Happy Thanksgiving!

The good Dr. Zaius reminded me that I haven't posted for awhile. Thanks for noticing Dr. Z! I'm not so big headed to put up things like 'Light posting' for the next two weeks. I'm rapidly working my way back down to 19 readers. Part of it might be that I feel like I have nothing new to say or action to recommend. I assume you all are reading what I read so if I can't provide something new I don't always want to say, "Go read (insert favorite blog here)" See my blog roll for some folks I read if you want to see who I like.

I'm working on some stuff now and hopefully I'll be able to blog more after it is completed. I might drop some of you a line asking for help to get it completed. Ol' Spocko likes to do things instead of the

I'm thankful for many things. Real friends and "invisible friends". I could go on and name specific people, but then that would seem like an academy award speech and the music would start playing.

Hope you all had a good holiday.
LLAP
Spocko

I voted for Adults today. Who did you Vote for?

I was talking to a friend who has a vast knowledge of things technical and spiritual and I said how much I'm loving Al Gore's book The Assault on Reason. We were talking about some of the underlying reasons people support certain politicians. I mentioned that Sara Robinson over at Orcinus has two great posts on the characteristics of people drawn to movement conseratives. People who John Dean classifies at Right Wing Authoritarian (RWAs) personalities will go along with almost anything a candidate says and ignore all their crazy past actions and ineffectual leadership if they think that there is someone who gives them what they really want. Daddy.

RWAs would far rather curl up in Daddy's lap -- even if it means abandoning reason and taking the occasional spanking -- than try to deal with the world by themselves, on adult terms. This is also why RWA family and community relationships (as Lakoff has explained) are necessarily hierarchical. These people still need parents around, because they don't feel emotionally safe without the presence of a strong authority figure. Egalitarian relationships terrify them, because there's nobody in charge to make the rules and set the boundaries that keep people from hurting each other. And that's damned scary, because (as masters of projection) they're quite sure that everybody else in the whole world is also still five years old and playing by sandbox rules. Without a playground supervisor in charge, they know for sure that somebody will get hurt.

Both posts are excellent. I'll let you read them for yourself.
1) Leering Old Men: Another Take by Sara Robinson at Orcinus
2) Who's your daddy? by Sara Robinson at Orcinus. In which she talks about why Conservatives expect spankings.

War Fetishism In Various Forms

I'm going to suggest you to click on the link below for two reasons.

1) It's a very interesting review of a video game that points out a lot about the way that Americans worship the activities of soldiers in World War II. Be advised the review contains the f-word mentioned more than once.

2) I heard someone going on the other day on talk radio about the bombing of Hiroshima. This person spent a lot of time talking about how great it was and how necessary it was in order to prevent further loss of life. And I was struck yet again by the concerted attempt to normalize horrific acts in order to justify them for use in the future. This normalization of the use of horrific weapons, as if they were equivalent to conventional weapons because they killed a similar number of people, misses the point. There is a qualitative difference to a nuclear weapon and not just because of the radioactivity. In our imagination the mushroom cloud looms larger than photos of bombed cities and firestorms.

When we lose sight of the horrors of war, of torture and destruction of entire cities, we can more easily consider unleashing more war.

Link to The Escapist Magazine review of MOH Airborne. The reviewer is Yahtzee.

Yahtzee is a British-born, currently Australian-based writer and gamer with a sweet hat and a chip on his shoulder. When he isn't talking very fast into a headset mic he also designs freeware adventure games and does the occasional feature for Australia's Hyper Magazine. His personal site is www.fullyramblomatic.com.

oh and h/t to Greg Saunders at The Talent Show for the link.