… There has been speculation that 20-year-old Adam Lanza, the gunman who perpetrated Friday’s senseless massacre at an elementary school in Newton, Conn., had Asperger’s, which is considered a high-functioning form of autism. …
… People involved in public protest should use social media to their strengths, like getting their message across. But they should not use them for things like discussing tactics. They might as well be having a tactical meeting with their opponents sitting in and listening. …
… Guerrillas use violence, generally directed against the police and army, but sometimes causing injury and death to civilians caught in the crossfire. Does [Arundhati Roy] condemn that violence? “I don’t condemn it any more,” she says. “If you’re an adivasi[tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.”
Her critics label her a Maoist sympathiser. Is she? “I am a Maoist sympathiser,” she says. “I’m not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism. But right now, when the assault is on, I feel they are very much part of the resistance that I support.” …
“It is often thought that the notion of an autonomous sphere of ‘civil society,’ separate from and largely unregulated by the state, is one that has little or no application in the ancient Greek world. There, we are told, society and state were merged into one entity, the polis - a term which, we are told, cannot be translated as either ‘society’ or ‘state,’ since it was both. The polis, so the story goes, was an organic community whose authority governed every aspect of life; and people had no sense of their own individuality apart from their role in the polis. The only conception of ‘freedom’ available to the Greeks was (according to, for example, Benjamin Constant’s famous essay ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared With That of the Moderns’) the freedom to participate in political life; but freedom in one’s day-to-day life was negligible and undesired.
Is this an accurate picture of Greek society?”
