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
Piketty on taxes
[Thomas Piketty] shrugs: “As a professor I was already, like, in the top five per cent of the income distribution, and with copyrights I moved to the top one per cent or 0.1 per cent, so it’s not as if I was very low to begin with. I would have liked to pay 90 per cent tax on my copyright. I paid about 60 per cent but I think this is not enough. First, books are also speculative markets, so when you sell 2.5 million copies, it doesn’t mean your book is 1,000 times better than someone who sold 2,500 copies. I’m not naïve about that. I know how everybody at some point wants to read the same book – or buy the same book.
