Daydreaming Idly
"It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it. Even so, it will always be the same possibilities, either in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality over the idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their directions, and he awakens them."
- Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is done with you."
- David Foster Wallace
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”Gun control is another area where progressive energies have been wasteful and counterproductive. “Centrists” of any persuasion will try to tell you that most people don’t actually want their fellow citizens running around with guns, but gun control appears to be one area that really has cost the Democratic Party a large number of one-issue voters over the years. In any case, you’ll have a hard time convincing anybody that we should abolish prisons and take away the community’s ability to defend itself. Even on its own terms, gun control is not a straightforwardly progressive matter. The war on guns bears important similarities to the war on drugs—both are used as pretexts for searching, arresting, and imprisoning ethnic minorities. Gun control, like drug control, doesn’t do much to restrict supply—instead, it creates a black market for the product regulated through violence. In many states, obtaining a gun license is expensive and complex: we’ve essentially made it legal to own a gun if you’re wealthy and white, and illegal to own a gun if you’re poor and black. Years are added onto criminal sentences because unregistered guns are spotted on the premises, even if the guns have never been used. The only way to sustainably curb the supply of guns is to reduce demand for guns, and the easiest way to do that would be to legalize narcotics.
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”In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.
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”Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.
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”The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been,
Fidel Castro Calls Republican Field a ‘Competition of Idiocy’ - NYTimes (via pieceinthepuzzlehumanity)
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”Regardless of how this plays out in the Republican primary race, Romney has done the country a great public service by offering up his personal finances as a shining example of all that’s wrong with the tax code after thirty years of politicians fiddling with it to make it more generous to the very rich.
Rational Irrationality: Mitt’s 1040s: The Real Scandal is the Tax Code : The New Yorker
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Salman Rushdie has launched a scathing attack on the Indian government for failing to protect free speech after organisers of Asia’s biggest literary festival were forced to cancel a video-linked appearance by the British author when owners of the venue in the north-west Indian city of Jaipur decided it would be unsafe.
However, in an interview with the local NDTV network, the 64-year-old author reserved his harshest words for the “Muslim groups that were so unscrupulous, and whose idea of free speech is that they are the only ones entitled to it”.
“[If] Anyone else, who they disagree with, wishes to open his mouth, they will try and stop that mouth,” Rushdie said.
“That’s what we call tyranny. It’s much worse than censorship because it comes with the threat of violence.”
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Author Amitava Kumar's Response to Being Advised to Leave the Jaipur Literature Festival - NYTimes.com
That the novel The Satanic Verses can still cause so much trouble because it “hurts the feelings” of some (not all) religious people is something that never ceases to amaze me. That Salman Rushdie was unable to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival because of death threats saddens me. That four artists at the Jaipur Literature Festival chose to read from Rushdie’s novel, putting themselves at personal risk for both violence and legal difficulties, well, that makes me smile, and gives me hope.
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Opinion: On abortion rights, Latinos distinguish between religious, political beliefs
Contrary to popular belief, strong majorities of Latinos support abortion rights. (Flickr: Steve Rhodes)By LUCY PANZA
Channel: PoliticsResearch released Thursday found that Latinos are overwhelmingly supportive of abortion rights, marking an important step toward understanding the nuanced views within Hispanic communities.
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”The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.
Noam Chomsky (via revolutionnow)
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If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that’s something, but the people in power can live with that.
What they can’t live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organizations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.
Noam Chomsky (via pieceinthepuzzlehumanity)
(Source: noleadersplease)
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”ONE sure giveaway of quack medicine is the claim that a product can treat any ailment. There are, sadly, no panaceas. But some things come close, and exercise is one of them. As doctors never tire of reminding people, exercise protects against a host of illnesses, from heart attacks and dementia to diabetes and infection. How it does so, however, remains surprisingly mysterious. But a paper just published in Nature by Beth Levine of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre and her colleagues sheds some light on the matter. Dr Levine and her team were testing a theory that exercise works its magic, at least in part, by promoting autophagy. This process, whose name is derived from the Greek for “self-eating”, is a mechanism by which surplus, worn-out or malformed proteins and other cellular components are broken up for scrap and recycled.
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Filipino Traffic Cop Doing His Job Like A Boss (by BODYGRock)
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”It is scarcity, Edsall contends, that turns modest policy differences into zero-sum showdowns between his “haves” and aspiring “have-nots.” Drawing on predictions that the economist Lester Thurow made following an earlier “era of limits,” the late 1970s, he sees a long and ugly period of zero-sum conflict over immigration, education and programs that serve primarily low-income people or minorities, like disability benefits. Edsall’s “haves” are not the rich, but older conservatives who have “income from savings, which they do not want more heavily taxed, and their Medicare coverage and Social Security benefits, which they do not want diverted to ‘ObamaCare’ or any venture transferring tax dollars to those with lower incomes.” In Edsall’s framework, it no longer seems paradoxical that Republicans can simultaneously attack a government health program, propose to gut Medicare for those under 55, and pledge to protect that same program faithfully against Democratic cuts. In a climate of austerity and limits, struggling older voters cling all the more desperately to what they have, and are all the more willing to see that same thing denied to those who are not them or don’t look like them.
Likes
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“Poor people have shitty lobbyists”—
Jon Stewart (via anticapitalist)
If you had to sum up the...
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On way to anti-choice rally Rand Paul refused TSA pat-down. Because invasive government is wrong...
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Keystone Expansion Rejection of the Day: President Obama today rejected ...
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“People who create things of value deserve to be rewarded for that creation, no less than people who...”
