This is old but needs to be posted
OVER A million Iraqis are dead from America’s war.
That sentence is a cognitive litmus test. Some people’s immediate reaction is, “That can’t be right,” because the United States couldn’t do that. Or because crimes on that scale don’t still happen. Or because they do happen, but only in horrible places that the United States hasn’t rescued.
One million is a “Grandpa, what did you do to stop it?” number. It’s a number that undeniably puts the American state among history’s villains. Those who are not willing or able to accept this are physically unable to retain the fact that over a million Iraqis are dead. Their brains expel it like a foreign germ.
Noam Chomsky once wrote that the “sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at the level of ‘Fuck You,’ so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response.”
That pretty much sums up the how the media reacted to the one million figure in 2007 when it was announced by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business (ORB). (In fact, the firm estimated 1,220,580 Iraqis had died, confirming and updating a separate study done the year before by researchers from Johns Hopkins University and published in the Lancet medical journal.)
Take Kevin O’Brien, deputy editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Upon receiving a media advisory about the findings from ORB, whose clients include the British Conservative Party and Morgan Stanley, this was his response: “Please remove me from your mailing list and spare me your transparent propaganda.”
The silence is deafening.
Of Elijah and God's Birds
Even the slightest anger or indignation does harm. We need to have goodness and love in our soul and to transmit these things.
- Elder Porphyrios
“That the Christians in the apostolic age erected special houses of worship is out of the question…. As the Saviour of the world was born in a stable, and ascended to heaven from a mountain, so his apostles and their successors down to the third century, preached in the streets, the markets, on mountains, in ships, sepulchers, eaves, and deserts, and in the homes of their converts. But how many thousands of costly churches and chapels have since been built and are constantly being built in all parts of the world to the honor of the crucified Redeemer, who in the days of his humiliation had no place of his own to rest his head!”
— Philip Schaff (via christianwisdom)
Edward Said at San Francisco State University-win (Taken with instagram)
Oli’s a perfect mushroom and a perfect slug.
#to be a fly on the wall during that game #while john tries to patiently explain that no mr. green didn’t bash his own head in with the hammer #and sherlock’s spouting off about how mr. green was clearly the kind of man who would kill himself at a party #brutally of course because of some childhood trauma #and the whole time he’s talking and making these grand deductions about fake characters #getting louder and louder as john’s patience wears thinner and thinner#until john is just finally grabbing the paper with the rules written on them to remind sherlock that this is a game and there’s a certain… #way it has to be played but sherlock’s having none of that#because he knows he’s right and there’s no way it could be any different #so john gives up and goes to bed leaving sherlock awake and alone and now on top of bored he’s whining and pissed off#so the board ends up pinned to the wall with the knife #go ahead john ask him to play monopoly#see what happens then
#‘John this is ridiculous’ #‘why have seperate colors’ #‘John no one would make money this many colors it’s horrid’ #‘John you can’t just buy a railroad’ #‘Who does that, John’ #‘John why do I have to pay you money if I land on your property’ #‘Does this mean I have to pay you every time I step into the flat, John’ #‘John this game is pointless’ #‘John’ #‘John where are you going’ #‘….’
(via jshegyi3rd)
“If humanity is in God’s image, there is something that it is like to be human, something beyond any negotiation or contingency. In this sense, Adam cannot wholly die. Yet if every individual is of incalculable value, a situation in which large numbers of human beings are liable to suffer the obscuring or defacing of the image is an insupportably tragic one. Adam will not wholly die, but this does not mean that the death - morally or spiritually - of any one child of Adam is tolerable. It is still necessary to write, in the effort to bear credible witness to the reality of Adam in a world where he is becoming invisible. It is necessary to go on talking, narrating, in the attempt to discover whether what is said or told can be recognized, which also means that a novel that closed down the possibility of intelligent dissent would have failed.”
— Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (via invisibleforeigner)
“
But when Palestinians act in this recommended manner, the West averts its gaze and Israel responds with cynical disregard, dismissing near-death Palestinian hunger strikers as publicity stunts or cheap tricks to free themselves from imprisonment. Today, Palestinians have epitomized the best of American values that reflect the global history of non-violent resistance, as they wage a mass hunger strike, engage in a global boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli Apartheid, and risk their bodies on a weekly basis in peaceful protests against the Annexation Wall. The latter continues to expand its devastating encroachment upon and around Palestinian lands in defiance of a near unanimous Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice as well as countless Security Council Resolutions.
Yet, this America chooses to label the hunger strikers’ prison guards, the architects of racist laws and policies, as well as the engineers of the Apartheid Wall, as the sole and exemplary democracy in the Middle East. Rather than condemn Israel’s colonial practices, which constitute the core of Arab grievances and explain the widespread resentment of the US role in the Middle East, a US Congressional House panel has just now approved nearly one billion US dollars in additional military assistance to augment Israel’s anti-missile defense program. If passed, Israel will receive a record amount of four billion dollars in military aid next year—more than any country in the world.
— Palestinian Hunger Strikers: Fighting Ingrained Duplicity via Jadaliyya (via sharquaouia)
(via arielnietzsche)
