There is no freedom to speak without the freedom to be silent.
Ruling
In ’37 Stalin made a hash
Of party loyalists and army brass.
Decimation: One in ten are shot.
What’s the word when one in ten are not?
Authority depends on prestige, or failing that, police.
It is rather late to mourn the dignity of office.
Say what you like about our form of government, it beats democracy.
Law keeps order: justice keeps score.
To deify the state has a certain logic; for the state is compulsion and coercion, and these, too, are God’s usual means.
If you separate Church and State, the State becomes the Church.
Actual tyrannies require courage to oppose.
If policy simply achieved its ends, a new outlet would have to be found for the ingenuity expended in its defense.
What politicians say about science is as silly as what scientists say about politics.