Binston Birchill > Recent Status Updates

Vyasas Mahabharata boasts that 1.6 billion people died on the battlefield of Kurukshetra in northern India, an unimaginable death toll in premodernity designed to highlight the clash's catastrophic nature. The globe did not support this population until maybe 1900 CE, and humanity's bloodiest historical war to date, World War II, resulted in the deaths of about one-third that grotesque number.

Umm… excuse me?

South India, for instance, gets left out when we fixate on political dynasties but comes into focus when we explore trade routes and even fashion around 2,500 years ago. By surveying a mix of topics, we glimpse a layered picture of Indian experiences in different areas of the subcontinent during the dynamic sixth-fourth centuries BCE.

p.119

His café life and all the newspaper articles he had read without understanding them had turned him into a terrible ranter. He spouted the strangest political ideas. You need to have heard one of those malcontents, who have little understanding of what they read, haranguing an audience in some provincial taproom to have any conception of the degree of spite and idiocy Macquart displayed.

Feels like he’s writing an impressionist painting - a focus on lighting.

Egotism is at the base of almost all great historical characters; egotism is the real mainspring that causes all great actions to be executed.
Quiroga possessed this political gift to an eminent degree, and exercised it by concentrating about him everything he saw disseminated in his surrounding, uncultured society; wealth, power, authority, all this he had…”

The “great man” theory of Carlyle

haven't copied them. When Your Grace dictates in circular form, order of the Perpetual Dictator, I write his words down in the Perpetual Circular. When Your Grace thinks out loud, in the voice of the Supreme Man, I note his words down in the Spiral Notebook. If, that is, I am able to, Excellency, what I mean to say is if I manage to net those words that caracole out of your mouth, mounting ever more swiftly upward.

“So tell this Monsieur Grandsire that we don't speak French here and that the Government of Paraguay is not prepared to pay an interpreter to attend to or contend with pretensions whose intention is to deceive.”

Wordplay that likely inspired Rick Harsch

Would you do such a thing, my spiritual-minded secretary? Not I, Sire! God save and keep this loyal servant! Such things shouldn't be done helter-skelet, Patiño. When my eye itches, I look for eyewash, not a spine of coconut palm. In your case, it's your rear that itches. Don't think you can stop the itching by rubbing it on my seat. What you'll end up with is a noose round your neck.

Finiquidate

“For the moment God does not occupy my mind. The question that preoccupies it is ruling over chance. Putting my daedal digit on the die, the die in the dicebox. Getting the country out of its labyrinth.”

To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real.

El Supremo’s interactions with his head clerk/amanuensis are quite fun.

“Give me your hand. Are you going to get up, Sire? Let me have your hand. A very great honor for this servant to have Your Excellency extend his hand to me. I'm not holding my hand out to you. I'm ordering you to hold yours out to me. It's not a reconciliation I'm proposing to you; simply a simulacrum of temporary identification.”

Almost all of you are servants of long standing. The majority of you,however,have not had time to study in depth these questions of our history, since all your time has necessarily been devoted to your duties.I have preferred you to be loyal functionaries rather than cultivated men.
Capable of carrying out my commands.I am not concerned with the sort of capabilities a man possesses. I require only that he be capable.

Suspicion falls on his sycophants immediately

p.108 starts Rilke’s Notebooks

Schoenberg's compositions have more faith in disquiet than rest, uncertainty than knowledge, difficulty than ease. This type of art—and all good art, in Schoenberg's view—plays out an unfin-ished, intellectual quest. Aiming only "to make things clear to himself,"the artist pursues clarity in open confusion. Here there is no intention of "provoking" an audience with such dissonant compositions, as many might think

p.59 The sewers of NY

p17-20 the priest

“Indeed, the precedent for the current right-wing paramilitary phenomenon in Antiquia… may be traced back to the endorsement of the contrachusma and the legal arguments made by Antiqueño governors to justify the arming of independently organized civilian groups during la Violencia.”

Violence in the southwest… trajectory seems to have differed so markedly from the way violence evolved elsewhere in Antiquia during the same period.The most commonly accepted version of la Violencia,in other words,was the regional exception, not the rule.Yet, even in the southwest where violence appears to have reproduced an uncomplicated version of la Violencia - a conflict waged exclusively around partisan issues

Some Conservatives asked regional govt not to send national policemen

“Other Conservatives opted to arm bands of Conservative civilians to fulfill the government’s responsibility.”

“others withdrew their support from the government and their party and colluded with members of the opposition in order to defend their personal interests.”

local authorities deflected aggression away from the stark economic and social inequalities typical of an economy that revolved around cattle ranching and large sugar estates dominated by hacienda owners. Partisan competition and repressive state policies produced a Hobbesian world in western Antioquia in which the opportunity for profit… gradually emerged as the only viable objective

Violence, initially waged in defense of particular party interests or to protect the lives of party members against the actions of the opposi-tion, evolved into a free-for-all in western Antioquia. Duty and partisan loyalty gave way to the pursuit of personal accumulation among armed members of both parties and even the government's own forces.

“The main perpetrators of violence were uniformly described as the very forces charged with controlling public order in the region and protecting its inhabitants' lives.”

Eastern Antioquia violence largely shaped by economic rather than partisan competition

What is striking about the landowners' appeal for a greater military presence in the area and their offer to "cooperate with the Armed Forces with all the means at our disposal" is that they were members of both parties. The threat posed to private property was attributed by landowners to the presence of "pillage and... banditry" which had transformed the region "into the most terrible site of vandalism and ruin…

p.132 The determinants of local violence in eastern Antiquia were hence far more complex than any innate, unavoidable differences between monolithic groups of Liberals and Conservatives..

In many areas there were no innate conflicts, these were created and fed by the state's own agents who capitalized on a few disgruntled, local adherents or otherwise imported them from nearby areas to fan and exploit the flames….

case of la Violencia in Antiquia is at all representative of Colombian violence as a whole, then what is significant about this study is the discovery of how selective and concentrated supposedly generalized violence has been, and to what degree factors such as ethnicity and race,cultural differences,class, and geography have shaped the evolution, trajectory, direction, and incidence of violence in Colombia over time