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Plea deals offered and rejected Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff reminds those still on “formerly known as Twitter” that the Proud Boys convicted of seditious conspiracy could have taken plea offers. Seditious conspiracy is notoriously tough to prove, as the the Department of Justice found in the Hutaree Militia case. The Proud Boys may have betted their seditious conspiracy prosecution would fail too. Except theirs (and the damage they wrought) was so public and so thoroughly documented on thousands of video clips even before prosecutors obtained emails, phone records, and cooperation from witnesses, that there is little comparison to the Hutaree, “almost a gang that couldn’t shoot straight.” The “Boys” now have twice as much jail time than they might have to contemplate their miscalculation (if not their sins). And to ponder why that six-foot-three inches and 215 pounds of rippling man-flesh named Trump, to whom they pledged so much allegiance, passed on pardoning them on his way out of the White House.
Society itself is a satirist and a thief; what it steals is the person you are. James Gillray’s mischief was of an unusual sort, at once refined and coarse, and sometimes with an opacity hard to penetrate even after several looks.
Sending venom through the post, rather than using email or social media, today appears an old-fashioned gesture. The laptop provides easier options. Yet abusive letters haven’t altogether gone away, and receiving one now might feel even more uncomfortable.
Nothing could be less like the conventional idea of a pugnacious Plantagenet than the fair nine-year-old child who came to the throne in 1216, already weeping, in circumstances that would have taxed a Churchill or a Napoleon. Henry III laboured all through his long reign under a doubly damnable inheritance, at least from the point of view of someone who never stopped wanting to be an absolute monarch.
John had a famous younger brother, Augustus John, and a famous older lover, Auguste Rodin. Her pictures are, on the whole, characterised by restraint of tone and technique. There are not very many of them. She lived quietly. She was a Catholic. She was a woman.
The geopolitical impact of the Prussian-German victory was profound. For centuries, the German centre of Europe had been politically fragmented and weak. The continent had been dominated by the states on its periphery, whose interest was in maintaining the power vacuum at the centre. Now, for the first time, the centre was united and strong.
Reconstituting the totality of a person knowing only the “parts” of his or her mind is equally nonsensical.
In Hazzard’s fiction there are very few children, and the ones who do appear are not particularly rewarding. But they are not the enemy. The enemy is the person who sees others as playthings. The enemy is the writer.
There is a moral here, if we like this sort of thing, and Petzold would no doubt say we are entitled to our liking. That’s what abeyance is about. Self-absorbed people have to learn about the lives of others, about pain and difference and surprise.
‘I am a better translator than he is,’ Willa Muir complained in a 1953 journal. For several generations the couple’s Kafka translations were the most widely read English-language versions. Early editions of The Castle were described as being ‘translated by Edwin and Willa Muir’, but by the 1970s the title page of the Penguin Classics edition had reversed the order of the translators’ names.
The trick that Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings plays is to make us think we’re reading a certain kind of novel, before wrongfooting us. Crime narratives are appealing not just because they’re lurid and shocking, but because they’re well-behaved: they obey generic conventions, stick to an internal logic.
Obtaining citizenship by descent can be especially complicated – logistically, emotionally and politically. Collecting the documents that prove a connection to a parent or grandparent usually involves talking to relatives who may or may not want to talk to you. It may involve dredging up stories that families would rather keep quiet.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 18 (Friday 08 September 2023)
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 18 (Friday 08 September 2023)
Data and statistics, all of them, are man-made. They are also central to modern politics and governance, and the ways we talk about them. That in itself represents a shift. Discussions that were once about values and beliefs – about what a society wants to see when it looks at itself in the mirror – have increasingly turned to arguments about numbers, data, statistics.
In the centuries between the reigns of Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II, hundreds of chartered companies sought to profit from and extend the empire. Although few came close to the Hudson Bay Company or East India Company’s durability or profitability, they lumpily but inexorably advanced British sovereignty all the same.
Weber insists that everything remain in its rightful place. Politicians should stick to politics, and scientists to science. Religion should vacate public life, except as an inner psychological ‘vocation’ through which individuals commit to their life course. The tragedy of modernity, as recognised most acutely by Nietzsche, is that modern knowledge can tell us a great deal about how the world works (facts), but nothing whatever about what we should do about it (values).
We may understand less about orcas than they do about us. The example of Twofold Bay suggests they are able to understand human desire and intention, at least when it overlaps with theirs.
Russia's attack on a crowded market in Kostiantynivka was the latest in a long line of mass casualty strikes that have been inflicted on Ukrainian citizens
[Today’s piece is adapted from the introduction to Norman Solomon’s book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press, 2023).] The day after the U.S. government began routinely bombing faraway places, the lead editorial in the New York Times expressed some gratification. Nearly four weeks had passed since 9/11, the newspaper noted, and America had finally stepped up its “counterattack against terrorism” by launching airstrikes on al-Qaeda training camps and Taliban military targets in Afghanistan. “It was a moment we have expected ever since September 11,” the editorial said. “The American people, despite their grief and anger, have been patient as they waited for action. Now that it has begun, they will... Read more
by Brian Czech
The only way to arrive at a safe, sustainable, steady state economy is with substantial behavioral and political reform. Those two categories of reform correspond roughly with the demand side and supply side of the economy, respectively. In the simplest of terms, people must conscientiously demand less—wealthy people in particular—and policymakers must help ensure that the supply of goods and services is not in a state of overshoot.
My focus here is on the supply side.
The post Defining “Economic Development” in Statutory Law: Content and Strategy appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
More bluster than balls Jeff Sharlet (“The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War“) posts in response to a Mike Huckabee monologue, “This is slow civil war: the rhetorical preparation, the simmer of hate, the little violences between individuals that won’t register to wonks as ‘political.’” Huckabee, likening the Biden administration to a third-world dictatorship (via The Wrap): “Do you know how political opponents to those in power are dealt with in third-world dictatorships, banana republics and communist regimes?” Huckabee asked during his monologue of Saturday night’s episode. “The people in power use their police agencies to arrest their opponents for made-up crimes in an attempt to discredit them, bankrupt them, imprison them, exile them or all of the above.” Bullets, not ballots “Joe Biden is using exactly those tactics to make sure that Donald Trump is not his opponent in 2024,” Huckabee went on before firing off the sort of “or you’re not going to have a country anymore” rhetoric Trump used to inspire a mob to attack police and sack the U.S. Capitol.