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IV Lyrics

Sound the alarm, get an ambulance, ready a statement: for reactive critics, for the OCI, for the rest of the back end. In these museums to living history, lined with the artifacts of threat, risk management is a precondition for every colour of self-defeat. Mandate piled on mandate, verdicts stacked high, dust-covered and time-worn, signed by solicitors general and bound by library services. A mounting legacy of heroic solutions and failed actions that can't be normalized and interpreted away - used to placate all the lives shamed and denied. Custom is the greatest of weavers: devoid of useful memory and locked in fixed movements. No small madness confusing symptoms with cause. A convenience of definition. Condemnation narrowed to a point. Better to drill it in. Benign as a bullet, meanings are inseparable from purposes.
We want to do something, and a definition is a means of doing it. If we want certain results, than we must use certain definitions. But no definition has any authority apart from a purpose...
I.A. Richards, Interpretation in Teaching
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Spoils of Failure (2009)