Petty Post Quotes

I wasn't much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing.

Capitalism, far from affording "privileges" to the middle classes, tends to degrade them more abjectly than any other stratum in society. The system deploys its capacity for abundance to bring the petty bourgeois into complicity with his own oppression—first by turning him into a commodity, into an object for sale in the marketplace; next by assimilating his very wants to the commodity nexus. Tyrannized as he is by every vicissitude of bourgeois society, the whole personality of the petty bourgeois vibrates with insecurity. His soporifics—commodities and more commodities—are his very poison. In this sense there is nothing more oppressive than "privilege" today, for the deepest recesses of the "privileged" man's psyche are fair game for exploitation and domination.

No realm was too petty: The Ministry of Posts ruled that henceforth when trying to spell a word over the telephone a caller could no longer say “D as in David,” because “David” was a Jewish name. The caller had to use “Dora.” “Samuel” became “Siegfried.” And so forth. “There has been nothing in social history more implacable, more heartless and more devastating than the present policy in Germany against the Jews,” Consul General Messersmith told Undersecretary Phillips in a long letter dated September 29, 1933. He wrote, “It is definitely the aim of the Government, no matter what it may say to the outside or in Germany, to eliminate the Jews from German life.

Neighbors turned surly; petty jealousies flared into denunciations made to the SA—the Storm Troopers—or to the newly founded Geheime Staatspolizei, only just becoming known by its acronym, Gestapo (GEheime STAatsPOlizei), coined by a post office clerk seeking a less cumbersome way of identifying the agency. The Gestapo’s reputation for omniscience and malevolence arose from a confluence of two phenomena: first, a political climate in which merely criticizing the government could get one arrested, and second, the existence of a populace eager not just to step in line and become coordinated but also to use Nazi sensitivities to satisfy individual needs and salve jealousies. One study of Nazi records found that of a sample of 213 denunciations, 37 percent arose not from heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial. In October 1933, for example, the clerk at a grocery store turned in a cranky customer who had stubbornly insisted on receiving three pfennigs in change. The clerk accused her of failure to pay taxes. Germans denounced one another with such gusto that senior Nazi officials urged the populace to be more discriminating as to what circumstances might justify a report to the police. Hitler himself acknowledged, in a remark to his minister of justice, “we are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.

Ere long, however, the daemon was wrestling with him once more; he was seized by that “terrible spirit of unrest” which drove him “like the deluge, to the mountain peaks”. Shadows of gloom and discontent crept into his letters. He began to complain of his “dependent position”, and the forces at work within him soon became obvious. He could not endure regular occupation, could not bear to participate in the daily round of ordinary people. No existence other than that of a poet was acceptable. In this first crisis he probably failed to understand that the trouble sprang from the daemonism within him, from the jealous exclusiveness of the spirit that possessed him, making mundane relationships impossible. He still rationalised the immanent inflammability of his impulses by discovering objective causes for them. He spoke of his pupil’s stubbornness, of defects in the lad’s character which he, as tutor, was impotent to remedy. Hölderlin’s incapacity to meet the demands of everyday life was in this matter all too plain. The boy of nine had a stronger will than the man of twenty-five. The tutor resigned his post. Charlotte von Kalb, who was anything but obtuse, grasped the underlying truth. Wishing to console Johann Christian Friedrich’s mother, she wrote to the latter: “His spirit cannot stoop to these petty labours … or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he takes them too much to heart.

I always had trouble with the feet of Jón the First, or Pre-Jón, as I called him later. He would frequently put them in front of me in the evening and tell me to take off his socks and rub his toes, soles, heels and calves. It was quite impossible for me to love these Icelandic men's feet that were shaped like birch stumps, hard and chunky, and screaming white as the wood when the bark is stripped from it. Yes, and as cold and damp, too. The toes had horny nails that resembled dead buds in a frosty spring. Nor can I forget the smell, for malodorous feet were very common in the post-war years when men wore nylon socks and practically slept in their shoes. How was it possible to love these Icelandic men? Who belched at the meal table and farted constantly. After four Icelandic husbands and a whole load of casual lovers I had become a vrai connaisseur of flatulence, could describe its species and varieties in the way that a wine-taster knows his wines. The howling backfire, the load, the gas bomb and the Luftwaffe were names I used most. The coffee belch and the silencer were also well-known quantities, but the worst were the date farts, a speciality of Bæring of Westfjord. Icelandic men don’t know how to behave: they never have and never will, but they are generally good fun. At least, Icelandic women think so. They seem to come with this inner emergency box, filled with humour and irony, which they always carry around with them and can open for useful items if things get too rough, and it must be a hereditary gift of the generations. Anyone who loses their way in the mountains and gets snowed in or spends the whole weekend stuck in a lift can always open this special Icelandic emergency box and get out of the situation with a good story. After wandering the world and living on the Continent I had long tired of well-behaved, fart-free gentlemen who opened the door and paid the bills but never had a story to tell and were either completely asexual or demanded skin-burning action until the morning light. Swiss watch salesmen who only knew of “sechs” as their wake-up hour, or hairy French apes who always required their twelve rounds of screwing after the six-course meal. I suppose I liked German men the best. They were a suitable mixture of belching northerner and cultivated southerner, of orderly westerner and crazy easterner, but in the post-war years they were of course broken men. There was little you could do with them except try to put them right first. And who had the time for that? Londoners are positive and jolly, but their famous irony struck me as mechanical and wearisome in the long run. As if that irony machine had eaten away their real essence. The French machine, on the other hand, is fuelled by seriousness alone, and the Frogs can drive you beyond the limit when they get going with their philosophical noun-dropping. The Italian worships every woman like a queen until he gets her home, when she suddenly turns into a slut. The Yank is one hell of a guy who thinks big: he always wants to take you the moon. At the same time, however, he is as smug and petty as the meanest seamstress, and has a fit if someone eats his peanut butter sandwich aboard the space shuttle. I found Russians interesting. In fact they were the most Icelandic of all: drank every glass to the bottom and threw themselves into any jollity, knew countless stories and never talked seriously unless at the bottom of the bottle, when they began to wail for their mother who lived a thousand miles away but came on foot to bring them their clean laundry once a month. They were completely crazy and were better athletes in bed than my dear countrymen, but in the end I had enough of all their pommel-horse routines. Nordic men are all as tactless as Icelanders. They get drunk over dinner, laugh loudly and fart, eventually start “singing” even in public restaurants where people have paid to escape the tumult of

After wandering the world and living on the Continent I had long tired of well-behaved, fart-free gentlemen who opened the door and paid the bills but never had a story to tell and were either completely asexual or demanded skin-burning action until the morning light. Swiss watch salesmen who only knew of “sechs” as their wake-up hour, or hairy French apes who always required their twelve rounds of screwing after the six-course meal. I suppose I liked German men the best. They were a suitable mixture of belching northerner and cultivated southerner, of orderly westerner and crazy easterner, but in the post-war years they were of course broken men. There was little you could do with them except try to put them right first. And who had the time for that? Londoners are positive and jolly, but their famous irony struck me as mechanical and wearisome in the long run. As if that irony machine had eaten away their real essence. The French machine, on the other hand, is fuelled by seriousness alone, and the Frogs can drive you beyond the limit when they get going with their philosophical noun-dropping. The Italian worships every woman like a queen until he gets her home, when she suddenly turns into a slut. The Yank is one hell of a guy who thinks big: he always wants to take you the moon. At the same time, however, he is as smug and petty as the meanest seamstress, and has a fit if someone eats his peanut butter sandwich aboard the space shuttle. I found Russians interesting. In fact they were the most Icelandic of all: drank every glass to the bottom and threw themselves into any jollity, knew countless stories and never talked seriously unless at the bottom of the bottle, when they began to wail for their mother who lived a thousand miles away but came on foot to bring them their clean laundry once a month. They were completely crazy and were better athletes in bed than my dear countrymen, but in the end I had enough of all their pommel-horse routines. Nordic men are all as tactless as Icelanders. They get drunk over dinner, laugh loudly and fart, eventually start “singing” even in public restaurants where people have paid to escape the tumult of the world. But their wallets always waited cold sober in the cloakroom while the Icelandic purse lay open for all in the middle of the table. Our men were the greater Vikings in this regard. “Reputation is king, the rest is crap!” my Bæring from Bolungarvík used to say. Every evening had to be legendary, anything else was a defeat. But the morning after they turned into weak-willed doughboys. But all the same I did succeed in loving them, those Icelandic clodhoppers, at least down as far as their knees. Below there, things did not go as well. And when the feet of Jón Pre-Jón popped out of me in the maternity ward, it was enough. The resemblances were small and exact: Jón’s feet in bonsai form. I instantly acquired a physical intolerance for the father, and forbade him to come in and see the baby. All I heard was the note of surprise in the bass voice out in the corridor when the midwife told him she had ordered him a taxi. From that day on I made it a rule: I sacked my men by calling a car. ‘The taxi is here,’ became my favourite sentence.

A: The unkind things these girls are saying about your friend Ashley are based on jealousy and have nothing to do with Ashley herself. I understand why you feel it might be right to tell Ashley about these attacks. Life Principle #1, “Do No Harm,” sometimes means that we have to get involved and prevent harm to others. In this situation, however, the right thing to do is to speak up when you hear these insults—and leave it at that. Here’s why. First, the reason many of us get away with doing or saying things we shouldn’t is because no one else tells us to stop. You may have heard the saying, “Silence is consent.” Even if you’re not actively joining in on the “fun” the other girls are having, remaining silent and not challenging them sends the message that what they’re doing is okay with you. But it’s not, and that’s why you should speak up. Second, Ashley almost certainly would not want to know that a few people are speaking ill of her, so telling her wouldn’t honor your duty to treat her with respect (Life Principle #3). In fact, repeating the slurs would hurt her feelings and thus violate Life Principle #1, “Do No Harm.” Of course, if Ashley has told you that she would like a full report whenever anyone talks trash about her, that’s one thing, but most people with any degree of self-respect have no interest in hearing the petty things that are said about them. So how should you handle the situation? It would be both self-defeating and a violation of Life Principle #1 to respond with the same kind of mean remarks you’re hearing or to post negative comments on your social networking site. As tempting as it might be to take the low road, you’re much better off taking the high road and leading by example. Saying something like, “Ashley is my friend, and I wish you wouldn’t say those things about her,” is a good way to stick up for your friend and not add to the nastiness. Dealing with the problem this way will show that you’re a person of integrity, and you’ll have every reason to feel good about that.

Freedom of the press is not to be taken for granted. The threat is real. Journalists are bullied and harassed in many countries, and even imprisoned and killed. The assassination of the Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian consulate of Istanbul is only a most recent and spectacular example of the violence and censure directed toward the press by authoritarians around the world. We have been here before. The story that follows shows how the light of truth went out in Germany and across all of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. And it shows how a handful of incredibly brave individuals at a small newspaper in Bavaria—the Munich Post—fought to keep that light alive.

There were also numerous newspapers owned and run by political parties, such as the Nazis’ poisonous Der Angriff (The Attack) and Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer) and the Communist Party’s Die Rote Fahne (Red Flag). Reflective of its times, the Munich Post (Münchener Post in German) did not pretend to be a neutral newspaper. It was owned by the Social Democratic Party and espoused the party’s socialist ideals. The Social Democrats’ principal newspaper, based in Berlin, was Vorwärts (Forwards). The Social Democrats had other papers as well, including the Munich Post.

While the Munich Post was not the only German newspaper to go after Hitler, its presence in the birthplace of the Nazi movement—coupled with the astonishing tenacity of its staff—put it in a position to break news about these rabid anti-Semites and their power-hungry leader. Journalistic standards practiced by the Post—but also by other newspapers—would not pass muster among today’s respected practitioners of the profession. A fair number of rumors made their way onto the pages of the Munich Post. And while the paper justified its aggressive coverage of a huge story it broke in 1931—revelations that Sturmabteilung chief Ernst Röhm was a homosexual—by attacking the hypocrisy of the fanatically anti-gay Nazis, the homophobic-seeming tone of some of the Post’s reporting can be jarring to modern readers. Still, it would be a mistake to judge the Post by the standards of contemporary journalism. The times were vastly different, as were customs in newspaper reporting.

If the Post’s editors were alive today, they would no doubt defend their style of journalism thusly: there was no greater threat to German democracy in the Weimar era than Adolf Hitler. They recognized it and set out to stop him. So much of what appeared on the pages of the Post ultimately played out after Hitler came to power. In the grand scheme of things, the editors of the Munich Post got it right.

It is hard not to admire the gutsiness of this little paper, which was often a lone voice—certainly one of the loudest—in defending German democracy. It invited the wrath and fury of Hitler. It provoked him. It taunted him. And although the editors were adherents of a political point of view—that of the anti-Hitler Social Democrats—they were also firm believers that the Weimar Republic’s democratic principles were worth fighting for. The editors of the Munich Post, Martin Gruber, Edmund Goldschagg, Erhard Auer, and Julius Zerfass, were certainly not the only journalists of the Weimar Republic who deserve to be singled out for their courage as Hitler plotted paths to power.

Another Munich-based journalist, Fritz Gerlich, made the ultimate sacrifice in his pursuit of Hitler. Editor of the newspaper Der gerade Weg (The Straight Path), Gerlich was one of Hitler’s fiercest critics. He was arrested after Hitler came to power and murdered in the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich. “We Will Not Be Intimidated,” the Munich Post said in a front-page headline a few days before storm troopers ransacked and shut down its offices in March 1933. Whatever the Munich Post’s faults, that headline should be the rallying cry of journalists around the globe whose work is threatened by those who place accumulating and wielding authoritarian power above the defense of citizens’ rights.

The Walther pistol, like the luxury apartment, belonged to Nazi Party leader, Adolf Hitler, uncle of the deceased. Munich police quickly ruled her death a suicide. But a scrappy newspaper called the Munich Post grew suspicious.

Citing “informed sources,” the newspaper reported that Hitler and Geli argued constantly over the half niece’s intention to move out of her uncle’s apartment and get engaged to a man in Vienna. According to the Post, on September 18 there was “once again a violent quarrel” between them, and the Nazi leader left the apartment. The Post said what provoked Geli to shoot herself was not known, but the newspaper insinuated a cover-up by Nazi officials. The “mysterious affair,” as the Post called it, triggered an avalanche of speculation.

Much of it was salacious, suggesting, for example, that Hitler had had an illicit relationship with his half niece and she was desperate to end it. Hitler was furious over the Post’s reporting. He issued a statement vehemently denying that he and his half niece had quarreled or that he opposed her traveling to Vienna.

British elections are mean-spirited and meretricious affairs that reveal what the country has become in its post-imperial form. In them, the focus flits between mercenary discussion of what the government is going to give the people and petty bickering over inconsequential details such as which schools the candidates went to and how much money they have. Few principles are at stake because classical liberalism is largely dead, so debates ultimately boil down to the question of who is going to run the welfare system more efficiently. The candidates’ arguments are full of nebulous, slippery words, such as 'fairness' and 'investment' — and the never-ending substitution of the word 'community' for “government.” You would never hear Kennedy’s famous 'Ask not what your country can do for you' line in a British political context because nobody would understand what he was talking about.

Interestingly, when illustrating what he means by friction, Clausewitz does not use a military example at all, but chooses instead to describe a man setting out on a journey: Imagine a traveler who decides toward the evening to cover a further two stages on his day’s journey, some four or five hours’ ride with post-horses along the main highway; nothing very much. Then when he comes to the first stage he discovers that there are no horses, or only poor ones; then a mountainous area and ruined tracks; it gets dark, and after all his trials he is mightily pleased to reach the final stage and get some miserable roof over his head. So it is that in war, through an accumulation of innumerable petty circumstances which could never be taken into account on paper, everything deteriorates and you find that you are far from achieving your goal.16

I wasn’t much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing.

Punishments were severe, their harshness underscored by the fact that they were written in blood. At the very least, petty thieves were beaten with whips. Those convicted of stealing property...routinely lost an army or a leg. the most serious offenders were tied to a post, where, as it was stipulated, 'his body shall be taken as a target,' with arrows.

Undoubtedly, the Classic Maya artistic tradition is magnificent, one of the greatest the world has ever seen. By comparison, artistic products from the ‘Post-Classic’ – as the period from roughly AD 900 to 1520 is known – often seem clumsy and less worthy of appreciation. On the other hand, how many of us would really prefer to live under the arbitrary power of a petty warlord who, for all his patronage of fine arts, counts tearing the hearts out of living human bodies among his most significant accomplishments? Of course, history is not usually thought about in such terms, and it is worth asking why.

Journalistic standards practiced by the Post—but also by other newspapers—would not pass muster among today’s respected practitioners of the profession.

rumors made their way onto the pages of the Munich Post. And while the paper justified its aggressive coverage of a huge story it broke in 1931—revelations that Sturmabteilung chief Ernst Röhm was a homosexual

it would be a mistake to judge the Post by the standards of contemporary journalism.

there was no greater threat to German democracy in the Weimar era than Adolf Hitler. They recognized it and set out to stop him. So much of what appeared on the pages of the Post ultimately played out after Hitler came to power. In the grand scheme of things, the editors of the Munich Post got it right.

We Will Not Be Intimidated,” the Munich Post said in a front-page headline a few days before storm troopers ransacked and shut down its offices in March 1933. Whatever the Munich Post’s faults, that headline should be the rallying cry of journalists around the globe whose work is threatened by those who place accumulating and wielding authoritarian power above the defense of citizens’ rights.

Of all the German newspapers that voiced criticism of the Nazis, none got under Hitler’s skin the way the Munich Post did.

she was mostly steamed about how I’d portrayed my conversation with the Amtrak gate agent in Atlanta. She thought that my account fit in too closely with the white-male capitalist hierarchical construct of Amtrak as a failure of central planning, and that I should have tried to advance a narrative more consistent with both social realism and the need for additional Amtrak funding. I tried to explain to her that I’d written the blog post based on what actually happened, which got me a lecture on the difference between objectivity and advocacy in the pursuit of social justice for the downtrodden proletariat. “But she wasn’t a proletarian,” I said. “If anything, she was petty-bourgeois.” I got a long lecture after that about mystification and revolutionary sentiment and code-switching, which I wish I had recorded now because it would have made for an awesome episode of that NPR podcast everyone is listening to.

The Nazis and their friends had been defeated, but in view of the scale of their crimes this was obviously not enough. If post-war governments' legitimacy rested merely on their military victory over Fascism, how were they better than the wartime Fascist regimes themselves? It was important to define the latter's activities as crimes and punish them accordingly. There was good legal and political reasoning behind this. But the desire for retribution also addressed a deeper need. For most Europeans WWII was experienced not as a war of movement and battle but as a daily degradation, in the course of which men and women were betrayed and humiliated, forced into daily acts of petty crime and self-abasement, in which everyone lost something and many lost everything.

captions of every Chad the Dog Instagram post with “Look, a loyal Chad!” Chad laughs it all off, but Hope is upset and says I should rename the dog. Chad’s mom agrees and says I’m not allowed to come over until I change the name, which kind of sucks because she’s my mom’s best friend and I end up there a lot for family stuff. I’m still not doing it. Am I petty? Yes. But am I the asshole?

The explosion and sinking of K-129 approximately 360 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor was recorded on the continuous printout at a Navy SOSUS listening post. The naval station monitoring the hydrophones actually picked up the sound of three blasts. Recordings from hydrophones arrayed along the Hawaiian Leeward Islands produced three blips, probably resulting from the discharge of the plastic explosives in the warhead trigger on the first missile, the ignition of its volatile rocket fuel, and the explosion of the second missile. These minor blips may have roused the curiosity of a petty officer at the SOSUS monitoring station, but when nothing suspicious followed, they were ignored at the time.

I wasn't much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing