ellauri052.html on line 654: There were two Krishnamurtis. One was the persona presented to the world through lectures and books; a man without ego who led a sanctified life of celibacy and high moral purity. The other Krishnamurti was a shadowy, self-centered, vain man, capable of sudden angers and enormous cruelty to friends. He was also a habitual liar. Krishna, as his friends called him, freely admitted his compulsive lying. He blamed it on simple fear of having his deceptions detected.
ellauri111.html on line 255: As I’d had to admit, I hadn’t read The Diary of a Writer (actually a kind of journal that Dostoevsky published monthly and that consisted entirely of his own thoughts about issues of the day), but I did know that he had been involved in several criminal cases, some of which were about the kind of cruelty to children that Ivan Karamazov cited as evidence against the existence of God. I couldn’t remember any details, though. I felt rather like a student who hasn’t done his homework hoping that he’s not the one going to be asked the next question. Only there wasn’t anyone else to ask. In the event, Fyodor Mikhailovich let me off fairly gently.
ellauri203.html on line 450: credulity and the same cruelty, the same lust of blood, of gold, of
ellauri222.html on line 257: For a man for such small balls, he had huge needs. The writing life needed to be supported. He failed his children; he left them, and it was a wound he carried around like a medal. He knew the cruelty of this. At the very end, though he was not Rosie's father (oops), he was in the house. He and Rosie would watch The Lion King together: in the final, unpleasant stages of his last illness, he was at the point where he didn't mind watching that same film over and over. I was somehow managing Rosie and Saul in the same way." Do they have a relationship with Saul's sons? Not really. Rosie has special needs, and Jänis is focused very much on her. Their house is cozy, not grand, there just happen to be photographs of a Nobel laureate on almost every shelf. Guess which one?
ellauri236.html on line 188: I have already outlined the plot, but the subject-matter is much more sordid and brutal than this suggests. The book contains eight full-dress murders, an unassessable number of casual killings and woundings, an exhumation (with a careful reminder of the stench), the flogging of Miss Blandish, the torture of another woman with red-hot cigarette-ends, a strip-tease act, a third-degree scene of unheard-of cruelty and much else of the same kind. It assumes great sexual sophistication in its readers (there is a scene, for instance, in which a gangster, presumably of masochistic tendency, has an orgasm in the moment of being knifed - I can relate to that!), and it takes for granted the most complete corruption and self-seeking as the norm of human behaviour. The detective, for instance, is almost as great a rogue as the gangsters, and actuated by nearly the same motives. Like them, he is in pursuit of ‘five hundred grand’. It is necessary to the machinery of the story that Mr. Blandish should be anxious to get his money back, but apart from this, such things as affection, friendship, good nature or even ordinary politeness simply do not enter. Nor, to any great extent does normal sexuality. Ultimately only one motive is at work throughout the whole story: the pursuit of power. (Well, there is also the pursuit of spaghetti and some twat.)
ellauri236.html on line 190: It should be noticed that the book is not in the ordinary sense pornography. In this respect it is a flop. Unlike most books that deal in sexual sadism, it lays the emphasis on the cruelty and not on the pleasure. Slim, the ravisher of Miss Blandish, has ‘wet slobbering lips’: this is meant to be disgusting (tho I didn't find it so). But the scenes describing cruelty to women are comparatively perfunctory. The real high-spots of the book are cruelties committed by men upon other men; above all, the third-degreeing of the gangster, Eddie Schultz, who is lashed into a chair and flogged on the windpipe with truncheons, his arms broken by fresh blows as he breaks loose. My conclusion: Chase is a closet homosexual (I should know)! He's an algolagniac, like Swinburne!
ellauri236.html on line 202: In a book like No Orchids one is not, as in the old-style crime story, simply escaping from dull reality into an imaginary world of action. One's escape is essentially into cruelty and sexual perversion. No Orchids is aimed at the power-instinct, which Raffles or the Sherlock Holmes stories are not. At the same time the English attitude towards crime is not so superior to the American as I may have seemed to imply. It too is mixed up with power-worship, and has become more noticeably so in the last twenty years. A writer who is worth examining is Edgar Wallace, especially in such typical books as The Orator and the Mr. J. G. Reeder stories. Wallace was one of the first crime-story writers to break away from the old tradition of the private detective and make his central figure a Scotland Yard official. Sherlock Holmes is an amateur, solving his problems without the help and even, in the earlier stories, against the opposition of the police. Moreover, like Lupin, he is essentially an intellectual, even a scientist. He reasons logically from observed fact, and his intellectuality is constantly contrasted with the routine methods of the police. Wallace objected strongly to this slur, as he considered it, on Scotland Yard, and in several newspaper articles he went out of his way to denounce Holmes by name. His own ideal was the detective-inspector who catches criminals not because he is intellectually brilliant but because he is part of an all-powerful organization. Hence the curious fact that in Wallace's most characteristic stories the ‘clue’ and the ‘deduction’ play no part. The criminal is always defeated by an incredible coincidence, or because in some unexplained manner the police know all about the crime beforehand. The tone of the stories makes it quite clear that Wallace's admiration for the police is pure bully-worship. A Scotland Yard detective is the most powerful kind of being that he can imagine, while the criminal figures in his mind as an outlaw against whom anything is permissible, like the condemned slaves in the Roman arena. His policemen behave much more brutally than British policemen do in real life — they hit people with out provocation, fire revolvers past their ears to terrify them and so on — and some of the stories exhibit a fearful intellectual sadism. (For instance, Wallace likes to arrange things so that the villain is hanged on the same day as the heroine is married.) But it is sadism after the English fashion: that is to say, it is unconscious, there is not overtly any sex in it, and it keeps within the bounds of the law. The British public tolerates a harsh criminal law and gets a kick out of monstrously unfair murder trials: but still that is better, on any account, than tolerating or admiring crime. If one must worship a bully, it is better that he should be a policeman than a gangster. Wallace is still governed to some extent by the concept of ‘not done’. In No Orchids anything is ‘done’ so long as it leads on to power. All the barriers are down, all the motives are out in the open. Chase is a worse symptom than Wallace, to the extent that all-in wrestling is worse than boxing, or Fascism is worse than capitalist democracy.
ellauri236.html on line 204: In borrowing from William Faulkner's Sanctuary, Chase only took the plot; the mental atmosphere of the two books is not similar. Chase really derives from other sources, and this particular bit of borrowing is only symbolic. What it symbolizes is the vulgarization of ideas which is constantly happening, and which probably happens faster in an age of print. Chase has been described as ‘Faulkner for the masses’, but it would be more accurate to describe him as Carlyle for the masses. He is a popular writer — there are many such in America, but they are still rarities in England — who has caught up with what is now fashionable to call ‘realism’, meaning the doctrine that might is right. The growth of ‘realism’ has been the great feature of the intellectual history of our own age. Why this should be so is a complicated question. The interconnexion between sadism, masochism, success-worship, power-worship, nationalism, and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered somewhat indelicate. To take merely the first example that comes to mind, I believe no one has ever pointed out the sadistic and masochistic element in Bernard Shaw's work, still less suggested that this probably has some connexion with Shaw's admiration for dictators. Fascism is often loosely equated with sadism, but nearly always by people who see nothing wrong in the most slavish worship of Stalin. The truth is, of course, that the countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini, nor from the efficiency experts who preached ‘punch’, ‘drive’, ‘personality’ and ‘learn to be a Tiger man’ in the nineteen-twenties, nor from that older generation of intellectuals, Carlyle, Creasey and the rest of them, who bowed down before German militarism. All of them are worshipping power and successful cruelty. It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes. A tyrant is all the more admired if he happens to be a bloodstained crook as well, and ‘the end justifies the means’ often becomes, in effect, ‘the means justify themselves provided they are dirty enough’. This idea colours the outlook of all sympathizers with totalitarianism, and accounts, for instance, for the positive delight with which many English intellectuals greeted the Nazi-Soviet pact. It was a step only doubtfully useful to the U.S.S.R., but it was entirely unmoral, and for that reason to be admired; the explanations of it, which were numerous and self-contradictory, could come afterwards.
ellauri236.html on line 210: One ought not to infer too much from the success of Mr. Chase's books. It is possible that it is an isolated phenomenon, brought about by the mingled boredom and brutality of war. (LOL) But if such books should definitely acclimatize themselves in England (or Nigeria!), instead of being merely a half-understood import from America, there would be good grounds for dismay. In choosing Raffles as a background for No Orchids I deliberately chose a book which by the standards of its time was morally equivocal. Raffles, as I have pointed out, has no real moral code, no religion, certainly no social consciousness. All he has is a set of reflexes the nervous system, as it were, of a gentleman. Give him a sharp tap on this reflex or that (they are called ‘sport’, ‘pal’, ‘woman’, ‘king and country’ and so forth), and you get a predictable reaction. In Mr. Chase's books there are no gentlemen and no taboos. Emancipation is complete. Freud and Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs. Comparing the schoolboy atmosphere of the one book with the cruelty and corruption of the other, one is driven to feel that snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.
ellauri262.html on line 176: The Christus Victor theory is becoming increasingly popular with both paleo-orthodox evangelicals because of its connection to the early Church fathers, and with liberal Christians and peace churches such as the Anabaptist Mennonites because of its subversive nature, seeing the death of Jesus as an exposure of the cruelty and evil present in the worldly powers that rejected and killed him, and the resurrection as a triumph over these powers.
ellauri270.html on line 381: Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves’s calm continuation of the lottery’s ritual shows that they are numb to the cruelty of the proceedings. Tessie’s protests imply that she doesn’t see the choice of the marked slip of paper as fate or some kind of divine decree, but rather as a human failing. Perhaps she sees, too late, that the lottery is only an arbitrary ritual that continues simply because a group of people have unthinkingly decided to maintain it.
ellauri270.html on line 385: Tessie’s protests have shown the reader that the outcome of the lottery will not be good. Little Davy’s inclusion reinforces the cruelty of the proceedings and the coldness of its participants. Little Davy is put at risk even when he is unable to understand the rituals or to physically follow the instructions. But so what? Is this one more case of "free will" stuffed down your throat?
ellauri270.html on line 403: By having children (even Tessie’s own son) involved in stoning Tessie, Jackson aims to show that cruelty and violence are primitive and inherent aspects of human nature—not something taught by society. Tessie’s attempts to protest until the end show the futility of a single voice standing up against the power of tradition and a majority afraid of nonconformists. Jackson ends her story with the revelation of what actually happens as a result of the lottery, and so closes on a note of both surprise and horror. The seemingly innocuous, ordinary villagers suddenly turn violent and bestial, forming a mob that kills one of their own with the most primitive weapons possible—and then happily going home to supper.
ellauri270.html on line 415: Jackson examines the basics of human nature in “The Lottery,” asking whether or not all humans are capable of violence and cruelty, and exploring how those natural inclinations can be masked, directed, or emphasized by the structure of society. Philosophers throughout the ages have similarly questioned the basic structure of human character: are humans fundamentally good or evil? Without rules and laws, how would we behave towards one another? Are we similar to animals in….. read analysis of Human Nature.
ellauri270.html on line 425: Jackson’s “The Lottery” was published in the years following World War II, when the world was presented with the full truth about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In creating the dystopian society of her story, Jackson was clearly responding to the fact that “dystopia” is not only something of the imagination—it can exist in the real world as well. Jackson thus meditates on human cruelty—especially when it is institutionalized, as in a dystopian society—and the… read analysis of Dystopian Society and Conformity.
xxx/ellauri122.html on line 814: An intriguing story in itself, its basis in tragic fact gives it a poignancy that makes it all the more powerful of a read. Forgot to mention, burning Dresden was just a wanton act of cruelty by the jealous yankees.
xxx/ellauri122.html on line 987: cruelty toward Jews. While images of emaciation and mass
xxx/ellauri127.html on line 504: 13. Nathan interprets Coleman’s choosing to reject his past and create a new identity for himself as “the drama that underlies America’s story, the high drama that is upping and leaving—and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands,” whereas Walter thinks of his brother as a “calculating liar,” a “heartless son,” and a “traitor to his race” [p. 342]. Which of these views seems closer to the truth? Are they both legitimate? What is Ernestine’s position?
xxx/ellauri178.html on line 76: Mixture of kindness and cruelty. Juutalaista menoa, ihan kuin Jehova. Anna Steiger muka löi ja potki äiskyä nimellä "kike bitch". (Rod Steiger oli goy.) Ritarillinen Roth puuttui asiaan ja kielti käyttämästä sellaista kieltä äidistä. Kike se oli izekin. Sen se ottikin izeensä. Siitä lähtien se ja Anna oli enemyjä kuin David ja filistealaiset. Annasta tuli oopperalaulaja. Roth muutti ulos muttei Lontoosta koska se oli vuokrannut molemmat kämppänsä ja oli muka vieläkin "hopelessly devoted to you". Mutta renting an apt in London would have disastrous tax consequences, advised an American lawyer. Phil oli varsinainen Shylock. I´m not going to be defeated by this kid, se murisi kuin karhu erauspennulle. Annalle tehtiin oma koppi pimeästi Clairen huoneiston nurkkaan (Clairen rahoilla). Säästyihän sekin penni.
xxx/ellauri193.html on line 215: Crimes of passion are often committed against women due to beliefs about female sexuality and are often present in societies dominated by strong double standards related to male and female sexual behaviors, particularly related to premarital sex and adultery. Indeed, with regard to adultery, many societies, such as Latin American countries, have been dominated by very strong double standards regarding male and female adultery, with the latter being seen as a much more serious violation. Such ideas were also supported by laws in the West; for example, in the UK, before 1923, a man could divorce solely on the wife's adultery, but a woman had to prove additional fault (eg. adultery and cruelty). Similarly, passion defenses to domestic murders were often available to men who killed unfaithful wives, but not to women who killed unfaithful husbands (France's crime of passion law, that was in force until 1975, is an example).
xxx/ellauri233.html on line 432: Jewish and Muslim commentators cite studies by the Vilna Gaon and Rebbe Schlemiel that show shechita is humane and that criticism is at least partially motivated by antisemitism. A Knesset committee announced (January, 2012) that it would call on European parliaments and the European Union to put a stop to attempts to outlaw kosher slaughter. "The pretext [for this legislation] is preventing cruelty to animals or animal rights—but there is an obvious element of anti-Semitism and a badly hidden message that Jews are cruel to animals," said Committee Chair MK Danny Danon (Likud).
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