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 Brexit
Barely had parliament said no to everything [on Brexit] last night than Mark was barrelling toward the TV cameras to give us his Mark Francois once more. His bumptiousness is now so pronounced that it has passed into the clinical realm, and comes across as a kind of exhibitionism. He is compelled to reveal his stupidity to a camera. Mark Francois is the Westminster equivalent of one of those zoo chimps, probably driven mad by confinement, who furiously masturbate in front of tourists.
