The Crow's Eye: What the...?

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Jun 1, 2010

What the...?

"WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court says suspects must explicitly tell police they want to be silent to invoke their Miranda protection during interrogations..."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/01/AR2010060101378.html

UPDATE 3:30PM:

This has Kagan's fingerprints all over it.

http://demosthenes.blogspot.com/2010/06/mirandas-toast.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-weisselberg/elena-kagan-and-the-death_b_596447.html

2 comments:

Ethan said...: I can't wait until the Supreme Court rules that, when the police tell you that you have a dickfor on your shoulder, you are required both to say "What's a dick for?" and also to endure their mocking afterwards.

I mean, really. "I wish to invoke my right to remain silent." "Then you shouldn't have said anything!" "I know you are but what am I?" etc.; June 1, 2010 at 8:13 PM
Jack Crow said...: That was appreciated. Have had little cause to laugh today.

Much obliged, Ethan. Much obliged.; June 1, 2010 at 9:52 PM

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This one took a while to put into words.

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

That is all.