Sentimentality, Envy, Vainglory Make a Toxic Trifecta All Right
(and Authority-Seeking & Prudery don't help any either)

I've described so far how, if you take seriously the teachings of the prolife movement as they have been expounded upon by all levels within it since the earliest years, it becomes not only a sane-seeming thing to do but a moral ( Read more... )

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... )

"America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you've lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn't belong to you. The only way you can ( Read more... )

I have to say, I am a little surprised at all the suggestions of the Vulcan non-interference proto-Prime-Directive being posited as examples of the Ming-the-Merciful "liberating" conquest of Earth with saucers and death-rays and giant robots and powered battle armor, moving into "Destroy the planet to save it" territory ( Read more... )

It is something of a blog tradition with me to post on this anniversary one of the two things we actually have of St. Patrick that aren't accretions, aren't legends merely - the Letter to the soldiers of Coroticus, a British Christian king or warleader of fifteen-hundred-plus years back who didn't let that stuff in the Gospels about living and ( Read more... )

"And in the name of all that's holy, please, please: nobody tell President Bush that the key to conquering Iran lies in finding a gigantic, enchanted worm and pouring molten copper down its throat."
--Unitary Moonbat, from History for Kossacks: Classical Persia, Feb 10, 2008

While I deal with the insomnia caused by having come home and crashed in sheer physical pain and exhaustion at 8 o' clock and mentally fortify myself against the hour when I get to go out again and traverse three miles of slush in the falling sleet for the privilege of working 9 hours for sub-living wages, I might as well try to knock down a couple ( Read more... )

That's the most important thing to remember about Armistice Day: they set an end date, and then they made the pawns go on killing each other for the rest of the week, while the king and bishops got to move off the board in safety, because class solidarity still trumped a war, same as in the Middle Ages. And they wanted everyone to pretend that it ( Read more... )

For the sake of those who have gladly let slip certain dogs, in the name of our dead on this day six years past, and who would like to hunt a wider field, I post these vignettes, all from the book Unhappy Far-Off Things, published in 1916 by Lord Dunsany, fantasy author, Boer War, Gallipoli and Easter Rising survivor, describing what he had seen on ( Read more... )

Guess when these quotes originate, and regarding which batch of expansionist conquests: (I've edited a couple of identifying words, but left 99% of it intact)

• Seeing that the Imperialism of the last three decades is clearly condemned as a business policy, in that at enormous expense it has procured a small, bad, unsafe increase of markets, and has ( Read more... )