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Quote du Jour | Legally speaking, I am innocent

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His dreams often end in screams. The screams turn into thunder, the thunder into humming and the humming into silence. They are the sounds of death from the gas chambers.

Gröning, though, didn’t kill anyone. He didn’t pour Zyklon B into the shafts or burn the piles of dead. He watched. He stood there, shocked at first, then indifferent. It became a routine.

Oskar Gröning was boekhouder in Auschwitz. Hij telde het geld dat de Joden in moesten leveren bij aankomst in het kamp. Hij zag de gruwelen, de gaskamers, de lijkverbranding. Hij is een van de weinige SS-ers die nog in leven zijn.

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Quote du Jour | Then what courage can we honor?

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It is not merely that an assault on an ideology is different from a threat made to a person; it is that it is the opposite of a threat made to a person. The whole end of liberal civilization is to substitute the criticism of ideas for assaults on people. The idea that we should be free to do our work and offer our views without extending a frightened veto to those who threaten to harm us isn’t just part of what we mean by free expression. It’s what free expression is.

The Charlie Hebdo staff kept working in the face of death threats, and scorning an effort to honor that courage gives too much authority to those who want that veto. The killers were not speaking for an offended community and explaining why, after all, someone might easily miss the point of the cartoons. They were responding to an insult with murder.

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Quote du Jour | Looting

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“While no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression and people who have had members of their family killed by that regime, for them to be taking their feelings out on that regime,” he said. “And I don’t think there’s anyone in any of those pictures … (who wouldn’t) accept it as part of the price of getting from a repressed regime to freedom.”

Rumsfeld said in the United States there has been looting and riots and they eventually come under control.

“Think what’s happened in our cities when we’ve had riots and problems and looting. Stuff happens!”

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Quote du Jour | Disrespect for the hollow law

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When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is “correct” or “wise,” any more than a forest fire can be “correct” or “wise.” Wisdom isn’t the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the rioters themselves.

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Quote du Jour | Resisting is never peaceful

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I’ve been to protests In Istanbul and Greece. I’ve seen windows smashed, graffiti drawn, Molotovs prepared, and things set alight. Still, the situations where lighter skinned people were filling the photographs: protests. When darker skinned people are involved? Riots. The decision to call one riots and the other protests has nothing to do with the amount of violence in the demonstrations. Violence is a realistic factor, and sometimes, a tactic, in all of these protests. Resisting is never peaceful. If the State fears you, it will crack down on you violently, despite your kumbaya circle.

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Quote du Jour | Trends for conservation

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Medicine is about health. So is conservation. And as with medicine, the trends for conservation in this century are looking bright. We are re-enriching some ecosystems we once depleted and slowing the depletion of others. Before I explain how we are doing that, let me spell out how exaggerated the focus on extinction has become and how it distorts the public perception of conservation.

Ecoloog en natuurbeschermer Steward Brand laakt de alarmistische berichtgeving over massa-uitsterven van de soorten. Volgens Brand is dat schromelijk overdreven, en hij illustreert aan de hand van tal van voorbeelden waarom.

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Quote du Jour | Sociale huurwoningen in de uitverkoop

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Waar Dekker volhardend de belangen van de Nederlandse volkshuisvesting heeft verdedigd, gooit Blok die belangen te grabbel door tienduizenden huurwoningen voor buitenlandse beleggers tegen ondergewaardeerde prijzen in de verkoop te zetten.

Allerlei wooncorporaties zitten in zwaar weer omdat ze na de privatisering van de woningmarkt zijn gaan avonturieren. Om de sector “financieel gezond te maken”, stimuleert de Minister voor Wonen en Rijksdienst de verkoop van sociale huurwoningen op de vrije markt. Aan buitenlandse investeerders wel te verstaan.

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Quote du Jour | Mythe van de Vrije Pers

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The crux of it is that there is no such thing as impartial news. That’s a fact of life. Everyone is pushing their own agenda and in the case of the British press that happens to be a pro-corporate, pro-war agenda. It’s important for people to take a step back and stop assuming that what they are being told is the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is not. The most fundamentally dangerous thing about the press in the UK and the ‘liberal-Western world’ as a whole is the assumption of neutrality, objectiveness and freedom that goes with it. This is part of the propaganda model that contributes to the idea that we are the good guys.

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Quote du Jour | Telegraph a Message

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Britain’s unique contribution has been to be the only state prepared to make the argument not to rescue migrants to “telegraph a message” to deter migrants from making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean.

Een samenleving kan snel afstompen.

Toen er in oktober 2013 driehonderdzesenzestig vluchtelingen omkwamen bij een scheepbreuk nabij het eilandje Lampedusa, schrok Europa wakker.

Vooral ook Italië zelf: dat richtte prompt de zeereddingsoperatie Mare Nostrum op. Een veiligheidsnet aan marine- en reddingsboten scande het Middellandse Zeegebied tot vlak voor de territoriale wateren van Libië op schepen in nood, om drenkelingen uit het water te vissen. Zo werden naar schatting in een jaar tijd 170.000 zielen gered.

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Quote du Jour | Luisteren naar de rechter

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We proberen eruit te komen. We hebben het over een heel belangrijk punt voor de VVD: een streng asielbeleid voor mensen die weigeren om uitspraken van Nederlandse rechters uit te voeren. (…) Als Willem Holleeder net zo naar de rechter zou luisteren als deze mensen, zou hij nog geen dag in de gevangenis hebben gezeten.

In een halfbakken poging hier illegaal verblijvende asielzoekers te criminaliseren, verslikt Halbe Zijlstra zich in het eigen frame: want of Holleeder nu een voorbeeld zou moeten nemen aan de asielzoekers (die kennelijk heel goed naar de rechter luisteren), of die asielzoekers juist zouden moeten kijken naar Holleeder om te zien hoe het moet, in beide gevallen slaat de vergelijking dood als een glas slecht geschonken bier.

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Quote du Jour | Spectator Sport

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Well, politics for me has become a spectator sport, it has become less and less entertaining for me over the years, so I’m less and less interested in it. I have not voted for perhaps 20 or 25 years. But even as a spectator sport, as I say, like other sports, it’s less and less interesting to me, and I feel it’s-I’ve come to a rather cynical belief that has been held by a large number of American conservatives, beginning with the Constitutional Convention, and philosophers in Victorian England and in Athens; that there are many illusions incorporated in democratic philosophy. They tend to be very pleasing and satisfying, but they are misleading and they are fantasies. And one of them is that the democratic ideal is even possible, that there is such a thing as participatory democracy. I think one of the illusions we have, and it’s very comforting, is that by voting we are participating in government. I maintain that is a delusion, it is a ritual routine. The right to vote, I feel, is indispensable to our contentment; in application it is absolutely useless.

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Quote du Jour | Unmournable bodies

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We may not be able to attend to each outrage in every corner of the world, but we should at least pause to consider how it is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful, and more worthy of commemoration, than others.

Terwijl de bombardementen van Assad, de terreurbrigades van IS, het oorlogsgeweld van de Saoedi’s in Jemen, en de slachtpartijen van Al-Shabaab dood en verderf zaaien is het de moeite waard nog eens stil te staan bij dit stuk van Teju Cole, waarin deze de vraag opwerpt waarom sommige doden wereldwijd meer verontwaardiging oproepen dan anderen.

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