“
Imagine 4 years.
Four years, two suicides, one death, one rape, two pregnancies (one abortion), three overdoses, countless drunken antics, pantsings, spilled food, theft, fights, broken limbs, turf wars–every day, a turf war–six months until graduation and no one gets a medal when they get out. But everything you do here counts.
High school.
”
”
Courtney Summers (Cracked Up to Be)
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Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.
”
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Iain Banks (Matter)
“
Louie was furious at the sharks. He had thought that they had an understanding:The men would stay out of the sharks' turf - the water - and the sharks would stay off of theirs - the raft. That the sharks had taken shots at him when he had gone overboard, and when the raft had been mostly submerged after the strafing, had seemed fair enough. But their attempt to poach men from their reinflated raft struck Louie as dirty pool. He stewed all night, scowled hatefully at the sharks all day, and eventually made a decision. if the sharks were going to try to eat him, he was going to try to eat them.
”
”
Laura Hillenbrand (Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption)
“
The true mind can weather all the lies and illusions without being lost. The true heart can tough the poison of hatred without being harmed. Though darkness thrives in the void, it always yields to purifying light.
”
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Michael Dante DiMartino (The Legend of Korra: Turf Wars, Part Two (The Legend of Korra: Turf Wars, #2))
“
The efforts spent on defending our turf in the culture wars could be better served on loving our neighbor as ourselves.
”
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Allen Yeh (Still Evangelical? Ten Insiders Reconsider Political, Social, and Theological Meaning)
“
Now there’s us, staking out our piece of cinematic turf (might be small but
it’s ours). And the music has to fit the vision as specifically as it did for [Star Wars and The Matrix.] OUR music comes from THEIR music, this scrappled bunch. It is spare, intimate, mournful and indefatigable.
”
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Joss Whedon (Serenity: The Official Visual Companion)
“
Candor, collaboration, and cooperation are almost impossible to establish in environments where turf wars and one-upsmanship exist.
”
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Judith E. Glaser (Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust & Get Extraordinary Results)
“
The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideologues, dogmatists, and bullies—people who think that their rightness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to subscribe to their particular ideology, dogma, or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later, by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them.
”
”
Louis Menand (The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America)
“
Masses of warring men animated the horizon, crashing into stubborn ranks, churning in melee. The air didn’t so much thunder as hiss with the sound of distant battle, like a sea heard through a conch shell, Martemus thought—an angry sea. Winded, he watched the first of Conphas’s assassins stride up behind Prince Kellhus, raise his short-sword …
There was an impossible moment—a sharp intake of breath.
The Prophet simply turned and caught the descending blade between his thumb and forefinger. “No,” he said, then swept around, knocking the man to the turf with an unbelievable kick. Somehow the assassin’s sword found its way into his left hand. Still crouched, the Prophet drove it down through the assassin’s throat, nailing him to the turf.
A mere heartbeat had passed.
”
”
R. Scott Bakker (The Warrior Prophet (The Prince of Nothing, #2))
“
Yeah, I’m a classy guy.” Ranger scooped up a handful of popcorn. “A little girl’s life is at stake. That doesn’t leave much room for ego and turf wars.
”
”
Janet Evanovich (Twelve Sharp (Stephanie Plum, #12))
“
I thought about soccer in history, the inspiration for wars, truces, rampaging mobs. The game was a global passion, spherical ball, grass or turf, entire nations in spasms of elation or lament. But what kind of sport is it that disallows the use of players' hands, except for the goalkeeper? Hands are essential human tools, the things that grasp and hold, that make, take, carry, create. If soccer were an American invention, wouldn't some European intellectual maintain that our historically puritanical nature has compelled us to invent a game structured on anti-masturbatory principles?
”
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Don DeLillo (The Angel Esmeralda)
“
Protection
For gangs, clubs, and nations
Causing grief in human relations
It's a turf war on a global scale
I'd rather hear both sides of the tale
See, it's not about races
Just places, faces
Where your blood comes from
Is where your space is
I've seen the bright get duller
I'm not going to spend my life being a color.
”
”
Michael Jackson
“
However, if he really wanted to bust me, all he had to do was ask to see my schoolbooks. The front and back covers are the first place graffiti artists start to draw.
”
”
Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
“
She gives him a hurled brick wrapped up in a smile
”
”
Coco Solid (How to Loiter in a Turf War)
“
Right now, up those stairs, the lady behind the door, she's neutral territory. A shrine where you pilgrimage a thousand miles on your knees to pay tribute. Same as Jerusalem or some church. Special to white supremacists and Bloods, Crips, Ninjas, a lady who transcends turf wars for power. Who transcends race and nationality and family. Every man might hate every other man, outside of here we might all kill each other, but we all love her.
”
”
Chuck Palahniuk (Snuff)
“
IN THE 1960S, WHEN I became a beat cop in San Diego, manufacturing, selling, possessing, or using “dangerous drugs” or “controlled substances” were all violations of the law. But there was no “war,” per se, on drug-law violators. We made the occasional pot bust, less frequently a heroin or cocaine pinch. Drug enforcement was viewed by many of us almost as an ancillary duty. You’d stumble across an offender on a traffic stop or at a loud-party call. Mostly, you were on the prowl for non-drug-related crime: a gas station or liquor store stickup series, a burglary-fencing ring, an auto theft “chop shop” operation. Undercover narcs, of course, worked dope full time, chasing users and dealers. They played their snitches, sat on open-air markets, interrupted hand-to-hand dealing, and squeezed small-time street dealers in the climb up the chain to “Mister Big.” But because most local police forces devoted only a small percentage of personnel to French Connection–worthy cases, and because there were no “mandatory minimum” sentences (passed by Congress in 1986 to strip “soft on crime” judges of sentencing discretion on a host of drug offenses), and because street gangs fought over, well, streets—as in neighborhood turf (and cars and girlfriends)—not drug markets, most of our jails and prisons still had plenty of room for violent, predatory criminals. The point is, although they certainly did not turn their backs on drug offenses, the country’s police were not at “war” with users and dealers. And though their government-issued photos may have adorned the wall behind the police chief’s desk, a long succession of US presidents stayed out of the local picture.
”
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Norm Stamper (To Protect and Serve: How to Fix America's Police)
“
Giving these lil’ fellas a gun was important to keep the name of the Rebellions strong, because whenever the name drops, it’s only a matter of time before someone kicks your door in. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members
”
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Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
“
No, this wasn’t a 1960s student riot. Out there were the streets. There were no nice dorms for sleeping. No school cafeteria for certain food. No affluent parents to send us checks. There was a ghetto riot on home turf. We already had our war wounds. So this was just another battle. Nobody thought of it as history, herstory, my-story, your-story, or our-story. We were being denied a place to dance together. That’s all. The total charisma of a revolution in our CONSCIOUSNESS rising from the gutter to the gut to the heart and the mind was here. Non-existence (or part existence) was coming into being, and being into becoming. Our Mother Stonewall was giving birth to a new era and we were the midwives.
”
”
New York Public Library (The Stonewall Reader)
“
So out of the six major subcontractors who buy from us, there are two left? Man, that’s a turf war, right there.”
“And whoever’s pulling this shit is probably going to try to work his way up the food chain.” Trez spoke up. “Which is why iAm and I think you should have someone with you twenty-four/seven until this shit shakes out.”
Rehv seemed annoyed but he didn’t disagree. “We got any intel on who’s leaving all those bodies around?”
“Well, duh,” Trez said. “People think it’s you.”
“Not logical. Why would I kill off my own buyers?”
Now Rehv was the one getting the hairy eyeball from the peanut gallery.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “I’m not that bad. Well, okay, but only if someone fucks with me."
-Rehv & Trez
”
”
J.R. Ward (Lover Avenged (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #7))
“
... the United states is as safe as a convent, but the culture is addicted to violence. Proof of that is to be found in its sports, its games, its art, and, certainly, not least, its films, which are bloodcurdling. North Americans don't want violence in their lives, but they need to experience it indirectly. They are enchanted by war, as long as it's no on their turf.
”
”
Isabel Allende (My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile)
“
American politicians had done little through the years to stem the flood. Hispanic voters wanted their kinsmen to be able to enter the United States regardless of their ability to contribute to the economy or pay their own bills, yet this wasn’t the decisive factor. Farmers and small-business men wanted a source of cheap labor, and were content to pass the true costs, the social costs, on to the taxpayers. Generous public welfare programs also drew millions of Mexicans, more than small business or agriculture could possibly use. Even draining off an eighth of the population didn’t really help Mexico, which found itself racked by turf wars between vicious criminal gangs that smuggled drugs into the United States to supply the richest narcotics market in the world.
”
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Stephen Coonts (Liberty's Last Stand (Tommy Carmellini #7))
“
Given their relationship with the locals and their general enthusiasm level, Doherty and Byrne had been assigned to go through a bazillion hours of closed-circuit TV footage, looking for regular unexplained visitors to Glenskehy, but the cameras hadn’t been positioned with this in mind and the best they could come up with was that they were fairly sure no one had driven into or out of Glenskehy by a direct route between ten and two on the night of the murder. This made Sam start talking about the housemates again, which made Frank point out the multiple ways someone could have got to Glenskehy without being picked up on CCTV, which made Byrne get snippy about suits who swanned down from Dublin and wasted everyone’s time with pointless busywork. I got the sense that the incident room was blanketed by a dense, electric cloud of dead ends and turf wars and that nasty sinking feeling.
”
”
Tana French (The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad #2))
“
here is something that is impossible for anyone to believe. The human species has been in existence as Homo sapiens for (let us not quarrel about the exact total) at least one hundred and fifty thousand years. An instant in evolutionary time, this is nonetheless a vast history when contemplated by primates with brains and imaginations of the dimensions that we can boast. In order to subscribe to monotheistic religion, one must believe that humans were born, struggled, and expired during this time, often dying in childbirth or for want of elementary nurture, and with a life-expectancy of perhaps three decades at most. Add to these factors the turf wars between discrepant groups and tribes, alarming outbreaks of disease, which had no germ theory to explain let alone palliate them, and associated natural disasters and human tragedies. And yet, for all these millennia, heaven watched with indifference and then—and only in the last six thousand years at the very least—decided that it was time to intervene as well as redeem. And heaven would only intervene and redeem in remote areas of the Middle East, thus ensuring that many more generations would expire before the news could begin to spread! Let me send a voice to Sinai and cement a pact with just one tribe of dogged and greedy yokels. Let me lend a son to be torn to pieces because he is misunderstood. . . . Let me tell the angel Gabriel to prompt an illiterate and uncultured merchant into rhetorical flights. At last the darkness that I have imposed will lift! The willingness even to entertain such elaborately mad ideas involves much more than the suspension of disbelief, or the dumb credulity that greets magic tricks. It also involves ignoring or explaining away the many religious beliefs that antedated Moses.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever)
“
Through all of those different wars, we came to understand each other. The Mason’s fellas just wanted to chill in their area and be left alone. The Border Boys basically wanted the same thing. Stinky and Robert just wanted to be able to sell their drugs and make their money. But us, we were on a mission to take over the whole town. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members
”
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Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
“
tells us in Ephesians 1:20–21 that when God raised Jesus from the dead, “he seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion” (ESV). It was only after Christ had risen that God’s plan was “made known … to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph 3:10). These cosmic forces are “the rulers and the authorities” disarmed and put to shame by the cross (Col 2:15). The incident at Babel and God’s decision to disinherit the nations drew up the battle lines for a cosmic turf war for the planet. The corruption of the elohim sons of God set over the nations meant that Yahweh’s vision of a global Eden would be met with divine force. Every inch outside Israel would be contested, and Israel itself was fair game for hostile conquest. The gods would not surrender their inheritances back to Yahweh; he would have to reclaim them. God would take the first step in that campaign immediately after Babel.
”
”
Michael S. Heiser (The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible)
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You want to know who the strongest man in the Kabuki District is? You must be new in town. You won't last long with that attitude. Forget it. This town is on a whole different level. You got thugs, brawlers, vigilantes and rogue warriors from all over Edo here. It's like a haven for hooligans. This is for your own good. Have a drink and go back to the countryside. What's that? You want me to tell you about the top dogs before you go? You really like this stuff. First, there are four monsters on a level of their own: The Fierce and Divine Madamoiselle Saigo, Doromizu Jirocho the Gallant, Peacock Princess Kada and Empress Otose. The four factions are in a standoff which preserves a fragile balance of power. Who would be the strongest in a fight? You wouldn't be able to even scratch those beasts. Saigo and Jirocho in particular, were heroes during the Joui War. Well, they're too old to go on a tear now. If you want someone who's currently active, there's Katsuro Kuroguma, a young leader in the Doromizu Faction. He's the most feared man in Kabuki District right now. You'll also find a few former Joui in Saigo's Faction. There are rumours about Kada's Faction having ties to some crazy folk. Otose's Faction? It's just a bar, really. She's just an old lady with a soft heart. But if you try any funny business on her turf, you'll run into a certain guy. A guy who holds his own against the Big Three by himself. One hell of a monster, with hair that's completely white. A demon...
”
”
Hideaki Sorachi
“
I was on one of my world 'walkabouts.' It had taken me once more through Hong Kong, to Japan, Australia, and then Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific [one of the places I grew up]. There I found the picture of 'the Father.' It was a real, gigantic Saltwater Crocodile (whose picture is now featured on page 1 of TEETH).
From that moment, 'the Father' began to swim through the murky recesses of my mind. Imagine! I thought, men confronting the world’s largest reptile on its own turf! And what if they were stripped of their firearms, so they must face this force of nature with nothing but hand weapons and wits?
We know that neither whales nor sharks hunt individual humans for weeks on end. But, Dear Reader, crocodiles do! They are intelligent predators that choose their victims and plot their attacks. So, lost on its river, how would our heroes escape a great hunter of the Father’s magnitude? And what if these modern men must also confront the headhunters and cannibals who truly roam New Guinea?
What of tribal wars, the coming of Christianity and materialism (the phenomenon known as the 'Cargo Cult'), and the people’s introduction to 'civilization' in the form of world war? What of first contact between pristine tribal culture and the outside world? What about tribal clashes on a global scale—the hatred and enmity between America and Japan, from Pearl Harbor, to the only use in history of atomic weapons? And if the world could find peace at last, how about Johnny and Katsu?
”
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Timothy James Dean (Teeth (The South Pacific Trilogy, #1))
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As we flew inland from the coast at about 1,200 feet I looked down to see a strange countryside. What I saw wasn't just a western European landscape, but ravaged terrain. The vegetation cover was so sparse a looked a somewhat burgundy tinge- mud oozing from the turf. I'd never seen anything lke it. It was quite surreal. For a few miles along the flight path and stretching towards the French coast on the Channel, as far as the eye could see, were hundreds of thousands of crater rings. There were so many it appeared almost incomprehensible. Yet, there they were, sullen on the surface of this ravaged landscape. We had heard of no heavy artillery attacks in this area, certainly nothing of this concentration of fury. Then it dawned on us quietly that we were flying over the World War 1 battlefields. It was a sobering sight, which filled us with melancholy for the suffering which must have gone on down there. Yet here we were 26 years after that last war ended, going to fight the same enemy. It took some time to come back to reality."
Sergeant Dan Hartigan, 1st Canadian Parachute Regiment
”
”
Max Arthur (Forgotten Voices of the Second World War: A New History of the Second World War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Were There)
“
As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop.
My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair.
Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.
”
”
Frank H. Wu (Yellow)
“
Māoridom in Aotearoa dictates that we generate prestige from manaakitanga. It is the connection and hospitality we express for those in our care but also to show all that they are our equal, they too have mana. What many may not know is that manaakitanga fortifies all those involved in its practice. The high-calibre nourishment that we express sustains our mana as much as those we give it to. Manaaki helps us unlock ourselves to the experience of service and activated respect. It is not pious or sacraficial in nature. It is not foolish either, however it has been mistaken for such and historically abused by settler colonialism. For Māori, manaakitanga is restorative of an unseen order, far beyond anything transactional.
”
”
Coco Solid (How to Loiter In a Turf War)
“
One day I was watching the cartoon She-Ra, and the episode that was on was called ‘She-Ra and the Mighty Rebellions.’ At that time, the gang was already formed and was on the move. We were already getting involved in territory fights. This was when the Syndicates was out [the Syndicates was the first street gang ever to be established in The Bahamas; however, they were put out of business by the Rebellions]. One day we were on the wall, and guys were throwing out different names. I told them that the best name for this gang would be the Rebellions. To this day, I’m sorry I ever came up with that name, because I’m getting tired of seeing that name on the walls throughout Nassau. Anthony ‘Ada’ Allen, one of the former leaders and founders of the Rebellion Raiders street gang.
”
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Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
“
Dinsdale and Rohwer found that as humans become more common, so do microbes. From Kingman to Christmas Island, top predators such as sharks went from dominant parts of the reefs to bit-players, coral cover fell from 45 percent to 15 percent, and the water contained 10 times as many microbes and viruses. All of these trends are connected in a complicated web of cause and effect that revolves around a turf war between corals and their ancient rivals: the so-called 'fleshy algae'.
”
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Ed Yong (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life)
“
This isn’t Grease. I’m not some Thunderbird who can only date a Pink Lady. As for the turf wars, this isn’t West Side Story, either. Do you think we settle disputes in song and dance?
”
”
S. Briones Lim (Palace Hills)
“
The leaders at that time believed so much in protecting the name and the reputation of the gang, that I along with one or two other individuals who were still in school who were trusted, responsible, and ready were given weapons to take to school to make sure that if anything arises, the matter would be dealt with properly. They made sure that even if their presence were not there during a fight, we were in a position to properly defend ourselves. Troit Lynes, former death row inmate of Her Majesty Prison
”
”
Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
“
The ax fell on programs that could not muster strong support from Congress, industry, international allies, or the secretary of defense and his staff. In short, political wheeling and dealing, hidden agendas, and turf battles determined the future Air Force, rather than carefully weighed visions.
”
”
James G. Burton (The Pentagon Wars: Reformers Challenge the Old Guard)
“
He lies still in the dark, hungry, listening to the birds discuss life in a thousand ancient dialects: bickering, turf war, recollection, praise, joy.
”
”
Richard Powers (The Overstory)
“
Imagination is kinda like ...
a torch.
So we can remember what is true.
- In the cave of any faith.
Definitely.
”
”
Coco Solid (How to Loiter in a Turf War)
“
Justice, solidarity, freedom, equal rights—these are all ideas that come straight out of the Enlightenment. In fact, out of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism is very anti-capitalist, contrary to what everybody says. And classical liberal and Enlightenment ideals lead in a very direct path, I think, to what was called libertarian socialism, or anarchism, or something like that.
The idea is that people have a fundamental core right and need to be free and creative, not under external constraints. Any form of authority requires legitimation. The burden of proof is always on an authoritarian structure, whatever it may be, whether it's owning people, sex-linked, or even child-parent relationships. Any form of authority has to be challenged. Sometimes they can be justified, and maybe in that case, okay, you live with them. But for the most part, not.
That would then lead quite directly to what were kind of truisms about a century ago. I mean, now they sound really crazy because there's been such a deterioration of values. But if you look at the thinking of just ordinary people, like say the working-class press in the mid-19th century, which grew where the ideas just grew out of the same soil—Enlightenment, classical liberal soil—the ideas are clear. Obviously, people should not be machines. They shouldn't be tools of production. They shouldn't be ordered around. We don't want chattel slavery, you know, like black slaves in the South, but we also don't want what was called, since the 18th century, wage slavery, which is not very different. Namely, where you have to rent yourself to survive.
In a way, it was argued with some plausibility that you're worse off than a slave in that scenario. Actually, slave owners argued that. When slave owners were defending slavery, there was a kind of a moral debate that went on. It had shared moral turf, as a lot of moral debate did. The slave owners made a plausible point. They said, "Look, we own our workers. You just rent your workers. When you own something, you take much better care of it than when you rent it." To put it a little anachronistically, if you rent a car, you're not going to pay as much attention to taking care of it as if you own the car, for obvious reasons. Similarly, if you own people, you're going to take more care of them than if you rent people. If you rent people and you don't want them anymore, you throw them out. If you own people, well, you've got a sort of an investment in them, so you make them healthier and so on. So, the slave owners, in fact, argued, "Look, we're a lot more moral than you guys with your capitalist, wage slave system."
Ordinary working people understood that. After the Civil War, you find in the American working-class press bitter complaints over the fact that, "Look, we fought to end chattel slavery, and now you're driving us into wage slavery, which is the same sort of thing." This is one core institution in society where people are forced to become tools of others, to be cast out if they're not necessary. It's a grotesque arrangement, totally contrary to the ideals of classical liberalism or Enlightenment values or anything else. It's now become sort of standard doctrine, but that's just a victory of absolutism, and we should dismantle all that stuff.
Culturally, it starts with changes. You've got to change your minds and your spirit, and recover what was a common understanding in a more civilized period, let's say a century ago, in the shop floors of Lowell, Massachusetts. Recover that understanding, and then we work to simply democratize all institutions, free them up, and eliminate authoritarian structures. As I say, you find them everywhere. From families up to corporations, there are all kinds of authoritarian structures in the world. They all ought to be challenged. Very few of them can resist that challenge. They survive mainly because they're not challenged.
”
”
Noam Chomsky
“
Oddly enough, the chaos of violence and turf wars didn’t bother me at all. Something about strategy and battle gave me a sense of purpose and thus control.
”
”
Jill Ramsower (Absolute Silence (The Five Families, #5))
“
My older brother was only eleven when he was brutally gunned down. I didn’t know his death triggered a war, only that it had changed everything. For two long years, all five families waged a deadly turf war against one another. It wasn’t until attrition forced a reluctant truce and brought the bloodshed to an end.
”
”
Jill Ramsower (Blood Always (The Five Families, #3))
“
An extravert should make friends more easily than an introvert, whereas a conscientious person should meet more deadlines than a person who is not conscientious. Mischel found, however, that the typical correlation between personality traits and behavior was quite modest. This news shook up the field, because it essentially said that the traits personality psychologists were measuring were just slightly better than astrological signs at predicting behavior. Mischel did not simply point out the problem; he diagnosed the reasons for it. First, he argued that personality researchers had underestimated the extent to which the social situation shapes people’s behavior, independently of their personality. To predict whether a person will meet a deadline, for example, knowing something about the situation—the consequences of not meeting it, how much time the person has, how much work remains to be done—may be more useful than knowing the person’s score on a measure of conscientiousness. Situational influences can be very powerful, sometimes overwhelming individual differences in personality.5 This argument set off a turf war between personality psychologists, who place their bets on individual differences as the best predictors of behavior, and social psychologists, who place their bets on the nature of the social situation and how people interpret it.
”
”
Timothy D. Wilson (Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious)
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The financial troubles were bad enough, but Saracho soon discovered he had another, even more unexpected problem to deal with. The board—the people he needed to support his efforts to turn around the bank—seemed oddly divided into two rival Catholic sects. After almost forty years of dealing with companies of all sizes, from every corner of the world, he had never before seen anything like it. He had walked into of the middle of a religious turf war—Opus Dei versus the Legionaries of Christ.
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Gareth Gore (Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church)
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Killing Caruso wasn’t going to end the war that had started right there in the A. I was going to end a turf war before I embarked on the mission in New York. Until
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Nika Michelle (Love In The A (A Forbidden Fruit Story))
Claire Svendsen (Turf Wars (Show Jumping Dreams, #8))
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What do you want that couldn’t wait until the morning?” Arik asked as he led the way inside. The Pride’s king headed to the bar he’d had installed in the corner of his living room. He pulled a bottle of whiskey from a shelf. He poured them each a generous dollop.
“I want permission to go after the Northern Lakes Pack.”
“Am I going to regret asking why?”
“They’re threatening Arabella.”
“Who’s that?”
“Jeoff’s sister.”
Arik tossed back the fiery liquid before asking with a frown, “Why the fuck would I let you start a war over Jeoff’s sister?”
“Because those pricks attacked us on home turf.”
A snort escape Arik. “Ah yes, that puny attempt at a kidnapping. You caused quite a stir with your antics. Part of your stunt even made it onto YouTube before we could squash it. I had to have our PR department spin a Twitter thread on how it was part of a scene being taped for a movie.”
“You can’t blame me for that. I had to stop them.” He did, but what he didn’t tell Arik was he’d never once thought of the repercussions of his actions. He saw Arabella in danger and had to go to her rescue. Bystanders and witnesses be damned.
“I can see why you’d feel like you had to act. I mean, they made you look silly by catching you off guard like that, but, next time, could you be a little more discreet?”
“No.” Why lie?
The reply took his leader aback. “What do you mean no? Discretion is a fact of life. One girl isn’t worth drawing undue attention to ourselves.”
“One girl might not be, but my mate is.”
Want to stop conversation dead? Drop a bombshell.
“Close your mouth, Arik, before you catch flies.” Only Arik’s mate could hope to tease him like that and get away with it. Dressed in yoga pants and a sweatshirt, Kira emerged from the bedroom and perched on a barstool.
“Did you hear what he said?” a still astonished Arik demanded.
“Yes. He’s fallen victim to the love bug. I think it’s cute.”
“I would have said impossible,” Arik muttered.
“You and me both, old friend. But, the fact of the matter is, I’m like ninety-nine percent sure that Arabella is supposed to be mine.”
“And the one percent that isn’t sure?”
“Is going to get eaten by my lion.
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Eve Langlais (When a Beta Roars (A Lion's Pride, #2))
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Which would seem to be a good thing—proposing a solution to a problem that people are hungry to solve—except that my view of silos might not be what some leaders expect to hear. That’s because many executives I’ve worked with who struggle with silos are inclined to look down into their organizations and wonder, “Why don’t those employees just learn to get along better with people in other departments? Don’t they know we’re all on the same team?” All too often this sets off a well-intentioned but ill-advised series of actions—training programs, memos, posters—designed to inspire people to work better together. But these initiatives only provoke cynicism among employees—who would love nothing more than to eliminate the turf wars and departmental politics that often make their work lives miserable. The problem is, they can’t do anything about it. Not without help from their leaders. And while the first step those leaders need to take is to address any behavioral problems that might be preventing executive team members from working well with one another—that was the thrust of my book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team—even behaviorally cohesive teams can struggle with silos. (Which is particularly frustrating and tragic because it leads well-intentioned and otherwise functional team members to inappropriately question one another’s trust and commitment to the team.) To tear
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Patrick Lencioni (Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors (J-B Lencioni Series))
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To tear down silos, leaders must go beyond behaviors and address the contextual issues at the heart of departmental separation and politics. The purpose of this book is to present a simple, powerful tool for addressing those issues and reducing the pain that silos cause. And that pain should not be underestimated. Silos—and the turf wars they enable—devastate organizations. They waste resources, kill productivity, and jeopardize the achievement of goals. But beyond all that, they exact a considerable human toll too. They cause frustration, stress, and disillusionment by forcing employees to fight bloody, unwinnable battles with people who should be their teammates. There is perhaps no greater cause of professional anxiety and exasperation—not to mention turnover—than employees having to fight with people in their own organization. Understandably and inevitably, this bleeds over into their personal lives, affecting family and friends in profound ways.
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Patrick Lencioni (Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors (J-B Lencioni Series))
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The evil spirits returned to Belial inside the mountain. He stared with a dire face into the blackened ooze of the Abyss that filled the large lake inside their sanctuary. Small flames of fire flitted across the surface of it. The sixty plus other gods gathered around their leader like a bodyguard of Watchers, swords drawn, javelins and maces held tight. Would they fight this day? Belial said, still staring into the oblivion, “It is worse than I thought.” Molech whined, “Are the heavenly host approaching?” “No. He transfigured.” “Glorification,” said Molech. “Is that not a call to battle?” “He is not attacking us on our turf. He is challenging us to his.” “It is almost upon us,” said Belial. “All gods, prepare for war.
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Brian Godawa (Jesus Triumphant (Chronicles of the Nephilim, #8))
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Why matrix organizational structures became so popular I’m not really sure. There is certainly an element of flexibility and collaboration suggested by them, but in reality they are forums for confusion and conflict. They have certainly not contributed to the breakdown of silos; they’ve merely added an element of schizophrenia and cognitive dissonance for employees who are unlucky enough to report into two different silos.
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Patrick Lencioni (Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors (J-B Lencioni Series))
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6. Why are you considering this project (to improve what)? 7. How would image/repute/credibility be improved? 8. What harm (e.g., stress, dysfunction, turf wars) would be alleviated? 9. How much would you gain on the competition as a result? 10. How would your value proposition be improved? 11. How would you most easily justify this investment?
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Alan Weiss (Million Dollar Consulting Proposals: How to Write a Proposal That's Accepted Every Time)
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When we hear about “drug-related violence,” we picture somebody getting high and killing people. We think the violence is the product of the drugs. But in fact, it turns out this is only a tiny sliver of the violence. The vast majority is like Chino’s violence—to establish, protect, and defend drug territory in an illegal market, and to build a name for being consistently terrifying so nobody tries to take your property or turf. Professor
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Johann Hari (Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs)
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These 11 questions best elicit true business objectives: 1. What is the ideal outcome you’d like to experience? 2. What results are you trying to accomplish? 3. What better product/service/customer/employee condition are you seeking? 4. Why are you seeking to do this (work/project/engagement)? 5. How would the operation be different as a result of this work? 6. Why are you considering this project (to improve what)? 7. How would image/repute/credibility be improved? 8. What harm (e.g., stress, dysfunction, turf wars) would be alleviated? 9. How much would you gain on the competition as a result? 10. How would your value proposition be improved? 11. How would you most easily justify this investment? A few of these questions honestly
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Alan Weiss (Million Dollar Consulting Proposals: How to Write a Proposal That's Accepted Every Time)
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She was perfectly sanguine about fighting a nest of Creeps, or jumping into the middle of a vampire turf war, but Elly would never be so reckless as to text and drive.
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Lauren M. Roy (Grave Matters (Night Owls #2))
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If there was history being made in the city, if history was the high-level war rich people waged for their own turf in the city—those wars about waterfront developments and opera houses and real-estate deals and privatization contracts—then the poor waged wars for control of their small alleyways and walkways, their streets and the trade in unofficial goods. Their currency was not stocks, wealth and influence peddling, but tough reputations and threats of physical damage; their gains weren’t stock options and expensive homes but momentary physical control and perennially contested fearsomeness. This war was a more volatile war, perhaps. There was no cushion of security to land on if you lost a skirmish.
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Dionne Brand (What We All Long For: A Novel)
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Detroit, for example, a new police commissioner took over in 1971 and began implementing a more Nixonian approach to illicit drugs. Chief John Nichols doubled up the personnel on his narcotics unit and started arresting and imprisoning heroin dealers instead of merely chasing them off, as the city had done in the past. The result was an impressive stat sheet on the enforcement side: 1,600 arrests. But cracking down on dealers opened the city up to turf wars. In one ten-day stretch in June, Detroit logged forty murders.28 It was one of the first examples of the sort of self-perpetuating, self-escalating feedback loop created by the modern drug war. Crackdowns upset the established black markets.
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Radley Balko (Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces)
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The yearlong fighting in Kashmir notwithstanding, Nehru was never comfortable with the armed forces. He would make the right noises at the appropriate forums, but his political indoctrination had consciously or unconsciously instilled in him a desire to downgrade India’s officer cadre rather than tap their leadership potential and assimilate them into the machinery of government. This in turn created a vacuum in the decision-making chain, into which the civil servants stepped. They in turn, to protect their own newfound turf, played the game of isolating and dominating the military even further, taking important military decisions that they were not equipped to handle. At
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Kunal Verma (1962: The War That Wasn't)
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Finally, doing good through the power of the state bumps up against institutional realities. Doing good requires bureaucrats and bureaucracies. But human nature dictates that people given bureaucratic power will exercise it in the service of petty psychological needs or for personal profit. Bureaucracy also means turf battles, in this case between the departments of War and Interior, and also turf battles within those departments. Doing good put the treaty-guaranteed food allocations at the mercy of yearly budget battles in Congress, where treaty obligations to the Sioux were extremely low on the hierarchy of interest that determined how congressmen voted. In fact, the realities of electoral politics meant doing good gave rising local politicians a chance to play on the anti-Indian fears and emotions of the populace to garner votes.
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Mark David Ledbetter (America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire)
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I found the mass grave at Gate of Heaven cemetery in Hawthorne, New York,” she told me. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a very large pit with AstroTurf thrown over it, which you could actually lift up. Under it one could see dozens of plain wooden coffins, haphazardly stacked. There may have been 100 of them. I learned there was more than one child’s body in each.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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I’d read a couple of the articles, the reporters’ speculations that a turf war was going to happen between the O’Sullivan Irish mob in New York and the Benedetti family out of Italy.
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Piper Stone (Cruel Prince (Benedetti Empire #1))
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But let’s face facts: war is led by generals and managed by bureaucrats. Anywhere you find generals and bureaucrats, you find turf wars.
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Lee Jackson (After Dunkirk (After Dunkirk #1))
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Thus FDR, being a shrewd, smart sonofabitch now in his third term as President, knew that despite the cries of the isolationists who wanted Amer ica to have nothing to do with another world war it was only a matter of time before the country would be forced to shed its neutral status.
And the best way to be prepared for that moment was to have the finest intelligence he could. And the best way to get that information, to get the facts that he trusted because he trusted the messenger, was to put another shrewd, smart sonofabitch in charge-his pal Wild Bill Donovan.
The problem was not that intelligence wasn't being collected. The United States of America had vast organizations actively engaged in it-the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Military Intelligence Division chief among them.
The problem was that the intelligence these organizations collected was, in the word of the old-school British spymasters, "coloured." That was to say, the intel tended first to serve to promote the respective branches.
If, for example, ONI overstated the number of, say, German submarines, then the Navy brass could use that intelligence to justify its demands for more funds for sailors and ships to hunt down those U-boats. (Which, of course, played to everyone's natural fears as the U-boats were damn effec tive killing machines.)
Likewise, if MID stated that it had found significantly more Axis troop amassing toward an Allied border than was previously thought, Army brass could argue that ground and/or air forces needed the money more than did the swabbies.
Then there was the turf-fighting FBI. J. Edgar Hoover and Company
didn't want any Allied spies snooping around in their backyard. It followed then that if the agencies had their own agendas, they were not prone to share with others the information that they collected. The argument, as might be expected, was that intelligence shared was intelli gence compromised.
There was also the interagency fear, unspoken but there, as sure as God made little green apples, that some shared intel would be found to be want ing. If that should happen, it would make the particular agency that had de veloped it look bad. And that, fear of all fears, would result in the reduction of funds, of men, of weapons, et cetera, et cetera. In short, the loss of im portance of the agency in the eyes of the grand political scheme.
Thus among the various agencies there continued the endless turf bat tles, the duplications of effort-even the instances, say, of undercover FB agents arresting undercover ONI agents snooping around Washington D.C., and New York City.
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W.E.B. Griffin (The Double Agents (Men at War, #6))
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But I also understand why Steve, who'd sewn his share of panels over the years, would fly into a rage as the end approached: 'And don't put me in that fucking quilt!' Being of a mind to have his body dumped instead on the White House lawn. The guilt had begun to seem too passive, even too nice, letting the war criminals off the hook and providing the media with far too easy a wrap up. Much neater than trying to unravel the Gordian knot of AIDS activism, the Byzantine infighting and turf protection, the in-your-face bad manners of those who wouldn't go quietly. The quilted dead made for prettier sound bites, especially effective at zeroing in on the "innocent" victims, the kids and the hemophiliacs.
At the same time there began to appear a certain overview phenomenon under the general rubric of AIDS-and-the-Arts. Typically these were hand-wringing accounts of the impact of so much cultured dying, lamenting for instance the White Way silence left by Michael Bennett, the songs unsung. This litany was something of a mixed bag, bringing under the same umbrella the likes of Way Bandy and Halston, Miss Kitty and Keith Haring. Though it was surely true what Fran Lebowitz so scathingly observed If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture, you would be pretty much left with 'Let's Make a Deal.' these roundups of the arts tended to foster in the general populace ever new heights of Not me.
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Paul Monette (Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise)
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I’ve coached on every type of people problem any individual, team, or organization has ever had. You name it, I’ve coached around it. Problems such as
Organizations that want to change their culture.
Teams that don’t succeed because they have turf wars that create silos.
Executive leadership teams that are in conflict and aren’t communicating effectively.
Leaders and executives who want more confidence to make tough decisions.
Managers who have strong technical expertise in their field but have never managed people.
Individual contributors who need to be more engaged with their coworkers and teams.
My clients come to me with these challenges. Nine times out of ten, those challenges are people problems. I coach them to handle these problems and clear the hurdles, so they have more time and energy to do what matters most to them—earn their yoga certification, be a more present mom, learn to play the guitar—and get back to focusing on the things they do best: their job and their organization’s mission.
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Darcy Luoma (Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success)
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The most virulent expression of narco religion is by La Familia Cartel in Michoacán. La Familia indoctrinates its followers in its own version of evangelical Christianity mixed with some peasant rebel politics. The gang’s spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno, “El Mas Loco,” or the Maddest One, actually wrote his own bible, which is compulsory reading for the troops. This sounds so nuts I thought it was another drug war myth. Until I got my hands on a copy of his “good” book. It is not an easy bedtime read.
But La Familia is only the most defined voice in a chorus of narco religion that has been rising in volume for decades. Other tones of the choir include some morphed rituals of Caribbean Santeria, the folk saint Jesús Malverde, and the wildly popular Santa Muerte, or Holy Death.
Many who follow these faiths are not drug traffickers or gun-toting assassins. The beliefs all have an appeal to poor Mexicans who feel the staid Catholic Church is not speaking to them and their problems. But gangsters definitely feel at home in these new sects and exert a powerful influence on them, giving a spiritual and semi-ideological backbone to narco clans. Such a backbone strengthens El Narco as an insurgent movement that is challenging the old order. Kingpins now fight for souls as well as turfs.
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Ioan Grillo (El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency)
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As drugs flow up into the United States, all kinds of people make money off them. People are subcontracted to ship, truck, warehouse, and finally smuggle the product over the border. To complicate this, drugs are often bought and sold many times on their journey. People actually handling these narcotics will often have no knowledge which so-called kingpin or cartel ever owned them, only knowing the direct contacts they are dealing with. Ask a New York cocaine dealer who smuggled his product into America. He would rarely have a clue.
All this helps explain why the Mexican drug trade is such a confusing web, which confounds both journalists and drug agents. Tracing exactly who touched a shipment on its entire journey is a hard task. But this dynamic, moving industry has a solid center of gravity—turfs, or plazas. Drugs have to pass through a certain territory on the border to get into the United States, and whoever is running those plazas makes sure to tax everything that moves. The border plazas have thus become a choke point that is not seen in other drug-producing nations such as Colombia, Afghanistan, or Morocco. This is one of the key reasons why Mexican turf wars have become so bloody.
The vast profits attract all kinds to the Mexican drug trade: peasant farmers, slum teenagers, students, teachers, businessmen, idle rich kids, and countless others. It is often pointed out that in poor countries people turn to the drug trade in desperation. That is true. But plenty of middle-class or wealthy people also dabble. Growing up in the south of England, I knew dozens of people who moved and sold drugs, from private-school boys to kids from council estates (projects). The United States has never had a shortage of its own citizens willing to transport and sell drugs. The bottom line is that drugs are good money even to wealthy people, and plenty have no moral dilemmas about the business.
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Ioan Grillo (El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency)
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the hands were wrestling with each other over interservice and interdepartmental turf wars.
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Ian Douglas (Alien Secrets (Solar Warden #1))
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And it was big enough that organized crime was split two separate ways. The west of the city was run by Ukrainians. The east was run by Albanians. The demarcation line between them was gerrymandered as tight as a congressional district. Nominally it followed Center Street, which ran north to south and divided the city in half, but it zigged and zagged and ducked in and out to include or exclude specific blocks and parts of specific neighborhoods, wherever it was felt historic precedents justified special circumstances. Negotiations had been tense. There had been minor turf wars. There had been some unpleasantness. But eventually an agreement had been reached. The arrangement seemed to work. Each side kept out of the other’s way. For a long time there had been no significant contact between them
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Lee Child (Blue Moon (Jack Reacher, #24))
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In shalom, warring over turf, wealth, or national security are extinct practices. In shalom, family wealth is no longer the point of blessing because living out shalom offers an alternative way for people to view wealth.
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Randy Woodley (Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision (Prophetic Christianity (PC)))
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I want him more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my entire fucking life.
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Bella Jewel (Biker Schmiker (Turf Wars, #1))
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Because you’re like a sparkler goin’ off, spittin’ shit everywhere and burnin’ everything you touch.
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Bella Jewel (Biker Schmiker (Turf Wars, #1))
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TERRITORY VERSUS HIERARCHY
In the animal kingdom, individuals define themselves in one of two ways — by their rank within a hierarchy (a hen in a pecking order, a wolf in a pack) or by their connection to a territory (a home base, a hunting ground, a turf).
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Steven Pressfield (The War of Art)
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Dead and mutilated bodies, famine, and citizens handicapped by economic sanctions are all part of the warlords’ bartering chips for seizing power and securing valuable concessions. Many proud nations of indigenous people perished in battle for control of lands that rightfully did not belong to the army bearing superior forces. No army returns territory it took, unless compelled to do so by hard costs. The meek might inherit the earth someday, but for now the most aggressive and ruthless armies control the turf.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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Both Mussolini and Hitler could perceive the space available, and were willing to trim their movements to fit.
The space was partly symbolic. The Nazi Party early shaped its identity by staking a claim to the street and fought with communist gangs for control of working-class neighborhoods of Berlin. At issue was not merely a few meters of urban “turf.” The Nazis sought to portray themselves as the most vigorous and effective force against the communists—and, at the same time, to portray the liberal state as incapable of preserving public security. The communists, at the same time, were showing that the Social Democrats were unequipped to deal with an incipient revolutionary situation that needed a fighting vanguard. Polarization was in the interest of both.
Fascist violence was neither random nor indiscriminate. It carried a well-calculated set of coded messages: that communist violence was rising, that the democratic state was responding to it ineptly, and that only the fascists were tough enough to save the nation from antinational terrorists. An essential step in the fascist march to acceptance and power was to persuade law-and-order conservatives and members of the middle class to tolerate fascist violence as a harsh necessity in the face of Left provocation. It helped, of course, that many ordinary citizens never feared fascist violence against themselves, because they were reassured that it was reserved for national enemies and “terrorists” who deserved it.
Fascists encouraged a distinction between members of the nation who merited protection and outsiders who deserved rough handling. One of the most sensational cases of Nazi violence before power was the murder of a communist laborer of Polish descent in the town of Potempa, in Silesia, by five SA men in August 1932. It became sensational when the killers’ death sentences were commuted, under Nazi pressure, to life imprisonment. Party theorist Alfred Rosenberg took the occasion to underscore the difference between “bourgeois justice,” according to which “one Polish Communist has the same weighting as five Germans, frontsoldiers,” and National Socialist ideology, according to which “one soul does not equal another soul, one person not another.” Indeed, Rosenberg went on, for National Socialism, “there is no ‘law as such.’” The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism.
For some, fascist violence was more than useful: it was beautiful. Some war veterans and intellectuals (Marinetti and Ernst Jünger were both) indulged in the aesthetics of violence. Violence often appealed to men too young to have known it in 1914–18 and who felt cheated of their war. It appealed to some women, too. But it is a mistake to regard fascist success as solely the triumph of the D’Annunzian hero. It was the genius of fascism to wager that many an orderly bourgeois (or even bourgeoise) would take some vicarious satisfaction in a carefully selective violence, directed only against “terrorists” and “enemies of the people.”
A climate of polarization helped the new fascist catch-all parties sweep up many who became disillusioned with the old deference (“honoratioren”) parties. This was risky, of course. Polarization could send the mass of angry protesters to the Left under certain conditions (as in Russia in 1917). Hitler and Mussolini understood that while Marxism now appealed mainly to blue-collar workers (and not to all of them), fascism was able to appeal more broadly across class lines. In postrevolutionary western Europe, a climate of polarization worked in fascism’s favor.
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
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Nazi officials felt free to take more violent action than they had done in the western campaigns of 1940, first against the enemies of the regime, then against fascism’s conservative allies, and eventually against the German people themselves, in an ecstasy of terminal destruction.
Whereas in traditional authoritarian war regimes, the army tends to extend its control, as it did in the German Reich during 1917–18 and in Franco’s Spain, the German army lost control of occupation policy in the east after 1941, as we have seen, to the Nazi Party’s parallel organizations. Party radicals felt free to express their hatreds and obsessions in ways that were foreign to the traditions of the state services. The issue here is not simply one of moral sensitivity; some officers and civil servants were appalled by SS actions in the conquered territories, while others went along because of group solidarity or because they had become hardened. It was to some degree an issue of turf. It would be unthinkable for a traditional military dictatorship to tolerate the incursions of amateurish party militias into military spheres that Hitler—and even, in Ethiopia, Mussolini—permitted.
Here we enter a realm where the calculations of interest that arguably governed the behavior of both the Nazis and their allies under more ordinary circumstances in the exercise of power no longer determined policy. At this ultimate stage an obsessed minority is able to carry out its most passionate hatreds implacably and to the ultimate limit of human experience.
Liberation from constraints permitted a hard core of the movement’s fanatics to regain the upper hand over their bourgeois allies and carry out some of the initial radical projects. At the outposts of empire, fascism recovered the face-to-face violence of the early days of squadrismo and SA street brawling. One must resist the temptation at this final stage to revert to a highly personalized way of looking at the exercise of power in fascist regimes, with its discredited notions of hoodlums kidnapping the state. The Nazi regime was able to pursue the war with ever mounting intensity only with the continued complicity of the state services and large sectors of the socially powerful.
Fascist radicalization, finally, cannot be understood as a rational way to persuade a people to give their all to a war effort. It led Nazi Germany into a runaway spiral that ultimately prevented rational war making, as vital resources were diverted from military operations to the murder of the Jews. Finally radicalization denies even the nation that is supposed to be at fascism’s heart. At the end, fanatical fascists prefer to destroy everything in a final paroxysm, even their own country, rather than admit defeat.
Prolonged fascist radicalization over a very long period has never been witnessed. It is even hard to imagine. Can one suppose that even Hitler could keep up the tension into old age? Arranging the succession to a senescent fascist leader is another intriguing but, so far, hypothetical problem. The more normal form of succession to a fascist regime is likely to be decay into a traditional authoritarianism. At that point, there can be progressive liberalization as in post-Franco Spain or perhaps revolution (as in post-Salazar Portugal). But orderly succession is clearly far more of a problem with fascism than with other forms of rule, even communism. Fascism is, in the last analysis, destabilizing. In the long run, therefore, it was not really a solution to the problems of frightened conservatives or liberals.
The final outcome was that the Italian and German fascist regimes drove themselves off a cliff in their quest for ever headier successes. The fascisms we know seem doomed to destroy themselves in their headlong, obsessive rush to fulfill the “privileged relation with history” they promised their people.
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
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So the moral battle still rages. The spiritual war still goes on. That means you need to understand that you live in a war zone. And you need to be very clear on this—that great spiritual war is fought on the turf of your heart and it’s fought for control of your soul. Your life is lived every day in the middle of that war. It’s a war of doubt and faith. It’s a war of submission and rebellion. It’s a war of anxiety and trust. It’s a war of wisdom and foolishness. It’s a war of hope and despair. It’s a war of allegiance and disloyalty. It’s a war.
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Paul David Tripp (New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional)
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Kusunoki left both ingredients as is, wrapping the salmon in the bacon and delicately heating both to elegant perfection.
Using the same concept behind the ramen staple seafood-pork broth, melding the umami of both fish and meat together created a powerfully savory flavor.
The olive oil bath he used to prevent even a drop of the fish's juices from escaping was also an excellent touch.
In the end, his dish was the picture of a salmon's savory deliciousness, perfectly recreated on the plate.
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Yūto Tsukuda (食戟のソーマ 19 [Shokugeki no Souma 19] (Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma, #19))