jaun williams

On the Zimmerman / Martin trial:

The New York Times has referred to [Zimmerman] in unique racial terms as a “white Hispanic." The terminology was necessary to have the story fit into a well-worn news narrative throughout American history from the Scottsboro Boys to Emmett Till to Rodney King – the black victim of white racism. Hispanic people can be as racist as black or white people in a country with a deep history of racism. But, apparently for the Times, Zimmerman's whiteness was important. It fit their good versus evil tale of a white racist killing an innocent black man.

. . . .

Martin, the 17-year-old, is dead. But he has not escaped the racial slander attached to this case. Zimmerman’s backers note that Martin had smoked marijuana – as if that is unusual among American teenagers. They seem delighted to find online messages in which he took on a rapper, street-thug persona and posed as a tough guy.

These are all caricatures of two real people caught in a tragedy.

Zimmerman should have listened to the 911 emergency dispatch operator who told him to stop following Martin.

. . . .

Why didn’t Martin just walk away from Zimmerman?

. . . .

Whatever the final verdict on Zimmerman, the media is clearly guilty of playing on the most primitive racial divisions in our society to fuel racial animosity and boost ratings.

thank you california

California Proposition 65 Warning:
WARNING: This Product May Contain A Chemical Known To The State Of California To Cause Cancer, Birth Defects Or Other Reproductive Harm.

This trivially true, completely uninformative, and anticonstructive, unorthodoxically capitalized scaremongering was found attached to a rather nice new piece of luggage.

de sade on law

The divine Marquis observed that all men are different in temperament, and consequently that "to seek to impose universal laws would be a palpable absurdity: such a proceeding would be as ridiculous as that of the general who would have all his soldiers dressed in a uniform of the same size." If there is then to be law, however, what form should it take?

That we cannot devise as many laws as there are men must be admitted; but the laws can be lenient, and so few in number, that all men, of whatever character, can easily observe them. Furthermore, I would demand that this small number of laws be of such a sort as to be adaptable to all the various characters; they who formulate the code should follow the principle of applying more or less, according to the person in question. It has been pointed out that there are certain virtues whose practice is impossible for certain men, just as there are certain remedies which do not agree with certain constitutions. Now, would it not be to carry your injustice beyond all limits were you to send the law to strike the man incapable of bowing to the law? Would your iniquity be any less here than in a case where you sought to force the blind to distinguish against colors?

~ de Sade (1795) La Philosophie dans le boudoir

ulysses

matched with an aged wife, i mete and dole unequal laws unto a savage race that hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.


this labor, by slow prudence to make mild a rugged people, and through soft degrees subdue them to the useful and the good.


death closes all; but something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done, not unbecoming men that strove with gods.


come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world. push off, and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars, until i die.

the golden rule

"we need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us"