Logic is one of the most valuable self-defense arts out there, because what it does (one thing, at least) is create wiring diagrams of conversation, so that you can see what connects up and what doesn't, what verbal switch or combination of switches work to make something else work, and what breaks the circuit or is completely irrelevant ( Read more... )

The thing I was trying to say in the last two posts, which keeps getting lost in the thickets of detail, I'll try to spell out a little more (beyond FISCAL CONSERVATIVISM = SOCIAL CONSERVATIVISM = FISCAL CONSERVATIVISM = LIBERTARIANISM) and show how under it all, when you dig down past the ZOMG! Naked Boobies On TV! Dudes Kissing! Ebol Bishops ( Read more... )

This is not as organized as it should be, but it is already too long and too far late, and migraine or no migraine it needs to be out there, I say in all humility--
All the leaves are brown
And the sky is grey
I went for a walk
On a winter's day
I'd be safe and warm
If I was in L.A.
California dreamin'
On such a winter's day
"Mel Gibson isn't an ( Read more... )

By a curious coincidence I have been reading The Crucible this week, for the first time - we didn't do it in any of my school English classes and I never got around to it on my own, until last week one evening walking home from the bus stop I passed a box on the sidewalk, aftermath of a yard sale, labeled FREE BOOKS. (NB: this would be a good trap ( Read more... )

Go offline early one night and miss an attempted amateur grand-old-fashioned ratfucking - and if it hadn't been a slow day at work, the debunking too. Slow Tuesday Night indeed!

So a bunch of GOP bloggers - and Serious Media People too - fell for a hoax so obvious that the proverbial five-year-old child on retainer to the competent Evil Overlord ( Read more... )

Y'all know I don't usually just post a link to something else sans commentary, but Adam Felber of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me has a short must-read about the media/political mess in this country: "Imaginary Bubba".

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... )

I usually post poetry on 9/11, and it's been e.e. cummings because the combination of his themes and the tone and his political imprisonment as a dissenter in WWI and the fact that they're over half a century old and still as bright as a new-sharpened knife-edge makes the choice fittingest for me ( Read more... )

I have on my desk a slim volume which is a very fine art book, if you only consider it as a picture book: the reproductions are of excellent quality, on good paper with minimal show through and printed at such a fine line screen that you can't see any dot pattern without putting your nose to the page, and even then it's minimal. If you just want to ( Read more... )

The one who tells the stories rules the world.
--Hopi proverb"Intersectionality" is one of those words that, like "dynamic", can seem to be (and is sometimes used as) a meaningless buzzword, but which really does have meaning and is a useful descriptor for discussion purposes, namely of the fact that the world is not a bunch of separate unrelated ( Read more... )