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 awful Jared and Invaka
“Ivanka [Trump] is no Princess Margaret and Jared [Kuschner] is not the Duke of Windsor regaling guests with amusing bon mots to a captive audience. No one wants to hear about Sarah Huckabee’s pies or Steven Bannon’s shirts.” A snob like that actually deserves a dynamic duo like them (and may shed light on how President Trump found the traction in the heartland that he did). Javanka can’t protest that they moderated the president, not after his past immoderate weeks of raging against democracy and conniving to subvert it. They can’t retroactively claim some profound but strangled ambivalence about his reign, not after her fangirl phantasmagoria at the Republican convention. No, they have made their bed. Lucky for them, the sheets have a serious thread count.
