Jonathan Vincent > Recent Status Updates

The moment of appropriation targeted the beneficiaries of the old order. In doing so, it tended to unify the victims. In contrast, the moment of redistribution disaggregated this latter group- because it created out of this group the beneficiaries of the new order.

In it's motivation and construction, I argue that the Rwandan genocide needs to be understood as a natives' genocide. It was a genocide by those who saw themselves as sons and daughters of the soil, and their mission as one of clearing the soil of a threatening alien presence.

The dedication:

"For Zohran"

Lucky bastard gets to be mayor and gets a book dedication 😤

"I did it because it meant a pleasant ride across a charming landscape and partly because it was another head to add, American-like, to my collection of places visited..."

This guy is an encyclopedia of old and random stereotypes

"This book is dedicated to my ten Nazi friends"

🤨

Interesting first line

I think this is the first thing I've ever read that takes the Metaverse seriously

"One of the rebel groups [in Syria] was an Islamist outfit, Jabhat al-Nusra... Its leader was a Syrian who had fought the Americans in Iraq after 2003."

It really says a lot about the unexpectedness of Assad's fall that a book written only a few years ago gives the current president of Syria one line, and doesn't even say his name.

Just to start, I absolutely love this cover.

The activities and pressures of the authorities began to be felt more openly in the town... At first they had paid attention to who did what and how he behaved, and now they inquired about who thought what and how he expressed his opinions.

For those who rule and must oppress in order to rule must work according to reason; and if, carried away by their passions or driven by an adversary, they go beyond the limits of reasonable action, they start down the slippery slope and thereby reveal the commencement of their own downfall. Whereas those who are downtrodden and exploited make equal use of their reason and unreason for they are but two different...

Speech from a government official to the town:

"It is more than likely that you have heard tales about me even before I came here and I know without asking that those tales could not have been pleasant or favourable. Probably you have heard that I demand work and obedience from everyone, and that I will beat and kill anyone who does not work as he should and does not obey without argument...

And everywhere were sheepish smiles of a peculiar sort. The smiles spoke of sheep who, under proper conditions, could commit murder gladly.

I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality.

The City 4/5

How long will my mind endure this slow decay?
Wherever I look, wherever I cast my eyes,
I see all round me the black rubble of my life
Where I've spent so many ruined and wasted years

I can't quote it fully here, but this is such a harsh poem. The lines about are said by another and the narrator responds with, basically, "It'll be no different anywhere else, because the person there will be YOU."

Here lies a toppled god
His fall was not a small one
We did but build his pedestal
A narrow and a tall one

Father Edeux could imagine just what kind of bishop Monsignor would be. His reign would be a wise one, excessively so. His mind was made up on everything, excessively so. He would know how to avoid the snares set in the path of the just man, avoid them, too, in good taste and good conscience.

Everyone blamed everything on them, everyone knew that they would cause trouble. He even knew from experience what they were like. But who were they?

"Who are they?" Bill asked.

"They are everyone who wants to be one of them," Deathwish said. "They are both a state of mind and an institution... They die off and are replaced, but the institution of they-ness goes on."

Yuu smoothly explained my husband's sudden absence, replacing the provocative word "incest" with other words such as "work."

Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.

Being loved comes at a price, unless we are utterly without conscience.

A complex civilization like ours is necessarily based on the individual's adjusting himself to changes whose cause and nature he cannot hope to understand: why should he have more or less, why should he have to move to another occupation, why some things he wants should become more difficult to get than others, will always be interconnected with such a multitude of circumstances that no single mind will be able to...

Probably it is true that the very magnitude of the outrages committed by the totalitarian governments, instead of increasing the fear that such a system might one day arise in more enlightened countries, has rather strengthened the assurance that it cannot happen here.

Other sources indicate that for every ton of gold in Kolyma that was extracted, 700-1000 lives were lost in the process.

The appetite for expansion was so great that, between 1550 and 1800, Russia was conquering territory at a rate of 35,000 square kilometers every year (an area equivalent in size to the Netherlands)

Let's admit it: the days after 9/11 felt good. Not for my friends who lost family in the attacks. Not for the woman I know who barely made it out of the towers and has spent the past twenty years wondering why she survived and so many of her colleagues did not. But for most of the rest of us, our country was justifiably at war. War with noble purpose.

It increasingly seems to me that the certainty of earlier life was based on fantasies of an orderly future in a rational, controllable world, fantasies that were no more than the wish that the Leviathan might one day be tied down by force. That man, with his ever-increasing sophistication and technology, could come up with a set of rules about how states are to be built, how societies are to be governed...

And so, without quite knowing why, I went back to Mass for the first time in years. And I thought about how the world was not quite meeting my hopeful expectations. And Christ, looking back at me from the cross, blood dripping from the thorns in His crown and the wound in His side and the nails in His hands and feet, asked, "What on earth convinced you that it would?"

The real world did not mean the lives and hopes and dreams of ordinary men and women- it meant the war. It meant the stuff I cared about. As one Vietnam veteran put it: "I could not fathom how Vietnam could be anything to all Americans but the central concern of their lives; how it could be anything less than the dark sun around which we were all in unbreakable orbit as its doomed and somehow hopeless satellite."

As the numbers went more and more in the right direction, I felt less and less as if I were in a place of mystery and confusion, but in a rational, controllable world where the correct application of right thinking and right technique could tame chaos, tame the wild spirits of war and civic life, and move us toward a progressive, technocratically managed ideal of democracy and peace.

The aspiration of such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a "civilizing mission."