Pace Oscar Wilde
barbarian1. A member of a people considered by those of another nation or group to have a primitive civilization. 2. A fierce, brutal, or cruel person. 3. An insensitive, uncultured person; a boor. See synonyms at boor.boor1. A person with rude, clumsy manners and little refinement. 2. A peasant.barbaric1. Of, relating to, or characteristic of barbarians. 2. Marked by crudeness or lack of restraint in taste, style, or manner.barbarism1. An act, trait, or custom characterized by ignorance or crudity. 2a. The use of words, forms, or expressions considered incorrect or unacceptable. b. A specific word, form, or expression so used.The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language:
Fourth Edition. 2000.
(We should note, however, that just as Vikings and Spanish Conquistadores may have been perfectly polite and neighborly in their home towns, people who manifest sociopathic behavior in some contexts may be perfectly polite and reasonable when they choose to be.)
Victorian European culture was characterized by a belief in Progress, including the continual general civilizing of humanity. Although less-civilized regions could still be found on the map, although brief and limited episodes of violence still occurred in "civilized" regions, and although atavistic tendencies persisted even among model citizens, it was largely felt that these things represented survivals from the past which would eventually be eliminated, that rationalism and reasonableness would gradually spread over the entire globe and throughout the soul of every person.
This happy conceit was rudely overturned by the Great War of 1914-1918(aka World War I) with its indiscriminate slaughter of millions of men by artillery, machine-gun fire, and poison gas, along with atrocities committed against civilians, and then by the rise of the fascist states in the 1930s, with virulent racism, the fuehrerprinzip, suspicion against learning and reason, the glorification of brutality against both external and internal foes, and the diligent application of all the tools of modern technology to the basest of human impulses.
In our own time there are signs of a similar degeneration of standards of interpersonal behavior.
- Throughout history, many new technologies have been announced as heralding the imminent arrival of Paradise on Earth.
So far, this has not happened.
The Internet is proving to be no exception to this rule.
A J Liebling is supposed to have said that "Freedom of the press belongs only to the person who owns one", and it's a commonplace that today anyone with a PC and an Internet connection can instantly publish to the entire world.
Unfortunately, it is becoming painfully clear that this doesn't automatically raise the intellectual and aesthetic levels of the writers.
- Several factors that I believe are contributing to the current situation:The internalization of the hyper-consumerist instant gratification model. Moderns expect to be able to find an answer to their detailed wants through attention to information (ads and product-rating sources, as well as gossip), and available to anyone who pays the price. If one purchases the product or service and it turns out not to satisfy the want, then one might simply conclude that one's consumer selection was erroneous and attempt to obtain a more effective replacement, or that the product or service is defective (and was possibly advertised or sold under false pretenses).
In other words, people have only limited experience in negotiating with / dealing with / tolerating others to get what they want.
Unlike traditional societies, moderns are largely lacking in experience with real and serious interpersonal violence (while on the other hand being exposed to extremely high levels of violence through the media, but without any actual personal consequences. They thus aren't conditioned by experience to have a healthy respect for (and even fear of) violence -- it appears to be a common and personal-consequence-free tool for obtaining one's objectives.
"Western culture has not survived this century; we float and make our lives, says Steiner, from the surface wreckage,the post-culture, and in the depths the largest fragments anchor vast, proliferating reefs of coral scholarship. ...
The death of the culture is not just the breaking of the chain of tradition, of reference. The confidence of the culture hasbeen shattered as well. The automatic, unself-conscious elitism it once possessed is gone --- Western culture is uniquefor its assaults on itself --- and the unforced ease with which it distinguished and evaluated, created hierarchy and gaveitself a high place therein is lost to all but the fatuous. That the great events of our century --- the ''Thirty Year's War''of 1914-1945, the genocides, the bureaucratization of terror and torture and death, the real possibility of deliberatehuman extinction at the press of a button --- that these were even possible would have struck those of prior centuriesas ''nightmarish jokes.'' The optimistic beliefs of those centuries, of the prior tradition --- that there is progress, thatthe humanities make one humane, that ''the future is holy'' --- in their turn begin to seem like nightmarish jokes."
"Warren Messner was 15 when he and some friends attacked a homeless man and left him for dead. Mr. Messner jumped on a log laid across the man’s ribs. He does not know why. He was high, does not remember much and wants to forget the rest. ...Yep, the old ultraviolence.
'It was just a senseless crime.' he said, his eyes down, his shoulders slumped. 'I wish it would have never happened. It made no sense. It was stupidity.'
Mr. Messner’s story is not unusual. Nationwide, violence against the homeless is soaring, and overwhelmingly the attackers are teenagers and young adults. In Florida the problem is so severe that the National Coalition for the Homeless is setting up speakers bureaus to address a culture that sees attacking the homeless as a sport. It is the first time the organization has singled out a particular state. ...
In Fort Lauderdale a group of teenagers captured national attention in 2006 when a surveillance camera caught one laughing as he beat a homeless man with a baseball bat. The teenagers attacked three homeless men that night and face a murder trial in one man’s death. A year later in Daytona Beach, a 17-year-old and two 10-year-olds attacked a homeless Army veteran. One 10-year-old dropped a cement block on the man’s face, the police said.
'What could possibly be in the mind of a 10- or 12-year-old that would possess them to pick up a rock and pick up a brick and beat another human being in the head?' said Ron Book, chairman of the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust.'It defies any rational thought process, but it’s also why we felt so strongly we had to do something.' ...
'I think it reflects a lack of respect for the homeless that has reached such extreme proportions that homeless people aren’t viewed as people,' said Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty."
"A central paradox of the rapid advances in media technologies is that the quantum leaps in computer hard drives and software have been accompanied by an approximately zero boost in human mental capacity -- or in what we refer to with such words as "insight," "wisdom" and "compassion."
FPD Symptoms: ...
3. Amoral: they believe that their insults, verbal abuse, character attacks, lies, and even death threats are perfectly acceptable behavior, once "justified"...
6. Narcisstic: they have extreme vanity, taking the form of an exquisite sensitivity to anything which even SLIGHTLY resembles an insult...
"Your country was born, after all, over a bloody revolt based on a tax on soft drinks. Violent defiance is etched into your DNA. You long to be the Luke Skywalker that destroys the Death Star, the Neo who brings down Skyynet. You do not look for common ground and compromise; you hunt for the one irreconcilable difference that will justify becoming the gun-slinging Diehard Mclean of your dreams. ...
There is an acidic ocean of online screaming matches out there boiling as we speak, Right vs. Left, Bush vs. Anti-Bush, being conducted by millions of apoplectic web surfers. And everywhere you see that imaginary line on which every American thinks he must stand to one side or the other, like picking teams for an American game of Freedom Ball or whatever it is you play there in your country.
I see seven Information-Age factors behind the brewing conflict that will ultimately undo America:..."
"... I began the program by propounding what I described as four "conservative" principles in which I deeply believe.- Links are mine -- ed.
These principles were:1) I believe that the Constitution is a great American treasure, that it’s what most defines us as a nation, the means by which we preserve both liberty and order, and something that we as Americans have the sacred duty to defend.
2) I believe, as did our Founding Fathers, that the United States is "a nation of laws, not of men," that – for the preservation of the American way of life -- it is absolutely essential that those who enforce the rules also obey the rules.
3) I believe, as did our Founding Fathers, that eternal vigilance –on the part of the press, and of the people—is the price of liberty. And that the Constitution’s system of checks and balances represents the Founders’ great insight that unchecked and unaccountable power is the greatest threat to the values for which America stands.
4) I believe that an oath is a sacred promise, and that this is especially true–because of the awesome powers and responsibilities of the office-- of the oath the president swears upon taking office, the oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."
... It would require them either to say that they disagreed with these "conservative" principles, or to argue there’s little reason to wonder whether President Bush might have violated those principles, or to agree that there’s enough "probable cause" to require an investigation into whether this administration has run roughshod over the law.
I doubted that these Bushites would explicitly repudiate the principles; I knew that I had enough information to establish "probable cause" for suspecting the Bushites of lawlessness; and so I hoped the conversation would move people in the direction of their acknowledging the vital importance of an unbiased and thorough-going investigation.
No such luck.
While logic might reduce the options to those three, the callers to the program seemed unconstrained by logic. Almost without exception, they chose to engage in the ad hominem attack—to ignore the message and attack the messenger—a form of argument regarded by philosophers as one of the logical fallacies. They seemed to believe that because I could be labeled a "liberal", anything I said –even statements of established fact-- could simply be dismissed or ignored. ...
The forces now ruling America have already taught their followers to discredit all the possible alternative sources of thought. Not only have "liberals" been demonized (liberals have become the new "communists"), but also discredited are all media that are not propaganda mouthpieces of the regime (there is no notion of journalism as a noble, truth-seeking profession). And likewise they’ve cast science as an enemy, and with it all other forms of expertise-based knowledge.
The impermeability of this Bushite thought system, which I encountered last week on the radio, reminded me of Catch-22. "If the source of some idea or information isn’t one of us, then we can reject it. And if anyone presents ideas or information that challenge our dogmas, then that person cannot be one of us." A fool-proof system for protecting the faith. ...
The regime, it seems, is teaching them how to not think, how to close themselves off from anything that might awaken them to the ways their rulers are deceiving them.
Years ago, I read a definition of "neurosis" as "a form of learned stupidity." In other words, people might learn –as an adaptation to the pathologies of a particular environment—how not to see what is before their eyes and not to think clearly about the true meanings of their experience.
In America now, what is happening is not at the individual level of neurosis, but at the larger cultural level where the ruling powers have created an environment to induce a collective blindness and inability to think clearly.
This form of consciousness -- the intentional product of propaganda and manipulation — can be seen as a form of “taught stupidity.”
"The more time I spend in the blogopshere, the more it seems to me that many blogs are merely online cults.Fascinating. You should read this in its entirety.
It's an easy comparison to make. Notice, for example, that blog audiences simply do not cross over. Most people who read and contribute to Free Republic stay away from DailyKos, and vice-versa. ...
Notice how this behavior is perfectly typical of what, in the real world, we call cults.
*Cult members do not leave their own cognitive and/or physical environments. Online, this means spending most, if not all, of your time in the echo chamber of blogs aligned with your point of view. ...
*Cult members have no empathy for rival views or the practitioners of those views. Opponents are devils; sympathizers are angels. Orthodoxy is all-important; dissent is unthinkable.
*A cult represents organized commitment to small-picture idiocy; a gang of what Berlin called philosophical hedgehogs (those who know only one big thing about the world). Overlay this with tribal ingroup-outgroup biology and you get the inescapable conclusion that a blog, far from being a progressive community of seekers, is more often a kind of prehistoric hunting expedition determined to go after big game.
In the West, blogs have also become an outlet for the rage that we are no longer allowed to express in our actual world. ... In Turkey, where I now happen to be, if someone didn't like me, they'd just stab or shoot me. That's the East for you. There are no sophisticated insults here. In a way, that's a good thing, because everyone has to be on guard and maintain a certain standard of public politeness. In another way, it's a bad thing, because beneath the politeness is a very violent world that can explode in your face at any moment, and people everywhere prefer to live in peace.
We prefer to live in peace, but we need a dash of violence too; we have good and bad angels in our nature. If you can't slap someone down in the real world, it feels just as good -- better, perhaps -- to do it online. It's all the testosterone with none of the consequence and none of the danger.
And so many blogs have simply become places to exalt one group of people while slapping down another. They have all the subtlety and intelligence of professional wrestling.
Back in April, I reprinted, without permission, an (attributed) post from (a "big name") blog. ... (however, the blog's owner) expressed displeasure at being reposted, (so) I removed the article -- within minutes of hearing from him. ...
Then there was a flood of simply abusive e-mails (from the blog's readers) and, remarkably, even two death threats.
I deserve to die for reposting a blog entry that I deleted minutes after the author requested I do so?"
"It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other -- to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities. ...
The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. ...
The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news,and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And -- again -- perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won't nuke each other.
On the other hand, if you are raised within some specific culture, you end up with a basic set of tools that you can use to think about and understand the world. You might use those tools to reject the culture you were raised in, but at least you've got some tools."
-- emphasis and links are mine -- ed.
I also recommend / "Jihad vs. McWorld" / and comments from David Brin.
"... an unredeemably sadistic film that makes a joke of horrific death. There is absolutely no point to this film except inciting audiences to new levels of bloodlust -- and it responded in kind, at least at the preview screening I attended: there was something truly bone-deep disturbing about listening to that crowd actually, literally stomp in delight and cheer out loud for each increasingly gruesome onscreen death."
"Marxism's natural death in Eastern Europe is no guarantee that subtler tyrannies do not await us, here and abroad. History has demonstrated that there is no final triumph of reason, whether it goes by the name of Christianity, the Enlightenment, or, now, democracy. To think that democracy as we know it will triumph -- or is even here to stay -- is itself a form of determinism, driven by our own ethnocentricity. Indeed, those who quote Alexis de Tocqueville in support of democracy's inevitability should pay heed to his observation that Americans, because of their (comparative) equality, exaggerate "the scope of human perfectibility." Despotism, Tocqueville went on, 'is more particularly to be feared in democratic ages', because it thrives on the obsession with self and one's own security which equality fosters.
I submit that the democracy we are encouraging in many poor parts of the world is an integral part of a transformation toward new forms of authoritarianism; that democracy in the United States is at greater risk than ever before, and from obscure sources; and that many future regimes, ours especially, could resemble the oligarchies of ancient Athens and Sparta more than they do the current government in Washington. History teaches that it is exactly at such prosperous times as these that we need to maintain a sense of the tragic, however unnecessary it may seem. (The Gods of the Copybook Headings...)"
Gwyne Dyer
Quoted here.
-- And do we also have to say:
"Here's how Leo Rosten translates the Yiddish word (bulvan), which Rosten says is also spelled "bulvon": 'a gross, thick-headed, thick-skinned oaf. . . . No English word carries quite the sneer of bulvon, or quite the implicit devaluation of brute strength. . . . A bulvon has no sensitivity, no insight, no spiritual graces.' ...
(Kirk)Douglas' trick was showing us the best qualities of a bulvan, the stoic endurance of physical pain, as well a physical man's exuberance, lustiness, and strutting intensity."
"Women in stripping are overwhelmingly motivated by the promise of wealth or a will to survive (Skipper and McCaghy 1970; Ronai 1992; Thompson and Harred 1992). ... Women in this study report the best part of stripping to be the money. ... Women in stripping feel it doesn’t take much skill to be a stripper (Forsyth and Deshotels 1997; Skipper and McCaghy 1970). ... The women in this study condemn the men associated with stripping and the impact stripping has on them as the worst parts of stripping. Women do not like the way customers treat them (Thompson and Harred 1992). ... Women characterize customers as scum, psycho mama’s boys, rapists and child molesters, old perverted men, idiots, [thoroughly contemptible, detestable persons], and pigs. Strippers are largely disgusted by customers and describe them as pitiful and pathetic, stupid and ignorant, sick, controlling and abusive."
"In a letter dated September 15, 1931, when he must have been finishing up Brave New World, Huxley wrote:Links are mine -- ed.'I have been very much preoccupied with a difficult piece of work -- a Swiftian novel about the Future, showing the horrors of Utopia and the strange and appalling effects on feeling, “instinct” and general weltanschauung of the application of psychological, physiological and mechanical knowledge to the fundamentals of human life. It is a comic book—but seriously comic.'The word “Utopia” there would have been taken by any literate person of the time to refer to the later works of H. G. Wells, especially the 1923 novel Men Like Gods, in which a party of Englishmen is accidentally transported into a parallel world run on Wellsian principles, a “universal scientific state” actually named Utopia, where all are made happy and well-adjusted via free love, eugenics, and enlightened education.
Wells, born in 1866, was of the generation before Huxley and Orwell, a generation for which unbounded late-Victorian scientific optimism was still possible. The younger writers, speaking from the dissolution and pessimism that followed World War I, understood that there was something wrong with Wells’s dream of progress and harmony under benevolent technocratic elites, and were intent on telling us what that something was."
"We need an excuse to send our characters to the center of the Earth, and the laws of physics have never mattered to Hollywood before. ...
If this doesn't sound dumb to you in the slightest, you will probably like THE CORE. Of course, this also means that you must have liked ARMAGEDDON, LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER, THE SCORPION KING, THE MUSKETEER, BEHIND ENEMY LINES, and films of that ilk. What do those titles have in common, you wonder? One thing: they all make extensive use of "dumbness that looks cool."
The most unfortunate thing about this film is that there are, no doubt, a bunch of high school kids who came out of that film feeling that they had been educated in the sciences of geology and physics. ...
There are so many holes in this film, so many leaps of logic, so many stupid propositions advanced that it angers one to think they can label this thing as "science fiction." There ought to be a law against that sort of thing...."
"The linguist Deborah Tannen does a terrific job with the subject in The Argument Culture. Sez Deborah:'The argument culture urges us to approach the world — and the people in it — in an adversarial frame of mind. It rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get anything done. The best way to discuss an idea is to set up a debate; the best way to cover news is to find spokespeople who express the most extreme, polarized views and present them as 'both sides'; the best way to settle disputes is litigation that pits one party against the other; the best way to begin an essay is to attack someone; and the best way to show you're really thinking is to criticize.
The war on drugs, the war on cancer, the battle of the sexes, politicians' turf battles — in the argument culture, war metaphors pervade our talk and shape our thinking. Nearly everything is framed as a battle or game in which winning or losing is the main concern. These all have their uses and their place, but they are not the only way — and often not the best way — to understand and approach our world. Conflict and opposition are as necessary as cooperation and agreement, but the scale is off balance, with conflict and opposition overweighted. . . .
In the argument culture, criticism, attack, or opposition are the predominant if not the only ways of responding to people or ideas. . . . It is the automatic nature of this response that I am calling attention to — and calling into question. Sometimes passionate opposition, strong verbal attack, are appropriate and called for. No one knows this better than those who have lived under repressive regimes that forbid public opposition. . . . What I question is the ubiquity, the knee-jerk nature, of approaching almost any issue, problem or public person in an adversarial way. One of the dangers of the habitual use of adversarial rhetoric is a kind of verbal inflation — a rhetorical boy who cried wolf: The legitimate, necessary denunciation is muted, even lost, in the general cacophony of oppositional shouting. What I question is using opposition to accomplish every goal, even those that do not require fighting but might also (or better) be accomplished by other means, such as exploring, expanding, discussing, investigating, and the exchanging of ideas suggested by the word 'dialogue.' I am questioning the assumption that everything is a matter of polarized opposites, the proverbial 'two sides to every question' that we think embodies open-mindedness and expansive thinking.' "
"Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for "vulgarity"; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful."
"The throng of Wal-Mart shoppers had been building all night, filling sidewalks and stretching across a vast parking lot at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, N.Y. At 3:30 a.m., the Nassau County police had to be called in for crowd control, and an officer with a bullhorn pleaded for order. ...
Suddenly, witnesses and the police said, the doors shattered, and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush for holiday bargains. One worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, was thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and trampled in the stampede that streamed over and around him."
"Dalrymple writes with great clarity, slicing through the common gibberish of the “official” social sciences with the sword of reductionism. The child-rearing philosophy of the underclass is, he tells us, one of 'laissez-faire tempered by insensate rage.' The distress that leads to attempted suicide — an everyday occurrence in the lives of Dalrymple’s patients — is 'the consequence of not knowing how to live.' (A key insight. In another place he speaks of 'the chronic suffering caused by not knowing how to live.') The poor, he writes, 'live in a torment of public and private disorder, which I have trembled to behold every day of the last ten years of my professional life.' Reading, we tremble with him. The misfortunes of a patient result from 'a willful chasing after misery.' Root causes? 'Since the cause of crime is the decision of criminals to commit it, what goes on in their minds is not irrelevant.'
Well, what does go on in underclass minds? Not much that is coherent, of course, since the people we are dealing with here have, either by their own will or under the example or intimidation of their peer group, rejected all attempts to educate them. The typical Dalrymple subject is 'devoid of either ambition or interests,' his inner life a solipsistic jumble of 'emotions ... simultaneously intense and shallow.' It is clear, however, that all the cant of our age, all the doctrines of moral and cultural relativism that seized hold of the educated classes in the years after WW2, all those pop-Marxist doctrines that attribute every worldy ill to some form of material deprivation, or to oppression by malign political conspiracies, have seeped down into the dull minds at the bottom of society, turning toxic in the process. Are our personalities formed in response to our physical environment? Why, then, the inanimate world is our master, and we cannot fairly be held responsible for the things we do. ... Why should a low-IQ barely-literate youth believe in the doctrine of free will, when, for all he can see, his intellectual superiors have given up on it?"
"I think the wave of spam that washes over our emailinboxes every day is what the mass market has learned from massmarketing over the last 70 years. Used to be only the Procter &Gambles of the world could do it. Now anybody can, for almost nomoney at all. The result is a kind of denial of civilization attack-- just like we've been getting on TV and radio since grandma was a kid."
"When one of the First Platoon M.P.'s, Specialist Corey E. Jones, was sent to Mr. Dilawar's cell to give him some water, he said the prisoner spit in his face and started kicking him. Specialist Jones responded, he said, with a couple of knee strikes to the leg of the shackled man.
"He screamed out, 'Allah! Allah! Allah!' and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his god," Specialist Jones said to investigators. "Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny." ...
It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah,' " he said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes." ...
On Dec. 8, Mr. Dilawar was taken for his fourth interrogation. It quickly turned hostile. ...
"About the first 10 minutes, I think, they were actually questioning him, after that it was pushing, shoving, kicking and shouting at him," Mr. Ahmadzai said. "There was no interrogation going on."
The session ended, he said, with Sergeant Salcedo instructing the M.P.'s to keep Mr. Dilawar chained to the ceiling until the next shift came on. ...
The next morning, Sergeant Yonushonis went to the noncommissioned officer in charge of the interrogators, Sergeant Loring, to report the incident. Mr. Dilawar, however, was already dead.
The findings of Mr. Dilawar's autopsy were succinct. He had had some coronary artery disease, the medical examiner reported, but what caused his heart to fail was "blunt force injuries to the lower extremities." Similar injuries contributed to Mr. Habibullah's death.
One of the coroners later translated the assessment at a pre-trial hearing for Specialist Brand, saying the tissue in the young man's legs "had basically been pulpified."
"I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus," added Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the coroner, and a major at that time."
"The basic strategical imperative of Rome was to placate the unproductive and feckless mob at home, a necessity St. Jerome later pithily summed up as Fex urbis, lex orbis -- 'the Excrement of the City is the Law of the World'.
Rome did this -- in a fashion all too familiar to us today -- via the dole and the Circus, that ancient equivalent of daytime TV and 'reality' show entertainment, staged in the Coliseum.
To achieve this, it was always prone to 'pay' its bills via inflation. Further, it secured an ever greater share (though ultimately a smaller pot) of the economic resources within the Empire by promoting a growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the large-scale rackrent oligarchs and financiers, at the expense of the small–medium entrepreneur/farming class, soon reduced to peonage via the double whammy of swingeing (i.e. "punishing") taxes and usurious lending, from which the elite were largely sheltered (usually through corruption).
Of course, this combination meant that the parasitical classes clustered around the throne progressively eroded the productive foundations of the Empire, and so its output consequently embarked upon what was to be a terminal decline."
"Two men were arguing over the last few chips remaining in the bag when one man stabbed the 43-year-old victim in the chest.
He was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. Police say the assailant fled with the chips and remains at large."