“
The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.
”
”
Martin Luther King Jr.
“
In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
Chi vuole troppo è un pazzo, perché un uomo non può possedere più di quello che il suo cuore riesce ad amare
”
”
Nicolai Lilin (Siberian Education: Growing Up in a Criminal Underworld)
“
But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
”
”
George Carlin
“
Why do we assume that educating a criminal is merely helping him commit more sophisticated crimes? Why can’t we assume that an education can give this person the tools to make more acceptable choices?
”
”
Laura Bates (Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard)
“
There is nothing so annoying as to be fairly rich, of a fairly good family,
pleasing presence, average education, to be "not stupid," kindhearted,
and yet to have no talent at all, no originality, not a single idea
of one's own—to be, in fact, "just like everyone else."
Of such people there are countless numbers in this world—far more
even than appear. They can be divided into two classes as all men
can—that is, those of limited intellect, and those who are much cleverer.
The former of these classes is the happier.
To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is
simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that
belief without the slightest misgiving.
Many of our young women have thought fit to cut their hair short, put
on blue spectacles, and call themselves Nihilists. By doing this they have
been able to persuade themselves, without further trouble, that they
have acquired new convictions of their own. Some men have but felt
some little qualm of kindness towards their fellow-men, and the fact has
been quite enough to persuade them that they stand alone in the van of
enlightenment and that no one has such humanitarian feelings as they.
Others have but to read an idea of somebody else's, and they can immediately
assimilate it and believe that it was a child of their own brain.
The "impudence of ignorance," if I may use the expression, is developed
to a wonderful extent in such cases;—unlikely as it appears, it is met
with at every turn.
... those belonged to the other class—to the "much cleverer"
persons, though from head to foot permeated and saturated with
the longing to be original. This class, as I have said above, is far less
happy. For the "clever commonplace" person, though he may possibly
imagine himself a man of genius and originality, none the less has within
his heart the deathless worm of suspicion and doubt; and this doubt
sometimes brings a clever man to despair. (As a rule, however, nothing
tragic happens;—his liver becomes a little damaged in the course of time,
nothing more serious. Such men do not give up their aspirations after
originality without a severe struggle,—and there have been men who,
though good fellows in themselves, and even benefactors to humanity,
have sunk to the level of base criminals for the sake of originality)
”
”
Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)
“
There are growing domestic social and economic problems, in fact, maybe catastrophes. Nobody in power has any intention of doing anything about them. If you look at the domestic programs of the administrations of the past ten years-I include here the Democratic opposition-there's really no serious proposal about what to do about the severe problems of health, education, homelessness, joblessness, crime, soaring criminal populations, jails, deterioration in the inner cities - the whole raft of problems... In such circumstances you've got to divert the bewildered herd, because if they start noticing this they may not like it, since they're the ones suffering from it. Just having them watch the Superbowl and the sitcoms may not be enough. You have to whip them up into fear of enemies. In the 1930s Hitler whipped them into fear of the Jews and gypsies. You had to crush them to defend yourselves. We have our ways, too. Over the last ten years, every year ot two, some major monster is constructed that we have to defend ourselves against.
”
”
Noam Chomsky (Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda)
“
If we are teaching children how to lie,to steal, and to be aggressive, why do schools punish those who lie and steal? and why does the society punish the offender criminal?
”
”
Ali Altantawi
“
It does not matter that the “intentions” of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, “intend” for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense—ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream. No one directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction. But a great number of educators spoke of “personal responsibility” in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
”
”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me (One World Essentials))
“
We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher.
”
”
G.K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare)
“
The rhetoric of ‘law and order’ was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern States to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely ‘rewarding lawbreakers.’
For more than a decade – from the mid 1950s until the late 1960s – conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime.
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
Here’s the thing,” I would say. “Most people, wherever they’re from, whatever they look like, are looking for the same thing. They’re not trying to get filthy rich. They don’t expect someone else to do what they can do for themselves. “But they do expect that if they’re willing to work, they should be able to find a job that supports a family. They expect that they shouldn’t go bankrupt just because they get sick. They expect that their kids should be able to get a good education, one that prepares them for this new economy, and they should be able to afford college if they’ve put in the effort. They want to be safe, from criminals or terrorists. And they figure that after a lifetime of work, they should be able to retire with dignity and respect.
”
”
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
“
We want you to write it down--to camouflage it. Only for the present, of course. Once the thing gets going we shan't have to bother about the great heart of the British public. We'll make the great heart what we want it to be. But in the meantime, it does make a difference how things are put. For instance, if it were even whispered that the N.I.C.E. wanted powers to experiment on criminals, you'd have all the old women of both sexes up in arms and yapping about humanity. Call it re-education of the mal-adjusted, and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive punishment has at last come to and end. Odd thing it is--the word 'experiment' is unpopular, but not the word 'experimental.' You must'nt experiment on children; but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school attached to the N.I.C.E. and it's all correct!
”
”
C.S. Lewis (That Hideous Strength (The Space Trilogy, #3))
“
le lacrime umane non cadono mai per terra, il Signore le raccoglie prima
”
”
Nicolai Lilin (Siberian Education: Growing Up in a Criminal Underworld)
“
But a great number of educators spoke of “personal responsibility” in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
”
”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me (One World Essentials))
“
The prison population consists of heterogeneous elements; but, taking only those who are usually described as 'the criminals' proper, and of whom we have heard so much lately from Lombroso and his followers, what struck me most as regards them was that the prisons, which are considered as preventive of anti-social deeds, are exactly the institutions for breeding them. Every one knows that absence of education, dislike of regular work, physical incapability of sustained effort, misdirected love of adventure, gambling propensities, absence of energy, an untrained will, and carelessness about the happiness of others are the causes which bring this class of people before the courts. Now I was deeply impressed during my imprisonment by the fact that it is exactly these defects of human nature--each one of them--which the prison breeds in its inmates; and it is bound to breed them because it is a prison, and will breed them so long as it exists.
”
”
Pyotr Kropotkin (Memoirs of a Revolutionist)
“
We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal.
”
”
G.K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare)
“
He does not know me. He does not know my background, or what culture or privilege I have experienced, or my tastes, or my education. That he judges based on my occupation and clothing is his problem, not mine.
”
”
Cole McCade (Junk Shop Blues (Criminal Intentions, #2))
“
Fazlullah’s men wear masks,” I said, “because they are criminals. But I have nothing to hide, and I have done nothing wrong. I’m proud to be a voice speaking out for girls’ education. And proud to show my identity.
”
”
Malala Yousafzai (I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World)
“
Suffering to the criminal can never be justified by the notion of vindictive punishment. If education combined with kindness is equally effective, it is to be preferred; still more is it to be preferred if it is more effective.
”
”
Bertrand Russell (What I Believe)
“
If shackling former prisoners with a lifetime of debt and authorizing discrimination against them in employment, housing, education, and public benefits is not enough to send the message that they are not wanted and not even considered full citizens, then stripping voting rights from those labeled criminals surely gets the point across.
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
The permanent antidote to crime is education alone.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables)
“
I love the criminal, but not the crime they have committed.
”
”
Debasish Mridha
“
I'm learning [that] love and school are the only things you get for free when you're young, and I took it for granted.
”
”
Monique W. Morris (Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools)
“
The world needs less cops and more teachers. Law enforcement only produces an illusion of order, it's the teachers who can create a crime-free society.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission)
“
A novel belief system is upending the legal and societal order, from education and sports to criminal justice and employment law. It has both fed off and worsened political polarisation
”
”
Helen Joyce (Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality)
“
Mr. Winston and I had already discussed:
How what I'd done was vile and on par with kicking disabled kittens.
That I was on the path to becoming a criminal and likely would spend the rest of my life in jail giving myself homemade tattoos with a needle and Bic pen.
That the statue was a work of art, and would I dare to ear the arm off the Mona Lisa? He didn't think so.
That I was a disappointment to him, my family, my boyfriend, my fellow students, and likely all of Western civilization.
”
”
Eileen Cook (The Education of Hailey Kendrick)
“
There's a reason that education sucks.
And it's the same reason
that it will never ever, ever be fixed.
It's never going to get any better,
don't look for it,
be happy with what you got.
Because the owners of this country don't want that.
I'm talking about the real owners now.
The real owners.
The big, wealthy business interests that control things
and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians.
The politicians are put there
to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice.
You don't.
You have no choice.
You have owners.
They own you.
They own everything.
They own all the important land.
They own and control the corporations.
They've long since bought and paid for the Senate,
the Congress, the state houses, and city halls.
They got the judges in their back pocket.
And they own all the big media companies
so they control just about
all of the news and information you get to hear.
They got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying,
lobbying to get what they want.
Well, we know what they want.
They want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I'll tell you what they don't want.
They don't want a population
of citizens capable of critical thinking.
They don't want well-informed, well-educated people,
capable of critical thinking.
They're not interested in that.
That doesn't help them.
That's against their interest.
That's right.
They don't want people who are smart enough
to figure out how badly they're getting fucked
by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
They don't want that.
You know what they want?
They want obedient workers.
Obedient workers.
People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork
and just dumb enough, to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs,
with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits,
the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension
that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
And now, they're coming for your Social Security money.
They want your fucking retirement money.
They want it back,
so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.
And you know something, they'll get it.
They'll get it all from you, sooner or later,
because they own this fucking place.
It's a big club, and you ain't in it.
You and I are not in the big club.
”
”
George Carlin (Life Is Worth Losing)
“
It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal..The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life.
”
”
G.K. Chesterton
“
If you wish a man to commit some abominable crime, from which he would naturally recoil in horror, you first teach him loyalty to a gang of arch-criminals, and then make his crime appear to him as exemplifying the virtue of loyalty.
”
”
Bertrand Russell (Education and the Social Order)
“
Countrymen: I have given proofs, as well as the best of you, of desiring liberty for our country, and I continue to desire it. But I place as a premise the education of the people, so that by means of instruction and work they may have a personality of their own and that they may make themselves worthy of that same liberty. In my writings I have recommended the study of the civic virtues, without which there can be no redemption. I have also written (and my words have been repeated) that reforms, to be fruitful, must come from above, that those which spring from below are uncertain and insecure movements. Imbued with these ideas, I cannot do less than condemn, and I do condemn, this absurd, savage rebellion, planned behind my back, which dishonors the Filipinos and discredits those who can speak for us. I abominate all criminal actions and refuse any kind of participation in them, pitying with all my heart the dupes who have allowed themselves to be deceived. Go back, then, to your homes, and may God forgive those who have acted in bad faith.
”
”
José Rizal
“
It often seemed like when it came to criminal justice expenditures--just as is the case in infrastructure development, early childhood education, and countless other areas--our society would much rather pay an obscene amount of money on the back end of a problem than pay a relatively small amount up front on evidence based programs that would prevent the problem from happening in the first place.
”
”
Cory Booker (United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good)
“
We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession.
”
”
G.K. Chesterton
“
The rhetoric of “law and order” was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern states to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely “rewarding lawbreakers.
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
... everything based on arguments involving the ''is'' of identidy and the older el (elementalistic) 'logic' and 'psychology', such as the prevailing doctrines, laws, institutions, systems. , cannot possibly be in full accordance with the structure of our nervous system. This, in turn, affects the latter and results in the prevailing private and public un-sanity. Hence, the unrest, unhappines, nervous strain, irritability, lack of wisdom and absence of balance, the instability of our instituitions, the wars and revolutions, the increase of ''mental ills, prostitution, criminality, commercialism as a creed, the inadequate standards of education, the low professional standards of lawyers, priests, politicians, physicians, teachers, parents, and even of scientists - which in the last-named field often lead to dogmatic and antisocial attitudes and lack of creativeness.
”
”
Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics)
“
I was, in short, but one generation removed from the South, which was now undergoing a new convulsion over whether black children had the same rights, or capacities, for education as did the children of white people. This is a criminally frivolous dispute, absolutely unworthy of this nation; and it is being carried on, in complete bad faith, by completely uneducated people. (We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.)
”
”
James Baldwin (Nobody Knows My Name)
“
our Constitution can be understood by any American with average intelligence and minimal education.
”
”
Joseph Befumo (The Republicrat Junta: How Two Corrupt Parties, in Collusion with Corporate Criminals, have Subverted Democracy, Deceived the People, and Hijacked Our Constitutional Government)
“
That is, ability, values, opportunities, gender, culture, and social class all affect the aspirations and achievements of academically talented students. So does chance.
”
”
Karen Arnold (Lives of Promise: What Becomes of High School Valedictorians: A Fourteen-year Study of Achievement and Life Choices (Jossey Bass Social and Behavioral Science Series))
“
Academically capable men and women almost never follow a single-minded interest from childhood into careers.
”
”
Karen Arnold (Lives of Promise: What Becomes of High School Valedictorians: A Fourteen-year Study of Achievement and Life Choices (Jossey Bass Social and Behavioral Science Series))
“
I also don’t have time to educate you on the fact that sitting outside someone’s house all night is firmly in Criminal Minds territory,
”
”
Anne Malcom (Beyond the Horizon (The Sons of Templar MC, #4))
“
So long as the precise letters of the law are more important than justice, there'll only be the illusion of order, but no justice.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans)
“
Criminal cases raised membership and money; they guaranteed press coverage and exposed, more dramatically than the education cases ever could,
”
”
Rawn James Jr. (Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation)
“
Understanding African American attitudes and actions on matters of crime and punishment requires that we pay careful attention to another topic that is often overlooked in criminal justice scholarship: class divisions within the black community.21 Although mass incarceration harms black America as a whole, its most direct victims are the poorest, least educated blacks. While
”
”
James Forman Jr. (Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America)
“
William Julius Wilson makes this point in his book, When Work Disappears. In his view, it is massive unemployment and not the lack of family values that has devastated our inner-cities and placed one-third of our young men-denied even menial jobs when they lacked education and skills-in prison or in the jaws of the criminal court system, most of them for nonviolent drug offenses.2
”
”
Derrick A. Bell (Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform)
“
They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke…. What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […] It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child. But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents…. But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldn’t borrow cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldn’t even tell her dad, because he would go crazy with shame and rage? Who couldn’t tell her mother? Who had to go alone to that filthy room and put herself body and soul into the hands of a professional criminal? – because that is what every doctor who did an abortion was, whether he was an extortionist or an idealist. You know what it was like for her. You know and I know; that is why we are here. We are not going back to the Dark Ages. We are not going to let anybody in this country have that kind of power over any girl or woman. There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.
”
”
Ursula K. Le Guin
“
Of course it may be argued that this is a fairly bleak view of life. It means, for instance, that we can stand in a room full of dear friends, knowing that nine-tenths of them, if the pack demands it, will become your enemies-will, as it were, throw stones through your window. It means that if you are a member of a close-knit community, you know you differ from this community's ideas at the risk of being seen as a no-goodnik, a criminal, an evil-doer. This is an absolutely automatic process; nearly everyone in such situations behaves automatically.
But there is always the minority who do not, and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody depends on this minority. And that we should be thinking of ways to educate our children to strengthen this minority and not, as we mostly do now, to revere the pack.
”
”
Doris Lessing (Prisons We Choose to Live Inside)
“
He was so out of step with the youthful antiwar fervor of the period that he enlisted in the army at the height of the Vietnam War, only to be thrown out for lying about his age, education, and criminal past.
”
”
Mark Bowden (The Last Stone)
“
One of my greatest fears is family decline.There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.” I’ll bet that if someone with empirical skills conducted a longitudinal survey about intergenerational performance, they’d find a remarkably common pattern among Chinese immigrants fortunate enough to have come to the United States as graduate students or skilled workers over the last fifty years. The pattern would go something like this: • The immigrant generation (like my parents) is the hardest-working. Many will have started off in the United States almost penniless, but they will work nonstop until they become successful engineers, scientists, doctors, academics, or businesspeople. As parents, they will be extremely strict and rabidly thrifty. (“Don’t throw out those leftovers! Why are you using so much dishwasher liquid?You don’t need a beauty salon—I can cut your hair even nicer.”) They will invest in real estate. They will not drink much. Everything they do and earn will go toward their children’s education and future. • The next generation (mine), the first to be born in America, will typically be high-achieving. They will usually play the piano and/or violin.They will attend an Ivy League or Top Ten university. They will tend to be professionals—lawyers, doctors, bankers, television anchors—and surpass their parents in income, but that’s partly because they started off with more money and because their parents invested so much in them. They will be less frugal than their parents. They will enjoy cocktails. If they are female, they will often marry a white person. Whether male or female, they will not be as strict with their children as their parents were with them. • The next generation (Sophia and Lulu’s) is the one I spend nights lying awake worrying about. Because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents, this generation will be born into the great comforts of the upper middle class. Even as children they will own many hardcover books (an almost criminal luxury from the point of view of immigrant parents). They will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses.They may or may not attend private schools, but in either case they will expect expensive, brand-name clothes. Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice. In short, all factors point to this generation
”
”
Amy Chua (Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother)
“
We were three hours from Chicago, so my blackness was less of a curiosity, more of a threat. And there were the black students on campus, the nerve of them, daring to pursue higher education. In the local newspaper, residents wrote angry letters about a new criminal element--the scourge of youthful black ambition, black joy. In my more generous moments, I tried to believe the locals were using anger to mask their fear of living in a dying town in a changing world.
”
”
Roxane Gay (Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body)
“
We’ve given up on rehabilitation, education, and services for the imprisoned because providing assistance to the incarcerated is apparently too kind and compassionate. We've institutionalized policies that reduce people to their worst acts and permanently label them "criminal," "murderer," "rapist," "thief," "drug dealer," "sex offender," "felon," - identities they cannot change regardless of the circumstances of their crimes or any improvements they might make in their lives.
”
”
Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy)
“
This is not a con game in the criminal sense, in which con artists deliberately dupe the suckers. Instead it's a form of good salesmanship, where the first principle is to sell yourself first. We sell ourselves on the value of education in solving social problems, and then we buy what we're selling. The whole thing rests on the uncertain foundation of our collective willingness to continue to believe the con. Whatever the problem, we continue to keep the faith in schools as the answer.
”
”
David F. Labaree (Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling)
“
One simple and basic fact of life is that no individual – or group of individuals – can ever be wise or knowledgeable enough to run society. Our core fantasy of “government” is that in some remote and sunlit chamber, with lacquered mahogany tables, deep leather chairs and sleepless men and women, there exists a group who are so wise, so benevolent, so omniscient and so incorruptible that we should turn over to them the education of our children, the preservation of our elderly, the salvation of the poor, the provision of vital services, the healing of the sick, the defense of the realm and of property, the administration of justice, the punishment of criminals, and the regulation of virtually every aspect of a massive, infinitely complex and ever-changing social and economic system. These living man-gods have such perfect knowledge and perfect wisdom that we should hand them weapons of mass destruction, and the endless power to tax, imprison and print money – and nothing but good, plenty and virtue will result.
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”
Stefan Molyneux (Everyday Anarchy: The Freedom of Now)
“
A very distinct pattern has emerged repeatedly when policies favored by the anointed turn out to fail. This pattern typically has four stages: STAGE 1. THE “CRISIS”: Some situation exists, whose negative aspects the anointed propose to eliminate. Such a situation is routinely characterized as a “crisis,” even though all human situations have negative aspects, and even though evidence is seldom asked or given to show how the situation at hand is either uniquely bad or threatening to get worse. Sometimes the situation described as a “crisis” has in fact already been getting better for years. STAGE 2. THE “SOLUTION”: Policies to end the “crisis” are advocated by the anointed, who say that these policies will lead to beneficial result A. Critics say that these policies will lead to detrimental result Z. The anointed dismiss these latter claims as absurd and “simplistic,” if not dishonest. STAGE 3. THE RESULTS: The policies are instituted and lead to detrimental result Z. STAGE 4. THE RESPONSE: Those who attribute detrimental result Z to the policies instituted are dismissed as “simplistic” for ignoring the “complexities” involved, as “many factors” went into determining the outcome. The burden of proof is put on the critics to demonstrate to a certainty that these policies alone were the only possible cause of the worsening that occurred. No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had so confidently predicted improvement. Indeed, it is often asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for the wonderful programs that mitigated the inevitable damage from other factors. Examples of this pattern are all too abundant. Three will be considered here. The first and most general involves the set of social welfare policies called “the war on poverty” during the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, but continuing under other labels since then. Next is the policy of introducing “sex education” into the public schools, as a means of reducing teenage pregnancy and venereal diseases. The third example will be policies designed to reduce crime by adopting a less punitive approach, being more concerned with preventive social policies beforehand and rehabilitation afterwards, as well as showing more concern with the legal rights of defendants in criminal cases.
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Thomas Sowell (The Thomas Sowell Reader)
“
La vera arte è una forma di protesta, quindi ogni opera d'arte deve creare contraddizioni, far discutere. Per la sua filosofia, il tatuaggio criminale era la forma d'arte più pura che esisteva al mondo. La gente, -diceva - odia i criminali, però ama i loto tatuaggi.
”
”
Nicolai Lilin (Siberian Education: Growing Up in a Criminal Underworld)
“
All too often, society is horrified with trauma survivors; their symptoms; and the burdens it places on the health care, child welfare, criminal justice, and educational systems—and insufficiently horrified by the systems of oppression that underlie so much trauma, violence, and abuse.
”
”
Kathryn Becker-Blease
“
- Guarda gli animali, secondo te loro ne sanno qualcosa della felicità?
- Beh, penso che anche gli animali ogni tanto si sentono tristi o felici, solo che non riescono a esprimere i loro sentimenti...- ho risposto io.
Lui mi ha guardato in silenzio e poi ha detto :
-E lo sai perché Dio ha dato all'uomo una vita più lunga di quella degli animali?
-No, non ci ho mai pensato...
-Perché gli animali vivono seguendo il loro istinto e non fanno sbagli. L'uomo vive seguendo la ragione, quindi ha bisogno di una parte della vita per fare sbagli, un'altra per poterli capire, e una terza per cercare di vivere senza sbagliare.
”
”
Nicolai Lilin (Siberian Education: Growing Up in a Criminal Underworld)
“
If we focused on these five interconnected foundations of oppression in a thoughtful and effective way, we could eliminate the lion’s share—perhaps 90 percent or more—of systemic racism that exists in our country. 1. Voting rights 2. Economic inequality 3. Public education 4. Criminal justice 5. Healthcare disparities
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”
Robert Livingston (The Conversation: How Seeking and Speaking the Truth About Racism Can Radically Transform Individuals and Organizations)
“
I've even come to a conclusion that would get me blackballed from ever setting foot in liberal education circles again. That is this: colonialism wasn't 100 percent evil. More like 96 percent evil. Sometimes the colonizing culture actually made moral improvements in the native culture. I came to this conclusion while reading about the abolition of the Indian custom of widow burning. In pre-British India, a man's widow was burned alongside his corpse. The British colonialists put a stop to that. So yes, they criminally oppressed an entire people. But like a robber who fills up the ice trays while he steals the TV, they did a smidgeon of good.
”
”
A.J. Jacobs (The Know-It-All)
“
I feel like Oklahoma is one big Dementiatown, suffering from some cerebral disease that is impeding blood flow to the brain. The steeper the declines in education spending, healthcare outcomes, and criminal justice, the more blame is placed on immigrants and the liberal media. The worse things get, the worse we sabotage ourselves.
”
”
Russell Cobb (The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America's Weirdest State)
“
Our government says people must not take law in their own hands, But has given the law in the hands of people who in power. That is why people who are in power are always corrupt, arrogant, violent, Aggressive, selfish, and don't care about anyone. They get away with all the bad things they do that Is criminating unlawful and injustice
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”
D.J. Kyos
“
It is because these modes of punishment don’t work. These forms of punishment do not work when you consider that the majority of people who are in prison are there because society has failed them, because they’ve had no access to education or jobs or housing or health care. But let me say that criminalization and imprisonment could not solve other problems.
”
”
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
“
Those who choose to live criminal lives are not the brightest among us. This truth inspires a question: If evil geniuses are so rare, why do so many bad people get away with so many crimes against their fellow citizens and, when they become leaders of nations, against humanity? Edmund Burke provided the answer in 1795: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. I would only add this: It is also essential that good men and women not be educated and propagandized into believing that real evil is a myth and that all malevolent behavior is merely the result of a broken family’s or a failed society’s shortcomings, amenable to cure by counseling and by the application of new economic theory.
”
”
Dean Koontz (Odd Hours (Odd Thomas, #4))
“
Even if a man keeps a secret mistress, she is a human being just the same. A person who uses a human being like a beast just for the pleasures of the moment, who disturbs the customs of the family and harms the education of his children an grandchildren, who spreads evils all over the country and leaves poison to future generations, must indeed be called a criminal.
”
”
Yukichi Fukuzawa
“
If a man is born ignorant, to parents that are ignorant, in a society that is ignorant, lives a life of ignorance, and eventually dies in ignorance, then ignorance is the norm.
Thus, indoctrination can be called education, hypnotism can be called entertainment, criminals can be called leaders, and lies can be called truth, because his mind was never truly his own.
”
”
Gavin Nascimento
“
The real school for the people and for all grown men is life. The only grand and omnipotent authority, at once natural and rational, the only one which we may respect, will be that of the collective and public spirit of a society founded on equality and solidarity and the mutual human respect of all its members. Yes, this is an authority which is not at all divine, wholly human, but before which we shall bow willingly, certain that, far from enslaving them, it will emancipate men. It will be a thousand times more powerful, be sure of it, than all your divine, theological, metaphysical, political, and judicial authorities, established by the Church and by the State; more powerful than your criminal codes, your jailers, and your executioners.
”
”
Mikhail Bakunin (God and the State)
“
Antidote to Crime (The Sonnet)
The way to a crime-free world is simple,
But it lies outside of all the legal 'n partisan muck.
Take away the guns from the kids on the street,
Put books in their hands and food in their stomach.
By the time they grow up into young adults,
The prehistoric warmongers will be in death bed.
The children whose childhood you restored,
Will all be ready to hold the reins of world stage.
Law, policy 'n all that stuff surely have their place,
But not as the antidote to crime, chaos 'n descension.
The permanent antidote to crime is education alone,
Law ‘n policy are just to ensure its true democratization.
More than trying a crime, focus on treating environment.
Feed the hungry ‘n establish education, free from any debt.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables)
“
In the same way that Americans now look back with horrified disbelief on the evils of slavery and the 'separate but equal' era of racial segregation, many years from now our children and grandchildren will reflect on this time in history and wonder how and why we ever chose to criminalize marijuana usage and homosexual marriage while poisoning our natural world in the name of economics.
”
”
Eric Micha'el Leventhal
“
Educators spoke of “personal responsibility” in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
”
”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
“
We're trying to help people on death row. We're trying yo stop the death penalty, actually. We're trying to do something about prison conditions and excessive punishment. We want to free people who've been wrongly convicted. We want to end unfair sentences in criminal cases and stop racial bias in criminal justice. We're trying to help the poor and do something about indigent defense and the fact that people don't get the legal help they need. We're trying to help people who are mentally ill. We're trying to stop them from putting children in adult jails and prisons. We're trying to do something about the poverty and hopelessness that dominates poor communities. We want to see more diversity in decision-makingroles in the justice system. We're trying to educate people about racial history and the need for racial justice. We're trying to confront abuse of power by police and prosecutors.
”
”
Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy)
“
We're trying to help people on death row. We're trying to stop the death penalty, actually. We're trying to do something about prison conditions and excessive punishment. We want to free people who've been wrongly convicted. We want to end unfair sentences in criminal cases and stop racial bias in criminal justice. We're trying to help the poor and do something about indigent defense and the fact that people don't get the legal help they need. We're trying to help people who are mentally ill. We're trying to stop them from putting children in adult jails and prisons. We're trying to do something about the poverty and hopelessness that dominates poor communities. We want to see more diversity in decision-makingroles in the justice system. We're trying to educate people about racial history and the need for racial justice. We're trying to confront abuse of power by police and prosecutors.
”
”
Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy)
“
So it's 2019. I'm gonna say the right thing to do is for the US to declare bankruptcy (Trump can do it… done it before…), and dismantle the criminal state of Israel as it exists today. Unfortunately, politicians are so full of shit and AIPAC money, and the economy is so addicted to war, and the US population is so fucking stupid... that we’ll probably have to go and try to fuck up another two or three countries before moving on to a decent, honest life.
”
”
Dmitry Dyatlov
“
In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern states to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely “rewarding lawbreakers.
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you are afforded scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
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”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
Progressives want to take over all the major industries, from education to health care to energy to automobiles to investment banking to real estate. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, they want, as my fellow inmates like to say, “the whole enchilada.” This is not to say that progressives intend to seize all that wealth, but they do want to control it. Progressives generally can’t create wealth, so they seek to take it over once it has been created by someone else. They do this through the various agencies of government, such as the IRS, the FBI, the EPA, the FCC, the FDA, the BLM, and HHS. Certainly progressive leaders intend to become fantastically rich while pretending to serve the public good—look at the way the Obamas and the Clintons live—but their ultimate goal isn’t just money: it is also power. Progressives like Obama and Hillary want to wrest control of the levers of society so that they can run things for their own benefit, and do what they want without restraint, above the law.
”
”
Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
“
The "whites only" signs may be gone, but new signs have gone up - notices placed in job applications, rental agreements, loan applications, forms for welfare benefits, school applications, and petitions for licenses, informing the general public that "felons" are not wanted here. A criminal record today authorizes precisely the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind - discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service. Those labeled criminals are even denied the right to vote.
”
”
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
Even so, the advance of the far right in Europe and the United States reveals the need to rethink memory work, to adapt it to new generations for whom the Second World War feels like a long-ago crisis. It's important to tell a story people can identify with, a story of ordinary people, the Mitlaufer, and not only of heroes, victims, or monsters. To raise awareness that, if history as such does not repeat itself, sociological and psychological mechanisms do, which push individuals and societies to make irrational choices by supporting regimes and leaders who are opposed to their interests, by becoming complicit in criminal ideas and actions. The most dangerous monster is not a megalomaniacal and violent leader, but us, the people who make him possible, who give him the power to lead. By our opportunism, by our conformity to all-powerful capitalism, which places money and consumption over education, intelligence, and culture, we are in danger of losing the democracy, peace, and freedom that so many of our predecessors have fought to preserve.
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”
Géraldine Schwarz (Those Who Forget: My Family's Story in Nazi Europe – A Memoir, A History, A Warning)
“
It is truly wonderful," he said, "how easily Society can console itself for the worst of its shortcomings with a little bit of clap-trap. The machinery it has set up for the detection of crime is miserably ineffective—and yet only invent a moral epigram, saying that it works well, and you blind everybody to its blunders from that moment. Crimes cause their own detection, do they? And murder will out (another moral epigram), will it? Ask Coroners who sit at inquests in large towns if that is true, Lady Glyde. Ask secretaries of life-assurance companies if that is true, Miss Halcombe. Read your own public journals. In the few cases that get into the newspapers, are there not instances of slain bodies found, and no murderers ever discovered? Multiply the cases that are reported by the cases that are not reported, and the bodies that are found by the bodies that are not found, and what conclusion do you come to? This. That there are foolish criminals who are discovered, and wise criminals who escape. The hiding of a crime, or the detection of a crime, what is it? A trial of skill between the police on one side, and the individual on the other. When the criminal is a brutal, ignorant fool, the police in nine cases out of ten win. When the criminal is a resolute, educated, highly-intelligent man, the police in nine cases out of ten lose. If the police win, you generally hear all about it. If the police lose, you generally hear nothing. And on this tottering foundation you build up your comfortable moral maxim that Crime causes its own detection! Yes—all the crime you know of. And what of the rest?
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”
Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White)
“
He used to be like a Snake Oil Salesman in the wild west
hawking his wares in the town square
as if at the carny.
Branded tower condos. Steaks. Deodorant. Water. Vodka.
Ostensible educations--those were pure scam.
Sneakers. Playing cards. NFTs. Bibles.
Swatches of his found-guilty suit.
A Used Car salesman
selling cars designed to run just long enough off the lot
to get him the bucks and the battle win
and plow down everyone around him.
But now he's desperate,
losing even his ability to coerce and con,
which is the only ability he ever had.
”
”
Shellen Lubin
“
Ultimately, the reason we have not yet told the truth about this history of Black and white America is telling an ordered history of this nation would mean finally naming America's commitment to violent, abusive, exploitative, immoral white supremacy, which seeks the absolute control of Black bodies. It would mean doing something about it.
How long will it be before we finally choose to connect all the dots? How long before we confess the history of racism embedded in our systems of housing, education, health, criminal justice, and more? How long before we dig to the root?
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”
Austin Channing Brown (I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness)
“
He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem, which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it he won the Mathematical Chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearances, a most brilliant career before him. But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers.
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Arthur Conan Doyle (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes, #4))
“
Criminalization and interdiction have filled prisons and corrupted governments in country after country. However, increasingly potent drugs that can be synthetized in any basement make controlling access increasingly impossible. Legalization seems like a good idea but causes more addiction. Our strongest defense is likely to be education, but scare stories make kids want to try drugs. Every child should learn that drugs take over the brain and turn some people into miserable zombies and that we have no way to tell who will get addicted the fastest. They should also learn that the high fades as addiction takes over.
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”
Randolph M. Nesse (Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry)
“
OUR PUBLIC-SCHOOL SYSTEM SEES BLACK AND BROWN children as violent, disruptive, unpredictable future criminals. This may seem like the hyperbole of an angry black woman, but when I look at the way in which our black and brown students are treated in schools, it is the only conclusion I can come to. Black students make up only 16 percent of our school populations, and yet 31 percent of students who are suspended and 40 percent of students who are expelled are black. Black students are 3.5 times more likely to be suspended than white students. Seventy percent of students who are arrested in school and referred to law enforcement are black. In the 2011–2012 school year alone, 92,000 students were arrested.1 When I look at these numbers, there are two possible explanations. I can assume that our black and brown children are violent, disruptive, unpredictable future criminals who are not deserving of the same access to education as white children. I can assume that there is something fundamentally wrong with black and brown people, something fundamentally broken that is sending our kids out of school and into prison. Or, I can assume that the school system is marginalizing, criminalizing, and otherwise failing our black and brown kids in large numbers.
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”
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
“
There is, then, no system in the history of the world which has sought for so long to combine moral and ethical teaching with the practical exercise of civil and criminal jurisprudence. It always had many drawbacks. That was why the Jewish Christians could achieve universalism only by breaking away from it. Eventually, in the Age of Enlightenment, it came to be seen as irredeemably backward, even positively abhorrent by many educated Jews, as well as by non-Jewish society. But it had many remarkable strengths too, and it gave to the Jews a moral and social world-view which is civilized and practical and proved extremely durable.
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Paul Johnson (History of the Jews: A National Bestseller—A Brilliant Survey Exploring 4000 Years of Jewish Genius and Their World Impact)
“
I tell you I am sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a very different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's.
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G.K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday)
“
I'm the capital for one of the most profitable money making institutions in modern history: the prisons. Man, before they had gente pickin cotton or coffee or lettuce, but now they don't even need our muscles, Homes! They just throw us in these cages where we play dominoes and spades while they cash in on our spirits. My actual body is their capital, their profit. I feed the guards, lawyers, and judges' children and educate them through college, so they can then before the lawyers that lock all of our asses up!...Come on, man. The California prison guard union is the strongest prison union in the world. The aint here to guard us from society; they're here to protect their investment: me.
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”
Benjamin Bac Sierra (Pura Neta)
“
Defining freedom cannot amount to simply substituting it with inclusion. Countering the criminalization of Black girls requires fundamentally altering the relationship between Black girls and the institutions of power that have worked to reinforce their subjugation. History has taught us that civil rights are but one component of a larger movement for this type of social transformation. Civil rights may be at the core of equal justice movements, and they may elevate an equity agenda that protects our children from racial and gender discrimination, but they do not have the capacity to fully redistribute power and eradicate racial inequity. There is only one practice that can do that. Love.
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”
Monique W. Morris (Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools)
“
Motherhood in prison was revered but also complicated by separation, guilt, and shame. To my eye, my fellow prisoners were mostly ordinary poor or middle-class mommies, grandmas, and even great-grandmothers, and yet some of them were serving very long sentences—five years, seven years, twelve years, fifteen years. I knew that, by virtue of being in the minimum-security Camp, they were unlikely to have been convicted of violent crimes. As I watched my neighbors, young women who lacked even a high school education, with their children in the visiting room, I found myself asking again and again (in my head), What could she possibly have done to warrant being locked up here for so long? Criminal masterminds they were not.
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”
Piper Kerman (Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison)
“
But in the meantime, it does make a difference how things are put. For instance, if it were even whispered that the NICE wanted powers to experiment on criminals, you’d have all the old women of both sexes up in arms and yapping about humanity. Call it reeducation of the maladjusted, and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive punishment has at last come to an end. Odd thing it is—the word ‘experiment’ is unpopular, but not the word ‘experimental.’ You musn’t experiment on children; but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school attached to the NICE and it’s all correct!” “You don’t mean that this—er—journalistic side would be my main job?” “It’s nothing to do with journalism. Your
”
”
C.S. Lewis (That Hideous Strength (The Space Trilogy #3))
“
There has never been a more necessary time for law enforcement officers who reveal misconduct to be protected. By rising to uphold our Nation's values, ethical law enforcement officers choose a conflict for which no education, experience, or training can prepare them. They discover their communities breached and their opponent already beyond their gates. They confront criminals, intimidators, and tyrants that disguise themselves wearing the same badge they hold so dear. They advance against others who would otherwise seek to abuse the public, control the narrative, investigate themselves or obscure the truth beneath a facade of pursuing the greater good. Afterward, they often find themselves cast out, lost, and silenced permanently from their profession for doing nothing more than what we asked of them: Policing.
”
”
Austin Handle
“
My stump speech became less a series of positions and more a chronicle of these disparate voices, a chorus of Americans from every corner of the state. “Here’s the thing,” I would say. “Most people, wherever they’re from, whatever they look like, are looking for the same thing. They’re not trying to get filthy rich. They don’t expect someone else to do what they can do for themselves. “But they do expect that if they’re willing to work, they should be able to find a job that supports a family. They expect that they shouldn’t go bankrupt just because they get sick. They expect that their kids should be able to get a good education, one that prepares them for this new economy, and they should be able to afford college if they’ve put in the effort. They want to be safe, from criminals or terrorists. And they figure that after a lifetime of work, they should be able to retire with dignity and respect. “That’s about it. It’s not a lot. And although they don’t expect government to solve all their problems, they do know, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities government could help.” The room would be quiet, and I’d take a few questions. When a meeting was over, people lined up to shake my hand, pick up some campaign literature, or talk to Jeremiah, Anita, or a local campaign volunteer about how they could get involved. And I’d drive on to the next town, knowing that the story I was telling was true; convinced that this campaign was no longer about me and that I had become a mere conduit through which people might recognize the value of their own stories, their own worth, and share them with one another. —
”
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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The political rhetoric of the ruling class claims to want to decrease the rate of violence. It advocates making the deadliest weapons, from handguns to assault rifles, freely available to as many people as possible; increasing the rate of capital punishment; imprisoning as many people as possible; and making the conditions in which they are incarcerated more and more brutalizing; depriving prison inmates of the opportunity to acquire education which could help them to renounce their criminal violence. All this is pursued in the name of being "tough on crime" and "tough on criminals"; but however "tough" these policies may be on criminals, they are, in fact, the most effective way to promote crime and violence. This deceptive rhetoric still fools millions of voters. This brilliant strategy also labels those policies that would decrease the rates of crime and violence, as being "soft on crime.
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James Gilligan (Preventing Violence (Prospects for Tomorrow))
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Paul Robin aimed at a higher ideal than merely modern ideas in education. He wanted to demonstrate by actual facts that the bourgeois conception of heredity is but a mere pretext to exempt society from its terrible crimes against the young. The contention that the child must suffer for the sins of the fathers, that it must continue in poverty and filth, that it must grow up a drunkard or criminal, just because its parents left it no other legacy, was too preposterous to the beautiful spirit of Paul Robin. He believed that whatever part heredity may play, there are other factors equally great, if not greater, that may and will eradicate or minimize the so-called first cause. Proper economic and social environment, the breath and freedom of nature, healthy exercise, love and sympathy, and, above all, a deep understanding for the needs of the child—these would destroy the cruel, unjust, and criminal stigma imposed on the innocent young.
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Emma Goldman (Anarchism and Other Essays)
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I have a law project called the Equal Justice Initiative, and we’re trying to help people on death row. We’re trying to stop the death penalty, actually. We’re trying to do something about prison conditions and excessive punishment. We want to free people who’ve been wrongly convicted. We want to end unfair sentences in criminal cases and stop racial bias in criminal justice. We’re trying to help the poor and do something about indigent defense and the fact that people don’t get the legal help they need. We’re trying to help people who are mentally ill. We’re trying to stop them from putting children in adult jails and prisons. We’re trying to do something about poverty and the hopelessness that dominates poor communities. We want to see more diversity in decision-making roles in the justice system. We’re trying to educate people about racial history and the need for racial justice. We’re trying to confront abuse of power by police and prosecutors—
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Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption)
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Yes, ma’am. Well, I have a law project called the Equal Justice Initiative, and we’re trying to help people on death row. We’re trying to stop the death penalty, actually. We’re trying to do something about prison conditions and excessive punishment. We want to free people who’ve been wrongly convicted. We want to end unfair sentences in criminal cases and stop racial bias in criminal justice. We’re trying to help the poor and do something about indigent defense and the fact that people don’t get the legal help they need. We’re trying to help people who are mentally ill. We’re trying to stop them from putting children in adult jails and prisons. We’re trying to do something about poverty and the hopelessness that dominates poor communities. We want to see more diversity in decision-making roles in the justice system. We’re trying to educate people about racial history and the need for racial justice. We’re trying to confront abuse of power by police and prosecutors—
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Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption)
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you think about it, our easy reliance on carceral logics in schools is especially sad. After all, shouldn’t schools—allegedly places dedicated to learning, nurturing, and understanding child development—be the first place where it occurs to us to address problems through care, compassion, and gentle inquiry rather than through punishment and containment? To the contrary, Black and Native people have been criminalized—labeled “dangerous people”—in schooling spaces throughout history. Like a perpetual motion machine, this allows carceral logics to sustain themselves: school becomes the place where they are routinized and made acceptable beyond questioning at an early age, impressing upon both children and the adults charged with caring for them that this is the only way things can possibly work. That normalization is cast upon the rest of our society, which in turn fails to condemn everyday acts of punishment and disposal enacted against children because these acts are seen as inevitable necessities.
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Eve L. Ewing (Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism)
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games. A summary: Exposing children to a violent TV or film clip increases their odds of aggression soon after.41 Interestingly, the effect is stronger in girls (amid their having lower overall levels of aggression). Effects are stronger when kids are younger or when the violence is more realistic and/or is presented as heroic. Such exposure can make kids more accepting of aggression—in one study, watching violent music videos increased adolescent girls’ acceptance of dating violence. The violence is key—aggression isn’t boosted by material that’s merely exciting, arousing, or frustrating. Heavy childhood exposure to media violence predicts higher levels of aggression in young adults of both sexes (“aggression” ranging from behavior in an experimental setting to violent criminality). The effect typically remains after controlling for total media-watching time, maltreatment or neglect, socioeconomic status, levels of neighborhood violence, parental education, psychiatric illness, and IQ. This is a reliable finding of large magnitude. The
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
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Or stay in Chechnya and wait to be attacked? What should we do? I have said what we must do. We must go through the mountain caves and scatter and destroy all those who are armed. Perhaps after the presidential elections, we should introduce direct presidential rule there for a couple of years. We must rebuild the economy and the social services, show the people that normal life is possible. We must pull the young generation out of the environment of violence in which it is living. We must put a program of education in place . . . We must work. We must not abandon Chechnya as we did before. In fact, we did a criminal thing back then, when we abandoned the Chechen people and undermined Russia. Now we must work hard, and then transfer to full fledged political procedures, allowing them and us to decide how we can coexist. It is unavoidable fact: We must live together. We have no plans to deport Chechens, as Stalin once solved the problem. And Russia has no other choice. Nobody can impose a solution on us by force but we are prepared to take maximum consideration of Chechen
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Vladimir Putin (First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President Vladimir Putin)
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As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends to compensatingly increase and the dictator...will do well to encourage that freedom, in conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope, movies and radio. It will help to reconcile his subjects to their servitude – Julian Huxley (Preface to Brave New World) The twenty-first century will be the era of the World Controllers…The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work…most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown – Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited) Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many – Aldous Huxley (The Devils of Loudan) In individuals insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule – Friedrich Nietzsche
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Michael Tsarion (Atlantis, Alien Visitation and Genetic Manipulation)
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We can’t allow ourselves to be used in this way, to be used against the future. We can’t permit our data to be used to sell us the very things that must not be sold, such as journalism. If we do, the journalism we get will be merely the journalism we want, or the journalism that the powerful want us to have, not the honest collective conversation that’s necessary. We can’t let the godlike surveillance we’re under be used to “calculate” our citizenship scores, or to “predict” our criminal activity; to tell us what kind of education we can have, or what kind of job we can have, or whether we can have an education or a job at all; to discriminate against us based on our financial, legal, and medical histories, not to mention our ethnicity or race, which are constructs that data often assumes or imposes. And as for our most intimate data, our genetic information: if we allow it to be used to identify us, then it will be used to victimize us, even to modify us—to remake the very essence of our humanity in the image of the technology that seeks its control. Of course, all of the above has already happened.
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Edward Snowden (Permanent Record)
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prerelease:
Snuggie Bobo grew up in the rural Midwest, but soon became enticed with running the streets of the hood. It became an area to be conquered by all means necessary! This, of course, led to a long stay in ‘upstate’ maximum security correctional college nicknamed ‘Gladiator School’. It was the school of hard knocks where men left better criminals than they entered. In the process of trying to omit the truth of the past years’ regrets, Snuggie became educated, going as far as obtaining a PhD with the hopes to rejoin society. Unfortunately, society tends to look down upon street hoods and ex-felons! Now, Snuggie lives in Chicagoland spinning tales based on this lived history to bring the reader into his world. Sean Jr. was one of the people in this world. He was a gay brother, who lost his father to crack. His father was dealing with their family problem. Sean’s mother abused him due to his forbidden illness: lusting for men. Snuggie knew Sean since he was knee-high to a grasshopper and years later took him in. He was his mentor. These are tales out of Sean and Snuggie’s life.
© Snuggie Bobo 2023
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Snuggie Bobo
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The only word these corporations know is more,” wrote Chris Hedges, former correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and the New York Times. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies. There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave. To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal.
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Jim Marrs (Our Occulted History: Do the Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens?)
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Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history in creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present. They rewrite the population’s shared understanding of reality by twisting the language of ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism, attacking universities and educational systems that might challenge their ideas. Eventually, with these techniques, fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate. As the common understanding of reality crumbles, fascist politics makes room for dangerous and false beliefs to take root. First, fascist ideology seeks to naturalize group difference, thereby giving the appearance of natural, scientific support for a hierarchy of human worth. When social rankings and divisions solidify, fear fills in for understanding between groups. Any progress for a minority group stokes feelings of victimhood among the dominant population. Law and order politics has mass appeal, casting “us” as lawful citizens and “them,” by contrast, as lawless criminals whose behavior poses an existential threat to the manhood of the nation. Sexual anxiety is also typical of fascist politics as the patriarchal hierarchy is threatened by growing gender equity. As the fear of “them” grows, “we” come to represent everything virtuous.
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Jason F. Stanley (How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them)
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Hoover fed the story to sympathetic reporters—so-called friends of the bureau. One article about the case, which was syndicated by William Randolph Hearst’s company, blared, NEVER TOLD BEFORE! —How the Government with the Most Gigantic Fingerprint System on Earth Fights Crime with Unheard-of Science Refinements; Revealing How Clever Sleuths Ended a Reign of Murder and Terror in the Lonely Hills of the Osage Indian Country, and Then Rounded Up the Nation’s Most Desperate Gang In 1932, the bureau began working with the radio program The Lucky Strike Hour to dramatize its cases. One of the first episodes was based on the murders of the Osage. At Hoover’s request, Agent Burger had even written up fictional scenes, which were shared with the program’s producers. In one of these scenes, Ramsey shows Ernest Burkhart the gun he plans to use to kill Roan, saying, “Look at her, ain’t she a dandy?” The broadcasted radio program concluded, “So another story ends and the moral is identical with that set forth in all the others of this series….[ The criminal] was no match for the Federal Agent of Washington in a battle of wits.” Though Hoover privately commended White and his men for capturing Hale and his gang and gave the agents a slight pay increase—“ a small way at least to recognize their efficiency and application to duty”—he never mentioned them by name as he promoted the case. They did not quite fit the profile of college-educated recruits that became part of Hoover’s mythology. Plus, Hoover never wanted his men to overshadow him.
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David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
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The banishing of a leper seems harsh, unnecessary. The Ancient East hasn’t been the only culture to isolate their wounded, however. We may not build colonies or cover our mouths in their presence, but we certainly build walls and duck our eyes. And a person needn’t have leprosy to feel quarantined. One of my sadder memories involves my fourth-grade friend Jerry.1He and a half-dozen of us were an ever-present, inseparable fixture on the playground. One day I called his house to see if we could play. The phone was answered by a cursing, drunken voice telling me Jerry could not come over that day or any day. I told my friends what had happened. One of them explained that Jerry’s father was an alcoholic. I don’t know if I knew what the word meant, but I learned quickly. Jerry, the second baseman; Jerry, the kid with the red bike; Jerry, my friend on the corner was now “Jerry, the son of a drunk.” Kids can be hard, and for some reason we were hard on Jerry. He was infected. Like the leper, he suffered from a condition he didn’t create. Like the leper, he was put outside the village. The divorced know this feeling. So do the handicapped. The unemployed have felt it, as have the less educated. Some shun unmarried moms. We keep our distance from the depressed and avoid the terminally ill. We have neighborhoods for immigrants, convalescent homes for the elderly, schools for the simple, centers for the addicted, and prisons for the criminals. The rest simply try to get away from it all. Only God knows how many Jerrys are in voluntary exile—individuals living quiet, lonely lives infected by their fear of rejection and their memories of the last time they tried. They choose not to be touched at all rather than risk being hurt again.
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Max Lucado (Just Like Jesus: A Heart Like His)
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As I see it, the War on Drugs—more than any other government program or political initiative—gave rise to mass incarceration as defined above. Although the political dynamics that gave birth to the system date back to slavery, the drug war marked an important turning point in American history, one that cannot be measured simply by counting heads in prisons and jails. The declaration and escalation of the War on Drugs marked a moment in our past when a group of people defined by race and class was viewed and treated as the “enemy.” A literal war was declared on a highly vulnerable population, leading to a wave of punitiveness that permeated every aspect of our criminal justice system and redefined the scope of fundamental constitutional rights. The war mentality resulted in the militarization of local police departments and billions invested in drug law enforcement at the state and local levels. It also contributed to astronomical expenditures for prison building for people convicted of all crimes and the slashing of billions from education, public housing and welfare programs, as well as a slew of legislation authorizing legal discrimination against millions of people accused of drug offenses, denying them access to housing, food stamps, credit, basic public benefits, and financial aid for schooling. This war did not merely increase the number of people in prisons and jails. It radically altered the life course of millions, especially black men who were the primary targets in the early decades of the war. Their lives and families were destroyed for drug crimes that were largely ignored on the other side of town. Those who define “mass incarceration” narrowly, to include only individuals currently locked in prisons or jails, erase from public view the overwhelming majority of
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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The terrible thing happened when the Board of Regents were being shown through the campus. The Regents were the supreme rulers of the University; they were bankers and manufacturers and pastors of large churches; to them even the president was humble. Nothing gave them more interesting thrills than the dissecting-room of the medical school. The preachers spoke morally of the effect of alcohol on paupers, and the bankers of the disrespect for savings-accounts which is always to be seen in the kind of men who insist on becoming cadavers. In the midst of the tour, led by Dr. Stout and the umbrella-carrying secretary of the University, the plumpest and most educational of all the bankers stopped near Clif Clawson's dissecting-table, with his derby hat reverently held behind him, and into that hat Clif dropped a pancreas.
Now a pancreas is a damp and disgusting thing to find in your new hat, and when the banker did so find one, he threw down the hat and said that the students of Winnemac had gone to the devil. Dr. Stout and the secretary comforted him; they cleaned the derby and assured him that vengeance should be done on the man who could put a pancreas in a banker's hat.
Dr. Stout summoned Clif, as president of the Freshmen. Clif was pained. He assembled the class, he lamented that any Winnemac Man could place a pancreas in a banker's hat, and he demanded that the criminal be manly enough to stand up and confess.
Unfortunately the Reverend Ira Hinkley, who sat between Martin and Angus Duer, had seen Clif drop the pancreas. He growled, "This is outrageous! I'm going to expose Clawson, even if he is a frat-brother of mine."
Martin protested, "Cut it out. You don't want to get him fired?"
"He ought to be!"
Angus Duer turned in his seat, looked at Ira, and suggested, "Will you kindly shut up?" and, as Ira subsided, Angus became to Martin more admirable and more hateful than ever.
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Sinclair Lewis (Arrowsmith)
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of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonial-style economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible. On being compelled by force of arms to give up their slave workforce, Deep Southerners developed caste and sharecropper systems to meet their labor needs, as well as a system of poll taxes and literacy tests to keep former slaves and white rabble out of the political process. When these systems were challenged by African Americans and the federal government, they rallied poor whites in their nation, in Tidewater, and in Appalachia to their cause through fearmongering: The races would mix. Daughters would be defiled. Yankees would take away their guns and Bibles and convert their children to secular humanism, environmentalism, communism, and homosexuality. Their political hirelings discussed criminalizing abortion, protecting the flag from flag burners, stopping illegal immigration, and scaling back government spending when on the campaign trail; once in office, they focused on cutting taxes for the wealthy, funneling massive subsidies to the oligarchs’ agribusinesses and oil companies, eliminating labor and environmental regulations, creating “guest worker” programs to secure cheap farm labor from the developing world, and poaching manufacturing jobs from higher-wage unionized industries in Yankeedom, New Netherland, or the Midlands. It’s a strategy financial analyst Stephen Cummings has likened to “a high-technology version of the plantation economy of the Old South,” with the working and middle classes playing the role of sharecroppers.[1] For the oligarchs the greatest challenge has been getting Greater Appalachia into their coalition and keeping it there. Appalachia has relatively few African
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Colin Woodard (American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America)
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The fascist leaders were outsiders of a new type. New people had forced their way into national leadership before. There had long been hard-bitten soldiers who fought better than aristocratic officers and became indispensable to kings. A later form of political recruitment came from young men of modest background who made good when electoral politics broadened in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the aforementioned French politician Léon Gambetta, the grocer’s son, or the beer wholesaler’s son Gustav Stresemann, who became the preeminent statesman of Weimar Germany. A third kind of successful outsider in modern times has been clever mechanics in new industries (consider those entrepreneurial bicycle makers Henry Ford, William Morris, and the Wrights).
But many of the fascist leaders were marginal in a new way. They did not resemble the interlopers of earlier eras: the soldiers of fortune, the first upwardly mobile parliamentary politicians, or the clever mechanics. Some were bohemians, lumpen-intellectuals, dilettantes, experts in nothing except the
manipulation of crowds and the fanning of resentments: Hitler, the failed art student; Mussolini, a schoolteacher by trade but mostly a restless revolutionary, expelled for subversion from Switzerland and the Trentino; Joseph Goebbels, the jobless college graduate with literary ambitions; Hermann Goering, the drifting World War I fighter ace; Heinrich Himmler, the agronomy student who failed at selling fertilizer and raising chickens.
Yet the early fascist cadres were far too diverse in social origins and education to fit the common label of marginal outsiders. Alongside street-brawlers with criminal records like Amerigo Dumini or Martin Bormann one could find a professor of philosophy like Giovanni Gentile or even, briefly, a musician like Arturo Toscanini. What united them was, after all, values rather than a social profile: scorn for tired bourgeois politics, opposition to the Left, fervent nationalism, a tolerance for violence when needed.
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
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Somewhere in between are the rest of us natives, in whom such change revives long-buried anger at those faraway people who seem to govern the world: city people, educated city people who win and control while the rest of us work and lose. Snort at the proposition if you want, but that was the view I grew up with, and it still is quite prevalent, though not so open as in those days. These are the sentiments the fearful rich and the Republicans capitalize on in order to kick liberal asses in elections.
The Democrats' 2006 midterm gains should not fool anyone into thinking that these feelings are not still out here in this heartland that has so rapidly become suburbanized. It is still politically profitable to cast matters as a battle between the slick people, liberals all, and the regular Joes, people who like white bread and Hamburger Helper and "normal" beer. When you are looking around you in the big cities at all those people, it's hard to understand that there are just as many out here who never will taste sushi or, in all likelihood, fly on an airplane other than when we are flown to boot camp, compliments of Uncle Sam. Only 20 percent of Americans have ever owned a passport. To the working people I grew up with, sophistication of any and all types, and especially urbanity, is suspect. Hell, those city people have never even fired a gun. Then again, who would ever trust Jerry Seinfeld or Dennis Kucinich or Hillary Clinton with a gun? At least Dick Cheney hunts, even if he ain't safe to hunt with. George W. Bush probably knows a good goose gun when he sees one. Guns are everyday tools, like Skil saws and barbecue grills.
So when the left began to demonize gun owners in the 1960s, they not only were arrogant and insulting because they associated all gun owners with criminals but also were politically stupid. It made perfect sense to middle America that the gun control movement was centered in large urban areas, the home to everything against which middle America tries to protect itself—gangbangers, queer bars, dope-fiend burglars, swarthy people jabbering in strange languages. From the perspective of small and medium-size towns all over the country, antigun activists are an overwrought bunch.
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Joe Bageant (Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War)
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It is very important to note, however, that the only segment of the population from whom changing our social and economic conditions in the ways that prevent violence would exact a higher cost would be the extremely wealthy upper, or ruling, class — the wealthiest one per cent of the population (which in the United States today controls some 39 per cent of the total wealth of the nation, and 48 per cent of the financial wealth, as shown by Wolff in Top Heavy (1996). The other 99 per cent of the population — namely, the middle class and the lower class — would benefit, not only form decreased rates of violence (which primarily victimize the very poor), but also from a more equitable distribution of the collective wealth and income of our unprecedentedly wealthy societies.
Even on a worldwide scale, it would require a remarkably small sacrifice from the wealthiest individuals and nations to raise everyone on earth, including the populations of the poorest nations, above the subsistence level, as the United Nations Human Development Report 1998, has shown. I emphasize the wealthiest individuals as well as nations because, as the U.N. report documents, a tiny number of the wealthiest individuals actually possess wealth on a scale that is larger than the annual income of most of the nations of the earth.
For example, the three richest individuals on earth have assets that exceed the combined Gross Domestic Product of the fortyeight poorest countries! The assets of the 84 richest individuals exceed the Gross Domestic Product of the most populous nation on earth, China, with 1.2 billion inhabitants. The 225 richest individuals have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion, which is equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 per cent of the world's population, or 2.5 billion people.
By comparison, it is estimated that the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food for all and safe water and sanitation for all is roughly $40 billion a year. This is less than 4 per cent of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world.
It has been shown throughout the world, both internationally and intranationally, that reducing economic inequities not only improves physical health and reduces the rate of death from natural causes far more effectively than doctors, medicines, and hospitals; it also decreases the rate of death from both criminal and political violence far more effectively than any system of police forces, prisons, or military interventions ever invented.
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James Gilligan (Preventing Violence (Prospects for Tomorrow))
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Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena. They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest. The looting which is their principal feature serves many functions. It enables the most enraged and deprived Negro to take hold of consumer goods with the ease the white man does by using his purse. Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he wants the experience of taking. But most of all, alienated from society and knowing that this society cherishes property above people, he is shocking it by abusing property rights. There are thus elements of emotional catharsis in the violent act. This may explain why most cities in which riots have occurred have not had a repetition, even though the causative conditions remain. It is also noteworthy that the amount of physical harm done to white people other than police is infinitesimal and in Detroit whites and Negroes looted in unity.
A profound judgment of today’s riots was expressed by Victor Hugo a century ago. He said, ‘If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.’
The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. Day-in and day-out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison. Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man. These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.
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Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK, Jr Quotes: The Vision of Martin Luther King, Jr.)
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The US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong.
But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects.
But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood.
Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal.
This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives.
And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist.
The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile.
What country do you want to live in?
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Cory Doctorow (Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future)
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Year after year, they are joined by a new age group from Germany’s youth, totally educated in accordance with National Socialist principles, forged together by the ideas of our Volksgemeinschaft, and willing to move against anyone who should dare to sin against our fight for freedom. And just as in the time of the party’s struggle for power, our female party comrades, our German women and girls, were the most reliable supports of the movement, so now again the multitude of our women and girls form the strongest element in the struggle for the preservation of our Volk.
After all, thank God, not only the Jews in London and New York but also those in Moscow made clear what fate might be in store for the German Volk.
We are determined to be no less clear in our answer. This fight will not end with the planned annihilation of the Aryan but with the extermination of the Jew in Europe. Beyond this, thanks to this fight, our movement’s world of thought will become the common heritage of all people, even of our enemies.
State after state will be forced, in the course of its fight against us, to apply National Socialist theories in waging this war that was provoked by them. And in so doing, it will become aware of the curse that the criminal work of Jewry has laid over all people, especially through this war.
As our enemies thought in 1923 that the National Socialist Party was defeated for good and that I was finished with in the eyes of the German Volk because of my trial, so they actually helped National Socialist ideology to spread like wildfire through the entire German Volk and convey the essence of Jewry to so many million men, as we ourselves would never have been able to do under normal circumstances. In the same manner international Jewry, which instigated this new war, will find out that nation after nation engrosses itself more and more in this question to become finally aware of the great danger presented by this international problem.
Above all, this war proves the irrefutable identity of plutocracy and Bolshevism, and the common ambition of all Jews to exploit nations and make them the slaves of their international guild of criminals.
The same alliance we once faced as our common enemies in Germany, an alliance between the stock exchange in Frankfurt and the “Red Flag” in Berlin, now again exists between the Jewish banking houses in New York, the Jewishplutocratic class of leaders in London, and the Jews in the Kremlin in Moscow.
Just as the German Volk successfully fought the Jewish enemy at home as a consequence of this realization and is now about to finish it off for good, the other nations will increasingly find themselves again in the course of this war.
Together, they will make a stand against that race that is seeking to destroy all of them.
Proclamation for the 23th anniversary of the N.S.D.A.P. (read by Hermann Esser) Fuhrer Headquarters, February 24, 1943
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Adolf Hitler (Collection of Speeches: 1922-1945)
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As the months rolled on, John and Sarah began to understand themselves less as teachers and more as parents, living into the names Baba and Kama Kiwawa. It was clear the boys needed something Keu couldn’t provide, consistent support and affection. Sarah started giving out hugs and bandages, and John role-modeled manhood by providing food, shelter, and an education. But unlike many parents, John and Sarah didn’t dole out punishments. They left that to the council. On his first visit, Keu had appointed six boys with hair sprouting on their chins as the elders of Kiwawa. He spent a week with them on a hill near Kiwawa where he instructed them in the ways of a traditional elder council, showing them how to resolve problems that might arise according to the Pokot traditions. And each night after the guard heard John’s snores rumbling out of the camper, the council built a fire and legislated the day’s problems according to the nomadic values they had learned, sometimes choosing to defer ruling on more complicated matters until Keu returned. Stolen writing stick? The elders huddled together in the shadow of the illuminated acacia tree. The oldest returned and pointed at the offender: “Water-fetching duty for a week.” “Oee,” the boys would shout, the Pokot version of Amen. “Refusing to share meat?” “Three rope whippings.” “Oee.” “Crying because you miss your mother?” “Spend more time with Kama,” the oldest boy would say with compassion. “Oee.” “We were modeling the Pokot elders by becoming the keepers of justice and fairness. You see, Pokot elders can never settle a matter based on anger or some personal retribution. That is so unacceptable,” Michael explained. “A punishment is meant to reform the person as quickly as possible so the criminal can be brought back into the group. This is because every single person has a job to do, whether it is to fetch water, herd cows, or stand guard against Karamoja. And if you are gone, then someone else has to work harder in your absence. Nomads do not have prisons like the modern world, which changes our whole entire judicial system. In America you can lock somebody up in prison for two years for just a small crime like stealing a cow. And while in prison they are taken out of the community and are expected to think about what they have done. And then after those two years of isolation, a group of psychologists and lawyers and I don’t know who else will examine that person and see if they have changed their stealing ways. If not, then they lock them back up,” he said, turning an invisible key. “In America there is the potential to give up on somebody, to leave them outside of the community. But there are no prisons in the desert, and without prisons the elders are left with two choices: reform you or kill you. And as I said, if they kill you, they are not only losing a good worker, but also a brother and a son. And the desert has already taken so many of our sons.
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Nathan Roberts (Poor Millionaires: The Village Boy Who Walked to the Western World and the American Boy Who Followed Him Home)
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Hyphen This word comes from two Greek words together meaning ‘under one’, which gets nobody anywhere and merely prompts the reflection that argument by etymology only serves the purpose of intimidating ignorant antagonists. On, then. This is one more case in which matters have not improved since Fowler’s day, since he wrote in 1926: The chaos prevailing among writers or printers or both regarding the use of hyphens is discreditable to English education … The wrong use or wrong non-use of hyphens makes the words, if strictly interpreted, mean something different from what the writers intended. It is no adequate answer to such criticisms to say that actual misunderstanding is unlikely; to have to depend on one’s employer’s readiness to take the will for the deed is surely a humiliation that no decent craftsman should be willing to put up with. And so say all of us who may be reading this book. The references there to ‘printers’ needs updating to something like ‘editors’, meaning those who declare copy fit to print. Such people now often get it wrong by preserving in midcolumn a hyphen originally put at the end of a line to signal a word-break: inter-fere, say, is acceptable split between lines but not as part of a single line. This mistake is comparatively rare and seldom causes confusion; even so, time spent wondering whether an exactor may not be an ex-actor is time avoidably wasted. The hyphen is properly and necessarily used to join the halves of a two-word adjectival phrase, as in fair-haired children, last-ditch resistance, falling-down drunk, over-familiar reference. Breaches of this rule are rare and not troublesome. Hyphens are also required when a phrase of more than two words is used adjectivally, as in middle-of-the-road policy, too-good-to-be-true story, no-holds-barred contest. No hard-and-fast rule can be devised that lays down when a two-word phrase is to be hyphenated and when the two words are to be run into one, though there will be a rough consensus that, for example, book-plate and bookseller are each properly set out and that bookplate and book-seller might seem respectively new-fangled and fussy. A hyphen is not required when a normal adverb (i.e. one ending in -ly) plus an adjective or other modifier are used in an adjectival role, as in Jack’s equally detestable brother, a beautifully kept garden, her abnormally sensitive hearing. A hyphen is required, however, when the adverb lacks a final -ly, like well, ill, seldom, altogether or one of those words like tight and slow that double as adjectives. To avoid ambiguity here we must write a well-kept garden, an ill-considered objection, a tight-fisted policy. The commonest fault in the use of the hyphen, and the hardest to eradicate, is found when an adjectival phrase is used predicatively. So a gent may write of a hard-to-conquer mountain peak but not of a mountain peak that remains hard-to-conquer, an often-proposed solution but not of one that is often-proposed. For some reason this fault is especially common when numbers, including fractions, are concerned, and we read every other day of criminals being imprisoned for two-and-a-half years, a woman becoming a mother-of-three and even of some unfortunate being stabbed six-times. And the Tories have been in power for a decade-and-a-half. Finally, there seems no end to the list of common phrases that some berk will bung a superfluous hyphen into the middle of: artificial-leg, daily-help, false-teeth, taxi-firm, martial-law, rainy-day, airport-lounge, first-wicket, piano-concerto, lung-cancer, cavalry-regiment, overseas-service. I hope I need not add that of course one none the less writes of a false-teeth problem, a first-wicket stand, etc. The only guide is: omit the hyphen whenever possible, so avoid not only mechanically propelled vehicle users (a beauty from MEU) but also a man eating tiger. And no one is right and no-one is wrong.
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Kingsley Amis (The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage)
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Society must show that blue-collar crime never pays. Insidious white-collar crime pays very well, and nothing is declared. It's the same reason why Financial Education, probably the most important subject of all, is absent from the general school curriculum - to keep the have-nots ignorant and the establishment's riches safe.
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Stewart Stafford
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The weapons in our house, as in all Siberian houses, were kept in particular places. The so-called personal guns—the ones Siberian criminals carry around with them and use every day—are placed in the “red corner,” where the family icons hang on the walls, along with the photographs of relatives who have died or are serving prison sentences. Below the icons and the photographs there is a shelf, draped with a piece of red cloth, on which there are usually about a dozen Siberian crucifixes. Whenever a criminal enters the house he goes straight to the red corner, pulls out his gun, and puts it on the shelf; then he crosses himself and places a crucifix over the gun. This is an ancient tradition that ensures that weapons are never used in a Siberian house: if they were, the house could never be lived in again. The crucifix acts as a kind of seal, which can only be removed when the criminal leaves the house.
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Nicolai Lilin (Siberian Education: Growing Up in a Criminal Underworld)
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Our elders had taught us well.
First of all, you had to respect all living creatures — a category which did not include policemen, people connected with the government, bankers, loan sharks and all those who had the power of money in their hands and exploited ordinary people.
Secondly, you had to believe in God and in his Son, Jesus Christ, and love and respect the other ways of believing in God which were different from our own. But the Church and religion must never be seen as a structure. My grandfather used to say that God didn’t create priests, but only free men; there were some good priests, and in such cases it was not sinful to go to the places where they carried out their activities, but it definitely was a sin to think that in the eyes of God priests had more power than other men.
Lastly, we must not do to others what we wouldn’t want to be done to us; and if one day we were obliged to do it nonetheless, there must be a good reason.
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Nicolai Lilin (Siberian Education: Growing Up in a Criminal Underworld)
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In fact, surveys consistently show that African Americans are generally less supportive of harsh criminal justice policies than whites, even though blacks are far more likely to be victims of crime.71 This pattern is particularly striking given that less educated people tend to be more punitive and blacks on average are less educated than whites.72
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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by fostering a persistent victim mentality. I will explain how a radicalized push for feminism is both emasculating and criminalizing men who are needed to lead strong families, and I will reveal the fallacy of socialism, in its inherent argument for the very same government that crippled black America in the first place. Lastly, I will expose the inefficiency of the left-leaning public education system and tackle the media’s role in the collective brainwashing of our youth.
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Candace Owens (Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation)
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By stripping King and Parks of the breadth of their politics—which interwove economic justice, desegregation, criminal justice, educational justice, and global justice—many of these national tributes render Parks and King meek and dreamy, not angry, intrepid, and relentless, and thus not relevant or, even worse, at odds with a new generation of young activists.
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Jeanne Theoharis (A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History)
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A dramatic ageing of the population. Its effects will start being felt in 2005 (from the retirement of numerous groups). Since the government did not foresee and reform the retirement system paid out of each year’s taxes, we know it is already too late. There will not be sufficient funds to furnish allocations and healthcare to seniors and ever higher taxes will be levied on those who are working. The result will necessarily be a generalised lowering of purchasing power and therefore of economic growth based on consumption. The ageing of the population will also rapidly lead — it is already happening — to another frightening effect: a loss of technological skills. There are not enough young minds. 2) The massive immigration of new battalions from the Third World to palliate these gaps, so desired by the UN, is an imposture. These migrants are unskilled and need social services themselves. They are mouths to feed, not the brains needed in a post-industrial society. Germany wanted to import more than 30,000 engineers that it needs (already), but got only 9,000 Indians. The immigration-colonisation (of which the entire cost is already more than 122 billion euros a year), which will not stop growing, added to the steadily increasing birth rate of the foreigners — most of them, as everyone knows, are not able to earn a good education — will be one more brake on economic prosperity. The current masses of ‘youths’ from Africa and North Africa will for the most part have a choice only between unemployment supported by welfare payments or participation in the parallel and criminal economy. The professional value of the workforce is going to experience a dramatic decline as soon as 2010.
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Guillaume Faye (Convergence of Catastrophes)
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Most people, wherever they’re from, whatever they look like, are looking for the same thing. They’re not trying to get filthy rich. They don’t expect someone else to do what they can do for themselves. “But they do expect that if they’re willing to work, they should be able to find a job that supports a family. They expect that they shouldn’t go bankrupt just because they get sick. They expect that their kids should be able to get a good education, one that prepares them for this new economy, and they should be able to afford college if they’ve put in the effort. They want to be safe, from criminals or terrorists. And they figure that after a lifetime of work, they should be able to retire with dignity and respect.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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In their struggle with al-Qaeda, the Al Saud benefited from several favorable circumstances. The Saudi state was highly centralized, backed by important allies, and determined to hold on to power. A state-controlled media and consolidated education system got out the message that al-Qaeda members were criminals, not heroes. Oil prices were high and the Saudi treasury full. The war in Iraq drew militants away from Riyadh. In a very conservative society, revolution was never likely to be popular and, as we have seen, the Al Saud made some deliberate, and ultimately effective, choices. Unlike the rulers of Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Libya, or Syria, the Saudi government did not turn the army on its own people. Torture was officially abandoned. Collective punishment of families and tribes was avoided. Less dangerous terrorists were treated more as prodigal sons than criminals. Police officers attended the weddings of released terrorists to indicate that they were still part of the community. In a deeply religious society, al-Qaeda was delegitimized in religious terms by respected theologians.
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David Rundell (Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads)
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A second precondition that enormously increases the likelihood that people will respond to feelings of shame by means of violence is that they do not perceive themselves as having non-violent means by which to maintain or restore their self-esteem and self-respect. Most of us have such means, such as education, knowledge, skills, and achievements that are honored and respected by others and by ourselves; a profession or career, and some standing or status in the community and with one's family and friends.
It is also important not to underestimate the degree to which the self-esteem of many if not most people, in the very materialist, capitalist culture in which we have all been raised and in which we have to live, is dependent on having whatever minimal degree of wealth or income they need in order to feel that their "net worth" (in the accountant's sense) reinforces their sense of "self-worth" (in the psychological sense).
The people who become violent criminals, and end up in prison, are notably lacking in all of those non-violent sources of self-esteem: they are overwhelmingly poor, uneducated (many are illiterate), lacking in any skills that they or others could respect, and of the lowest possible social and economic status in society. As the poor, they are lower class; and as members of minority groups (which often means people of color) they are of lower caste (which increases the risk that they will be poor, or lower class, as well). So when they are shamed they do not have enough non-violent internal or external sources of self-esteem with which to compensate. Violence is their last resort in the literal sense that it is their last resource.
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James Gilligan (Preventing Violence (Prospects for Tomorrow))
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The fact that depriving prisoners of the opportunity to acquire an education increases the rates of crime and violence in our society, and that there is no reason a society as wealthy as ours cannot afford to provide free higher education for everyone, are points that tend to get lost in discussions of this issue. But there are two even bigger points that also tend to get lost, so I will emphasize them here.
The first is that it is in the interests of the extremely wealthy upper class for the government to pursue policies whose effect is to raise the rates of crime and violence in our society. It is in their economic interest to increase the gap between rich and the poor to the highest level possible because they are the rich, and the greater the gap, the more they get. But the larger that gap becomes, the higher the rate of crime and violence. There is a clear conflict of interest between their economic interest in becoming wealthier, and the public's interest in preventing violence.
There is also a political dimension: namely, how to persuade the public to vote for politicians who will write the laws that keep diverting more money into the hands of the upper class and out of the hands of the middle and lower classes. A high rate of crime and violence pits the middle class against the lower class. Most of the categories of violence that the laws define as criminal are committed by lower-class people, and this makes the middle classes angry at the poor and afraid of them. But it also divides the lower class against itself — most poor people do not commit violent crimes, but most of the victims of violent crime are poor.
The higher the rates of crime and violence, then, the more the middle and lower classes are distracted from noticing that they are in most danger of being robbed by the very wealthy and their political agents. As the old saying goes, the poor man robs you with a gun, the rich man with a pen.
In this analysis, I am not assuming that there are many individual members of any class who are consciously aware of the role they are playing in this conflict. Some are, and of those, some work consciously to support this system, and some work consciously to oppose it. But the beauty of the system, from the standpoint of the rich, is that the vast majority of people whose lives are affected by it, whether for good or for ill, do not have to understand the system or consciously support it in order for it to work. The socio-economic and criminal justice systems do that job for them.
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James Gilligan (Preventing Violence (Prospects for Tomorrow))
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Malice toward none” was hardly a popular slogan. Consider the words of Henry Ward Beecher, as popular and influential in his day as Billy Graham has been in his. “I charge the whole guilt of this war,” Beecher said in 1864, “upon the ambitious, educated, plotting political leaders of the South . . . A day will come when God will reveal judgment, and arraign at his bar these mighty miscreants.” Beecher looked forward to the day when “these most accursed and detested of all criminals” would be “caught up in black clouds full of voices of vengeance and lurid with punishment” and “plunged downward forever in an endless retribution.” “Endless retribution”—now there was a phrase that people would rally behind. What Lincoln sought to forestall would in fact come to pass. A vengeful reconstruction policy, the backlash it provoked, and the failure to provide adequately for the well-being of four million freed slaves had ramifications that would last to the present day. The pain of the Civil War sank into many fields.
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Joshua Wolf Shenk (Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness)
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The controversy and confusion that surrounded the Shah’s human rights record overshadowed his many real accomplishments in the fields of women’s rights, literacy, health care, education, and modernization. Help in sifting through the accusations and allegations came from a most unexpected quarter, however, when the Islamic Republic announced plans to identify and memorialize each victim of Pahlavi ‘oppression.’ But lead researcher, Emad al-Din Baghi, a former seminary student, was shocked to discover that he could not match the victims’ names to the official numbers: instead of 100,000 deaths, Baghi could only confirm 3,164. Even that number was inflated because it included all 2,781 fatalities from the 1978-1979 revolution. The actual death toll was lowered to 383, of whom 197 were guerilla fighters and terrorists killed in skirmishes with the security forces. That meant 183 political prisoners and dissidents were executed, committed suicide in detention, or died under torture. … The lower numbers do not excuse or diminish the suffering of political prisoners jailed or tortured in Iran in the 1970s. They do, however, show the extent to which the historical record was manipulated by Khomeini and his partisans to criminalize the Shah and justify their own excesses and abuses.
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Andrew Scott Cooper (The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran)
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I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body. And I began to see these two arms in relation—those who failed in the schools justified their destruction in the streets. The society could say, “He should have stayed in school,” and then wash its hands of him. It does not matter that the “intentions” of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, “intend” for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense—ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream. No one directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction. But a great number of educators spoke of “personal responsibility” in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream. An unceasing interrogation of the stories told to us by the schools now felt essential. It felt wrong not to ask why, and then to ask it again. I took these questions to my father, who very often refused to offer an answer, and instead referred me to more books. My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers—even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being “politically conscious”—as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty. Some things were clear to me: The violence that undergirded the country, so flagrantly on display during Black History Month, and the intimate violence of “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” were not unrelated. And this violence was not magical, but was of a piece and by design. But what exactly was the design? And why? I must know. I must get out…but into what? I devoured the books because they were the rays of light peeking out from the doorframe, and perhaps past that door there was another world, one beyond the gripping fear that undergirded the Dream.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me (One World Essentials))
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Fugitivity—and fugitive pedagogy in particular—is the metanarrative of black educational history. It is a social and rhetorical frame by which we might interpret black Americans’ pursuit to enact humanizing and affirming practices of teaching and learning. To this latter point, I am referring to the reality that the literate slave was akin to a fugitive slave, particularly when we take into account antiliteracy laws, which criminalized reading and writing by black Americans, making it a punishable offense.
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Jarvis R. Givens (Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching)
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Cixi began to revolutionise China's legal system. In May 1902, she decreed a wholesale review of 'all existing laws...with reference to the laws of other nations...to ensure that Chinese laws are compatible with those of foreign countries'. With a legal reform team headed by a remarkable mind, Shen Jiaben, who had a comprehensive knowledge of traditional laws and had studied several differentWestern codes, a brand-new legal structure based on Western models was created in the course of the decade, covering a whole range of commercial, civil, criminal laws and judicial procedures. Cixi approved the team's recommendations and personally decreed many landmark changes. On 24 April 1905, the notorious 'death by a thousand cuts' was abolished, with a somewhat defensive explanation from Ci:xi that this horrific form of execution had not been a Manchu practice in the first place. In a separate decree, torture during interrogation was prohibited. Up to that point it was universally regarded as indispensable to obtain confessions; now it was deemed 'only permissible to be used on those whom there was enough evidence to convict and sentence to death, but who still would not admit guilt'. Cixi made a point of expressing her 'loathing' for those who had a penchant for torture, and warned that they would be severely punished if they failed to observe the. new constraints. Prisons and detention centres were to be run humanely; the abuse of inmates would not be tolerated. Law schools were to be set up in the capital and provinces, and law studies were to be made a part of general education. Under her a legal framework began to be constructed.
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Jung Chang (Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China)
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The hard left ideology that has accelerated the West’s demise and threatens the whole of humanity with World War III was entrenched through the formal schooling system. In 2023 it is the most educated college liberal that is likely to not know the difference between men and woman, believe that poverty is justification for criminality, and extorting money from those who earn it to distribute amongst those who don’t is a good thing, amongst other half-witted ideologies. This was achieved by constant repetition of man’s superior abilities over nature in formal schools and tertiary institutions.
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Salatiso Lonwabo Mdeni (The Homeschooling Father, How and Why I got started.: Traditional Schooling to Online Learning until Homeschooling)
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People speak of the profound injustice of the social arrangement, as it the fact that one man is born in favourable circumstances and that another is born in unfavourable ones—or that one should possess gifts the other has not, were on the face of it an injustice. Among the more honest of these opponents of society this is what is said: "We, with all the bad, morbid, criminal qualities which we acknowledge we possess, are only the inevitable result of the oppression for ages of the weak by the strong"; thus they insinuate their evil natures into the consciences of the ruling classes. They threaten and storm and curse. They become virtuous from sheer indignation—they don't want to have become bad men and canaille for nothing. The name for this attitude, which is an invention of the last century, is, if I am not mistaken, pessimism; and even that pessimism which is the outcome of indignation. It is in this attitude of mind that history is judged, that it is deprived of its inevitable fatality, and that responsibility and even guilt is discovered in it. For the great desideratum is to find guilty people in it. The botched and the bungled, the decadents of all kinds, are revolted at themselves, and require sacrifices in order that they may not slake their thirst for destruction upon themselves (which might, indeed, be the most reasonable procedure). But for this purpose they at least require a semblance of justification, i.e. a theory according to which the fact of their existence, and of their character, may be expiated by a scapegoat. This scapegoat may be God,—in Russia such resentful atheists are not wanting,—or the order of society, or education and upbringing, or the Jews, or the nobles, or, finally, the well-constituted of every kind. "It is a sin for a man to have been born in decent circumstances, for by so doing he disinherits the others, he pushes them aside, he imposes upon them the curse of vice and of work.... How can I be made answerable for my misery; surely some one must be responsible for it, or I could not bear to live."...
In short, resentful pessimism discovers responsible parties in order to create a pleasurable sensation for itself—revenge.... "Sweeter than honey"—thus does even old Homer speak of revenge.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
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The need to live by secure, sharply etched classifications is buried deep in the human mind and one of its earliest demands; simplicity allays anxieties by defeating discriminations. Real situations are rarely clear-cut, real feelings often nests of ambivalence. This is something the adult learns to recognize and to tolerate, if he is fortunate; it is a strenuous insight from which he will regress at the first opportunity. That is why the liberal temper, which taught men to live with uncertainties and ambiguities, the most triumphant achievement of nineteenth-century culture, was so vulnerable to the assaults of cruder views of the world, to bigotry, chauvinism, and other coarse and simplistic classifications. "Every society," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in one of his most brilliant aphorisms, "has the tendency to degrade and, as it were, to starve out, its adversaries—at least in its perception." The criminal, he thought, was one victim of such a regressive process; so was the Jew. And "among artists, the 'philistine and bourgeois' becomes a caricature." And artists, the avant-gardes, Nietzsche might have added, only set the tone for the wider culture. Class consciousness, which emerged fitfully and then more and more fully and aggressively towards the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century, enshrined such a caricature: a mixture and social reality and unconscious needs.
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Peter Gay (Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud)
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A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.’ —Theodore Roosevelt
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Souvik Bhadra (RED-HANDED: 20 Criminal Cases That Shook India)
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The Jenkins family, who took her in after the Kindertransport, gave her their surname. She didn’t expect to see any of her family again. This was supposed to be a fresh start for her, here in England. Her mother, God bless her, was already dead. Her father was in trouble with the authorities.’
‘For doing what?’ Though I had pretty much guessed the answer: he was Jewish.
‘It’s just so stupid,’ I said, drying the plate rather roughly. ‘How can you hate someone just because of how they live their life?’
Mrs. Henderson sighed. ‘People like to have something to hate – it makes life easier when things go wrong if there’s someone to blame. Think about what happened here today with that pilot, Olive.’
She meant how quickly the crowd turned on him. It was frightening how easily normal, pleasant people got whipped up into nastiness. The possibility that something similar had happened to Esther’s family disturbed me.
‘But it’s worse than that, isn’t it?’ I said, thinking ‘The German pilot was a fighter from the enemy side. Esther’s family were… well… just people.’
‘Yes, my dear,’ Mrs. Henderson sighed again, blowing damp strands of hair off her face. ‘Normal, educated, cultured people. It was all very well, the Kindertransport, but what good’s a child without its parents? You saw what it did to Esther.’
‘Well, I’m glad they’re all here,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you helped them.’
Mrs. Henderson looked sad. ‘But we can’t save everyone… our government needs to take some responsibility and do much, much more. We should be helping them flee Hitler, not turning them away. We’ve had to smuggle these good people in like criminals.
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Emma Carroll (Letters from the Lighthouse)
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In response to James Baldwin's idea that it is not Black people's task to save white people given their history.
"We have to give up this folly too. Much is made today of the necessity to reach out to the disaffected Trump voter. This is the latest description of the silent majority, the Reagan Democrat, or the forgotten American. For the most part were told these are the high school educated white people, working class white people who feel left out of an increasingly diverse America. These are the voters left behind a democratic party catering to so called identity politics as if talking about a living wage and healthcare as a right or affordable education or equal pay for women or equal rights for the LGBTQ community or a fair criminal justice system somehow excludes working class white people. W'ere often told they are they heartbeat of the country and we ignore them at our peril. But to direct our attention to these voters, to give our energy over to convincing them to believe otherwise often takes us away from the difficult task of building a better world. In some ways they hold the country hostage and we compromise to appease them...But all to often that compromise arrests substantive change and Black people end up having to bear the burden of that compromise while white people get to go own with their lives... Tending to the quote unquote Trump voter in that generalized sense involves trafficking in a view of the country that we ought to leave behind. We can't compromise about that... In our after times our task then is not to save Trump voters. It isn't to convince them to give up their views that white people ought to matter more than others. Our task is to build a world where such a view has no place or quarter to breathe.
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Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own)
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The declaration and escalation of the War on Drugs marked a moment in our past when a group of people defined by race and class was viewed and treated as the 'enemy.' A literal war was declared on a highly vulnerable population, leading to a wave of punitiveness that permeated every aspect of our criminal justice system and redefined the scope of fundamental constitutional rights. The war mentality resulted in the militarization of local police departments and billions invested in drug law enforcement at the state and local levels. It also contributed to astronomical expenditures for prison building for people convicted of all crimes and the slashing of billions from education, public housing and welfare programs, as well as a slew of legislation authorizing legal discrimination against millions of people accused of drug offenses, denying them access to housing, food stamps, credit, basic public benefits, and financial aid for schooling. This war did not merely increase the number of people in prisons and jails. It radically altered the life course of millions, especially black men who were the primary targets in the early decades of the war. Their lives and families were destroyed for drug crimes that were largely ignored on the other side of town.
Those who define 'mass incarceration' narrowly, to include only individuals currently locked in prisons or jails, erase from public view the overwhelming majority of people ensnared by the system. Twice as many people are on probation or parole in this country as are locked in literal cages. The United States has a staggering 2.3 million people in prison-a higher rate of incarceration than any country in the world-but it also has another 4.5 million people under state control outside of prisons, on probation or parole. More than 70 million Americans-over 20 percent of the entire U.S. population, overwhelming poor and disproportionately people of color-now have criminal records that authorize legal discrimination for life. The New Jim Crow was intended to help people see that it is a serious mistake to think of mass incarceration as simply a problem of too many people in prisons and jails. It is that, but it is also much, much more. Prison statistics barely begin to capture the enormity of this crisis. And yet for too many, the discussion begins and ends there.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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If now -- and this is my idea -- there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.
Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one's life. I spoke of the "moral equivalent" of war. So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until and equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skilful propogandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.
The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound everywhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree if its imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, and our pride would rise accordingly. We could be poor, then, without humiliation, as army officers now are. The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as part history has inflamed the military temper.
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William James (The Moral Equivalent of War)
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All black people should pause for a minute and ask themselves this question: Where does my "education" come from? If your education is not self-directed or directed by those who truly have your best interest at heart and are properly informed about the past as well as present-day reality, and are truthtellers, then you are not being educated; you are being purposefully MISeducated and TRAINED to serve those who are, in fact, educated because being truly educated is about being made aware of the truth.–Demico Boothe
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Demico Boothe (The U.S. Child Support System and The Black Family: How the System Destroys Black Families, Criminalizes Black Men, and Sets Black Children Up for ... Varying Relationship and Experience series))
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Society at a Crossroads: Diminished Empathy, Rising Crime, and Injustice
In contemporary society, we bear witness to numerous changes shaping our everyday lives. However, one of the most concerning trends is the diminishing empathy and increasing crime across all spheres. As the world strives for material progress, it seems that values and ethical principles have yielded to the pursuit of success and wealth.
Empathy, a key element of humanity, is becoming a rarity in today's society. Immersed in technological advancements and immersed in a virtual world, people are losing touch with real emotions and the need to understand the suffering of others. This attitude towards empathy reveals a profound crack in the fabric of society, leaving individuals vulnerable to various challenges without basic support.
On the other hand, the growing crime in different domains poses tensions and threats to personal security. Not only is crime one of the biggest state and social problems, but it also fosters feelings of insecurity and fear among people. The roots of criminal behavior can be traced back to a lost sense of community and empathy, preventing many youths from taking the path of crime in their search for belonging and recognition.
Furthermore, the race for material wealth has created a society where the value direction is lost. While economic progress is essential, it becomes evident that, at times, the price of success is paid with the loss of values and ethical standards. This orientation not only damages the individual but also the society as a whole.
We live in a society where an ordinary person finds it challenging to obtain justice. Contradictions within the legal system and a lack of empathy among some institutional representatives often lead to injustice. Citizens become victims of their own systems, which should protect their rights.
To escape this tragic situation, it is necessary to bring empathy and values back to the forefront. Education and awareness about the importance of empathy and values must be prioritized. Additionally, a reassessment of the legal system is crucial to ensure that it functions in the service of justice rather than benefiting a select few.
If society does not turn towards the ideals of empathy, selflessness, and respect for values, the danger of descending into complete chaos and injustice will increase. Only by rejuvenating the spirit of empathy and humanity can we avoid a path where crime and injustice prevail, leaving the common people struggling to obtain their justice.
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A.Petrovski
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These two factors—childhood poverty and a single-parent household—are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future. Growing up in a single-parent home roughly doubles a child’s propensity to commit crime. So does having a teenage mother. Another study has shown that low maternal education is the single most powerful factor leading to criminality.
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Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything)
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There’s a classic interview strategy that works particularly well with college-educated criminals—particularly academics. You tell them everything you know, and half the time they can’t resist interrupting you to tell you where you’ve gone wrong.
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Ben Aaronovitch (Winter's Gifts (Rivers of London #6.5))
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The way to a crime-free world is simple, but it lies outside of all the legal 'n partisan muck. Take away the guns from the kids on the street, put books in their hands and food in their stomach.
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Abhijit Naskar (Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables)
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These implicit biases shape their behavior in ways they are not even aware of. The research suggests that about 70 to 80 percent of whites fall into this category.” These autonomic responses contribute to disparities in hiring, in housing, in education, and in medical treatment for the lowest-caste people compared to their dominant-caste counterparts and, as with other aspects of the caste system, often go against logic. For example, a pioneering study by the sociologist Devah Pager found that white felons applying for a job were more likely to get hired than African-Americans with no criminal record.
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Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
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This is a shift from the seemingly axiomatic statement about “overrepresentation,” of children of color in special education or of people of color in prisons, to understanding this debilitation and forces of what I call racial criminal pathologization as a core of institutions that uphold settler racial “democracies.” Puar shows that disability under capitalism and empire is not overrepresented, as if this is an unfortunate side effect of these regimes. Rather, it is the core function of the system as is—to incapacitate, punish, contain.
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Liat Ben-moshe (Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition)
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I stand up for equality, justice, criminal justice, racism, laws, human rights&more serious issues too! It's so important for everyone to educate themselves on to learn more about these serious issues to gain more knowledge from it too! Everyone have to be careful with their words, their actions and their behaviours for what they say to other people about these serious issues too!
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100% Savage Queen Sarah
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Who are we, the people who have ADHD? We are the problem kid who drives his parents crazy by being totally disorganized, unable to follow through on anything, incapable of cleaning up a room, or washing dishes, or performing just about any assigned task; the one who is forever interrupting, making excuses for work not done, and generally functioning far below potential in most areas. We are the kid who gets daily lectures on how we’re squandering our talent, wasting the golden opportunity that our innate ability gives us to do well, and failing to make good use of all that our parents have provided. We are also sometimes the talented executive who keeps falling short due to missed deadlines, forgotten obligations, social faux pas, and blown opportunities. Too often we are the addicts, the misfits, the unemployed, and the criminals who are just one diagnosis and treatment plan away from turning it all around. We are the people Marlon Brando spoke for in the classic 1954 film On the Waterfront when he said, “I coulda been a contender.” So many of us coulda been contenders, and shoulda been for sure. But then, we can also make good. Can we ever! We are the seemingly tuned-out meeting participant who comes out of nowhere to provide the fresh idea that saves the day. Frequently, we are the “underachieving” child whose talent blooms with the right kind of help and finds incredible success after a checkered educational record. We are the contenders and the winners. We are also imaginative and dynamic teachers, preachers, circus clowns, and stand-up comics, Navy SEALs or Army Rangers, inventors, tinkerers, and trend setters. Among us there are self-made millionaires and billionaires; Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners; Academy, Tony, Emmy, and Grammy award winners; topflight trial attorneys, brain surgeons, traders on the commodities exchange, and investment bankers. And we are often entrepreneurs. We are entrepreneurs ourselves, and the great majority of the adult patients we see for ADHD are or aspire to be entrepreneurs too. The owner and operator of an entrepreneurial support company called Strategic Coach, a man named Dan Sullivan (who also has ADHD!), estimates that at least 50 percent of his clients have ADHD as well.
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Edward M. Hallowell (ADHD 2.0: New Science and Essential Strategies)
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I tell you I am sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a very different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s.” Syme
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G.K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday)
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Perpetrators of crimes should be educated and trained in prison to be gentle citizens and propitious to society rather than torture or victimize them, which may incite them to become professional and more dangerous criminals.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Title IX disciplinary actions almost as rare as criminal convictions for sexual assault. Rowan Frost, who directs the Sexual Health, Advocacy and Relationship Education program at Reed College, estimates that if the school has one hundred sexual assaults per year, twenty to forty will be reported, three to five will go through a disciplinary hearing, and one to two students will be disciplined.25 Paradoxically, however, while narrowing the official definition of what “counts” as sexual assault or harassment may have discouraged official Title IX investigations, it has opened the door for more informal and creative ways of responding to sexual misconduct that doesn’t fit within the narrowed guidelines.
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Judith Lewis Herman (Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice)
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Many parents are not fit to have the control of children. Hence the state should see that they are sheltered, feed, clothed, and educated. It is far better for the state to make good citizens of its children in the beginning than in the end to be compelled to to care for them as criminals.
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Elizabeth Cady Stanton (80 YEARS & MORE REMINISCENCES)
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The lingering barriers to a quality education and the transgenerational trauma associated with internalized ideas about performance in school have yet to be exhaustively measured.
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Monique W. Morris (Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools)
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He made a checklist of objectives: “Destroy the military power. Punish war criminals. Build the structure of representative government. Modernize the constitution. Hold free elections. Enfranchise the women. Release the political prisoners. Liberate the farmers. Establish a free labor movement. Encourage a free economy. Abolish police oppression. Develop a free and responsible press. Liberalize education. Decentralize the political power. Separate church from state.
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H.W. Brands (The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War)
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She had always told me stories about how poor a country Argentina was, being the reason for her girlfriend, Caterina, to move to Spain, which she said was the 13th richest country on the planet. Perhaps Martina's perception of Spain itself was crooked or surrealistic. She didn't realize that the country might be the 13th richest country in the world, but Spain was seriously broke and the people were desperately impoverished since 2007, the economic crisis had never ended, yet Martina seemed oblivious to all that. In her eyes, Spain was a rich country compared to Argentina.
Martina perceived Europe and its various nationalities and countries in a surrealistic way, removed from reality; as if all Europeans were the same and equally trustworthy, just like non-Europeans in Spain, and she could not distinguish between people or groups of people coming from different places, with no reservations.
This sounds very liberal, but there was only selfish capitalist interest behind it all and sometimes it showed for a moment or two that money was the main reason for her being in Europe in the first place, under the guise of a cover-up not being so much of a secret from me time to time.
As if Spain were a playground for children or criminals, which wasn't too far from reality. But I noticed that she saw different false shadows under the same light casting shade of the same crap; she was confident in her beliefs, but at the same time seemingly questioning herself as to whether she was right or wrong, and if it mattered at all. Nonetheless, she was completely unaware of the dangers and trusted people too easily. She had no fear and appeared like a cool kid from the streets of even more dangerous places. Yet, considering her well-educated nature, and the fact that she could also be quite normal, she saw things differently than a European person, almost like a child from the favelas of Brazil, ready to kill for daily nutrition, making it an interesting paradox to observe her personality and her vibes changing like a kaleidoscope beneath the surface for those looking from the right angle.
Martina didn't realize that Italy was Romania vol. 2, or what that meant--how history lives on, how the gypsies who died with the Jews never received a country of their own. I was not acutely aware of the fact that Spain was Romania vol. 3. The prospect of warm weather and easy money had been attracting criminals from all corners of the planet. She seemed to be the typical Libra she actually was, quite consciously quite lost and always trying to find her own balance unsuccessfully as if she was dizzy, never managing to attain the perfect measure, making mistakes and constantly questioning her own results and the actions that led to them. She attempted to conceal her lack of confidence with at times an exaggerated display of confidence. She vacillated between being too shy and too cool, never seeming authentic. I attempted to impart Herder's philosophy to her, explaining how opposing things can settle into harmony, where the truth is likely to be found in moderation and synthesis, hoping she would find it easier to maintain her inner balance amidst all the bad people and bad vibes coming from all directions.
”
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Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
She had always told me stories about how poor a country Argentina was, being the reason for her girlfriend, Caterina, to move to Spain, which she said was the 13th richest country on the planet. Perhaps Martina's perception of Spain itself was crooked or surrealistic. She didn't realize that the country might be the 13th richest country in the world, but Spain was seriously broke and the people were desperately impoverished since 2007, the economic crisis had never ended, yet Martina seemed oblivious to all that. In her eyes, Spain was a rich country compared to Argentina.
Martina perceived Europe and its various nationalities and countries in a surrealistic way, removed from reality; as if all Europeans were the same and equally trustworthy, just like non-Europeans in Spain, and she could not distinguish between people or groups of people coming from different places, with no reservations.
This sounds very liberal, but there was only selfish capitalist interest behind it all and sometimes it showed for a moment or two that money was the main reason for her being in Europe in the first place, under the guise of a cover-up not being so much of a secret from me time to time.
As if Spain were a playground for children or criminals, which wasn't too far from reality. But I noticed that she saw different false shadows under the same light casting shade of the same crap; she was confident in her beliefs, but at the same time seemingly questioning herself as to whether she was right or wrong, and if it mattered at all. Nonetheless, she was completely unaware of the dangers and trusted people too easily. She had no fear and appeared like a cool kid from the streets of even more dangerous places. Yet, considering her well-educated nature, and the fact that she could also be quite normal, she saw things differently than a European person, almost like a child from the favelas of Brazil, ready to kill for daily nutrition, making it an interesting paradox to observe her personality and her vibes changing like a kaleidoscope beneath the surface for those looking from the right angle.
Martina didn't realize that Italy was Romania vol. 2, or what that meant--how history lives on, how the gypsies who died with the Jews never received a country of their own. I was not acutely aware of the fact that Spain was Romania vol. 3. The prospect of warm weather and easy money had been attracting criminals from all corners of the planet. She seemed to be the typical Libra she actually was, quite consciously quite lost and always trying to find her own balance unsuccessfully as if she was dizzy, never managing to attain the perfect measure, making mistakes and constantly questioning her own results and the actions that led to them. She attempted to conceal her lack of confidence with at times an exaggerated display of confidence. She vacillated between being too shy and too cool, never seeming authentic. I attempted to impart Hegel's philosophy to her, explaining how opposing things can settle into harmony, where the truth is likely to be found in moderation and synthesis, hoping she would find it easier to maintain her inner balance amidst all the bad people and bad vibes coming from all directions.
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
ask how much the mafia pays to carry out murders. Fríjol tells me without stopping for a moment. One thousand pesos. That is about $85. The figure seems so ludicrous that I check it out in several other interviews up in the barrios with former and active gang members. They all say the same thing. One thousand pesos to carry out a killing. The price of a human life in Juárez is just $85.
To traffic drugs is no huge step to the dark side. All kinds of people over the world move narcotics and don’t feel they’ve crossed a red line. But to take a human life. That is a hard crime. I can at least comprehend assassins killing to jump from poverty to riches. But for someone to take a life for just $85—enough to eat some tacos and buy a few beers over the week—shows a terrifying degradation in society.
To try to get a handle on how this has happened, I talk to social worker Sandra Ramirez at a youth center in the westside slums. Sandra grew up in the barrios and worked on assembly lines before trying to steer young people away from crime. She says the teenage sicarios are the result of systematic alienation over the last two decades. The slums were a convenient place for factory workers but got nothing from the government. As the factory jobs slumped with the economy, the slums were left to rot. One 2010 study found that a stunning 120,000 Juárez youngsters aged thirteen to twenty-four—or 45 percent of the total—were not enrolled in any education nor had any formal employment.
“The government offers nothing. It can’t even compete with a thousand pesos. It is only the mafia that comes to these kids and offers them anything. They offer them money, cell phones, and guns to protect themselves. You think these kids are going to refuse? They have nothing to lose. They only see the day-to-day. They know they could die and they say so. But they don’t care. Because they have lived this way all their lives.” ask how much the mafia pays to carry out murders. Fríjol tells me without stopping for a moment. One thousand pesos. That is about $85. The figure seems so ludicrous that I check it out in several other interviews up in the barrios with former and active gang members. They all say the same thing. One thousand pesos to carry out a killing. The price of a human life in Juárez is just $85.
To traffic drugs is no huge step to the dark side. All kinds of people over the world move narcotics and don’t feel they’ve crossed a red line. But to take a human life. That is a hard crime. I can at least comprehend assassins killing to jump from poverty to riches. But for someone to take a life for just $85—enough to eat some tacos and buy a few beers over the week—shows a terrifying degradation in society.
To try to get a handle on how this has happened, I talk to social worker Sandra Ramirez at a youth center in the westside slums. Sandra grew up in the barrios and worked on assembly lines before trying to steer young people away from crime. She says the teenage sicarios are the result of systematic alienation over the last two decades. The slums were a convenient place for factory workers but got nothing from the government. As the factory jobs slumped with the economy, the slums were left to rot. One 2010 study found that a stunning 120,000 Juárez youngsters aged thirteen to twenty-four—or 45 percent of the total—were not enrolled in any education nor had any formal employment.
“The government offers nothing. It can’t even compete with a thousand pesos. It is only the mafia that comes to these kids and offers them anything. They offer them money, cell phones, and guns to protect themselves. You think these kids are going to refuse? They have nothing to lose. They only see the day-to-day. They know they could die and they say so. But they don’t care. Because they have lived this way all their lives.
”
”
Ioan Grillo (El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency)
“
I ask how much the mafia pays to carry out murders. Fríjol tells me without stopping for a moment. One thousand pesos. That is about $85. The figure seems so ludicrous that I check it out in several other interviews up in the barrios with former and active gang members. They all say the same thing. One thousand pesos to carry out a killing. The price of a human life in Juárez is just $85.
To traffic drugs is no huge step to the dark side. All kinds of people over the world move narcotics and don’t feel they’ve crossed a red line. But to take a human life. That is a hard crime. I can at least comprehend assassins killing to jump from poverty to riches. But for someone to take a life for just $85—enough to eat some tacos and buy a few beers over the week—shows a terrifying degradation in society.
To try to get a handle on how this has happened, I talk to social worker Sandra Ramirez at a youth center in the westside slums. Sandra grew up in the barrios and worked on assembly lines before trying to steer young people away from crime. She says the teenage sicarios are the result of systematic alienation over the last two decades. The slums were a convenient place for factory workers but got nothing from the government. As the factory jobs slumped with the economy, the slums were left to rot. One 2010 study found that a stunning 120,000 Juárez youngsters aged thirteen to twenty-four—or 45 percent of the total—were not enrolled in any education nor had any formal employment.
“The government offers nothing. It can’t even compete with a thousand pesos. It is only the mafia that comes to these kids and offers them anything. They offer them money, cell phones, and guns to protect themselves. You think these kids are going to refuse? They have nothing to lose. They only see the day-to-day. They know they could die and they say so. But they don’t care. Because they have lived this way all their lives.
”
”
Ioan Grillo (El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency)
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Fourteen Ways To Tame Pharma
1. No more direct-to-consumer advertising on TV, in magazines, or on the internet
2. No more drug company-sponsored junkets, dinners, promotional gifts, or continuing medical education for doctors or medical students
3. No more financial support for medical professional organizations
4. No more beautiful salespeople congregating in the doctors' waiting room
5. No more free samples
6. No more off-label marketing
7. No more co-opting of thought leaders
8. No more drug company funding for the Food and Drug Administration
9. Bigger fines and criminal penalties for malfeasance that are directed against the executives as well as the companies
10. Shortened patent protection for companies that break the law
11. No more financial aid for consumer advocacy groups
12. No more disease-awareness campaigns
13. No more unlimited and undisclosed contributions to politicians
14. A three-year quarantine before politicians, staffers, and bureaucrats involved in setting or monitoring drug company regulations can join a drug company as officer or employee
”
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Allen Frances
“
Never take advice, trust, or rely on a hungry person.
Hunger has made people kill each other and sell each other.
Hunger has made people turn against each other.
We have no shame , morals, values, or principles anymore.
We don’t have back bone or stand for something, because of hunger we fall for everything. Hunger controls lot of people.
Hunger for success or for attention. Hunger to be rich. Hunger for being relevant or to trend. Hunger for being famous. Hunger for power or to be in control. Hunger for being noticed or liked. Hunger for sex or pleasure. Hunger for being loved. Hunger for money. Hunger for being cool, hunger for being credited, Hunger for being looked at as the smartest, wisest, or educated. Hunger for more followers or promos. Hunger for being right. Hunger for being in the circle or table. Hunger for being admired and hunger for friends.
A starving person will say and do anything as long it is feeding their hunger. They can mislead, say wrong things, misinform, manipulate, abuse, lie, provoke, insult, intimidate, black mail, rage farm, influence, instigate people if it will feed their hunger.
I hate poverty. It has made lot us break the law, support criminals, bad people, bad leaders , bad parties, bad things, bad behavior because whatever we support feeds our hunger.
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De philosopher DJ Kyos
“
You wish to practice crime as a profession, to gain a livelihood by appropriating—by violence or otherwise—the earnings of honest and industrious men. Very well, you may do so on certain conditions. If you are skilful and cautious you will not be molested. You may occasion danger, annoyance and great loss to honest men with very little danger to yourself unless you are clumsy and incautious; in which case you may be captured. If you are, we shall take possession of your person and detain you for so many months or years. During that time you will inhabit quarters better than you are accustomed to; your sleeping-room will be kept comfortably warm in all weathers; you will be provided with clothing better than you usually wear; you will have a sufficiency of excellent food; expensive officials will be paid to take charge of you; selected medical men will be retained to attend to your health; a chaplain (of your own persuasion) will minister to your spiritual needs and a librarian will supply you with books. And all this will be paid for by the industrious men whom you live by robbing. In short, from the moment that you adopt crime as a profession, we shall pay all your expenses, whether you are in prison or at large.' Such is the attitude of society; and I repeat it is that of a community of madmen. "How much better and more essentially moral is my plan! I invite the criminal to walk into my parlor. He walks in, a public nuisance and a public danger; and he emerges in the form of a museum preparation of permanent educational value.
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R. Austin Freeman (The Uttermost Farthing A Savant's Vendetta)
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LOOK! EVEN I HAVE DONE WRONG, I HAVE BEEN SENT INTO JAIL. WHAT IS THE USE OF STRIKE? GO STRIKE. BUT THE COUNTRY NEEDS ITS FUTURE! IT’S EDUCATION! KILL THE CRIMINAL LIKE ME
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Fahmid Hassan Prohor (Society's Acceptance- Tragedy Drama (দিগন্ত ছুঁয়েছে মন))
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Susan Curtis reminds us that a minority of 'Social Gospelers' were already developing concerns about their victory. She quotes Shailer Matthews asking in the pages of Biblical World in 1907, Will the state displace the church? ...[the state] has been and still is absorbing the functions formerly discharged by the church. ...Education, the relief of poverty, the defense of the weak against the strong both in matters of affording asylum to the accused and in the protection of employees against employers, and now at last the 'cure of souls,' to the extent at least of seeking reform and reinstatement of the criminal - all these originally belonging to the church and in large part its creation, are now in the process of passing over into the hands of the state.
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Mark David Ledbetter (America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire)
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Paul Blumberg writes: "A Massachusetts Act of 1651, for example, prohibited status disguises in such matters as dress, and declared ‘our utter detestation and dislike that men and women of meane Condition should take upon themselves the garb of gentlemen, by wearing gold and silver, lace or buttons, or points at their knees or to walk in bootes or women of the same rancke to wear silke or tiffany horlles or scarfes, which though allowable to persons of greater estates, or more liberal education, yet we cannot but judge it intollerable in persons of such like condition.
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Diego Gambetta (Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate)
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In stark contrast were the white-collar criminals who appeared before Shoob. Most were the people about whom Kennedy spoke—people who had been given opportunities. Their crimes were those of the well educated and well heeled, crimes of greed, arrogance, and a blatant disregard for the rules that governed the rest of society—crimes that Uhlmann realized did arouse the anger in him. It pissed him off. When
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Joseph Hilldorfer (The Cyanide Canary: A True Story of Injustice)
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In America, criminal justice policies have become a second line of defense, if you will, against individuals whose development has not been adequately fostered by other societal institutions, like welfare, education, employment and job training, mental-health programs, and other social initiatives.
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David Cay Johnston (Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality)
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She was a racist but didn’t know it. The proof of this came during my questioning her on cross-examination. I asked her if the perpetrator had any unusual accent or speech pattern, and she said, “Yes, he did not sound like a black man; he sounded educated!” No shit, that’s what she said.
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John Henry Browne (The Devil's Defender: My Odyssey Through American Criminal Justice from Ted Bundy to the Kandahar Massacre)
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A college student who wants to file a complaint of sexual assault within the campus disciplinary system informs a university employee such as an assistant dean for student life, or perhaps the Title IX coordinator. That person eventually forwards the complaint to a university disciplinary panel that may be composed of, for example, an associate dean with a master's degree in English literature, a professor of chemistry, and a senior majoring in anthropology. Unlike criminal prosecutors, members of the disciplinary panels do not have access to subpoena powers or to crime labs. They often have no experience in fact-finding, arbitration, conflict resolution, or any other relevant skill set. There is, to put it mildly, little reason to expect such panels to have the experience, expertise, and resources necessary to adjudicate a contested claim of sexual assault.
Making matters worse, most campus tribunals ban attorneys for the parties (even in an advisory capacity), rules of procedure and evidence are typically ad hoc, and no one can consult precedents because records of previous disputes are sealed due to privacy considerations. Campus "courts" therefore have an inherently kangoorish nature. Even trained police officers and prosecutors too often mishandle sexual assault cases, so it's not surprising that the amateurs running the show at universities tend to have a poor record. And indeed, some victims' advocacy groups, such as the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), oppose having the government further encourage the campus judicial system to primarily handle campus sexual assault claims, because that means not treating rape as a serious crime.
A logical solution, if federal intervention is indeed necessary, would be for OCR [US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights] to mandate that universities encourage students who complain of sexual assault to report the assault immediately to the police, and that universities develop procedures to cooperate with police investigations. Concerns about victims' well-being when prosecutors decline to pursue a case could also be adjudicated in a real court, as a student could seek a civil protective order against her alleged assailant. OCR could have mandated or encouraged universities to cooperate with those civil proceedings, which in some cases might warrant excluding an alleged assailant from campus.
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David E. Bernstein (Lawless: The Obama Administration's Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law)
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When you present something in writing to a vast group of audiences that has an obscured meaning to it, it means that you are trying to delude your readers from figuring out your actual idea. This kind of act can jeopardize other peoples' life and someone who has a distinguished intelligence can eventually intervene your actions and you could face civil or criminal allegations for fraud because this kind of behavior is considered as a serious offense.
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Saaif Alam
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A number of studies show that immigrants generally have a lower level of criminal activity and incarceration than the general population, even when income and education levels are considered.3
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Dale Hanson Bourke (Immigration: Tough Questions, Direct Answers (The Skeptic's Guide Series))
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A criminal record today authorizes precisely the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind—discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service. Those labeled criminals can even be denied the right to vote.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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But the alternative is the return to power of Labour. This is the party which did more than any other to wreck Britain with its obsession with borrowing and wasting our money on its public-sector paymasters; its policy of diluting our national identity by allowing uncontrolled immigration; its attempts to destroy the middle classes, which Labour loathed, by removing any excellence or aspiration from our education system while Labour politicians mostly sent their own children to private schools; and its pandering to the liberal elites through the introduction of human rights legislation which has made human rights lawyers wealthy, has protected criminals and has been used to persecute those who do try to obey the law.
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David Craig (GREED UNLIMITED: How Cameron and Clegg protect the elites while squeezing the rest of us)
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The happiest have found adult achievement arenas that do engage them, occasionally through the luck of good early choices, sometimes by leaving worn paths, and most often through exploring themselves and careers with the help of guides and sponsors.
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Karen Arnold (Lives of Promise: What Becomes of High School Valedictorians: A Fourteen-year Study of Achievement and Life Choices (Jossey Bass Social and Behavioral Science Series))
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In an advanced, civilized country, a handful of men were able to gain for their criminal schemes the enthusiastic backing of millions of decent, educated, law-abiding citizens. What is the factor that made this possible?
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Leonard Peikoff (The Cause of Hitler's Germany)
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(KJV) King James Translation Important Facts An advantage of owning or reading a (KJV) King James Translation or Authorized Version, whether they are the older 1611 version or newer non-1611 version is that they are usually more accurate compared to many other bibles. They rank highly when translated from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek manuscripts. However all bible translations have many faults with the translation as does the King James Version which is not perfect by any means It’s a difficult task to master translation of hundreds of scrolls and manuscripts and compile them into a single book. With that being said, when choosing a bible you will usually have to choose between the lesser of the two evils, and it is always advised to have at least three translations if not more when you want to get a more accurate idea of what the writer is saying. One major disadvantage that the King James Bible (KJV) has is that the translators have replaced the holy names of The Almighty Creator and His Son, as many other translators have also done with other bible translations. This is never a good thing to do. To replace a proper noun or name, especially when it happens to be the name of our Heavenly Father or His Son our Messiah is a serious thing to consider changing. The bible clearly states in many verses to make His name “known” and proclaim it. It does not say to “change it” or to proclaim a different name. Our Opinion about Name Changes The reasons of why the translators chose to make these name changes is “not” something that we at Heavenly Publishers want to focus on. Instead, we prefer to educate readers of this fact, especially those that were not already aware of it and make suggestions as to how to fix this. Many translations around these days have this same issue and even other serious changes on top of this one. We would also like to encourage all readers to consider restoring the holy names of our Savior and Heavenly Father back into the bible and back into our reading and vocabulary. The example of how our Savior taught us to pray by starting out in prayer by acknowledging and revering the holy name of “Our Father” is something we should remember. The prayer starts out with the words, Our Father who art in Heaven, “Hallowed be Thy Name” and is a great example of how important and holy His name is. This word “hallow” means to render sacred and consider holy. So my question to you is can you imagine doing something like changing our Father’s holy name to something else? Never should this be done, but the translators of many bible versions have done this. The KJV is only one example of this spiritually criminal act. The people that have done this for whatever agendas they had will be held accountable and judged accordingly one day by their maker as He sees fit. It’s not our job to judge but to make others aware of this and hopefully reverse this wrongdoing.
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Heavenly Father (King James Bible for Kindle: KJV with All Word Search)
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Per me, se esiste il paradiso, dev'esserci assolutamente una tavola imbandita come quella del locale di zia Katja. Non osavamo bere alcol davanti a lei, per non darle dispiacere. Così bevevamo kompot, una specie di composta di frutta, una macedonia di mele, pesche, prugne, albicocche e mirtilli rossi e neri fatta bollire a lungo in un grosso pentolone. Si preparava d'estate, e per il resto dell'anno veniva conservato in bottiglioni da tre litri con un collo largo circa dieci centimetri, chiuso ermeticamente. Si teneva in fresco nelle cantine, poi andava riscaldato prima di berlo.
Ogni volta che zia Katja si allontanava, zio Kostič aggiungeva nei nostri bicchieri un po' di vodka facendoci l'occhiolino:
- Fate bene a non farvi vedere da lei...- Noi buttavamo giù obbedienti il misto di vodka e kompot, e lui rideva delle facce che facevamo subito dopo.
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Nicolai Lilin (Siberian Education: Growing Up in a Criminal Underworld)
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For educators, not providing a global context for your students in today’s world is almost criminal.
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Ben Green (The Global Superstar: How Your Students Can Develop An Advantage Over Global Competition)
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Yet, as Brandon explained with a mixture of bitterness and regret, college proved to be the start of a long series of disappointments. Unable to pass calculus or physics, he switched his major from engineering to criminal justice. Still optimistic, he applied to several police departments upon graduation, excited about a future of “catching crooks.” The first department used a bewildering lottery system for hiring, and he didn’t make the cut. The second informed him that he had failed a mandatory spelling test (“I had a degree!”) and refused to consider his application. Finally, he became “completely turned off to this idea” when the third department disqualified him because of a minor incident in college in which he and his roommate “borrowed” a school-owned buffing machine as a harmless prank. Because he “could have been charged with a felony,” the department informed him, he was ineligible for police duty. Regrettably, his college had no record of the incident. Brandon had volunteered the information out of a desire to illustrate his honest and upstanding character and improve his odds of getting the job. With “two dreams deferred,”2 Brandon took a job as the nightshift manager of a clothing chain, hoping it would be temporary. Eleven years later, he describes his typical day, which consists of unloading shipments, steaming and pricing garments, and restocking the floor, as “not challenging at all. I don’t get to solve problems or be creative. I don’t get to work with numbers, and I am a numbers guy. I basically babysit a team and deal with personnel.” When his loans came out of deferment, he couldn’t afford the monthly payments and decided to get a master’s degree—partly to increase his earning potential and partly to put his loans back into deferment. After all, it had been “hammered into his head” that higher education was the key to success. He put on twenty-five pounds while working and going to school full-time for three years. He finally earned a master’s degree in government, paid for with more loans from “that mean lady Sallie Mae.”3 So far, Brandon has still not found a job that will pay him enough to cover his monthly loan and living expenses. He has managed to keep the loans in deferment by continually consolidating—a strategy that costs him $5,000 a year in interest. Taking
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Jennifer M. Silva (Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty)
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The progressives are right that there is no way Gates can spend $50 billion on himself. He can only eat three meals a day and wear one set of clothes at a time. Even his heirs can be provided for with a fraction of that amount. Gates actually knows this. He has vowed to give away most of his fortune to charity. Nor is he waiting for death to do this. He has already given away billions. He buys mosquito nets for people in poor countries so that they don’t get malaria. He invests in medical research. He funds educational projects in America and abroad.
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Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
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It would be up to FBI profilers and the investigative support unit at Quantico, Virginia, to penetrate this criminal’s mind. John Douglas pioneered behavioral profiling for the FBI. He and others developed the investigative tool from over 25 years of interviews with convicted killers, arsonists, rapists, and bombers. John Douglas: “When someone asks for a profile, what they are looking for are characteristics which include a gender, age, race, sometimes body typing, educational level, and occupational type.
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John Humphrey (Killer Files: Abduction & Murder in South Carolina)
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Most people just aren’t very talkative during the delicate tango that precedes sex, and the re-education required to make them more forthcoming would be a very big project. Nor are people unerringly good at decoding sexual signals. If they were, we wouldn’t have romantic comedies. “If there’s no social consensus about what the lines are,” says Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and a retired judge, then affirmative consent “has no business being in the criminal law.
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Anonymous
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Often thought of as “finishing schools” for criminals, prisons offer very little in the way of reform but much in the way of a graduate education in criminality. In fact, a study by Ohio University showed that “individuals with an incarceration history earn significantly higher annual illegal earnings than those who do not have such a history, bringing in on average an additional $11,000 per year of illicit income.” Just as college improves the earning potential of those working in the lawful economy, so too does the graduate education received behind bars.
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Marc Goodman (Future Crimes)
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The advantages of using account of the legal defense DUI professional
According to a DUI or DWI they have very high values, and can be much more difficult, if not able to qualified lawyer in these types of services.
It important to get the services of professionals who are familiar with the course of DUI criminal record because the team is almost certainly best, highest paid on the common law also working for many years in a row, and he is almost certain that the officials involved to enforce the law and choose the most effective way. The consumption can peak at promoting the method of blood flow to help ease and the minimum number of punches than likely. Even if you do not want the removal of a fence of a demo, it is deliberately allowed to produce only for the ingredients so suddenly that the interest will be at least in his imprisonment and the decision of the necessary business expense.
Education Lawyer, worth DUI, because they understand the rules on the details of the DUI. Great leadership only recognizes attorneys who offer surgery that seemed to bend the lowest possible cost. Field sobriety tests are defense without success, and when the lawyer to provide classroom-oriented, to the surprise of identifying the brain decides what industry breathalyzer sobriety vote or still under investigation.
Trying to fight against DUI private value, it may be impossible for the layman is that much of the Berufsrecht did. DUI lawyer can be a file with the management consultants can be used or deny the accuracy of the successful management of blood or urine witnesses. Almost always one day, you can not help learning tool. If there is a case where the amount, solid, is the legal adviser to shock and other consultants witnesses are willing to cut portions and finds out she has some tire testing and influence. Being part of the time, problems with eating problems and more experience DUI attorney in looks secrets and created.
The idea that the lawyer is suddenly more than the end result of controlling historical significance of countless people do not share the court made. It very appropriate, qualified, but two at the end of every little thing that you do not agree even repentance and uses for what was happening right opportunity. It can not be argued, perhaps, costs, what seems to be one that includes many just go to the airport to record driving under the influence, but their professional experience and meetings, both issues related to diversity, Lange random taxation measures. Many people today claim that the market is in DUI cases, of course, exhausted, and are a lawyer, go to their rights in the region.
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DWI Lawyer
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What deserves a bigger punishment—someone with a college education who knowingly helps a gangster or a terrorist open a bank account? Or a high school dropout who falls asleep on the F train? The new America says it’s the latter. It’s come around to that point of view at the end of a long evolutionary process, in which the rule of law has slowly been replaced by giant idiosyncratic bureaucracies that are designed to criminalize failure, poverty, and weakness on the one hand, and to immunize strength, wealth, and success on the other.
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Matt Taibbi (The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap)
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Therefore, perhaps Black citizenship would need to occur in stages: first, Black control of the police in their communities and Black control of all their criminal justice system (Black political prisoners would be released immediately and most Black prisoners—nearly all of whom are, in fact, political prisoners as well—would be freed or given new trials); second, Black control over where their taxes go; third, Black control over the education of their children; fourth, Black control over the rebuilding of housing and infrastructure in their communities; fifth, Black control over sources of food and healthcare. None of this will be easy; but Black people have never had it easy in this country. I imagine this would be a challenge welcomed by many Black people whose talents and energies could be channeled into building their own community for their own benefit and not merely to survive white supremacy.
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Samantha Foster (an experiment in revolutionary expression: by samantha j foster)
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The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason but no morals…We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
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Erin Osborne (What They Don't Teach You)
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Anglos dominated the prisoner population in 1977 and did not lose their plurality until 1988. Meanwhile, absolute numbers grew across the board—with the total number of those incarcerated approximately doubling during each interval. African American prisoners surpassed all other groups in 1988, but by 1995, they had been overtaken by Latinos; however, Black people have the highest rate of incarceration of any racial/ethnic grouping in California, or, for that matter, in the United States (see also Bonczar and Beck 1997). TABLE 4 CDC PRISONER POPULATION BY RACE/ETHNICITY The structure of new laws, intersecting with the structure of the burgeoning relative surplus population, and the state’s concentrated use of criminal laws in the Southland, produced a remarkable racial and ethnic shift in the prison population. Los Angeles is the primary county of commitment. Most prisoners are modestly educated men in the prime of life: 88 percent are between 19 and 44 years old. Less than 45 percent graduated from high school or read at the ninth-grade level; one in four is functionally illiterate. And, finally, the percentage of prisoners who worked six months or longer for the same employer immediately before being taken into custody has declined, from 54.5 percent in 1982 to 44 percent in 2000 (CDC, Characteristics of Population, various years). TABLE 5 CDC COMMITMENTS BY CONTROLLING OFFENSE (%) At the bottom of the first and subsequent waves of new criminal legislation lurked a key contradiction. On the one hand, the political rhetoric, produced and reproduced in the media, concentrated on the need for laws and prisons to control violence. “Crime” and “violence” seemed to be identical. However, as table 5 shows, there was a significant shift in the controlling (or most serious) offenses for those committed to the CDC, from a preponderance of violent offenses in 1980 to nonviolent crimes in 1995. More to the point, the controlling offenses for more than half of 1995’s commitments were nonviolent crimes of illness or of illegal income producing activity: drug use, drug sales, burglary, motor vehicle theft. The outcome of the first two years of California’s broadly written “three strikes” law presents a similar picture: in the period March 1994–January 1996, 15 percent of controlling offenses were violent crimes, 31 percent were drug offenses, and 41 percent were crimes against property (N = 15,839) (Christoper Davis et al. 1996). The relative surplus population comes into focus in these numbers. In 1996, 43 percent of third-strike prisoners were Black, 32.4 percent Latino, and 24.6 percent Anglo. The deliberate intensification of surveillance and arrest in certain areas, combined with novel crimes of status, drops the weight of these numbers into particular places. The chair of the State Task Force on Youth Gang Violence expressed the overlap between presumptions of violence and the exigencies of everyday reproduction when he wrote: “We are talking about well-organized, drug-dealing, dangerously armed and profit-motivated young hoodlums who are engaged in the vicious crimes of murder, rape, robbery, extortion and kidnapping as a means of making a living” (Philibosian 1986: ix; emphasis added).
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (American Crossroads Book 21))
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Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.1 Cotton’s story illustrates, in many respects, the old adage “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” In each generation, new tactics have been used for achieving the same goals—goals shared by the Founding Fathers. Denying African Americans citizenship was deemed essential to the formation of the original union. Hundreds of years later, America is still not an egalitarian democracy. The arguments and rationalizations that have been trotted out in support of racial exclusion and discrimination in its various forms have changed and evolved, but the outcome has remained largely the same. An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history. They are also subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service, just as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents once were. What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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It does not matter that the 'intentions' of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, 'intend' for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense - ignore the heat and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream. No one directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction. But a great number of educators spoke of 'personal responsibility' in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
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To grasp the significance of these numbers, we should note that for most disadvantaged groups today “the criminal justice system increasingly is the main provider of health care, substance abuse treatment, mental health services, job training, education, and other critical social and economic supports. . . .”[31]
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Mark Lewis Taylor (The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America)
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Congressman Ryan is a strong advocate for greater mindfulness in health care as well as in other important areas such as education, the military, and criminal justice. In his book, he makes a very strong case for why we need greater mindfulness in these and other areas of our society.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn (Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness)
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What would you do if you faced a candidate who took a traditional moral stance on the social and cultural issues? They would not be mean-spirited and, for example, blame gay people for the breakdown of the family, nor would they criminalize the choices of desperate women backed into difficult and dangerous corners. But the candidate would decidedly be pro-family, pro-life (meaning really want to lower the abortion rate), strong on personal responsibility and moral values, and outspoken against the moral pollution throughout popular culture that makes raising children in America a countercultural activity. And what if that candidate was also an economic populist, pro-poor in social policy, tough on corporate corruption and power, clear in supporting middle- and working-class families in health care and education, an environmentalist, and committed to a foreign policy that emphasized international law and multilateral cooperation over preemptive and unilateral war? What would you do?” I asked. He paused for a long time and then said, “We would panic!
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Jim Wallis (God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It)
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For progressives, Obamacare was a prize. The prize was control of the huge American health care system, representing virtually one-sixth of the whole economy. Obamacare put progressives in charge of more than 10 million doctors, dentists, pharmacists, nurses, and technicians and support staff. Obamacare gave progressives control of more than five thousand hospitals and almost a million hospital beds. The system included hospitals and also drug companies, insurance companies, and the producers of hospital equipment, not to mention research and educational institutions. Obamacare was a heist with a very big payoff.
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Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
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In sum, progressives have set up a triangular alliance of envy—made up of academics, media types, and community and political activists—all seeking to broker the envy of ordinary citizens into economic and power gains for themselves. This coalition isn’t perfect—as the Gruber example shows—but for the most part, it works. It works because the left controls the education sector as well as the megaphones that transmit political information to the American people. The con men, one may say, have taken over the mainstream organs of society.
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Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
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Reformists and Capacianists definitely believe in their own ideologies. I mean, we even made names for those movements. However, both of us— and yes, I admit that us Reformists do it, too—have not directed our potentials to acknowledge one another’s capabilities. I swear, I will try to change the name Reformation, and hopefully, Capacianists won’t replicate the same intolerance we showed them in the past. You know what? I wouldn’t be surprised if the person who suggested the enforcement of African education bans and the Triangular Slave Trade to the Museum of Recreation did this because of intolerance. I mean, in 2999, rights for people of color were so intense that gaining rights for people of color meant diminishing the rights of Caucasians! Everyone had this preconceived notion that Caucasians were racists, and they even arrested Caucasians simply by alleging that they were being racist without even giving them a fair trial, which is like the equivalent of wrongfully accusing Black people of being criminals. I am saying this as a person of color! If only Reformists will tolerate Capacianists, Capacianists will tolerate Reformists, and people of all races and colors will tolerate one another!
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Lucy Carter (The Reformation)
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They [i.e., freed slaves] lived in an atmosphere of extreme hostility and suspicion, with the status of “outlaws,” in the oldest meaning of that term—which did not originally mean “criminals,” but people outside the protection of the law. They could not get justice; they and their relatives were murdered while the killers went free; their right to marry whom they chose was abrogated; by force and violence they lost the right to vote; and when they sought to improve their lot through education, their teachers were threatened and a schoolhouse was destroyed.
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Henry Wiencek (The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White)
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But 2018 broke the pattern. Record turnout occurred across the country to elect governors, state legislators, and those running for federal office. The national sea change occurred in part due to a surge of interest in state and local politics caused by greater demand from constituents. State lawmakers have more of an impact on the daily lives of voters of color and the marginalized than Congress ever likely will. Just as they set the law overseeing the right to vote, they also determine criminal justice, health care access, housing policy, educational equity, and transportation. Governors set budgets, sign bills, and implement these ideas. Secretaries of state act as superintendents of election law, but in many states they also manage access for small businesses and a host of administrative duties invisible to citizens until the policies go awry. Attorneys general serve as the chief law enforcement arm of the state, determining statewide matters that can have local impact.
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Stacey Abrams (Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America)
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Abortion was another flashpoint, but we aligned in striving for a world in which pregnancy could be almost always a cause for celebration. We advocated for health care for all Americans, especially women who often lacked the care they needed to plan pregnancies and get the maternity care they needed. And we worked to end pregnancy discrimination, raise the minimum wage, and ensure access to health care and education. We agreed that criminalizing
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Jennifer Butler (Who Stole My Bible?: Reclaiming Scripture as a Handbook for Resisting Tyranny)
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The first stage is the roundup. Vast numbers of people are swept into the criminal justice system by the police, who conduct drug operations primarily in poor communities of color. They are rewarded in cash—through drug forfeiture laws and federal grant programs—for rounding up as many people as possible, and they operate unconstrained by constitutional rules of procedure that once were considered inviolate. Police can stop, interrogate, and search anyone they choose for drug investigations, provided they get “consent.” Because there is no meaningful check on the exercise of police discretion, racial biases are granted free rein. In fact, police are allowed to rely on race as a factor in selecting whom to stop and search (even though people of color are no more likely to be guilty of drug crimes than whites)—effectively guaranteeing that those who are swept into the system are primarily black and brown. The conviction marks the beginning of the second phase: the period of formal control. Once arrested, defendants are generally denied meaningful legal representation and pressured to plead guilty whether they are or not. Prosecutors are free to “load up” defendants with extra charges, and their decisions cannot be challenged for racial bias. Once convicted, due to the drug war’s harsh sentencing laws, people convicted of drug offenses in the United States spend more time under the criminal justice system’s formal control—in jail or prison, on probation or parole—than people anywhere else in the world. While under formal control, virtually every aspect of one’s life is regulated and monitored by the system, and any form of resistance or disobedience is subject to swift sanction. This period of control may last a lifetime, even for those convicted of extremely minor, nonviolent offenses, but the vast majority of those swept into the system are eventually released. They are transferred from their prison cells to a much larger, invisible cage. The final stage has been dubbed by some advocates as the “period of invisible punishment.”13 This term, first coined by Jeremy Travis, is meant to describe the unique set of criminal sanctions that are imposed on individuals after they step outside the prison gates, a form of punishment that operates largely outside of public view and takes effect outside the traditional sentencing framework. These sanctions are imposed by operation of law rather than decisions of a sentencing judge, yet they often have a greater impact on one’s life course than the months or years one actually spends behind bars. These laws operate collectively to ensure that the vast majority of people convicted of crimes will never integrate into mainstream, white society. They will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives—denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Unable to surmount these obstacles, most will eventually return to prison and then be released again, caught in a closed circuit of perpetual marginality.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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Two of the most sensible (one a forger, the other a kleptomaniac on an important scale) are friends of mine. They are fairly well educated, respectable city men, clean, solemn, stodgy, punctilious, and resigned, but they are both unhappy; not because they are cursed with the double brand of madness and crime, and have forfeited their freedom in consequence; but because they find there are so few "ladies and gentlemen" in a criminal lunatic asylum, and they have always been used to "the society of ladies and gentlemen." Were it not for this, they would be well content to live here. And each is in the habit of confiding to me that he considers the other a very high-minded, trustworthy fellow, and all that, but not altogether "quite a gentleman." I do not know what they consider me; they probably confide that to each other.
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George du Maurier (Trilby and Other Works)