Moulin Rogue.
(Yes, I know how it's really spelled.)
Very cool. It makes me a little wistful - born in 1974, there really isn't an equivalent televised moment of wonder for my generation. (Especially not in the realm of science.) To be sure, we've witnessed more than our fair share of technological revolutions, but, the discovery of these has tended to be more personal and often gradual.
On the other hand, so much of the commentary is colored by the idea of that promise being unfulfilled, maybe... no, it's still better to have dreamt once and fallen short, to one day dream again.
Well, some of it is that, I theorize, it's a natural personality pattern. Someone who is deeply tempted by something that they don't want (be it drugs, forbidden sex, or whatever), one of the responses is going to be to embrace a philosophy that helps you stand strong against it. In the US, an obvious choice is rightwing fundamentalism. By towing a very hard philosophical line, they hope to be able to control their own unwanted urges. I imagine many succeed, some do not, and rising to power only puts more temptations in the path.
(Which is not to say that all moralizing fundamentalists are struggling with their demons - not true. Or all people with demons take this route, also clearly false. It's just two things that actually do logically follow.)
I wish they wouldn't - it's a fairly destructive path to large swaths of humanity that have made different choices - but it's not all that surprising. And hypocrisy is really a side-effect of it, but the root cause is just simple human pain and defense mechanisms failing.
I found a really good procmail tutorial recently, that helped me do some rather complex stuff:
http://www.perlcode.org/tutorials/procmail/proctut/
Enjoy!
I've actually encountered this one in the wild, so to speak. My mother, who is a conservative, Bush-supporting, moderately racist individual (she's not a white supremicist, but definitely regards black people as 'other', and still uses the term Negro) mentioned that she was worried that Obama was the antichrist. And not in a hyperbole way, just a matter of fact, people were talking, maybe it's true, sort of way.
It doesn't make a lick of sense. Even putting aside all the rather awful thoughts that lead one to such a conclusion, if the antichrist had ridden, would a good Christian care if he became President? They've all got a ticket to ride if it's true, and it's not like you could stop him. It's God's Will or something that he come into power. (N.B.: I am not a Christian or a theist.) It'd be like going back in time to stop the crucifiction - nice sentiment, but not really a good idea with the tenets of the faith.
He's the reason I stopped vising the sff.net newsgroups. Single handedly turned a great group of intelligent posters into a never-ending, tedious series of flamewars, and never once contributed anything useful. He's a troll's troll. It's entirely fitting that he's finally found a place where he belongs.
Really, I never thought about it before, but Ann Coulter is truly an Internet Troll operating in a different medium.
Yes, and for these reasons, thank you for blogging.
It's not a coincidence that printing newspapers became relatively cheap and easy right around the times of the American and French revolutions. I'm not a history geek, but I think it's safe to say that the ability of an elite class to control public opinion took a big blow, and the ruling class widened considerably.
Of course, the people breaking in are generally all too happy to leave behind the populism that got them power, and form a new, slightly less elite but still pretty elite ruling class, and that's what we've had since.
But that's cracking at the seams. It may be 'just a bunch of Internet bloggers', but I can count a lot of stories that the media chose to ignore, and the bloggers didn't, that turned into real stories. Like Abu Ghraib, Rather's memo, Valerie Plame, electronic voting irregularities... the list keeps growing. They have already lost their monopoly on the filter, and can never get it back.
I think we're in for some interesting times, very soon, as a result.
And this revolution requires a lot less than it takes to own a printing press and get circulation. The circle widens again.
And it is good.
I knew a Shiloh in high school. In the irony department, perhaps, her last name was Savage.
(I wonder what happened to her. She was neat.)
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