n+1: Notes on a News Cycle

Kristin Dembock on the Giffords shooting:

René Girard wrote in Violence and the Sacred that people never look more similar than they do when they’re fighting. Violence is mimetic. And mimesis, Girard argued there and elsewhere, is where violence comes from in the first place. Not from difference, which is what we usually think, but from sameness. We only become who we are by imitating others, which means we imitate even their desires (we want their things, their careers, the girl, the political power, even the power to tell the story, to find the answer), and then in that moment when we reach for the same thing, we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror of the other and want to smash it.

[via George Lazenby]

The Prioress' Prologue and Tale -- An Interlinear Translation

Regarding the phrase, "Blood Libel":

565 Fro thennes forth the Jues han conspired
From thenceforth the Jews have conspired
566 This innocent out of this world to chace.
To drive this innocent out of this world.
567 An homycide therto han they hyred,
For this they have hired a murderer,
568 That in an aleye hadde a privee place;
Who in an alley had a secret place;
569 And as the child gan forby for to pace,
And as the child began to pass by,
570 This cursed Jew hym hente, and heeld hym faste,
This cursed Jew seized him, and held him tightly,
571 And kitte his throte, and in a pit hym caste.
And cut his throat, and cast him in a pit.