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Quote by Bismillah Achakzai

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Bismillah Achakzai

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“,Further, two steps forward, and all the chaos of the world above fell away, the smell of wet dirt and rat droppings rising to invade my nostrils. The familiar feeling froze me in fear. Immediately, alarm bells were ringing in my head. My hands trembled. I scanned every shadow for something I could not name but which crept out of view like an ambush. Macnaghten absently kicked a rock, and the tinkle as it skimmed the ground gave me cause to jump; I turned to face the sound, and something crunched underfoot - a lump of something dry and brittle, like petrified wood - reduced to dust. At that, the lantern tilted slightly, dangling, wavering ethereally in our direction. IT WAS AWARE OF US NOW. ~ Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline, The Ripper Lives: Into the Black (4/10)”

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Book:The Ripper Lives: Jack the Ripper Series I - Into the Black
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“My nostrils flared, but a dreadful sound kept me from going any further—a whistle sharp enough to tear through the mists. It came back from the way I’d come, all the way back from the cursed Buck’s Row. I stopped. My arms fell by my side, the chill settling upon me like a blanket of ice. I knew immediately it was Macnaghten. He’d found something. What else could it be? I looked back into the fog, into the unknown, and in my heart, I knew the worst awaited me. It was another body. Another victim. Another failure for justice. It had to be. I set off to face it. And the fog closed in around me. ~ Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline, The Ripper Lives, Into the Black (4/10)”

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Book:The Ripper Lives: Jack the Ripper Series I - Into the Black
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“Most Romans believed that their system of government was the finest political invention of the human mind. Change was inconceivable. Indeed, the constitution's various parts were so mutually interdependent that reform within the rules was next to impossible. As a result, radicals found that they had little choice other than to set themselves beyond and against the law. This inflexibility had disastrous consequences as it became increasingly clear that the Roman state was incapable of responding adequately to the challenges it faced. Political debate became polarized into bitter conflicts, with radical outsiders trying to press change on conservative insiders who, in the teeth of all the evidence, believed that all was for the best under the best of all possible constitutions (16).”

PoliticsChangeConstitutionInstitutionsProtestRebellionExtremismAdvocacyRadicalismDemocratizationChangee
Book:Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician
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“The revolutionary idea of contemporary art was that any object, any detail or fragment of the material world, could exert the same strange attraction and pose the same insoluble questions as were reserved in the past for a few rare aristocratic forms known as works of art. That is where true democracy lay: not in the accession of everyone to aesthetic enjoyment, but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which every object would, without distinction, have its fifteen minutes of fame (particularly objects without distinction). All objects are equivalent, everything is a work of genius. With, as a corollary, the transformation of art and of the work itself into an object, without illusion or transcendence, a purely conceptual acting-out, generative of deconstructed objects which deconstruct us in their turn. No longer any face, any gaze, any human countenance or body in all this - organs without bodies, flows, molecules, the fractal. The relation to the 'artwork' is of the order of contamination, of contagion: you hook up to it, absorb or immerse yourself in it, exactly as in flows and networks. Metonymic sequence, chain reaction. No longer any real object in all this: in the ready-made it is no longer the object that's there, but the idea of the object, and we no longer find pleasure here in art, but in the idea of art. We are wholly in ideology. And, ultimately, the twofold curse of modem and contemporary art is summed up in the 'ready-made': the curse of an immersion in the real and banality, and that of a conceptual absorption in the idea of art.”

AddictionIdeologyAbstractionPop CultureSimulationBanalityContemporary ArtPandemicsDemocratization
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“The most notable amendment is the alteration to Article 200, which describes the constitutional role of the military. This amendment extends the military’s duties to include the ‘protection of the constitution, democracy, the state and its secular nature, and personal freedoms.’ This phrase has radical implications, the most notable of which is that it paves the way for continued military intervention in politics, if and when it deems that the secular nature of that state, democracy or personal freedoms are threatened by an elected civilian government. This is very cynical, considering that the military autocracy has been the main violator of the freedoms mentioned in the amendment. In fact, this is the military’s option of last resort, in the event that popular pressure forces a free election and that a civilian government is elected. This is a very similar argument to the one made by the Algerian military on the eve of the coup in 1992, when elections won by F.I.S. were voided, triggering a bloody civil war that lasted the better part of a decade (Evans and John, 2007). Hidden in the language of the amendment is a very dangerous ideological imperative, which identifies the military with the ‘state’ rather than with the elected government of the day. It assumes that since the military is serving the ‘state’, then the military—and only the military—is able to defend the ‘state’ against the incompetence of civilians. In other words, the amendment assumes that the military’s supremacy over civilians is the natural order of things. This assumption is deeply rooted in the regime’s ideological construct, where the ‘state’ is imagined as an almost mythical entity that has to be protected against the folly of civilian politicians and the demands for democratization. In essence, the amendment turns the concept of popular sovereignty on its head, with the source of sovereignty transferred from the popular will to the military, as the ultimate guardian of the ‘state’. This entrenches a paternalistic attitude towards the citizenry, as incompetent simpletons who, in a moment of folly, might elect a government that could destroy the ‘state’. Finer identifies acceptance of civilian supremacy as one of the pre-conditions for restraining a military’s interventionist appetite (Finer, 2002). This is clearly not the case in Egypt, where prospective future coups now have a solid constitutional basis.” Chapter 2: The New Leviathan, pages 52-53”

DemocracyConstitutionDictatorshipDemocratizationPopular SovereigntyCoupAmendmentMilitarizationModern EgyptEl Sisi
Book:Egypt under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge
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