"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... )

It's hard to explain the existence of Willful Cognitive Dissonance - tho' Slacktivist has certainly tried hard enough over the years - and how someone can manage to simultaneously believe and not believe that their mostly-churchgoing neighbors are all just waiting for the signal to come from the Kremlin (or the Mothership, perhaps, or just the ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

--but only partly, which makes it all the worse

This is what I was doing this morning when I should have been a) getting ready for work, b) catching up on the eternally-undone housework, c) finishing serious posts. Not an excuse, just a statement of fact.

For some reason, I'm not sure why, astronaut emeritus Buzz Aldrin decided to jump on the ( Read more... )

via dKossack Morgan Sandlin, an account in Salon by a Dutch reporter in the tradition of Nellie Bly, who went undercover with the McCain campaign and was assigned to write glurgy astroturf fictions to be forwarded around as genuine letters from ordinary Americans that would be sent in to newspapers in order to sway public sentiment by peer pressure ( Read more... )

--During the last elections we had a number of incidents of our government officials' flunkeys concern-trolling liberal blogs under assumed identities to try to sway readers to their side, or at least away from voting for their masters' opponents, including one in my state (the one where the guy later turned out to be the stalker ex from hell)- ( Read more... )

My next entry in the Slashers of Gor fanart genre, "Privacy", is up at slashersofgor - it's NSFW, with "artistic nudity" as they say, and explicit eroticism. Everything the same as for "Reunion" with the addition of Aiko 3 for Talena ( Read more... )

The phenomenon of paid comment spammers, who pose as Real Live Commenters with more or less success to leave "cleverly" camouflaged advertising in blogs, recently came up again at ML, and by a curious coincidence I dowsed up a probable instance of it going on in the wild, concerning the movie (which I didn't know was being made) of Susan Cooper's ( Read more... )

Oh, did auld Willie have a gift for turning a phrase -- and the older I get, the more it does seem that all things "perne in a gyre". He was writing about them the first time they came along - but it wasn't really the first, after all, these things just keep coming around and around and around, in new suits to fit the cut of the times. ( two for the present hour )

...as seen through beam-filled eyes--

"Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions."
--G.K. Chesterton
(most lately spotted on a sticker on an SUV in a local gated community
sharing bumper space with boastings of lunacy, gun ownership, and cat-killing...)To understand how "tolerance" is a Bad Word to conservatives (in the US at least) ( Read more... )