Thursday, February 16, 2006

Settled In

Well, this place looks empty. Wait, what's that smell? Did Gavin die under the floorboards? And who forgot to flush the toilet?

While I open the windows to air this place out -- so I can get back into the swing of things, here's a few random comments.

The wind is howling and storms are coming. I feel very uneasy about the huge pecan limb hanging over my house.

Via site meter I see that my ISP's location is.. Syracuse, New York. Hahaha. Good, that should confuse people. It might even help me stay anonymous.

RE: the cartoon controversy, and the reaction to it, let me say that I'm for Free Speech. Is that good enough? If not, too bad. Any would-be Christopher Hitchens who finds me in insufficient solidarity with the Danes can kindly slag off: I have more important fish to fry than Muslim whackjob attitudes to blasphemy and free expression. No Muslim, whackjob or not, can subvert the US Constitution, only Bush and his minions can -- and have. And to those who think that fascist cunts like Coulter and Malkin have suddenly redeemed themselves with their opportunist, cynical, and hypocritical Free Speech concerns, well, I think you need to re-evaluate your assessment.

This storm is powerful. Jebus.

Cheney was drunk, and fantasising about shooting something/someone else when he accidentally tracked the quail into the old man's face. Fantasising about, you know, someone like a Red Cross worker, a member of the Sierra Club, a nun, or some indigenous person standing between him and a drop of oil.

Can my fellow lefties stop using "eliminationist" as a term of opprobrium, please? Fight fire with fire, yet add fuel to said fire by the decency of your convictions. The vast majority of the modern Republican party -- by which I do not mean voters, but rather politicians and professional chatterers -- should die and burn in hell were this world just. They've certainly earned such a karmic fate, though it (rightly) will not come literally by our hands but rather, hopefully, on the field of acceptable open-society applications. They've directly or indirectly murdered thousands, made millions suffer, and have destroyed the bill of rights. If that's not worth the conviction that modern Republicanism is a cause of evil, in both the moral and in the crudest utilitarian sense, that should be combatted to the last resister, then I've missed the point of the few moral crusades (like the cause of abolition, WW2, the Progressive reforms of the 1900s) that were worth fighting. There are fascists in our midst, and just because they don't actually wear jackboots doesn't mean they, too, are not the scum of humanity. Fuck this pussyfooting shit -- fuck it and feed it fishheads. You're too nice and too squeamish. These are words, not McVeigh-like actions -- actually, recommendations for McVeigh-like actions come from the other side -- so I'm not advocating violence. That said, more and more I do catch myself thinking that we need a new Lenin to rise up, line up all the fascists and shoot them, then we need to shoot him so that there is no new boss to be the same as the old boss, as Lenin's heirs proved to be in that scenario. Plus, it suits my notions of irony that fascists should be expunged by the boot stamping, at last, on their faces. Why the fuck should I worry about extremist Muslim attitutes to Free Speech or women's rights or whatever when we already have their clones here and in charge? Okay, worry, yes. Devote my energy to? No. The Middle East is already a wreck and a hell-hole; I'm more concerned with conserving what is not supposed to be a hell-hole, the United States. Bushism should -- must -- be eliminated. It's a moral abomination, and our aim should be eliminating it to the point that it's only freely discussed without taboo in troglodyte places in Appalachia: it should be reduced to the point that it's on the same level of societal acceptibility as snake-handling and sister-fucking, because that's its true value.