Greg > Recent Status Updates

‘despotism increases in severity with the number of despots; the responsibility is more divided, and the claims more numerous.’ He might also have asked: what is the nature of despotism in the United States such that White skin, on sight, allows one to inhabit the class of rulers?...James McCune Smith suggest[ed] in 1843 that [the US was]…a ‘Polygarch[y]’ filled with ‘tyrannies of many masters.’

Das Wort ist das Mittel des Glaubens und das der Lüge. Es ist fähig, eine unsichtbare Welt zu verwirklichen, aber auch, eine nicht bestehende Welt zu erlügen.

The idea that White people are superior by nature, then, is an ideological illusion that masks the material circumstances governing any perceived natural advancements…This is all to say that the ideals of the U.S. Constitution, no matter how perfect they had been, were still vulnerable to vitiation by a corrupt populace that has displayed an ongoing commitment to maintaining racial hierarchies.

The whole of Lucy’s behavior in the affair, and the prosperity which crowned it, therefore, may be held forth as a most encouraging instance of what an earnest, an unceasing attention to self-interest, however its progress may have been obstructed, will do in securing every advantage of fortune, with no other sacrifice than that of time and conscience.

‘I am not wishing him too much good,’ said Marianne at last with a sigh, ‘when I wish his secret reflections may be no more unpleasant than my own. He will suffer enough in them.’

James Warren, the Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives...argued that the three-fifths clause, in effect, tethered political influence to the people who owned the most (human) property. For Warren, sanctioning the three-fifths clause would be tantamount to establishing 'in the representative branch of the new Congress a principle of aristocracy, with a vengeance.'

Because they neither flattered herself nor her children, she could not believe them good-natured; and because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical; perhaps without knowing what it was to be satirical; but that did not signify.

…such grief, shocking as it was to witness it, must have its course…

…she could have no lasting affection in the company of a person who joined insincerity with ignorance, whose want of instruction prevented their meeting in conversation on terms of equality, and whose conduct towards others made every show of attention and deference towards herself perfectly valueless.

…she proceeded to question him on the subject of books; her favourite authors were brought forward and dwelt upon with so rapturous a delight, that any young man of five-and-twenty must have been insensible indeed, not to become an immediate convert to the excellence of such works, however disregarded before. Their taste was strikingly alike.

They have, there is no doubt, a generosity, a species of nobility, that do not really belong to the twentieth century. It is this that makes one hope that in Spain even Fascism may take a comparatively loose and bearable form. Few Spaniards possess the damnable efficiency and consistency that a modern totalitarian state needs.

It is impossible to read through the reports in the Communist Press without realizing that they are consciously aimed at a public ignorant of the facts and have no other purpose than to work up prejudice.

It is a horrible thing to have to enter the details of inter-party polemics; it is like diving into a cesspool. But it is necessary to try and establish the truth, so far as is possible.

What the devil was happening, who was fighting whom and who was winning, was at first very difficult to discover. The people of Barcelona are so used to street-fighting and so familiar with the local geography that they know by a kind of instinct which political party will hold which streets and which buildings. A foreigner is at a hopeless disadvantage.

It is not a nice thing to see a Spanish boy of fifteen carried down the line on a stretcher...and to think of the sleek persons in London and Paris who are writing pamphlets to prove that this boy is a Fascist in disguise. One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Als deutsche politische Häftlinge standen die Dachauer Spanienkämpfer in einer nach rassischen „Prinzipien“ aufgebauten Häftlingshierarchie a priori an der Spitze der KZ-Gesellschaft. Diese allgemeinste Rahmenbedingungen bot individuell natürlich keinen oder nur kaum Schutz, machte jedoch eine kollektive Vernichtungsabsicht sehr unwahrscheinlich.

It appeared that even in Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays; for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists.

…Österriechern [die] in...1939 nach Wien zurückkehrte, einige Monate inhaftiert war, anschließend in einem Betrieb arbeitete und später zur Wehrmacht eingezogen wurde. Die zur Verfügung stehende Quellenbasis deutet jedenfalls nicht darauf hin, dass es bei den Heimkehrern um verkappte Nazis, geschweige denn um Gestapoagenten gehandelt hätte, wie die KP-Presse und die Stalinisten im Lager nicht müde wurden zu beteurn.

As Laura Kalman put it, the neorepublicans rummaged through the past ‘to find arguments for whatever vision of the social order they wished to promote. By mooring their vision in the Founding, law professors believed they could make a more powerful case for it. They could claim kinship with the Founders.’

Forgotten injustices lead people to assume that the present is more or less justified…Erasure amplifies the moral meaning of what is remembered, while evaporating the moral meaning of what is erased. If we did not remember the civil rights movement, its moral authority—and its ability to shape our views of paradigmatic cases of justice and injustice—would disappear.

The conceit of originalism is that it offers stability and permanence in a changing world. In fact, originalism is a moving target, the product of each generation’s interaction with the historical record of the past.

The perpetual retrofitting of originalist theory to reach particular results leads to the sneaking suspicion that what really has constitutional authority in the United States is not the original meaning of the Constitution itself but rather contemporary social and political values, to which originalist theories must continually conform.

The men who are truly ‘for all times’ were also fully of their own time.

When earth was to be rebuked by heaven, men brought the Declaration to sit in judgment on the Constitution.

Connection with one’s own system of social ties makes for enmity toward an alien system threatening it. Thus the mother will die for her child, the patriot for his country. Though the mind may mistake the grounds for conflict, or misinterpret a menace, response to the menace is automatic and powerful because the bonds of affection are so strong.

To understand the attractions of originalism in the United States, one must stop thinking of it primarily as a theory of interpretation and start thinking about it as a cultural narrative. Cultural memory, not philosophical theory, is the best explanation for Americans’ attraction to originalism in politics and law.

Jefferson’s attitude toward property was always closer to Hutcheson’s than to Locke’s…Jefferson, like Hutcheson looked to a constant transferal of property as the healthy ‘circulation’ of society. (That is one reason he contrived his scheme for limiting contracts to nineteen years.) He felt freedom was impossible in Europe, so long as the land was frozen in feudal molds of entail.

History matters to constitutional interpretation because people believe that history bestows authority on their arguments or, conversely, that it undermines the authority of opposing arguments. History matters in constitutional interpretation because authority matters.

It is when the desire for choice is broken that what men do thereby loses all moral value, and actions lose all significance (in terms of good and evil) in their own eyes; that is what is meant by destroying people’s self-respect, by turning them, in your words, into rags.

...resistance to [the institutions of the polis] – in the name of individual liberty or even peaceful retreat from the market-place into private life – is scarcely conceived. Idiotes means just ‘private citizen’, but in so far as such a person is concerned with his own private affairs at the expense of those of the city, it can be a pejorative term, like the modern word etymologically related to it.