Quote of the Day

Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice…

Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them.

From Julian Assange’s now defunct blog at IQ.org

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Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

- From Araby by James Joyce

Continue Reading This Article…

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Antisemitism used to refer to people who hate Jews. Now it refers to people Jews hate.

– Redditor OllieGarkee on the story of AdBusters being removed from a national grocery chain in Canada after published side-by-side photographs of the Gaza and Warsaw Ghetto’s

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The rising debt, poverty, and disease in the south are beginning to reach deep into rich countries in the north. We can no longer turn our backs on this misery. If we dislike humanitarian reasons for addressing these issues, we should at least be motivated by self-interest…

The attacks are a language of last resort: the oppressed and persecuted have used many languages to reach us so far, but we seem unable to translate the meaning. So a few have taken the personal responsibility to speak in a language that needs no translation.

From A message from the global south by Saskia Sassen

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Do you vote?

I often do, without much enthusiasm. In the US, there is basically one party – the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.

– Noam Chomsky, in an interview with the New Statesman

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I wish a person were only intelligent enough to both have a religion if it’s important to himself and his community, but having the fucking discernment to understand that the power elite outside of his community needs to play religious distortion in order to get him and his community’s resources thieved for a completely non-religious purpose.

Religion does keep people grounded and is human heritage and has a real state when it’s not tainted by power structure. This is like so many other things, that are pure before extra-community power distorts it.

You could say “well, what if some stupid community has a religion that’s totally fucked up and a few guys are sitting around abusing everything and making a dark backwoods Hellscape of life?” Well, that goes back to the argument that a man is not capable of recognizing justice unless a supra-community, a state power structure is there to shepard communities to perceive the structure’s “religion.” At that point everything is over.

- Procopius, commenting on Liberty Papers: Religious Freedom Is What Makes America.

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Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

– U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, Ruling on Proposition 8 in California

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