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?
A time-honored tactic of the schoolyard bully, after he has ground your face into the dirt, is to release you on the condition that you mouth some humiliating absurdity. He does not want to convince you of its truth; he wants to see what you will swallow.
Rules are made to be selectively enforced.
Propaganda demands endless repetition, not just of the same ideas, but in the same words.
Separation of powers: each bureaucrat gets a tiny bit.
Deontology for thee, but not for me.
The crisis is not that the press is distrusted: the press has always been distrusted. The crisis is that this has finally dawned on the press.
We complain of government inefficiency and unaccountability, instead of government mass murder, wholesale theft, and miseducation of our children by force, which makes our own supine posture rather too apparent.
A law is a metric, and like any other metric it can and will be gamed.
Popular sovereignty in a democracy comes to resemble Swiss cheese, as ambitious men carve little chunks of political power out for themselves and proof them as best they can against the vagaries of elections. Eventually nothing is left but the holes.
It is unjust to require IDs to vote. What ought to be required is an accurate statement of Arrow’s impossibility theorem.