Luke > Recent Status Updates

In [Guttmacher's] dreary record of how frequently [the rapists] masturbated and wet their beds, he never bothered to write down what they thought of women.

It has been argued that when killing is viewed as not only permissable but heroic behavior sanctioned by one's government or cause, the distinction between taking a human life and other forms of impermissible violence becomes lost, and rape becomes an unfortunate but inevitable by-product of the necessary game called war.

You can't go whole hog, downright creating a fucking culture of surveillance and then gripe when stuff gets leaked. Means you have so many people watching that you can't even keep tabs on who's watching who.

They were doctors, however freshly minted. I was not. Ergo, any concerns I had must be cosmetic, frivolous.

What's free about it if you have to pay?

One more thing, ostentatious gentlemens. Never turn your back 'pon a white bwoi. After a hot night with no moon all you can think of is that something out to betray you, maybe God, maybe man, but never turn your back 'pon a white bwoi.

Tender is the Night would not, of course, be recalled from Scribner's as Save Me the Waltz had been because of Scott's fictional exploitation of Zelda's mental illness in the novel. There was no one to act in Zelda's behalf, as Scott had once acted in his own.

I say to him, Brethren, you're like Robin Hood. He say, But me never rob from a man in me life. I say, brethren, neither did Robin Hood.

If you don't live politics, politics will live you

Rebecca West didn't like Zelda Fitzgerald, but since West was a eugenicist jackass who thought pedophilia and xenophobia made the world go round, I'm not concerned.

Rooms, she knew, became more like worlds than rooms at the age of twenty-four.

The question is whether we as a society are willing to sacrifice a bit of efficiency in the interest of fairness.

A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything.

(14. Hateful Things)

"Union" (racial/ethnic/religious/national) and "Progress" (economic determination) have long been the twin coordinates of genocide.

I like the companies who make AIDS drugs that no one can afford. I love that kind of dark, edgy humor.

Only a male god could have created this repulsive, abominable world.

What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?

All I knew that night was that I believed in something and couldn't express it, while your team believed in nothing but knew how to say it—in other men's words.

It's never a bad time to be reading Roy.

That the evil suffer most is not true, their suffering is not deep, in one sense it is a pleasant habit for them.

Everything that doesn't make you forget about yourself is a form of compensation.

And in those moments he would feel that he was neither full of war nor full of peace, he was simply lost.

It does not become me to make myself less than I am.

For what was the worth of being a genius if choice was denied to him? After all, fools were always told what they should do and they were foolish because they obeyed.

[I]t is the first one, "rootless cosmopolitan," that Nina finds most telling. The usual officially cryptic language, such a brilliantly awkward substitute for "wandering Jew."

[T]he goal of curing the victims of cancer is more exciting, more tangible, more glamorous and rewarding than prevention[.]

When I got back home I heard about a former classmate...who...had an affair on the way and came back pregnant...She hanged herself, leaving a note saying she was "too ashamed to live." No one challenged this medieval concept of shame, which might have been a target of a genuine cultural revolution. But it was never one of Mao's concerns, and was not among the "olds" which the Red Guards were encouraged to destroy.

The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.

[T]he laws of science do not observe the boundaries of politics.

Keep throwing those ads at me, Amashit. More fodder for my capitalist trash shelf.