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Month: August 2009

Ted Kennedy: RIP

His story was one of the great US political stories, and his accomplishments were legion. So were his flaws. I think that in the end, the former far outweighed the latter.

Biden mourns, in a manner I find tremendously affecting. As does Massachusetts.

Eric Raymond on Homosexuality

“That suggests to me that a tendency for male homosexuals to drift into the darker corners of domination sex is still wired in beneath the modern homophilic construction. It might take actual genetic engineering, of a kind we don’t yet have, to fix that wiring.”

He manages to go on for an entire post about how male gay behavior tends towards pederasty and domination, while lesbians are blissfully free of such problems. The evidence boils down to the historical record, which is of course a perfect transcript of human behavior, and “a how-to manual written by homosexual SM practitioners for newbies.” Seriously. The manual said the male homosexual murder rate was 26 times the norm, so that’s where his suggestion above comes from.

A couple of commenters wanted to know more about the source. “Alas, all I remember about the book other than a few prominent facts from it was that it was a skinny paperback with a dead-black cover, printed on cheap grayish paper – looked very undergroundy.”

Well, that’s certainly enough evidence with which to confirm suspicions! It was an underground skinny paperback!

“Why, oh why, can’t somebody invent a memetic equivalent of antibiotics?”

“It’s called SF. But it’s ineffective on victims over 21.”

“Sorry, it’s also ineffective under 21, and it also is known to cause objectivism and other memetic diseases.”

Uh huh.

Guns and Butter

I’m not entirely sure what I think about the trend of carrying guns to political events. On the one hand, I don’t object to open carry. It’s the old security versus freedom debate, and I try hard to come down on the side of freedom. I’m also pretty sure the Secret Service knows what it’s doing around Obama.

I’m edgy because it is not the primary job of the Secret Service to protect, say, liberals. Or Congressmen, for that matter. Emotions are running high at the healthcare town halls, and I don’t trust everyone on either side of the issue to be stable.

There’s debate about this in the gun rights community too, for what that’s worth. I tend to agree that there’s something iffy about trying to fuse open carry activism with the health care issue. Are some of these guys getting off on scaring liberals? Well, duh, yeah.

My sincerely proposed solution: defuse the tensions by wearing ACORN shirts or Obama shirts while exercising your right to open carry at Republican town meetings. If you’re really not trying to scare people — if you really just want to bring open carry into the mainstream — flip your causes.

Madder Men

Rose Madder? Nah, probably not. But spoilers, definitely.

Mad Men is back. As the Anglophile in me decrees, everything’s better with Brits. The office politics are going to be sharper and, probably, meaner. And funnier, since we’ve now got a world of misapprehensions and bad cultural assumptions to play with. Since this is Mad Men, we even get that point thrust home with a Don Draper metatextual commentary.

Not his only one this episode, either. Consider the implications of his London Fog tag line given that he’s just seen Sal with a half-dressed bellboy. “Limit your exposure.” He’s quick, that Don. Whereas Mad Men is pleasantly slow. It took three seasons for Sal to get even a taste of the sexual release most of the cast has already seen; but it worked. A slow build is good. Good for AMC, as well, for not shying away.

Ah, metatext. The new British CFO is named Pryce? Cute; but I’ll forgive it since he’s played by Jared Harris. I didn’t realize until afterwards, but that’s no doubt while I had the little frisson of alarm when I first saw him. Some part of me was expecting him to try and break through into an alternate world, no doubt.

Awesome show remains awesome.

Step Three

My 101 tasks blog is merged and assimilated. Burp.

Some reworking of categories (mostly to turn the sub-subcategories of Gaming into tags) and I’ll feel done. I will be doing a fair bit of tagging later on but that can wait.

Step Two

Imaginary Vestibule has been merged into Population One. Still to do: a couple of redirects and a bunch of category editing. Apologies if this does horrendous things to anyone’s RSS feeds.

Edit: category mergers complete.
Edit 2: Vestibule redirect complete.

Step three is another blog merger, and then I have some CSS cleanup/modification to do, and then I think I’m done.