October 2009
22 posts
“The number of people who have been mass murdered [in the 20th century] is,...”
– Goldhagen
“Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular...”
– Kirsch
I have seen some of the best minds of my...
Huh
“Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with...”
– Malalai Joya
“Some mistakes that we made, we can’t recover from.”
– Christine Fair
September 11 and we leapt to draw conclusions...
“We do consistently overestimate our own capacity and underestimate the capacity...”
– Rory the Tory
Clues to Cameronism
From the speech of 8 October and my bold:
The fault lies with big government. With their endless targets and reorganisations, Labour have tried to run the NHS like a machine. But it’s not a machine full of cogs. It is a living, breathing institution made up of people – doctors, nurses, patients. This lever-pulling from above – it has got to stop. With Andrew Lansley’s reform plans, we’re going to...
Nick Griffin
Let me attempt a fair paraphrase. According to Griffin, because of Obama’s election, ‘third worlders’ or black men who aren’t ‘clever’ are more likely to attribute their failure to be promoted at work to discrimination, to get a second chip on their shoulder to go with the first which is the result of a misconception of slavery (it was economics, you see,...
“Anyone who proposed giving government guarantees to retail depositors and other...”
– Guardian
“US aerial attacks on the Afghan-Pakistan border have killed 14 al-Qa’ida...”
– David Kilcullen (Hari)
Heaney, ‘Sibyl’
My tongue moved, a swung relaxing hinge. I said to her, ’What will become of us?’ And as forgotten water in a well might shake At an explosion under morning Or a crack run up a gable, She began to speak. […] ‘… My people think money And talk weather. Oil-rigs lull their future On single acquisitive stems. Silence Has shoaled into the trawlers’ echo-sounders. The ground...
“Every time an MP put forward a firm proposal for reforming the law, the justice...”
– Monbiot
“Anyone spending time in the bars of either the Groucho Club or Soho House will...”
– Jason Cowley
The lesson of Hirst is the difficulty of telling – so perhaps the fineness of the difference – between art whose badness mocks its buyers and art whose badness makes a mockery of them.
I rejoice to see the Photoshop-enhanced body fall...
(Tallis)
“We all move with the reins of the vectors driving us trailing along behind like...”
– Yglz comments
That’s how this thing works. We ebb toward war...
—Taibbi
every conservative these days fancies himself a...
—deBoer
