blessed britons

“I am dying here every day, mentally and physically. This is happening to all of us. We have been ignored, locked up in the middle of the ocean for years. Rather than humiliate myself, having to beg for water, I would rather hurry up the process [of dying] that is going to happen anyway...
“The British government refuses to help me. What is the point of my wife being British? I thought Britain stood for justice, but they … abandoned us [British residents], people who have lived in Britain for years, and who have British wives and children. I hold the British government responsible for my death, as I do the Americans.”

— Shaker Aamer

mad world

The only thing that keeps the system working at all is that the United States, the richest country in the world, has become the 'deficit of last resort'. As other countries strive to eliminate their deficits, as Japan and China continue to run huge surpluses, America is willing and able to run the huge deficits that make the global arithmetic add up. This is the ultimate irony. The financial system allows the US to live year after year far beyond its means, even as the US Treasury, year after year, lectures others on why they should not.

— Joseph Stiglitz

The Roaring Nineties

doublethink

aerial bombardment intends to kill civilians

Submitted by antarchi on August 16, 2007 - 16:39.

To say that the civilian deaths from aerial bombardment are unintentional is sophistry, because if there is a probability that the bombs will hit civilian targets, then ipso facto the civilian deaths are not unintentional. This is tantamount to saying that a drunk driver who did not intend to kill someone in an "accident" should be set free for good motives; US law prosecutes drunk drivers regardless of whether they have been in an accident, because it recognizes that drunk driving is an inevitable accident. The same must be said of aerial bombardment. It always already intends to kill civilians, despite the best intentions of the military planners.

what did it matter who invented aeroplanes?

Submitted by antarchi on June 5, 2007 - 16:19.

Often Julia was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for instance, having learnt it at school that the Party had invented aeroplanes. And when he told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was born, and long before the Revolution, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After all, what did it matter who had invented aeroplanes?
George Orwell, 1984
What does it matter? And yet if it doesn't matter that we have been given the wrong facts, or not all of the facts; if it doesn't matter that there is a reason why the facts were hidden from us; if it doesn't matter that those who bothered to hide the facts from us (deliberately) continue to be 'believed', trusted - or at least in positions of authority; if it doesn't matter that others continue to believe in their lies, and that by those means, their lies become the 'truth'; if it doesn't matter, above all, that all of this doesn't matter to people - then what, in the end, matters?
Lying matters partly because you can't build trust on lies. But it also matters because the fact of lying - or holding back the truth - is nearly always a symptom of disrespect - or mistrust - towards others. Why otherwise do you not give them the story as you see it? Do you think they would not want to hear it? Or do you not trust them to hear it as you say it?
'To glorify democracy and to silence the people is a farce; to discourse on humanism and to negate people is a lie'
Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

continued leadership on climate change

Submitted by antarchi on November 6, 2007 - 00:37.

Two senior White House officials published an open letter seeking to correct inaccurate stories in the press 'that the President's concern about climate change is new'. 'In fact', they reported, 'climate change has been a top priority since the President's first year in office'. To prove it, they had found 37 words he said about the subject in 2001; 46 words in 2002, and 32 words in January 2007. In January 2007, he had even managed to say 'climate change'. This demonstrated, the claimed, that he has shown 'continued leadership on the issue'.

antarchi's quotes