spectacle. If you have to take part in such things—and I think you do have to, unless you are armoured by old age or stupidity or hypocrisy—then you also have to keep part of yourself inviolate. For most people the problem does not arise in the same form, because their lives are split already. They are truly alive only in their leisure hours, and there is no emotional connection between their work and their political activities. Nor are they generally asked, in the name of political loyalty, to debase themselves as workers. The artist, and especially the writer, is asked just that—in fact, it is the only thing that Politicians ever ask of him. If he refuses, that does not mean that he is condemned to inactivity. One half of him, which in a sense is the whole of him, can act as resolutely, even as violently if need be, as anyone else. But his writings, in so far as they have any value, will always be the product of the saner self that stands aside, records the things that are done and admits their necessity, but refuses to be deceived as to their true nature.” – George Orwell, “Writers and Leviathan”
“A modern literary intellectual lives and writes in constant dread—not, indeed, of public opinion in the wider sense, but of public opinion within his own group. As a rule, luckily, there is more than one group, but also at any given moment there is a dominant orthodoxy, to offend against which needs a thick skin and sometimes means cutting one’s income in half for years on end.” – George Orwell, “Writers and Leviathan”