no. 484

"As for the election, it's sometimes about winning, and sometimes it's about losing as little as possible."

Kaleberg commenting at ginandtacos

no. 462

"In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over."

Dan Hodges @DPJHodges

no. 440

no. 421

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956


Or as my friend Mark Davis put it, "Silence is to injustice what oxygen is to fire."

no. 397

"Ed Ochester has a poem that goes something like (paraphrasing, including the spacing):

A retired miner in Dr. Cappaletti's office, crippled and wheezing:

"If someone tells you he
got rich from
hard work ask him
whose."

Might be from his book Dancing on the Edges of Knives."


junior, commenting at Gin And Tacos

no. 381

"Wage repression is a fairly self-explanatory term meaning the deliberate undermining of wages by employers. Wage repression is most often used by private sector employers in order to cut their payroll expenditure, but taken as a whole, the state is actually the largest employer, and is just as capable of repressing wages as the private sector.

The idea that economic efficiency can be increased through the repression of wages is an article of faith for ideological neoliberals. Witness the effects of the current Tory austerity programme on wages, or think back to the 1980s when the collective bargaining rights of millions of workers were attacked by Margerat Thatcher’s government.

I say that wage repression is an article of neoliberal faith because (much like a lot of orthodox neoliberal theory) there is actually little actual evidence that wage repression is good for the national economy, and in fact, a lot of evidence that it is actually harmful.

The reason that the subject of wage repression is important now, is that the UK is currently enduring the longest period of wage repression in over a century, in which the average wage has fallen in real terms every single month for three consecutive years (every month since the Tory led government came to power).

…

The idea that wage repression is actually bad for the economy is hardly a new one. Quakers and other non-conformist religious groups realised early in the industrial revolution that by paying reasonable wages, and providing additional benefits such as education and healthcare, they themselves benefited from the massively increased productivity of a loyal, healthy and educated workforce (as compared to the bitterly exploited, poor, unhealthy, malnourished and ill-educated workforces of the less ethically minded of the early industrial pioneers). Probably the most famous rejection of wage repression was the high pay / low price policy of the American automobile manufacturer Henry Ford (hardly a “leftie” by any stretch of the imagination), who paid high wages and made low profit margins on his vehicles, so that his employees would return their wages back to his business through the purchase of the vehicles they themselves had been constructing.

To put the historic objection to wage repression into reasonably simple economic terms: Wage repression is bad because it reduces the disposable income of workeres - When workers have less money to spend, this results in a fall in consumer spending - When consumer spending falls, aggregate demand falls - When aggregate demand falls the economy falls into low-growth, recession or depression.

I don’t think it takes a lot of brains to realise that the less money the public have in their pockets, the less they are going to spend, and that this fall in spending will have a negative knock-on effect on the wider economy.”

Thomas G. Clark

no. 368

“This is the rule I always give myself: that nothing new can come from a situation that involves being free or that doesn’t involve suffering.”

Rei Kawakubo

no. 360

“ Childhood is still running along beside us like a little dog who used to be a merry companion, but who now requires our care and splints, and myriad medicines, to prevent him from promptly passing on. ”

Thomas Bernhard


via

no. 335

"The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.

I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.

In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown our any logically based intentions [unclear], it is usually an American soldier that is ordered to carry out some ill-conceived mission.

Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, the Japanese-American internment camps—to name a few. I am confident that many of our actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.

As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

I understand that my actions violated the law, and I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intention to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.

If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal."

Statement by Bradley Manning read after his sentencing, by his lawyer David Coombs

via


And, that, my friends, is what a soldier does for his country.

no. 314

"[W]hen I told friends and colleagues that I was resigning from my academic job to focus on writing, I was warned that I was making a dangerous mistake, that I could not possibly live on an income that was between twenty and thirty thousand dollars a year. When I pointed to the reality that families of four and more live on such an income, the response would be “that’s different”; the difference being, of course, one of class. The poor are expected to live with less and are socialized to accept less (badly made clothing, products, food, etc.), whereas the well-off are socialized to believe it is both a right and a necessity for us to have more, to have exactly what we want when we want it."

bell hooks, where we stand: Class Matters, chapter 4

via

no. 302

"The problem w/ the Zimmerman verdict isn’t that he got away with murder. It’s that even in 2013, citizens of society refuse to be humble, to be teachable, to be pliable. Pride goes before destruction, and haughtiness before a fall. Society has consistently fallen short of truly being human. Coercion replaces compassion; fear replaces love; complacency replaces being proactive. People have resolved that 'this is just the way it is', shrug their shoulders, and move on with the life, leaving the grieving families of displaced, misplaced, replaced, and dead children in the wake, then they wonder why 'kids these days' never learn. Who’s teaching them to be unteachable? Who’s teaching them to be passive and aggressive in the wrong areas of life? Who’s teaching them that murder is okay, sex tapes are the norm and will make you a lot of money, and selling your soul for a reality show is the ultimate goal in life? Who’s teaching them that more time & money are spent on trying to be pretty, in-shape, attractive, and/or appealing to the masses, rather than teaching them humility, generosity, compassion, and love? A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve."

iv

via

no. 289

“The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.”

Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

via

no. 287

"I think that if they make abortion illegal, they should make men deserting women who they got pregnant illegal as well. Because if a women can’t back out of a pregnancy a man should be able to either."

Keely @ This is a wasteland

via

no. 281

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

Carl Sagan, in his last interview with Charlie Rose.

via

no. 249

"Be of service. You are taking your degree into a society dominated by concentrated poverty and a vulnerable middle class, a society where it is harder to pay for education, harder to find a job, harder to buy a house and harder to hold onto those things even if you manage to get them. You are entering adulthood during a period of mass incarceration and near constant war. There is a lot for you to do. Service is the rent you pay for the space you take up on the earth, and as a relatively privileged American you take up a lot of space. We are the most consuming, polluting, wasteful nation on earth. So your rent is steep. Pay it with service."

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry’s advice to Class of 2013

via

no. 248

"We wanted a president who listens to all Americans - now we have one."

Jay Leno, riffing on the NSA surveillance story.

Of course, Obama is merely continuing a policy begun under George W. Bush, which doesnt in any way make it right.

no. 238

"It is one thing for rich people to believe intellectually that everyone depends on them. In reality, it is they who are the moochers and looters, who depend on an entire system of low-wage workers for their luxurious lifestyles."

Mano Singham, Threatening to Go Galt, Again.

via

no. 194

"Let me take a moment aside to discuss the elephant in the room here: Nuclear Power. I know, big bad scary right? For all the newly dredged fears and misinformed scare mongering, nuclear power is still the safest energy source we have. Per terrawatt-hour it has had less deaths associated with it than any other form of energy. Mind boggling, I know. But you have to look at the big picture. Think of the dangers of working in coal mines or from air pollution produced. Coal power is by-far the worst energy source out there as far as related deaths go.

You would need 25 meltdowns a year to match it. That’s statistics, baby."

Maki