The Crow's Eye: Capital Speaks

"...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

Dec 7, 2010

Capital Speaks

"4.14pm: Charles Arthur, the Guardian's technology editor, points out that while MasterCard and Visa have cut WikiLeaks off you can still use those cards to donate to overtly racist organisations such as the Knights Party, which is supported by the Ku Klux Klan.

The Ku Klux Klan website directs users to a site called Christian Concepts. It takes Visa and MasterCard donations for users willing to state that they are 'white and not of racially mixed descent. I am not married to a non-white. I do not date non-whites nor do I have non-white dependents. I believe in the ideals of western Christian civilisation and profess my belief in Jesus Christ as the son of God.'"

Source. (hat tip)

5 comments:

Randal Graves said...: Somehow, I don't think this will be fodder for Sunday's talking hairpieces.; December 7, 2010 at 12:01 PM
Jack Crow said...: I imagine not. On the Tevye hand, I'm waiting for one of them to pontificate in poombah tones about how all the anti-panjandrums are sex offenders, how opposition to power is itself probably a sign of sex pathology.; December 7, 2010 at 12:21 PM
mp said...: so, larry craig was doing undercover investigative work in that bathroom?; December 7, 2010 at 12:30 PM
Jack Crow said...: Well, McEwan does not disappoint:

"re: Assange. Although I've been broadly "on his side" in terms of the document leaking thus far, he strikes me as the kind of guy whose idea of boundaries is very different than mine, in many things. I frankly expect that it is only a matter of time before he goes too far, that it has been mostly coincidence I have not yet grimaced with dismay at his choices re: document leaking; thus, rightly or wrongly, am I reluctant to mount much of a vociferous defense [hah! - Jack] on his behalf, as I fully expect I would come to regret it."

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2010/12/and-more-wikileaks.html; December 7, 2010 at 1:38 PM
Randal Graves said...: "Sure, he did the right thing, but he's so icky!"

I hope the state doesn't slap some crap* on Manning or they'll be disavowing him, too.

*yes, Shakes, in this instance, Julian the Apostate's personal fuckery, true or no, is irrelevant to this discussion. Hmm, I think I typed that before. I need to find a new thought.; December 8, 2010 at 10:58 AM

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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.