Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 397

And so it’s come to this…

When I was young I was a liberal. Well, not by the standards of where I lived, but by the standards of the US. Impossible not to be a liberal when you’re raised in Europe.

Here are some of the things I believed from an ESR post which you should definitely read in its entirety:

There is no truth, only competing agendas.
All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
There are no objective...

Cultural Narratives

At one time, when I was very young – probably early teens – I came across an interview from someone or other in the French glitterati circles talking about how it was a shame that until the Asterix comics little French kids knew more of the history of the little Jesus than about their ancestors the Gauls.

To this day I’m not a 100 percent sure about why this is a bad thing, precisely. I mean, you have to think there is some sort of virtue to what is linked by blood over what is transmitted by...

Of Miracles

So I’m sitting here,looking at the reports, and so far it’s hard to tell if Colorado got its miracle or not.

Oh, sure, we got rid of Mark Uterus, but after O’Keefe exposed their scams in CO, it was hard to steal a national race and not be in trouble. The local one, though…

Perhaps my readers will correct me. Perhaps there IS somehow, reason for someone to vote for Cory Gardner but not for Beauprez. I can’t find one. Last I checked Hickenloper, aka Bloombug’s love child, was slightly less popula...

Voting

I voted for the first time at the age of eighteen, in Portugal, after I went back from being an exchange student.

I voted a lot. You see, Portugal had a lot of parties and at the time for whatever reason governments were always falling and special elections being called.

I was a snooty kid (well, I was) and made mine a protest vote for the only party that had no chance of ever winning an election: the monarchists.

Note that going in, they had someone inspecting however many yards away to make su...

That’s An Awfully Nice Civitas You’ve Got There . . . – David Pascoe

That’s An Awfully Nice Civitas You’ve Got There . . . – David Pascoe

We are mere hours away from finding out the results of the latest batch of experimentselections (so what if it’s more than twenty-four; if you can’t count higher than that, you’re insufficiently ambitious). There’s been speculation for months on whether the Republicans will once more snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. More recently – and more widespread than ever – there’s been speculation that voting practices enacted b...

We Free Men

“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anyth...

Oh, Hai Book Promo Post!

Greetings, O people my people. Now that All Saints Day has passed, the deluge of Christmas kitsch can now descend. To drown out the pop stars murdering White Christmas, I offer you some interesting books to peruse this week. So go, buy stories, leave reviews, and for those of you doing NaNoWriMo, good luck and make sure you send me your finished work! Heck, you could submit it for the promo post too. :D As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!

Jason Dyck,...

To The Dragons

Some of you — cough Eamon J. Cole cough — asked about this novel To The Dragons that I’ll hopefully be writing in the later half of NanoWrimo. It’s actually a trilogy To The Dragons, With The Dragons, For the Dragons. I am not proposing to write those three in two weeks, but maybe I can finish it over the holidays?

Anyway, for the subscribers, yes, I’ll be posting more on it, as I finish it, you get first peek. But so everyone else doesn’t think I’m even crazier than usual (or perhaps has his/...

November

November used to be my favorite month, because it was the month of my birth and because it was the time the lights went up for Christmas in the city of Porto and also because it was cold but not really cold, so the sort of enjoyable cold that makes it pleasurable to curl up by the wood stove with a cat or three. (Grandma had a big armchair by the stove, and I read in it and the cats slept on me.)

The lights were important because dad used to take me out to the city for a whole day. We usually...

Moral Lepers

So, yesterday I had a comment I had to think about before I approved.

I always think about approving new commenters before bed, because this gives them free rein to scat all over the threads before I wake and usually before the Huns are active and neutralizing. So this comment made me hesitate.

First there was the name. The name was Ele. Now that means “he” in Portuguese. It could also arguably be a diminutive of something like Giselle. OTOH it’s also a misspelling of Elle – French for “She” wh...