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Political quotes of the moment

Started by Cain, September 13, 2009, 03:10:36 PM

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Cain

The single best quote on the whole "Richard III was a pretty-boi cruelly buried in a car-park" saga that is currently engulfing UK papers and television:

Quotehalf the country – and the twee half at that – seems to be getting in a tizzy about a man who, given the medieval level of state formation, was basically a fucking gangster; and what's more a gangster among gangsters: the royals were all gangsters until Cromwell taught them a little circumspection. That little princes in the tower wet job should be a clue with Richard, but there seems to be a general feeling that it was dignified by being done as statecraft. Or maybe it's a Kray twins thing: 'they only murdered their own', etc

Sure, he was a lawgiver: so was Lucky Luciano. And sure, there was that time in 1215 when the underbosses ganged up on a weak capo and took a bunch of diabolical bleeding liberties. But Richard 'Snakey Spine' Plantagenet played the same role in Our Island Story asJake 'Greasy Thumb' Guzickdid in the history of Chicago. Under a car park is exactly the right place for him, at least in the absence of a flyover or a crocodile filled swamp.

Cain

The blogger formerly known as IOZ:

QuoteWhat you will not hear in the crushingly predictable debate about guns, "freedom," and security that we're about to endure for the thousandth time is that our society is so terrifically violent because we don't really value human life except as instrumental to other ends—economic production, the global war on terror, winning the future against China, whatever. Life has little value in and of itself; in the American worldview, we are all either future middle managers or future terrorists, depending mostly on the chance of the geography of our birth; the death of the former is to be lamented, the latter, if not cheered, ignored. But what makes them similar, those extinguished lives, is that for all our protestations to the contrary, we cannot value life as life; the very idea is antithetical to the manner in which our culture assigns value.

One of our more popular current entertainments features the specter of a desiccated future North America in which children are pitted against each other in gladiatorial combat; the rich are rewarded with exaltation, the poor with grief, but for everyone, the result is entertainment, diversion from their gray and daily lives. As the news continues and you find yourself diverted and horrified by the dreadful, inevitable drip-drip of grotesque forensic and psychological detail, well, are you not entertained?

The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: Cain on February 26, 2013, 05:17:27 PM
The blogger formerly known as IOZ:

QuoteWhat you will not hear in the crushingly predictable debate about guns, "freedom," and security that we're about to endure for the thousandth time is that our society is so terrifically violent because we don't really value human life except as instrumental to other ends—economic production, the global war on terror, winning the future against China, whatever. Life has little value in and of itself; in the American worldview, we are all either future middle managers or future terrorists, depending mostly on the chance of the geography of our birth; the death of the former is to be lamented, the latter, if not cheered, ignored. But what makes them similar, those extinguished lives, is that for all our protestations to the contrary, we cannot value life as life; the very idea is antithetical to the manner in which our culture assigns value.

One of our more popular current entertainments features the specter of a desiccated future North America in which children are pitted against each other in gladiatorial combat; the rich are rewarded with exaltation, the poor with grief, but for everyone, the result is entertainment, diversion from their gray and daily lives. As the news continues and you find yourself diverted and horrified by the dreadful, inevitable drip-drip of grotesque forensic and psychological detail, well, are you not entertained?

This person has a real grasp on America.  Nail/head.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

LMNO

Wow.  Totally.  These days, it's not who you are, it's what you do.

And what most of us do, is not rock the boat.

The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on February 26, 2013, 05:28:04 PM
Wow.  Totally.  These days, it's not who you are, it's what you do.

And what most of us do, is not rock the boat.

Well, sure.  If you're up to your bottom lip in poop, you have only one thing to say..."Don't make waves".
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Cain

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on February 26, 2013, 05:19:58 PM
This person has a real grasp on America.  Nail/head.

That's IOZ for you.  Or Jacob, as it turns out he is called.  He had some pithy lines regarding the recent election, too:

QuoteAmong the many tonal contradictions of all this gala pomposity is the relentless self-reassurances we seem to require that what's special, what's unique is how regular our elections are, how our uninterrupted history of electing lawyers, rich guys, and Indian killers every four years, come war or come war, is business as usual. Well, if that were the case, what's with the flyovers and drum-and-fife bands and floats and the presence of Beyoncé? In fact, we seem slightly shocked as a nation each time we manage to pull this off, a shock that we then sublimate into a grotesquely puritanical Washington bacchanal, which suggests to me at least an underlying ambivalence about the whole system. The President-elect then gets up and praises the national bylaws: "Fourscore and a bunch of other years ago, our forefathers brought forth this corporation based on a pre-cash valuation of ten million to be issued as follows: 3,000,000 Series A preferred shares to . . . Please see non-dilution language in Appendix A . . . Board of Directors to be composed of . . ." And so on.

Then they all drink crap wine, eat an underdone steak and overboiled lobster, and tomorrow the French will still be bombing Mali, the drones still attacking Pakistan, the Rockaways still a mess, the prisons still full, the Mexican civil war still raging, and the Congress still angling for jobs as Canadian Tar Sands lobbyists or whatever. It is futile to get worked up about these things. Your friends are all posting Proud to Be messages in their Facebook feeds, but you are bigger than that. Your soul is bigger. You walk into the kitchen. You put the music on loud and you get the nice fish out of the refrigerator. You give the dog some crackers, and you kiss your boyfriend, and you open a nice IPA, because you feel like a beer tonight. Martin Luther King, Jr. isn't rolling in his grave, guys. He's dead. And the dead have one up on us, for they are constitutionally incapable of giving a fuck. You kiss your boyfriend again on the lips, and you pay all those assholes exactly the attention they deserve, which is none at all.

The Good Reverend Roger

Holy shit.   :lulz:  That's some Goddamn GOSPEL, is what that is.

I love this guy.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Anna Mae Bollocks

Quote from: Cain on February 07, 2013, 04:20:30 PM
The single best quote on the whole "Richard III was a pretty-boi cruelly buried in a car-park" saga that is currently engulfing UK papers and television:

Quotehalf the country – and the twee half at that – seems to be getting in a tizzy about a man who, given the medieval level of state formation, was basically a fucking gangster; and what's more a gangster among gangsters: the royals were all gangsters until Cromwell taught them a little circumspection. That little princes in the tower wet job should be a clue with Richard, but there seems to be a general feeling that it was dignified by being done as statecraft. Or maybe it's a Kray twins thing: 'they only murdered their own', etc

Sure, he was a lawgiver: so was Lucky Luciano. And sure, there was that time in 1215 when the underbosses ganged up on a weak capo and took a bunch of diabolical bleeding liberties. But Richard 'Snakey Spine' Plantagenet played the same role in Our Island Story asJake 'Greasy Thumb' Guzickdid in the history of Chicago. Under a car park is exactly the right place for him, at least in the absence of a flyover or a crocodile filled swamp.

Yeah, the best you could probably say about him is that he was a man of his times.

Heads on spikes downtown, etc.
Scantily-Clad Inspector of Gigantic and Unnecessary Cashews, Texas Division

Juana

[ulr=http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/texas-secessionist-kilgore-hitler-and]Just...this.[/url]

"One of the things that Texas allows...you can still talk the cell phone or text while you're driving...that's how much freedom Texans want to keep."
"Tyrant to me would be like Hitler or Lincoln, who come in and murders the people for their own political gain. ...Lincoln and Hitler are very similar. Most Americans aren't aware of it."
"Hitler was the one who killed six million Jews. Lincoln was the one who killed 600,000 Americans."
"I dispose of obsolete meat machines.  Not because I hate them (I do) and not because they deserve it (they do), but because they are in the way and those older ones don't meet emissions codes.  They emit too much.  You don't like them and I don't like them, so spare me the hysteria."

Junkenstein

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/22/1189043/-John-McCain-tells-grieving-mother-you-need-some-straight-talk-because-he-s-a-very-bad-man

QuoteThe mother of a young man killed in the Aurora, Colo. movie theater massacre told TPM on Thursday she was appalled at the way Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) handled her question about an assault weapons ban at a town hall event in Phoenix. [...]
At Wednesday's town hall, Teves told McCain that her son, Alex, was killed in the massacre, and she urged the senator to support a ban on assault weapons. McCain responded: "I can tell you right now you need some straight talk. That assault weapons ban will not pass the Congress of the United States."

While direct and most likely true, this will fuel the GUNS+GUNS+DRUGS sideshow for a while.



Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Junkenstein

Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Cain

I know we have a TV Tropes entry for Magnificent Bastard, but if there was ever to be one for Magnificent Dickery, Henry Kissinger would be at the top of the list for inclusion:

QuoteOne oft-told tale about Kissinger...involved a report that Winston Lord had worked on for days.  After giving it to Kissinger, he got it back with the notation, "is this the best you can do?" Lord rewrote and polished and finally resubmitted it; back it came with the same curt question.  After redrafting it one more time - and once again getting the same question from Kissinger - Lord snapped, "Damn it, yes, it's the best I can do." To which Kissinger replied: "Fine, then I guess I'll read it this time."

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Cain on March 08, 2013, 01:41:29 PM
I know we have a TV Tropes entry for Magnificent Bastard, but if there was ever to be one for Magnificent Dickery, Henry Kissinger would be at the top of the list for inclusion:

QuoteOne oft-told tale about Kissinger...involved a report that Winston Lord had worked on for days.  After giving it to Kissinger, he got it back with the notation, "is this the best you can do?" Lord rewrote and polished and finally resubmitted it; back it came with the same curt question.  After redrafting it one more time - and once again getting the same question from Kissinger - Lord snapped, "Damn it, yes, it's the best I can do." To which Kissinger replied: "Fine, then I guess I'll read it this time."

:lulz: That's masterful.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Cain

Corey Robin, using the power of political science to troll his students:

QuoteEvery once in a while I teach constitutional law, and when I do, I pose to my students the following question: What if the Senate apportioned votes not on the basis of states but on the basis of race? That is, rather than each state getting two votes in the Senate, what if each racial or ethnic group listed in the US Census got two votes instead?

Regardless of race, almost all of the students freak out at the suggestion. It's undemocratic, they cry! When I point out that the Senate is already undemocratic—the vote of any Wyomian is worth vastly more than the vote of each New Yorker—they say, yeah, but that's different: small states need protection from large states. And what about historically subjugated or oppressed minorities, I ask? Or what about the fact that one of the major intellectual moves, if not completely successful coups, of Madison and some of the Framers was to disaggregate or disassemble the interests of a state into the interests of its individual citizens. As Ben Franklin said at the Constitutional Convention, "The Interest of a State is made up of the interests of its individual members.  If they are not injured, the State is not injured." The students are seldom moved.

Then I point out that the very opposition they're drawing—between representation on the basis of race versus representation on the basis of states—is itself confounded by the history of the ratification debate over the Constitution and the development of slavery and white supremacy in this country.

As Jack Rakove argued in Original Meanings, one of the reasons some delegates from large states ultimately came around to the idea of protecting the interests of small states was that they realized that an equal, if not more powerful, interest than mere population size bound delegate to delegate, state to state: slavery. Virginia had far more in common with South Carolina than it did with Massachussets, a fact that later events would go onto confirm.

Cain

Quote from: Terrorism, A Challenge to the StateThe central error of the Red Brigade consists precisely in believing that they can succeed in striking at the heart of the State. The heart of the Italian State does not exist. Neither, any longer, does its brain. And it is that which paradoxically is its strength, or at least its capacity to resist.

Harsh and funnily enough true.

Of course, the central error of the Red Brigades was believing that they were not doing what the state wanted.

Like Sanguinetti said:

Quote from: On Terrorism and the StateThe State has been declaring for years that it is fighting the R.B.'s, it infiltrated them several times without ever attempting to dismantle them, therefore the State makes use of the R.B.'s as a cover, because the R.B.s are useful to this State, therefore R.B. = the State.