Over at Making Light I spotted the following exchange, in which Bruce Cohen said:
It seems pretty obvious to me, but seems to have totally eluded the current President of France, for instance, that creating a subculture of young, angry men* who feel no identity with the country they live in, and who are constantly being told they should go back to ( Read more... )

So here's a quick, dashed-off-in-a-few-hours rendering of the scene in Chapter 15 of Tarnsman of Gor where Tarl reveals his continued existence to his old comrade Kazrak:
I was searching for Kazrak's tent, which lay in the outer ring near the tharlarion corrals. My calculations had been correct, and in a moment I had slipped inside the domed ( Read more... )

The foreign savages asked for it, and we did them the favor.

But we did it to ourselves, too.

Not just to the ones who didn't look like us the elite caste, either. Or the ones with funny accidents.

What makes you think we ever stopped?We never punish the ones who do it in the name of the Law, either ( Read more... )

I'm not sure where this vignette came from - Spiritus Mundi I suppose--
The whole of the great house is still, still as a breath held against hearing, waiting, half in dread and yet half-hoping for interruption, for the jarring of door opened, footfall on the stair, voice in the vaulting - but no such rescue, alas, is to come ( Read more... )

"State Sanctioned Torture"

In our hearts, we all know that state sanctioned torture has long been the exclusive tool of the thugs and dictators we've spent most of our history reviling. For reasons both moral and practical, we shouldn't join their company.
--Bad enough that he starts out the post with an unquestioning acceptance of the validity of ( Read more... )

Other people back when this came out a couple weeks ago tackled Useful Idiot Fareed Zakaria, MSNBC pundit and his fatuously-naive bit of Exceptionalist logic, so I didn't really think I needed to bother. But given that Bob Woodward has been newly revealed as having gone Darkside (this was pretty well a foregone conclusion, given the way he has been ( Read more... )

via Americablog, In the spirit of jmhm's Claude Raines Award -

Even Diem only claimed 98%(98.2 to be exact.) When our newly-approved, properly-Christian puppet overset the former handpicked puppet Bao Dai of the French-American alliance in Indochine (but still, as a scion of old royalty, preferred by locals, even if a sybaritic playboy something of a ( Read more... )