Chris Chapman > Recent Status Updates

No Tagalog, born in this Tagalog archipelago, shall exalt any person above the rest because of his race or the colour of his skin; fair, dark, rich, poor, educated and ignorant – all are completely equal, and should be in one loób (inward spirit). There may be differences in education, wealth, or appearance, but never in essential nature and ability to serve a cause. (Constitution of the Republic of Katagalugan)

The dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class rather than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to 'blue' or 'white' blood and 'breeding' among aristocracy.

The logic here is: 1. I will be dead before I have penetrated them. 2. My power is such that they have had to learn my language. 3. But this means that my privacy has been penetrated. Terming them 'gooks' is small revenge.

'What about the Breuers' kittens? You spend all your time playing bridge, you let those kittens die one by one...'

'Brodsky, Brodsky. It's too late. We're done for now. Let's just be a cold modern city and be done with it.'

En vous lisant dans cet entretien, j'ai finalement saisi l'inattendu : que vous craignez d'être compris, monsieur Parsky. Vous brouillez les pistes, vous fabriquez vous-même les protecteurs malentendus, car votre hantise et d'être compris.
Chercher, oui.
Compris, non.
Une juste dose d'impénétrable évite ce grand malheur et conserve intact votre prestige.

Surely they also reflect the characteristic mindset of a well-known type of left-wing European intellectual, proud of his command of the civilised languages, his Enlightenment heritage, and his penetrating understanding of everyone else's problems. In this pride, internationalist and aristocratic ingredients are rather evenly mixed.

One can trace this lexicographic revolution as one might the ascending roar in an arsenal alight, as each small explosion ignites others, till the final blaze turns night into day.

Marco Rubio in Munich on Saturday: "Armies don't fight for abstractions; armies fight for a people, armies fight for a nation". Dude, you need to read Anderson....

No, the wretchedness of the poor lies below hunger and nakedness. It consists in their incessant incertitude and fear, the drudging succession of shift and scheme and subterfuge, the labouring in the quicksand where every step that takes hold of the firm ground is also a step into the danger of condemnation. Not cold and hunger but Law and Justice are the bitterest affliction of the poor.

Four days later, when news came that a vagrant man called Jack Nonesuch, also Jack the Latiner, also Jackie Pad, had been seized in Waxelby and cast into jail, her satisfaction was terrible to witness. She guffawed, she cracked jokes, she scratched herself, she suggested having a Te Deum sung for the occasion: it was as if all her de Stapledon forebears, so pious over property, so ruthless over flesh and blood...

When the car at last drew up, she came slowly down the steps, took a last and most longing look back at the house, gave her head the breath of a toss and entered the car.

I turned back to the forlorn river, to the scrappy breeze that rippled an evening cold across it, to the barges and the tugs that no longer looked busy and plucky but now soot-poor and tired.

It was a six-bedroom affair built in the twenties, retired enough in its three acres of rhododendron, birch and fir. But retired only in that it was hidden among trees – in itself it was a formidable amalgam of many telling styles: one felt that the railways had managed a direct line falsewards into the Wars of the Roses.

Eve picked up with her slender red fingernails a T-square, her nails slid about the brown wood like lacquered weevils.

The "relationship of people to food" involves systems of power, property and law. Conflict over entitlement to food in the market might be seen as a forum of class struggle, if most historians were not too prissy nowadays to use the term.

A few Gaelic ones revolted, who were quelled later, but in the main the partisans like Robin were glad to settle down. They were sick of the anarchy that had been their portion under Uther Pendragon. Sick of overlords and feudal giants, of knights who did what they pleased, of racial discrimination, and of the rule of might is right.

Et je remerciais les dieux, puisqu'ils m'avaient accordé de vivre à une époque où la tâche qui m'était échue consistait à réorganiser prudemment un monde, et non à extraire du chaos une matière encore informe, ou à se coucher sur un cadavre pour essayer de le ressusciter.

When you see a system change once, it’s not that difficult to believe that it can change again. Fighting cynicism and political apathy turns into what some might call a moral duty. To me, it’s more of a debt that I feel I owe to all the people of the past who sacrificed everything because they were not apathetic, they were not cynical, they did not believe that things fall into place if you just let them [...]

Je chassai les fonctionnaires incapables; je fis exécuter les pires. Je me découvrais impitoyable.

The bread would do for tomorrow. The belly is a rascal. It doesn't remember how well you treated it yesterday, it'll cry out for more tomorrow.

He said that people who did not know the country - did not know nature and did not stay close to it - could never understand the loss that they were feeling.

Not to go to you is to precipitate the dark and yet I hesitate. It is not that I do not crave the light. Rather, it is the certainty of the eventual dark.

...the clubhouse itself was surrounded by a churned mass of red mud. It was the cloistral hour, the hour of silence, as if the very fact that in the trees, and in the veld that was no more than half a mile's walk distant, the little creatures and birds were sinking into sleep aroused, in these people, though briefly, the memory of that other cycle submerged in their blood.

Founders' Street was narrow and shabby; and, although it was named to commemorate those adventurers, who had come riding over the veld to plant the Union Jack, regardless of the consequences to themselves or to anybody else, it was now synonymous in the minds of the present citizens with dubious boarding houses and third-rate shops.

By and large, the popular theatre for which Shakespeare wrote, was in favour of monogamous, wedded love; the aristocratic coterie theatre was more cynical and contemptuous in its attitude towards women. This may in the main be attributed to a rise in economic importance of those middling sized households, in town and country, in which the wife was a junior partner in the business.

John Boggis of Great Yarmouth asked in January 1646, 'Where is your God, in heaven or in earth, aloft or below, or doth he sit in the clouds, or where doth he sit with his arse?'

In a remarkable passage, Winstanley suggested that the doctrine of election was a mirror of the unequal social order: 'kingly government hath made the election and rejection of brethren from their birth to their death, or from eternity to eternity'.

State, power, armies, laws, and the machinery of 'justice', prisons, the gallows, all exist to protect the property which the rich have stolen from the poor. Exploitation, not labour, is the curse, we must abolish wage labour if we are to restore prelapsarian freedom.