and indeed are forced to do so...

Indeed, the kind of minimal or no-government societies envisioned by dreamers of the Left and Right are not fantasies; they actually exist in the contemporary developing world. Many parts of sub-Saharan Africa are a libertarian's paradise. The region as a whole is a low-tax utopia, with governments often unable to collect more than about 10 percent of GDP in taxes, compared to more than 30 percent in the United States and 50 percent in parts of Europe. Rather than unleashing entrepreneurship, this low rate of taxation means that basic public services like health, education, and pothole filling are starved of funding. The physical infrastructure on which a modern economy rests, like roads, court systems, and police, are missing. In Somalia, where a strong central government has not existed since the late 1980s, ordinary individuals may own not just assault rifles but also rocket-propelled grenades, antiaircraft missiles, and tanks. People are free to protect their own families, and indeed are forced to do so. ...

- Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order

Any full analysis of patriarchy

Any full analysis of patriarchy should take into account the veiling, sequestering, and regimentation of women in Muslim societies; the tradition of foot binding in China; the suttee tradition of the Indian subcontinent; the deeply institutionalized practice of clitoridectomy among many cultures in 26 different nations across the African continent, a mutilation affecting 2 million girls each year; the near ubiquitousness of wife beating around the world; and the fact that polygyny - multiple wives - is an accepted practice in far more cultures than not. It ought to examine the fact that 67 percent of married women in Papua New Guinea describe themselves as battered, with at least one in five hurt severely enough to require hospitalization at least once. It should note that in Pakistan the mortality rate for girls is half again as high as that for boys, who are better fed; and that in many parts of Africa and the Middle East women cannot visit health clinics without their husbands' permission. We might hear more about the problem of patriarchy outside the West if more non-Western women were freer from grinding poverty and, in some instances, rigid cultural restrictions against expressing themselves. In Bangladesh, one must remember, feminist poet Taslima Nasrin has been placed under fatwah, the Muslim death sentence, for writing the wrong thing.

- from Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham, 1996

Do you really think a God who created the universe, billions of galaxies, stars, billions of planets- would promise to reward some little things in a pale blue dot (i.e Earth) for repeatedly saying that he is the greatest and kindest and for fasting? Such a great creator can't be so narcissist!

-Taslima Nasrin

The peculiarity of the whole affair was its needlessness

The peculiarity of the whole affair was its needlessness, and this underlines two characteristics of folly: it often does not spring from a great design, and its consequences are frequently a suprise. The folly lies in persisting thereafter. With acute if unwitting significance, a French historian wrote of the Revocation that "Great designs are rare in politics; the King proceeded empirically and sometimes impulsively." His point is reinforced from an unexpected source in a perceptive comment by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who cautioned, "In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial." This is a factor usually overlooked by political scientists who, in discussing the nature of power, always treat it, even when negatively, with immense respect. They fail to see it as sometimes a matter of ordinary men walking into water over their heads, acting unwisely or foolishly or perversely as people in ordinary circumstances frequently do. The trappings and impact of power deceive us, endowing the possessors with a quality larger than life. Shorn of his tremendous curled peruke, high heels and ermine, the Sun King was a man subject to misjudgment, error and impulse - like you and me.

- Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly. 

It is not difficult to imagine

It is not difficult to imagine how this scenario [war with North Korea] could come to pass. ... Imagine that Kim and Trump arrive at the summit only to discover that they hold radically different views of the commitment to "denuclearize": Trump believes that Kim is willing to negotiate away his arsenal for sanctions relief, whereas Kim believes that full denuclearization also requires the removal of U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula and and end to the U.S.-South Korean alliance... . After it becomes clear that Trump will not move forward on Kim's terms, Kim is outraged and renews his August 2017 pledge to test missiles over Guam.

Both Washington and Pyongyang now think the other is responsible for derailing diplomacy. Out of a desire to induce the United States to drop its denuclearization demands, Kim decides to show that his willingness to negotiate does not mean his will has been broken, and he proceeds with his missile launch. Much as the Japanese did before they attacked Pearl Harbor, he hopes that a missile test over Guam - a U.S. territory but not a state - will unnerve the United States enough to persuade it to accept his nuclear program, but not so much as to bring a full-scale war.

But then, one of his missiles expels debris over Guam. Fragments from the reentry vehicle strike the island itself, killing a few residents - who are, after all, U.S. citizens. Trump declares this "an act of war" and gives Kim 48 hours to issue a formal apology and a pledge to denuclearize. Kim does not comply, and the United States dusts off one of its plans for a limited military strike. It attacks a known missile storage facility, believing the limited nature of the target will induce Kim's cooperation and minimize the risk of retaliation. Instead, Kim views the strike as the beginning of a larger effort to disarm him and as a prelude to regime change. Following his conventional bombardment of Seoul, the United States begins to attack other known weapons sites and command-and-control facilities to neutralize the threat. Kim launches nuclear weapons the following day.

- from "Perception and Misperception on the Korean Peninsula," Robert Jervis and Mira Rapp-Hooper, in Foreign Affairs, May/June 2018, pg. 116

Some frightful catastrophe

"The United States finds itself in possession of enormous power and is eager to use it in brutal fashion against anyone who comes along without knowing how to do so and is therefore constantly on the brink of some frightful catastrophe."

- from a letter by E.L. Godkin, 1895

Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation

"When we see...the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man created, we can hardly avoid being filled with...a moral sadness, a revolt of good will - if indeed it has any place within us. Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simple truthful account of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest nations and finest exemplars of virtue forms a most fearful picture and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness."

- Georg Hegel, Reason in History, 1837

Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle,
Earth and high heaven are fixt of old and founded strong,
Think rather, - call to thought, if now you grieve a little,
The days when we had rest, O soul, for they were long.

Men loved unkindness then, but lightless in the quarry
I slept and saw not; tears fell down, I did not mourn;
Sweat ran and blood sprang out and I was never sorry:
Then it was well with me, in days ere I was born.

Now, and I muse for why and never find the reason,
I pace the earth, and drink the air, and feel the sun.
Be still, be still, my soul; it is but for a season:
Let us endure an hour and see injustice done.

Ay, look: high heaven and earth ail from the prime
foundation;
All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain:
Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation -
Oh why did I awake? when shall I sleep again?

- A.E. Housman, 1896