A.R. Moxon Profile picture
Jul 13, 2019 25 tweets 8 min read Read on X
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,

Plodding to the ports and costs for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,

Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got?

I'll tell you:
You had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern

Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,

With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,

Would shark on you,
and men like ravenous fishes

Would feed on one another.
Let me set up before your thoughts, good friends,

On supposition; which if you will mark,

You shall perceive how horrible a shape

Your innovation bears.
O, desperate as you are,

Wash your foul minds with tears,

And your unreverent knees,

Make them your feet to kneel to be forgiven
You'll put down strangers
kill them

cut their throats
And lead the majesty of law in line,

To slip in like a hound.
Say now the king

(as he is clement, if th' offender mourn)

Should so much come to short of your great trespass

As but to banish you, whether would you go?
Why, *you* must needs be strangers.
Would you be pleased

To find a nation of such barbarous temper,

That, breaking out in hideous violence,

Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs,
and like as if that God

Owed not nor made not you
What would you think

To be thus used?
This is the strangers’ case;
And this

your mountainish

inhumanity.
____________

"The Stranger's Case," William Shakespeare

Sir Thomas Moore: Act II Scene 4
"What is the precise moment, in the life of a country, when tyranny takes hold? It rarely happens in an instant; it arrives like twilight, and, at first, the eyes adjust."

-Evan Osnos @eosnos
@eosnos And here is the magnificent @IanMcKellen, bringing the words found in this thread to gorgeous tragic life.

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More from @JuliusGoat

Oct 28
There's a moment in Steven Soderbergh's film Traffic where the newly freed drug boss says to the drug lawyer who had been working behind his back "do you know the difference between a reason and an excuse? Because I don't."

At this point the lawyer knows he is in deep shit. 🧵
(By the way this thread is part of a longer essay, but if I lead off the thread with a link to an outside source, it usually gets crushed by this site's dork owner and his algorithm shenanigans, so here you go.)

the-reframe.com/out-damned-spo…
Anyway the lawyer knows he's in deep shit because "do you know the difference between a reason and an excuse" means "I'm not buying your bullshit," and if newly-freed-drug-lords-behind-whose-back-you've-been-working aren't buying your bullshit, then it is murder goon o'clock.
Read 30 tweets
Oct 24
One thing I’ve noticed is, the meanest tables are often popular ones. Sometimes they are the most popular. My observation here would be that bullies know that cultivating friendly relationships is useful and necessary for effective bullying.
Any abuser knows they need accomplices. If dad is getting drunk and beating mom up he’s going to need everyone to keep nice and quiet about it, and if anybody squawks then it’s got to be quickly framed as something bad being done to him rather than the other way around.
If it looks as if the truth of the story is about to get around he’s going to need people to stand up for him in that moment and say things like this: “Nooooo! Not him. I know him. He would never. He has never been anything but nice to me.”
Read 15 tweets
Oct 22
I’d like to talk about what leadership is and what governance is. I’d like to talk about the compass, the navigation, the travel, and the corrections.

the-reframe.com/the-compass-an…
When people decide to leave the place they are and move to a different place, there’s an observable order to it. The order is very important.

So, in movement, there is the moment of arrival at the destination.
But before that moment, there is the actual journey. We began here. We moved until we got there. We put one foot in front of the other. We set sail and kept going until we arrived. The aircraft cut its way across the sky. This is the journey.
Read 35 tweets
Sep 24
There's so much scandal all the time, it can be hard to remember where we are, much less how we got here. But they say it's important remember the lessons of the past, or else we're fated to do...something, I forget what, I forget, I forget.

Full Essay: the-reframe.com/the-rot-goes-t…
Where we are.

It's really hard to know where to begin when it comes to where we are. There's only so much sheer volume of blatant corruption and noxious hate that a person can stay aware of even if they're trying. Eventually something pushes out.
It came out this week that NC Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson has in past years spent his time posting pro-slavery and pro-Nazi comments on porn sites, and other things of that nature, many of which are so bad CNN, who broke the story, declined to print them.
Read 14 tweets
Sep 18
Conservatives keep telling us they're oppressed, and when they define what form the oppression takes, they explain that other kinds of people ... exist.

You know what? Let's do it. Let's actually do it. I think we ought to oppress conservatives.

Other people *should* exist. 🧵
Let's oppress conservatives with a kind and open and generous world that they will hate and fear specifically because it will care for everyone, even them, while it refuses any longer to accommodate the revenge fantasies that they call "self-defense."
At the bottom of it all, it strikes me that conservatives are driven by fear. They're big fraidy-cats, scared specifically of the ongoing danger of good and necessary things, of openness and diversity and peace and plenty.

We should stop accommodating those fears.
Read 29 tweets
Sep 15
Last Tuesday Donald Trump shat his pants on national TV. Ever since, he's been scooting his butt around on the national carpet to dislodge the detritus of loserdom. It's standard wounded narcissist self-care behavior, and it would be nice if all of this could be *only* funny. 🧵
Unfortunately, it can't be only funny; Trump and his gang are engaged in some shockingly evil rhetoric even for them—promising that, for the crime of existing while undesirable to conservatives, as many people as possible will be hurt, as soon and as badly as possible.
Incidentally, this thread is part of an essay that you can read right here on my weekly newsletter, The Reframe.

the-reframe.com/its-time-to-op…
Read 31 tweets

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