I doubt it.

Guy "Guido" Fawkes, an Englishman who converted to Catholicism as a teenager in the time when Catholicism was no longer the state religion but a proscribed and persecuted one, and then went to fight on the side of the empire that had tried quite hard to invade and conquer England when he was eighteen, came back with explosives training ( Read more... )

Averting the Sin Cooties is All That Matters

Sorry, conventionalists, I'm going back to my old Victorian letter-writer/typist's style of using underlining for primary emphasis because it's just too distracting for me to use bold for primary emphasis all the time and italics don't always show up well. Links are burnt-orange and usually bolded in my ( Read more... )

How Prolifism Substitutes For Genuine Ethical Engagement With A Fantasy Life of Moral HeroismI've been trying to write this post for years. I keep failing at doing it, for various reasons. It keeps on needing to be written. So, this time, I'm just going to write it, and fail, and post it anyway, however far or not I get, and however muddled it is ( Read more... )

A short while back, I was in a situation where the only book on hand to read was a novel by somebody I'd never read nor heard of, of that genre that is hard to nail down, the quasi-mystery novel which is often called "suspense" or "thriller" but which would be most accurately called "serial-killer fear porn" in most cases - they were very big ( Read more... )

Bob Herbert gives the worship of the Invisible Hand a rare and righteous smackdown in the NYT, being one of the rare members of the SCLM with a memory longer than a guppy's; people all over the blogosphere are getting fed up with the SCLM's endless torrent of "Pity the poor rich, they are being made to feel BAAAAD about their new Jags and it's ( Read more... )

I know I've been AFIA for a long while, but has Minsky been gunning for fandom lately? I barely know who he is in mundane matters - some computer guy, right? - and I have no idea if he's jumped on the "Denounce Skiffy As Nekulturny" bandwagon - so many have, but I don't recall hearing anything outrageous about him. Did I miss the declaration of war ( Read more... )

Emperors - not new in the blogosphere, but ancient in internet time, and perhaps new to some of the whippersnappers out here.

ETA: Oh, and "oil baron" , as "robber baron" is totally not a figure of speech, any more than it ever was in the Gilded Age...

(xpost to/fro dKos)

Ad hominem is not a fancy Latin word for calling me names.

--Colin Meier

If I'd been a rich man's son,
Pay me my money down,
I'd sit on the river and watch it run,
Pay me my money down

Oh pay me, oh pay me,
Pay me my money down,
Pay me or go to jail,
Pay me my money down

--African-American poets, via Lydia Parrish, Maxfield's spouse, via Bruce ( Read more... )

"Timor Mortis conturbat me"

--"The fear of death confounds me" This dread of the inevitability of our own singular personal terminations combined with the (fortunately-mostly-fantasized) willingness to inflict death upon innumerable strangers is a grotesque enough hallmark of conservativism as it has existed for as long as I've been alive in this ( Read more... )

Because it is & has been stiflingly hot in my flat, I am hungry and out of tea, and the state refused to give me a fiscal hardship deferment on jury duty this month despite my being a minimum wage worker, sole provider, and my rent going up, you get these without any diplomatic amelioration whatsoever ( Read more... )