The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Yonmei:

DavidB: It's about as far from morally defensible as one can get ...

Okay, David B, your opinion has been noted, and should you be kidnapped by terrorists, we will urge your family and friends not to pay any ransom to get you back alive, since you find the idea so objectionable.

But, even though I accept you have the right to make this decision for yourself (not, of course, for other people) I kind of hope your family and friends would tell us to get stuffed and pay up, because they love you and they want you to live.

Paul Kincaid: Patrick, my problem is trying to puzzle out why America has never developed a political middle ground.

It has: the Democratic party. What America has never developed is a left-wing party equivalent to the Labour party in the UK. Looked at from the POV of a Scot, a Brit, and a European, American politics is severely skewed rightward, thanks to the lack of a balancing leftwing. It's as if 21st century British politics consisted exclusively of dialogue between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, and the Labour Party had never existed - or rather, was the size of the English Green Party, with the same access to political power. (We must also imagine that all newspapers to the left of the Daily Telegraph don't exist...)

Greg, I went over and read your analysis of Andy's reaction to TNH and PNH on his blog, and it's excellent: kind and intelligent. Well done.

It has evidently had no immediate effect on Andy's thinking, but maybe a year or so down the line he'll get what you're saying.

Glad you're back up: hope you don't have the same problem again.

*kicks evil spammers*

(notes that the second word is redundant)

It would have been wholly impressive behavior if the principal had told Bush-Cheney sure, you can rent our gym, but you can't restrict our students from the event: if they want to show up wearing Kerry badges/t-shirts, you still have to let them in.

From the point of view of a Brit, it is all a little weird.

You have a centre-right Party. You have a far-right Party. You have a centre-left Party. The far-right Party has an influence and political power all out of proportion to the number of people it actually represents. The centre-right Party is drifting rightwards. The centre-left Party is being regularly demonised in the press for even existing, and has a hard time getting on the ballot.

The Republicans lost the 2000 Presidential election, and I don't see how Nader can be blamed for Bush getting appointed President anyway.

Thanks, John and Terry - I was wondering what everyone else was on about, until I realised that the unreadable text overlaying the unreadable text to the right of the comments thread was indeed Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Civil partnership is what we're working towards in the UK - next autumn as ever is, if all goes well.

Xopher, neither of which Democrats? McGovern? Shachtman? Innocent III?

For the record, it was clear to me that Xopher's comment referred to Clinton and Gore.

(Of course, if Xopher intended to refer to Innocent III, I'm now publicly embarrassed. Oh well.)

Best wishes for the move! I'd offer to come and help you shift boxes, but I'm a little too far away, so I'll send you the Good House Move Fairy who helped me out when I moved house in February. She flitters around the place making coffee, providing cookies, dropping good will and good karma like invisible glitterdust, and generally helping people stay unfrazzled. She also reminds you to do stuff like buy toilet roll and toothbrushes for the new house before you move into it, rather than rely on finding the old stuff in the packing.

Why would anyone with reasonable concern for their privacy want a Gmail account?

I'm not 100% certain that I buy the story about bulldozering a group of soldiers who had already surrendered.

Maggie O'Kane reports eyewitness testimony that it happened in Riding the Storm: How To Tell Lies And Win Wars.

I was anti-war from the start, and never changed my mind. The worst thing for me personally (obviously, this is a very trivial "worst thing" in the world's scales) is that the worse the news gets from Iraq, the more I feel a horrible jagged doubleness: On the one hand "I told you so!" on the other hand "I wish I'd been wrong."

There's no doubt that some people supported the war from the best motives. People who had a vision of what Iraq could become, and believed that the US invasion could do it. And I look at the news, and I wish they'd been right.

There's no doubt that some people supported the war for (at best) appallingly stupid reasons, or straightforwardly vicious reasons. And I look at the news, and there's a horrid pain as well as a horrifying kind of satisfaction in hearing myself mutter "I told you so."

I really do wish I'd been wrong. I wish the people who supported the war for the best reasons had been right.

Mark, do you understand why "I hope you're not going to beat up your wife now" is almost as insulting a question as the classic version?

Yonmei, the big difference for Scott Ritter was that he wasn't just smeared on IndyMedia, the story that he was a paedophile was carried by major news, um, outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Daily News.

Really? Thanks for the link to the summary. The first I heard of this was when this wingnut on livejournal was claiming that we need pay no attention to Scott Ritter's views on Iraq "because he was a paedophile!", but as the only link he could provide was to a right-wing "news" source that had never struck me as being particularly accurate, I assumed it was a purely wingnut invention. It's never had any play in serious UK news media (well, I can't answer for TV news, because I don't watch it...).

The logic of his accusation, even if it were true, in any case escaped me.

Do you know that a hoax news item appeared on Indymedia some months ago that Charles, the creator of LGF, has been picked up by local police on a charge of child molestation? That is the dirtiest trick I've yet seen so far in blog wars.

I don't read Indymedia, but the same trick was used against Scott Ritter - the claim was made that he had been picked up, twice, by local police, on a charge of child molestation. (I was even told by a right-wing LJer that this constituted evidence that Ritter couldn't be trusted.)

Tavella wrote: I'm surprised that in such a geeky group that no one has yet mentioned an even more direct fictional prediction: the pilot episode of the Lone Gunmen.

I'm relieved you mentioned it, because that relieves me of the responsibility of mentioning it. ;-) I never saw the pilot episode of the Lone Gunmen, though, because although Channel 4 bought the first series for UK broadcast, it did not (most uncharacteristically) show the pilot episode. That was in late 2001, as I recall...

However, I got to read the Television Without Pity recap, here.

I shall probably have to hand in my Scottish citizenship papers for admitting this, but the only way I really like whisky (not counting brose, because who could not like whipped cream with oatmeal, honey, and whisky?) is in hot tea. My great-aunt believed firmly that a mug of strong hot tea with a dash of whisky was medicinal, and while I wouldn't go that far, the combination leaves me feeling warmed and braced, as Uncle would say. (Hot chocolate with a dash of orange vodka is also good, but the effect of this is to make me want to curl up in front of a nice warm fire and not do anything for some time - whereas hot tea with whisky just makes me feel sturdier.)

I've never tried whiskeys made outside Scotland, though (except for a slug of Jack Daniels, offered by a Stargate fan: didn't like it but didn't expect to).

I tend to be a wine/fortified wine kind of person, but I like flavoured vodkas: I made chilli vodka a few years ago that was terrific stuff, like drinking a red-hot ice-cube.

Well, there goes any chance of my attending Boskone next year. Not when it has a bigot as GoH.

Jon, for heaven's sake! Go, go, and tell OSC to his face that he's a bigot! Get Boskone to organise a panel on same-sex marriage with people who can quote OSC's earlier writings back to him verbatim! Get Boskone to organise a debate between OSC defending and some articulate person attacking his thesis on same-sex marriage and society!

It's what I'd do, at least, if I could afford to go to a con which OSC was attending.

This is one of the vilest lies that the cynical right wing has promulgated.

Actually, I recently came across an even viler (and weirder) one: Orson Scott Card claiming that no one who's for same-sex marriage will want to defend their country. (You need to scroll down about halfway: it's the section that begins "It is the most morally conservative portion of society that is most successful in raising children who believe in loyalty and oath-keeping and self-control and self-sacrifice.")

They make very decorative coffee mug coasters. And when they get so stained with coffee that they are no longer decorative, well, there's always more.

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