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 bad cartoons
As with his lord and saviour, Trump, it’s all a con. Jerm’s business strategy is to produce deliberately offensive work and then crow about how the fake news media is distorting his intent. He then turns to his followers and asks them to continue financially supporting his brave crusade. But, for a supposed satirist, he doesn’t seem especially concerned with actually making jokes or wry observations about social folly. Jerm seems to exist under a perpetual cloud of humourless outrage, endlessly frothing at the bit about teen climate activists, post-modernists, anti-fascist groups or whatever other enemy he is pathologically obsessed with at any particular moment.
