The non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy. That State is the best governed which is governed the least.
Mohandas Ghandi
In no longer pretty cities There are warrants, forms and chitties There are fingers in the kitties And a jackboot on the stair.
V for Vendetta
Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
Thomas Jefferson
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
John Stuart Mills
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Pitt the Younger
Coercion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.
Never give your government any power that you wouldn't also be comfortable entrusting to a genocidal dictator.
The Angry Exile
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C.S. Lewis
America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.
Claire Wolfe
The powers delegated to the government must be precisely defined … and clearly be of such extent as that, by no reasonable construction, they can be made to invade the rights and prerogatives intended to be left in the people.
Richard Henry Lee
It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?
James Madison
A charity that relies in the main part on taxes is no more a charity than a prostitute is your girlfriend.
Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.
John Adams
Government’s view of the economy can be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidise it.
Ronald Reagan
It's amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness ... There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [...] We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
Into our town the Hangman came, Smelling of gold and blood and flame. And he paced our bricks with a diffident air, And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side, Only as wide as the door was wide; A frame as tall, or little more, Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time, Who the criminal, what the crime That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread, We passed those eyes of buckshot lead -- Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye, And he gave us a riddle instead of reply: "He who serves me best," said he, "Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand On a man who came from another land. And we breathed again, for another's grief At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone. So we gave him way, and no one spoke, Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down On roof and street in our quiet town, And stark and black in the morning air Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand With the yellow hemp in his busy hand; With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done Yesterday, with the foreign one?" Then we fell silent, and stood amazed, "Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us: "Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss To hang one man? That's a thing I do To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!" And into our midst the Hangman came To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he, "with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm. And we shrank back in quick alarm! And we gave him way, and no one spoke Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size. Fed by the blood beneath the chute, The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more, Than the steps that led to the courthouse door, As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall, Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell -- Was a usurer, and an infidel. "What," said the Hangman "have you to do With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he Who has served you well and faithfully?" The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song Had scratched our comfort hard and long; "And what concern," he gave us back. "Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again, "Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?" "It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more, As the Hangman tallied his bloody score. And sun by sun, and night by night, The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide Till they covered the square from side to side; And the monster cross-beam, looking down, Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came, Through the empty streets, and called my name -- And I looked at the gallows soaring tall, And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me To help pull down the gallows-tree." So I went out with right good hope To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down To the courthouse square through the silent town. And supple and stretched in his busy hand Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap, And it sprang down with a ready snap -- And then with a smile of awful command He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then, "That your scaffold was built for other men... And I no henchman of yours," I cried, "You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye, "Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I. For I answered straight and I told you true -- The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully Then you with your coward's hope?" said he, "And where are the others who might have stood Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably "Murdered," the Hangman corrected me: "First the foreigner, then the Jew... I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky None had stood so alone as I. The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.
My first thought when I read that a primary school had started a school farm to educate the children was what the fuck was she thinking of? Give the poor little mites fucking complexes, why don't you? But I'd barely got to the end of the first paragraph of The Telegraph's Rowan Pelling's article on the real fallout, that animals such as a lovely little lamb are being sent for the, aha, chop before I changed my mind. Pelling makes a very good point that children can be far less sentimental than adults, and the fact that it was put to a vote and the children decided to send the lamb, who was named Marcus for some reason*, off to market for the fairly practical reason that they wanted the money to buy pigs.
Cue widespread outrage, with one parent branding Charman "a murderer", and chat-show host Paul O'Grady offering Marcus refuge on his smallholding. The doughty Charman refused to be intimidated: she scrupulously observed the democratic process and last weekend Marcus went to the great pasture in the sky.... one cuddly animal obsessive wrote on Facebook that the school should be torched.
Yep, got to wonder who the fragile minds really are, haven't you. And as Pelling points out they're hard of thinking too.
The big question is why are the protesters so terminally dim? Do they truly not see that the project bolsters their cause? Any child who understands that animals have to be killed before they end up on our plates is more likely to respect the meat on their table. They are also more likely to weight up the pros and cons of vegetarianism – as has happened with at least one pupil. And any child who helps hand rear a lamb will be more likely to oppose the cruelties of factory farming.
Well, most, probably, but there's always one... such as Tom Gleeson, the guy on the right of the panel in this clip (about two minutes in):
Mean while the fuss over the school farm that began with the parents has spread, even as far as early evening Australian TV shows, and as a result the whole project now hangs in lambo shit, sorry, I mean limbo. Yes, probably the piglets were going to end up in apple sauce too when the children looked at their economic value and decided that it would cover the cost of a cow or something, but it seems a great shame that self righteous pricks are fucking up something that really does teach something useful. It's got too damn easy to disassociate ourselves from what runs around in fields and what is under the gravy on our plates. My parents' generation knew: many, even some townies, would have kept chickens in the wartime and post war rationing years, and no doubt a few of them ended up on the menu when they stopped laying. Yes, intellectually we know, but it's not knowing knowing when it's so easy to pretend that food just comes from the shops. That's bollocks, and that appears to be the lesson Lydd Primary School and Andrea Charman are trying to get across. I didn't learn it in school but by fishing and eating what I caught - after hiring the boat for the fishing trip it must have been many times the price of buying the same sort of fish in the supermarket, but having personally dragged a couple of the buggers out of the water before belting them over the head with a stick I can honestly say that I harbour no illusions about fish being like a miniature orange railway sleeper. The same goes for meat since I shop at markets where it's often still recognisable, rabbits being only the most obvious example, and while I've never shot at another living creature I could cheerfully do so to fill my stomach**. And as Pelling points out, learning that lesson and breaking down that disassociation between animals and food is surely a good thing for animal welfare in the long run. If more schools did something like it at the least there'll be a few kids turn veggie because of it, and since that would be a better educated choice I'd still call it a good thing even while tucking into a nice bloody steak. And even the ones who don't go veggie would hopefully take more of an interest in the welfare of animals that are destined for the chiller section of the supermarket. Unfortunately the sort of mentality we're dealing with is also the kind that calls for Lydd Primary to be burned to the ground and would ideally like the world to stop eating meat overnight. No doubt PETA*** will soon have some unbearably self righteous fuckwits waving signs and sitting naked in cages on the way to kent if they're not outside the school already, but while I have little but contempt for PETA I'll credit them with this: they're at least consistent with their message, which is more than can be said for some of the protesting parents who I don't doubt have been putting meat in front of their kids for years before this school farm thing came along. Maybe the lesson was most needed by some of them rather than their children.
* 'Marcus'? For fuck's sake, Come on. Surely it should have been Larry. And why give it a names all? I suppose the kiddies named it but I wonder why we do that? Pets, yes, but farm animals? Would anyone name individual fruit or chocolate bars? So why an animal that will, or even just might, become food? And why not name it Adolf or Mugabe instead as suggested on that video clip? Would people get upset about it if it'd been called Osama bin Lamb Dins or something? ** I don't actually hunt and the idea of hunting purely for sport doesn't interest me. Quite the opposite in fact, though here in Australia there are enough pest species to hunt that it's hard to oppose someone shooting an animal that they actually have no intention of eating if it's one that has no business being here in the first place. Here I could probably bring myself to shoot a wild pig and not eat it, but not in Europe unless it was going to be on the menu later. *** Please Eat the Tasty Animals?
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... it’s time to put the old charger out to stud, and plant the lance in
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Thus farewell, dear readers...
4 comments:
"*** Please Eat the Tasty Animals?"
Also known as 'People for the Elimination and Termination of Animals' after this news broke.
Yep. Also touched on a few years ago by Penn and Teller
"'Marcus'? For fuck's sake, Come on. Surely it should have been Larry. "
Interestingly, several 'anons' popped up at my place in support of the headmistress, and said it wasn't called Marcus at all. But 'market'!
Seemed too good to be true though ;)
Laughing my arse off at 'Market the lamb'...
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