Violence wins again

The biscuitbox has been thrown again, and this time it meets its mark.

The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect… All the lordly residences in the vicinity of the palace of justice were demolished and that noble edifice itself, in which at the time of the catastrophe important legal debates were in progress, is literally a mass of ruins beneath which is to be feared all the occupants have been buried alive.

Surprise—the banality of violence is revealed, again. Intimidation really works—no duh. FK concedes and switches off the comments once more. (Another form of enclosure, though a trivial one. (Fort Kant as a gated community.))

Matthew Arnold, quoted in The Country and the City:

And when I go through the country, and see this and that beautiful and imposing seat of theirs crowning the landscape, “There,” I say to myself, “is a great fortified post of the Barbarians.”

Well, a great fortified post of the Philistines, anyway.