Today we have a pair of readings, illustrating the alternately generous and brutal, ultimately xenocidic mindset of 16th century Argentina.

This first excerpt is from the account Voyage to Río de Plata and Paraguay by Ulderico Schmidt, a German soldier and adventurer, published in 1554. Do be patient and read all the way to the end, as it gets rather interesting.

There we built a new town and called it Bonas Aeieres, that is, in German, Guter Wind.

We also brought from Hispania on board the fourteen ships seventy-two horses and mares.

Here, also, we found a place inhabited by Indian folk, named Querandíes, numbering about three thousand people, including wives and children, and they were clothed in the same way as the Charrúas, from the navel to the knees. They brought us fish and meat to eat. Those Querandíes have no houses, but wander about, as do the Gipsies with us at home, and in summer they oftentimes travel upwards of thirty miles on dry land without finding a single drop of water to drink.

And when they meet with deer and other wild beasts, when they have killed them they drink their blood. Also if they find a root, called Cardos, they eat it to slack their thirst. This — namely, that they drink blood — only happens because they cannot have any water, and that they might peradventure die of thirst.

These Querandíes brought us daily their provisions of fish and meat to our camp, and did so for a fortnight, and they did only fail once to come to us. So our captain, Pedro de Mendoza, sent to them, the Querandíes, a judge, named Johan Pabon, with two foot-soldiers, for they were at a distance of four miles from our camp. When our emissaries came near to the Indians, they were all three beaten black and blue, and were then sent back again to our camp. Pedro de Mendoza, hearing of this from the judge’s report (who for this cause raised a tumult about it in our camp), sent Diego Mendoza, his own brother, against them with three hundred foot-soldiers and thirty well-armed mounted men, of whom I also was one, straightaway charging us to kill or take prisoners all these Indian Querandíes and to take possession of their settlement. But when we came near them there were now some four thousand men,for they had assembled all their friends. And when we were about to attack them, they defended themselves in such a way that we had that very day our hands full. They also killed our commander, Diego Mendoza, and six noblemen. Of our foot-soldiers and mounted men over twenty were slain, and on their side about one thousand. Thus did they defend themselves valiantly against us, so that indeed we felt it…

In due course God Almighty graciously gave us the victory, and allowed us to take possession of their place; but we did not take prisoner any of the Indians, and their wives and children also fled away from the place before we could seize them.

…

---

And when we returned again to our camp, our folk were divided into those who were to be soldiers, and the others workers, so as to have all of them employed. And a town was built there… The town wall was three foot broad, but that which was built today fell to pieces the day after, so that they suffered great poverty, and it became so bad that the horses could not go. Yea, finally, there was such want and misery for hunger’s sake, that there were neither rats, nor mice, nor snakes to still the great dreadful hunger, and unspeakable poverty, and shoes and leather were resorted to for eating and everything else.

It happened that three Spaniards stole a horse, and ate it secretly, but when it was known, they were imprisoned and interrogated under the torture. Whereupon, as soon as they admitted their guilt, they were sentenced to death by the gallows, and all three were hanged.

Immediately afterwards, at night, three other Spaniards came to the gallows to the three hanging men, and hacked off their thighs and pieces of their flesh, and took them home to still their hunger.

…

After all this we remained still another month together in great poverty in the town of Bonas Aeieres, until ships could be prepared.

At this time the Indians came in great power and force, as many as twenty-three thousand men, against us and our town of Bonas Aeieres. There were four nations of them, namely, Querandíes, Charrúas, and Timbúes. They all meant to go about to destroy us all. But God Almighty preserved the greater part of us, therefore praise and thanks be to Him always and everlasting, for on our side not more than about thirty men, including commanders and ensign were slain.

– from The Argentina Reader, pp 22-25.

Legacy of Dissent

Dissent Magazine is my favorite contemporary political journal (admittedly, of like three that I ever read). It’s avowedly left-wing, so it doesn’t try to be all things to all people (like some). Yet unlike many left-wing magazines, it doesn’t waste your time with choir-preaching conservative-bashing that serves merely to make you feel righteous, rather than advance a discussion (like a few magazines I can think of). Rather, it devotes its energy to liberal self-critique, challenging of orthodoxies, and honest insight into what in the liberal agenda is both moral and practicable.

I was vaguely aware of Dissent’s history as a noteworthy anti-Communist (but pro-democratic-socialism) voice in the post-WWII landscape, so I was excited to stumble onto this collection of essays spanning the history of the magazine.

Well, my overwhelming impression is: Socialist thinking was by and large a bunch of dreck, man. For an anti-Communist magazine, they spent a lot of time quoting Marx, debating what Marx really would have wanted, and cooking up their vision of what a just society would look like. Peering from the far side of the millenium, this stuff reads like so much hooey.

The cultural writing, on the other hand, retains immense social and historical interest, and there are some real gems here. Paul Goodman’s “Growing Up Absurd”, from 1960, charts the emergence of the Beats and a whole generation of “Independents”, who are not outside of the economic system, yet do not properly belong to it:

…This is the vast herd of the old-fashioned, the eccentric, and criminal, the gifted, and serious, the men and women, the rentiers, the free-lances, the infants, and so forth. This motley collection has, of course, no style or culture, unlike the organization that has our familiar “functional” style and popular culture. Its fragmented members hover about the organizations in multifarious ways — running specialty-shops, trying to teach or give other professional services, robbing banks, landscape gardening, and so forth — but they find it hard to get along, for they do not know the approved techniques of promoting, getting foundation grants, protecting themselves by official unions, lefally embezzling, and not blurting out the truth or weeping or laugh out of turn.

Cute!

Another wonderful piece is Richard Wright’s 1957 “White Man — Listen!”, derived from his book of the same name. He wrestles with the twin facts of his existence: Black, and thus “never allowed to blend with the culture and civilization of the West”; and yet, irreconcilably, Western in his beliefs and outlook:

I have not consciously elected to be a Westerner; I have been made into a Westerner… The content of my Westernness resides fundamentally, I feel, in my secular outlook upon life. I believe in a separation of Church and State. I believe that the state possesses a value in and for itself. I feel that man - just sheer brute man just as he is - has a meaning and value over and above all sanctions or mandates from mysetical pwoers, either on high or from below… When I look out upon those vast stretches of this earth inhabited by brown, black, and yellow men — sections of the earth in which religion dominates, to the exclusion of almost everything else, the emotional and mental landscape — my reactions and attitudes are those of the West.

Though Western, Wright is not of the West:

Yet, when I turn to face the environment that cradled and nurtured me, I experience a sense of dismaying shock, for that Western environment is soaked in and stained with the most blatant racism that the contemporary world knows… Rooted in my own disinheritdness, I know instinctively that this clinging to, and defense of, racism by Western whites are born of their psychological nakedness, of their having, through historical accident, partially thrown off the mystic cauls of Asia and Africa that once too blinded and dazed them…

And I’ll just end with a long excerpt from Erazim V. Kohák’s “Requiem for Utopia”, written after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Kohák went into exile from Czechoslovakia in 1948, and continues to write and teach at Boston University and Charles University in Prague.

[Dubcek and his colleagues] were determined to be humane authoritarians, respecting the rights of their subjects. In their seven months in power they discovered that the idea of a humane authoritarianism, the standard illusion of welll-intentioned rhetorical revolutionists, is an illusion, a contradictio in adiecto. A humane authoritarianism would respect the freedom of its subjects, and so inevitably create the possibility of dissent and opposition. Faced with opposition, the human authoritarian faces the choice of ceasing to be authoritarian — or ceasing to be humane. Repression, whatever its overt aim, can be humane only in rhetoric — in practice it necessarily means breaking men. Czechs and Slovaks, including Dubcek, were too familiar with the logic of terror to opt for the latter alternative. After seven months, the program which started out as a program of humane communism became a program of social democracy.

…

The ideals of human freedom and social justice remain valid. Democracy — democracy for blacks as well as whites, in economics as well as politics, at home as well as in remote reaches of Latin America or Eastern Europe — remains valid. Socialism, the ideal of social justice and social responsibility in industrial society, remains valid. Human and vicil rights, the right of every man to personal identity and oscial participation, all remain valid. But the utopian myths of self-proclaimed rhetorical radicals do not advance these ideals. The detour on which too many socialists embarked in 1917 is over, finished, discredited, revealed as an exhiliarating, aristocratic, and ultimately reactionary social sport, not the radical social progress it claimed to be. The task that remains is the work of social progress — not the aristocratic sport of revolution, but the solid work of redical, deep-rooted transformation of society. Men may still demand their daily dose of illusion, the exhilaration of revolution or “confrontation” rather than the down-to-earth facts and figures of a Freedom Budget; but those who cater to this demand can no longer do so in the name of social progress — or in the name of socialism.

Utopia is dead. Czechoslovakia has been a graveyard of illusions.

ordure: excrement; or, something morally offensive. [Latin horridus]

“That kind of rig, a man’d die settin’ in his own, uh, ordure long before they got around to stretching his neck.” - p13, The Confessions of Nat Turner

chattel: An article of moveable personal property (as distinguished from real estate). [Latin capitalis]

“The point is that you are animate chattel and animate chattel is capable of craft and connivery and wily stealth… Because that’s how come the law provides that animate chattel like you can be tried for a felony, and that’s how come you’re goin’ to be tried next Sattidy.” - pp21-22, The Confessions of Nat Turner

sedulous: persevering, assiduous.

Right now I had this other bitterness to contend with, the knowledge of which for ten weeks I had so sedulously shunned… - p23, The Confessions of Nat Turner

fagot: A bundle of sticks tied together. [Greek phakelos, bundle]

They moved with quick and sprightly motions… piling twigs and sticks and fagots high in their arms against their bodies. - p40, The Confessions of Nat Turner

bruit: a rumor or report; in medicine, an abnormal sounds heard in auscultation [Old French bruir, roar]

“For several years now there has come to my attention wondrous bruit of a remarkable slave, …, who had so surpassed the paltry condition into which he had been cast by destiny that — mirabile dictu — he could swiftly read from a difficult and abstract work in natural philosophy… - p66, The Confessions of Nat Turner

folderol: Foolishness, nonsense

“I do think Boysie’s sermon was most inspiring, don’t you, little Miss Peg?” “Oh Mother, it’s the same old folderol, every year! Just folderol for the darkies! - p104, The Confessions of Nat Turner

gallus: suspenders.

He blinks steadily, and with his other hand he adjusts one gallus on his shoulder… - p149, The Confessions of Nat Turner

Have a merry snowstorm, everybody.

Technorati Tags: english-practice

Some English practice for us all:

irenic: Promoting peace; conciliatory.

Among the more irenic critics [of Burnet's flood geology] was Robert Hooke… - The Biblical Flood p69

palistrophe: synonym for chiasmus; A rhetorical inversion of the second of two parallel structures.

British evangelical scholar Gordon Wenham has made a case for the coherence and unity of the flood narrative on the basis of a perceived extended palistrophic or chiastic structure in which the first item matches the final item, the second item corresponds to the penultimate item, and so on, so that the second half of the story is a mirror image of the first half. - The Biblical Flood p238

raiment: Clothing; garments.

The national raiment, in [Vladimir Jabotinsky]’s formulation, had to be unsullied by foreign admixtures and universalistic notions such as socialism. - The Legacy of Dissent p138

tribune: A protector or champion of the people (from Latin tribuna, raised speaking platform)

…since even [Tom Wolfe's character from Bonfire of the Vanities] Kramer’s father “had no interest in left-wing politics,” a reader might suppose that father’s socialism, too, was merely half-remembered and that, in the Kramer family, grandfather, the oppressed immigrant garment worker, was socialism’s truest tribune. - The Legacy of Dissent p212

Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami

This is the first Murakami novel I’ve read, having stalled out on Norwegian Wood a few years ago. It’s a sheer delight, a deeply weird story of an aimless 34-year old freelance writer, his aquaintance from middle school (now a movie star), three call girls, an intensely beautiful teenage psychic, a one-armed American poet who spends his days fixing sandwiches, a failed writer named Hakari Makimuri, and the Sheep Man who inhabits a separate reality.

The novel is what I understand to be a Murakami trope: disaffected thirtysomething, unsure what he’s accomplishing in his life, alienated by his meaningless job “shoveling cultural snow”, and unable to forge true connections to the people around him. He trudges through, distracting himself as best as possible, while wondering if and when things will change. There are a few hopeful sparks amidst a fundamentally disheartening series of events, and in the end it’s only vivid personalities that we have to hold onto.

With such an oddball cast, there’s much not to relate to, but I identify with this brief passage, with the protagonist on a quasi-date with the teenage psychic:

I bought Yuki a chocolate from the snack bar as we waited for the movie to start. She broke off a piece for me. When I told her it’d been a year since I’d last eaten chocolate, she couldn’t believe it.
“Don’t you like chocolate?”
“It’s not a matter of like or dislike,” I said. “I guess I’m just not interested in it.”
“Interested? You are weird. Whoever heard of not liking chocolate? That’s abnormal.”
“No, it’s not. Some things are like that. Do you like the Dalai Lama?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s not a ‘what,’ it’s a ‘who.’ He’s the top priest of Tibet.”
“How would I know?”
“Well, then do you like the Panama Canal?”
“Yes, no, I don’t care.”
“Okay, how about the International Date Line? Or pi? Or the Anti-Trust Act? Or the Jurassic Period? Or the Senegalese national anthem? Do you like or dislike November 8, 1987?”

I love lists of marginally related entities.

The Biblical Flood by Davis A. Young

Davis Young is a geology professor at Wheaton College, a small Christian college in Michigan. He uses Noah’s flood as a lens to examine how Christian thinkers have considered extrabiblical evidence in their understanding of both scripture and the natural world.

The essential points of contention in regards to the flood are:

• Whether the flood was geographically universal, covering the entire globe, or local, limited to Mesopotamia.
• Whether the flood was anthropologically universal, destroying the entire human population other than the 8 ark-riders, or local, meaning that there are living humans not descended from Noah.
• Whether the flood required extensive miracles, such as the wholesale creation and later destruction of the flood waters ex nihilo, or whether its proximate causes were mostly or entirely natural.

A brief synopsis:

1. Early Church fathers did not hesitate to cite extrabiblical knowledge in support of their interpretation of Scripture. For example, Augustine referred to the existence of marine fossils in the mountains, and the prevalence of flood traditions in many cultures as positive evidence for a universal deluge.
2. Young argues that an appeal to extrabiblical knowledge is absolutely appropriate, because God created both Scripture and the natural world, and hence prima facie there cannot be any contradiction between the two. Any apparent contradiction is due to either incorrect interpretation of Scripture, or erroneous science.
3. Many writers strove to explain how the flood and ark could work without resorting to miracles. Note that this is a rather different exercise than seeking evidence of the deluge itself; a miraculous deluge might still be expected to leave evidence that we could discover. For example, James Hutton explained the global deluge by positing an enormous subterranean abyss, which an earthquake unleashed. Edmund Halley (yes that one) suggested that a passing comet might have caused a great tidal wave to wash across first one side of the globe, then the other. An entire field of “arkeology” (my favorite word of the month!) grew around the calculation of the size of the ark, the arrangement of the animals within, and the logistics of transporting, feeding, and returning the animals. Johannes Buteo, a Catholic mathematician, calculated in 1554 that a year’s supply of hay for the ruminants would occupy 146,000 cubic cubits, filling the second deck of the ark. The world’s larger animals would occupy a space equivalent to 120 cows; the reptiles could wrap themselves around rafters and beams. In 1675, Athanasius Kircher estimated that 4,562.5 sheep would be required to feed the carnivores.
4. Over time, scientific evidence piled up that challenged the traditional interpretation of the flood. The discovery of the Americas & Australia, with animals unique to each, now required long and tortuous journeys for the critters to and from the ark. In the nineteenth century, the discovery of dinosaur fossils presented a challenge to the space requirements of the ark. And in the twentieth century, modern dating techniques establish a human presence in the Americas at least 15,000 years ago — well before the posited historical flood — calling into question the anthropological universality of the flood.
5. Young notes that many writers adjusted their interpretation of the scripture of the flood in response to this new evidence:
   • The critical school of scriptural analysis accepts that there was a historical flood in Sumeria in around 2,500 B.C., an event incorporated into the epic of Gilgamesh, and later into the Hebrew Bible.
   • Modern Evangelical commentators have for the most part pressed the case for a universal flood on both textual and scientific grounds. Scripturally, a geographically or anthropologically local flood poses problems for the promise of God to Noah never again to flood the Earth. A variety of Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, Seventh-day Adventist and other Christian scholars have appealed to scientific uncertainty about the distant past, or embraced fringe science (such as using frozen mammoths as evidence of a catastrophic deluge), to assert that extrabiblical evidence can support, or at least not contradict, the traditional interpretations.
   • Young himself, with a vocal minority of Christian scientists, believes that the text describes a disrupting event in Mesopotamian civilization, in order to make vital theological points about human depravity, faith, and obedience.

I’m entirely wooed by Young’s argument that if one believes God created both scripture and the natural world, there can be no threat in understanding both as thoroughly as possible. The appeal to fringe creation science by some evangelicals puts their faith on less firm ground, by making it seem that any alternate understanding of the worldly evidence would overthrow their religious understanding. As Augustine himself wrote:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars… about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics… Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books.

I came away from the book intensely curious what Jewish scholars have written about the historical reality and nature of Noah’s flood. In fact, I found it rather curious that Young didn’t consider their writings at all, since they’ve presumably been pondering this for at least a thousand years longer than Christians. Will report back if I learn anything.

Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino

Truly delightful. Fanciful, sparkling sketches inspired by the sublime and ridiculous stories that modern cosmology has to tell. Nothing more need be said, except that All At One Point (listen to it read!), a wistful reminiscence of Mrs. Mrs. Ph(i)Nk from back when everyone was in the same place before the Big Bang, sustained my longest smile in ages.

The Nazi Seizure of Power by William Sheridan Allen

A very merry Christmastime to all. Nothing better than a cozy week of snowshoeing and fireplaces to get some reading done…

In the small [Bavarian] town of Northeim, the National Socialist Party rose from winning 5% of the vote in 1930 to over 60% in 1933. Once they achieved democratic victory, the Nazis promptly dismantled the free press, absorbed civil societies, crushed opposition parties, and cancelled elections. Allen seeks to explain how and why the Nazis swept to power so suddenly and thoroughly.

Northeim was a typical country town of about 10,000, with about one-third of the (male) population civil servants, one-third industrial workers or unskilled laborers, and the remainder a mixture of professionals, farmers, and merchants. Unemployment peaked at a moderate 10%, even at the height of the Depression. Around 130 residents (1%) were Jewish, mostly thoroughly assimilated shop owners. A relatively small number (~ 8%) were Catholic, with the rest Lutheran. The character of the place was solid “Red State”, if you will — industrious, tightly-knit, patriotic, militaristic.

Prior to the Nazi rise, the electoral picture was roughly this:

• a solid 25% of the electorate supported the Democratic Socialists, to whom [AUTH] is clearly sympathetic. They were the only party that was committed to democracy and the Weimar Republic to the bitter end, and their support scarcely wavered over the years.
• A small but noisy fraction (~ 5%) supported the Communists, whose effects were primarily to frighten the middle class and prevent the Socialists from moving further to the center. A sizable chunk of the Communists would eventually support the Nazis, either out of spite of the Socialists, an attraction to radical revolution of any stripe, or the belief that it would hasten the true communist revolution.
• The majority of the electorate was split between several conservative parties: the Nationalists, the Catholic Center, and the People’s Party. It was from these rather staid parties that the Nazis would win the bulk of their support.

Much of the middle of the book is simply a chronicle of rallies, speeches, and marches held by the various parties. This part is rather boring and seems to miss the point — I rather doubt the Nazis won simply because they held four rallies with three brass bands each in April of 1932. Rather, the victory was primarily ideological and strategic:

• First of all, the patriotic, militaristic character of the town was shrewdly exploited by the Nazis, who took every opportunity to wave the flag, point to the Imperial Army as the true soul of the nation, and identify the Nazi cause with a rejuvenated military.
• Both from tradition and for fear of Communist encroachment, the Democratic Socialists espoused Marxist rhetoric (though they were centrist in practice). This alienated the sizable middle class of the town and made a centrist governing coalition impossible. The Nazis crafted their message to be primarily anti-Marxist, stirring up fears of violent revolution by anticlerical fanatics.
• As unemployment rose, the right-wing parties stymied every effort of the Socialists to reduce unemployment with public works projects. Though unemployment was never very high, the unemployed were very visible, waiting for the dole and at the soup kitchen. Thus fear of a worsening economy tilted sentiment away from the ineffective Socialists and conservatives, toward the parties that were agitating for decisive action, i.e. the Nazis (and to a lesser extent Communists).
• Violent clashes between militia groups on the left and right (the Socialist Reichsbanner and the SA Brownshirts) further polarized the situation. Once blood had been spilled, prospects for a centrist governing coalition evaporated, and conservative fears of Bolshevik violence escalated. Soon the thuggery of the Nazis seemed to be only “safe” course to prevent Communism.
• Finally, the tradition and commitment to democratic principles was simply not well established. Hence neither the electorate nor the right-wing parties flinched when Nazi rhetoric made clear their desire to stamp out dissent and bring strong, “uniting” leadership to the country.

It is at the end of the book that the simple failure of democratic society is made clear. As the Nazis consolidated power, they began shutting down both the left-wing and right-wing independent newspapers. One would like to think that in countries with well-rooted democratic traditions, this would bring such a hue and cry that the experiment would end there. Instead, the conservatives acquiesced utterly. Then the Socialist party was banned, and again the conservatives did not object; when the conservative parties themselves were banned, people were upset but the train was already off the tracks. Martin Niemoller indeed.

This one is catch-up from a couple of weeks ago:

Fighting Years: Black Resistance and the Struggle for a New South Africa by Steven Mufson

Written in 1989, after the mid-80’s revival of the liberation movement in South Africa, but before the freeing of Mandela and the end of apartheid. Two rather simple lessons stand out for me:

1. Counterinsurgencies actually can work, and liberations can fail.

Watching The Battle of Algiers, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that when you’re fighting for liberation and self-determination, victory is a historical inevitability, and counterinsurgency only cuts heads from an indomitable hydra. In the modern context this may be true, viewed from a sufficient distance. But there were determined, popular, and well-organized black liberation movements that had the entire nation of South Africa ablaze in 1960, in 1979, and 1985. And each time, with ruthless persecution of the leaders, squelching of the free press, and concessions to the material and social well-being of the underclass, the government pretty well stamped each movement out. So damn, these things are hard, it turns out. I suppose a Palestinian or Tibetan could remind me of that.

2. The question of the use of violence in a liberation movement is not a simple one. I have always maintained, along with the rest of my 8th grade social studies class, that Gandhi and Martin Luther King were good men. No controversy there. The question is, is their path truly the only just one?

There’s a moment in the book in which a crowd seizes a suspected police informer. They begin to force a tire around his shoulders, in preparation for necklacing. Bishop Desmond Tutu jumped into the crowd, cradled the informer in his arms, and told the mob they would have to kill him first.

A few days later, speaking to an extremely skeptical crowd, he tried to explain his actions. He raised his arms in a Christ-like pose, and said:

I understand when people are angry or hurt and want to take it out on those we think are collaborators. But I abhor all forms of violence. I want to condemn in the strongest terms what happened in Duduza [an internationally televised necklacing]. Many of our supporters around the world said then “Oh, oh. If they do those things maybe they are not ready for freedom.” Let us demonstrate the discipline of people who know that they are ready for freedom. At the end of the day, we must be able to walk with our heads high!

It’s a great speech, and the practical and moral lesson is clear, but the crowd was unimpressed. Years of nonviolent efforts had resulted in nothing but exile or death for the leaders. George Orwell once wrote a short essay (forget the name? Ah. Reflection on Gandhi) in which he alleged that a non-violent campaign like Gandhi’s, intended to appeal to the conscience of the oppressor, would simply fail in a country where dissenters disappeared in the middle of the night. South Africa was such a country, and the conscience of the whites was simply not stirred.

Not until whites faced civil unrest, difficulty traveling through the countryside, and rebellious youth throwing stones in downtowns of “white” cities did they take notice. So perhaps, just perhaps, there is room in my moral universe for violent acts, at least directed against property, and against uniformed enforcers of the oppression.

Alright, hafta cut this short. cheers.

But first, a treacly moment for the fuzzy ones in life, be they animate or dis:

Sniff. Growing up is hard. (via Pharyngula)