Quotes from the Scraps.txt
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Quotes from the Scraps.txt
by Hobb Wed 1 Mar 2017 - 12:12
I've kept a massive file of tidbits and quotes called 'scraps.txt' for over 15 years. In this corner of R2N I will post them.
PHOTO from Twitter (Feb 26th 2017)
John Ehrlichman (Nixon aide and fixer) wrote:"[Nixon] had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people”. As they couldn’t just outlaw segments of the population, they got “the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin” and then criminalized both drugs to destroy Nixon's enemies.
Henry Kissinger wrote:“Bill Clinton lacked the moral fibre to be called a war criminal.”
Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere (1960s) wrote:"The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them"
Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (2017) wrote:“If Alabamians can put man on the moon, we can build new prisons.” Huntsville, Alabama was once home to one NASA’s biggest compounds. In fact that’s where Werner von Braun and many of his fellow rocketeers ended up after being swept out of German during Operation Paperclip.
- The Law as 'intervening layers of possibly resistant humanity':
Allowing injury is antagonistic to the norms of the social contract and to the whole idea of what a social contract is, which is to establish peace, it means that if you are going to allow injury, both in the case of criminal wrongdoing—that is, at TRIAL—and in the case of going to WAR, you can only lift the gates by going through intentionally encumbering provisions.
I think that the analogy in the realm of trials is very easy to see. In many centuries—let’s say, just going to seventeenth-century England—they had what we have: the grand jury that decides whether there can be a trial, and then what they call the petite jury, or what we just call a jury. Both of those test the legitimacy of the accusation. Only if it passes through the first gate will it go to the second gate, and then only if there’s a guilty verdict at the second gate will there be punishment. I’ve looked at the figures because other scholars have happily collected them. In the time Hobbes was alive, in England, 44 percent of murder charges and 52 percent of infanticide charges were eliminated by the time you went through the two gates.
Now imagine the reverse. Imagine that you could have a suspicion that someone did something, and you just send out a drone and you execute the person.
Then, to borrow a term from the scholar George Questor—a term that I think is very important and that and I often use—you don’t have any “intervening layers of possibly resistant humanity” to test the claim that we need to lift the gate and inflict an injury.
That’s the case of criminal wrongdoing, where it can be summarized very quickly. In the case of war making, we again have a double brake. The first brake is Congress. The Constitution requires a declaration of war. Not an authorization of force, not something that says, yeah, “We’ll give away our powers to the president,” but an actual declaration of war, where the Congress takes responsibility for the fact that probably thousands of people are going to die. But that is then followed by a second brake, and that is my claim about the right to bear arms.
http://bostonreview.net/us/elaine-scarry-nuclear-weapons
- The population only has the power to stop war if its arms are needed:
- We all know that in Vietnam many people dissented on the threshold and refused to go. But even soldiers who went to Vietnam and were in the war dissented. Thirty-three thousand deserted during 1971 alone. And in every war there’s been something like that. So, for example, at the end of World War I, Winston Churchill writes to Lloyd George—I’m paraphrasing here—“I want to go into Russia and stand with the Whites and fight the Reds. But I can’t. The soldiers won’t let me.” And all over England and Canada there were soldier strikes saying, “Enough. We’re not doing any more.” And we can go back to draft riots at the beginning of the Civil War. In fact, in the Civil War, scholars have shown—particularly one scholar, Ella Lonn, who wrote in the 1920s—the amount of desertion on both the sides, the North and the South. As the war goes on, more and more people are deserting, until finally 250,000 Southerners have deserted. Lonn records the announcements sent out by Robert E. Lee. The daily dispatches would say things like, “Twenty-three more soldiers deserted today”; “One hundred and fifty more soldiers deserted today”; “Hundreds of men are deserting nightly.”
Again, this is not to say that there can never be a time when we should go to war. I mean, that’s an interesting question. Some of us might say, “War should be absolutely prohibited.” Others might say, “No, let’s allow for the possibility of going to war.” But one thing that’s crucial, regardless, is that the population itself only has the power to stop war if its arms are needed, if its limbs are needed to participate in the war. If the government has a way of fighting the war without the citizenry, then the citizenry has lost its voice completely. Gandhi said, “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.” He’s not assuming arms will be used. His position is that people should use passive resistance, not arms. But you don’t even have the power to practice passive resistance unless you have distributed the military power across the full population.
http://bostonreview.net/us/elaine-scarry-nuclear-weapons
Myron Dewey (Standing Rock protester) wrote:“They heard that song, the strong medicine coming their way. Send the blessings over the water to the DAPL. Maybe these blessings, these songs that they hear in the morning time will somehow touch their spirit. They’re not listening, but we know their spirit is listening, and it’s lost. It’s disconnected from this earth. So to bring it back we give our prayers.”
Dewey's prayer song in the early morning darkness was directed across the Cannonball River where the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) workers—like a host of orcs— were furiously ripping into the earth beneath stadium floodlights. Right now, the humans who are acting like zombies may not hear those prayer songs, but we know their lost spirits are listening.
LINDA BLACK ELK wrote:"North Dakota has lost its mind. I’m just a mom, and I’m a teacher. And yet I can tell you dog breeds that have attacked me. I know the difference between tear gas, CS gas and pepper spray, and the difference in the way that those feel. I know how to spot infiltrators and agent provocateurs. You know, I know these things."
PHOTO from Twitter (Feb 26th 2017)
As the philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte writes, First Nations people already live in their ancestors’ apocalyptic future. That is, apocalypse is felt unevenly and it is already happening—in fact, it has been happening for a long time.
counterpunch wrote:The Politics of Turning Away: or, Skills for Living in Ruins
I pace, blood boiling, after reading my cousin’s Facebook post following the inauguration about how all these “riots” are the reason she voted for Trump in the first place.
Even if it was only because she was attracted to “other issues” in Trump’s platform, she has abandoned me.
She has abandoned me because she had abandoned my mixed-race nephews to the threat of police violence.
She has abandoned my queer sister. The queer family I was not born to but chose.
She abandoned my partner, who, though underinsured, relies on the ACA (Affordable Care Act) in the case of emergency (and emergency has already happened once).
She abandoned her aunts and cousins who suffer from disability and the unintended, further-disabling effects of their medications.
She abandoned our relatives who have been raped, sexually assaulted, and molested—including myself.
She abandoned my Muslim, Latino, and Native American friends.
My cousin abandoned me to a toxified body from having to live in a Superfund site.
Perhaps she abandoned herself.
If Trump can promise my cousin anything, it is only through these abandonments.
Hobb- Admin
- Posts : 1671
Join date : 2015-03-31
Age : 49
R2N :: Archives :: 2018-9 Archives :: Made
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