Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
On regulating larghe companies
Legislators are under the sway of an army of lobbyists: Google alone spent more than twenty-one million dollars on lobbying last year; together, Google, Facebook, and Amazon spent an unprecedented forty-eight million dollars, which was an increase of seventeen per cent from the previous year, much of it to stave off regulation. (A recent tweet by the digital-rights activist and developer Aral Balkan put this in perspective, claiming that Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had told him, at a private book event in SoHo, “I wake up every morning and I fight regulation, it’s what I do, it’s my job.”)
