Splitter IV

“Our Society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of. It's an inevitability tourists can't help but realize when visiting Mayan ruins, Egyptian ruins, Roman ruins. How long will it be before someone is visiting American ruins?” 

(Neil Strauss - Emergency)

Splitter III

"The truth was, she hadn't felt much like a cop in a long time. That was a place she never thought she'd get to. Be just like the rest of them after ten years. Angry and drunk. Numb to pretty much everything. That wasn't supposed to be her. But she now knew what they all knew: that the very thing you need to stay strong and keep your head, that daily and deliberate apathy you practice like meditation, is the very thing that, in the end, robs you of your desire to get in the car and catch bad guys. Nobody tells you that, once you put on the armor, you can never take it off." 

(Scott Frank - Shaker)

Splitter II

"[Federal prisons] are dreadful institutions whose procedures are designed to dehumanize the people they contain. And when you look at our rates of incarceration - roughly seven times higher than those of our peer nations, higher even then the Soviet Union under Stalin - you can't help but feel there is something wrong with a society that feels the need to lock so many of its citizens in cages." 

(Brad Parks - Say Nothing)

Splitter I

"Security was a myth, a grand lie we told ourselves to mask the jarring reality of the human condition: that the social contract was written in sand, not stone, and it could be blown away at any time, by anyone with sufficient breath his lungs." 

(Brad Parks - Say Nothing)

Neue alte Heiligenverehrung

In der ersten Staffel der Netflix-Serie 'Narcos' gibt es eine Szene, die in der Wohnung einer armen kolumbianischen Familie spielt. 
An der Wand hängt ein Bild des Drogenhändlers Pablo Escobar, auf dem Escobar aussieht wie ein Heiliger. Entsprechend spöttisch wird das Bild von DEA-Agenten kommentiert. 

Wenn man sich dieser Tage in Berlin umschaut, kommt man allerdings kaum umhin, mit einer neuen Art dieser Heiligenverehrung konfrontiert zu werden:

Hitchens bei BBC Newsnight Special

Ein gleichermaßen faszinierendes wie bestürzendes aktuelles Interview mit dem kahlköpfigen - weil vom Krebs befallenen - Christopher Hitchens, Autor von God Is Not Great:

Konversion = Selbst-Versklavung?

Die Konversion von Tony Blairs Schwägerin Lauren Booth zum Islam ist Anlass für Herbert Londons klugen Artikel auf pajamasmedia.com, in dem er seufzend die Frage aufwirft, aus welchen Gründen sich Bürger westlich-säkularer Gesellschaften - zumal Frauen - entscheiden, Muslime zu werden:

"Some poor souls unable 'to find themselves' seek refuge in self-selected slavery. They are prisoners of their own vision. The West they see is morally bankrupt; Islam may be violent and harsh, but it does prescribe moral parameters. [...] what converts often confuse is culture and religion. The warmth a family confers is not the same as the demands of religious obedience."