the bastards' last stand

I was recently expelled from my neighborhood Facebook group. I was accused of bigotry and spreading misinformation, not directly to me, but in explanation to the group. What this means is that I expressed views that were heterodoxical to the mainstream views of the group and counter to the current discourse.  It would be more accurate to say that I was expelled for noting that the neighborhood was abandoning its principles over a disagreement. My offense was suggesting that people are not evil for expressing skepticism with our current public health regime. I want to address that more fully in another piece. There is a professed value for supporting local businesses, especially restaurants in this community. After the owner of a new restaurant wrote on the page to welcome the neighborhood to his establishment someone took screenshots of his personal page to advertise his political beliefs. He had expressed doubts over the efficacy of masks and vaccines and support for due process in th

@DrawingEggen I have been re-reading 1984 and it has admittedly taken longer than needed. It was an assigned text in high school to which I never felt the need to return. It's better reading than I remembered. I think that I sometimes forget that our cannon is made up of literature that's not just thematically important, but also masterfully written. That Orwell knew what he was doing. The reason it's taking so long is that I find it so chilling that I need to periodically stop. It generates more dread than actual horror stories might. It's not entirely clear if I missed this in the first reading because of my own relative youth and naiveté or the shrinking distance between this moment in time and the society in the book. The erosion of the wall between our reality and the fictional reality of 1984 begins with the way that language is constructed to maintain ideological commitment and social control. The totalitarian state,  Oceania, created and recreates the language o

A reed warbler raising a common cuckoo chick it hatched from an egg surreptitiously placed in its nest by the cuckoo's parent “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”―  George Orwell Parasite to Virus Brood parasites are species that manipulate other organisms to raise their young for them. Among the best known of brood parasites is the cuckoo.  A number of cuckoo species have specialized to lay their eggs among hosts whose eggs theirs mimic closely enough to provide protective camouflage. The eggs hatch sooner than host eggs, the chicks grow faster, and they often eject the eggs or hatchlings of the host from the nest. The cuckoo chicks begin to mimic the cries of the host young to encourage the fostering birds to keep up with their growth to the detriment of their own young. Following one of the first documented cases of computer espionage in the mid 80s, the concept of brood parasitism was applied to malware.

Great Britain has been called TERF Island by Trans Rights Activists (TRAs) for a number of years now. TERF means Trans Exclusionary Reactionary Feminist. It's used to refer to women who recognize that sex in humans is binary and immutable. They are accused of excluding males from being women, when it's reality that excludes males from being women. The word 'woman' means nothing if it's applied to both people born female and male. That's the nature of words. Few words continue to have meaning while simultaneously holding a concept and its opposite. British feminists were among the first to recognize the conflict between the rights of women and the desire of males to be considered women expressed as a right. As someone only waking to the madness behind gender ideology in the last few years it's due to the constancy of British women and a growing number of men fighting gender ideology. Reading the incredibly 'bigoted' open letter from "Queen TERF&q