????? If “Post-partisan” lived 100 years he/she still wouldn’t be one-hundredth the writer Molly Ivins was. Must be from the Paglia school of contrarian concern trolls.

F&SF writers who aren’t wingnuts: Lois McMaster Bujold, Barbara Hambly, C.J. Cherryh, Elizabeth Moon. Somebody above mentioned Charles Stross to which I add, YEAH!

You just gotta love it when academic dingdongs bloviate about shit they know absolutely nothing about:

The problem facing international security is that people who believe something will always be stronger and more committed than people who believe nothing

Which is why the more ethically steadfast progressives have dominated the politics & culture globally for the past 30 years, as opposed to the weak-willed opportunistic neocons (who repeatedly throw their time-honored principles aside at their corporate masters’ bidding, thus assuring their permanent obscurity), amirite?

Let’s face it: if she hadn’t caught the fancy of a pack of coked-up Villagers back in the day, Paglia would now be running an S&M dungeon, frenetically pegging closeted marketing-consultants in order to make the rent on a two-room apartment in Poughkeepsie. She’s the intellectual equivalent of Turducken.

Hey, Camille, Nietzsche called: he wants his tertiary syphilis back.

No, they won’t – they’ll just bring on some punditoid who insists the shooter was a liberal and all will be right with the world.

No one could have forseen &c.

“what do you think all those gun sales last year were all about?”

It’s only a matter of time before one of the wackos takes a shot at some prominent figure from the television’s pundit class – as they’re all “liberals”, don’cha know – and our pantheon of oligarchic media whores, who’ve been sniggeringly dismissive of the threat of homegrown right wing terrorism all along, will all suddenly start screaming, “Why didn’t anyone WARN us about these guys?!?!?”

http://lileks.com/bleat/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/21.jpg

I’m posting too fast.

Go zombie go!

Unless you’re in the Grateful Dead. In which case, wank away!

Shut up and go and change your armor!!

what do you think all those gun sales last year were all about?

…my favorite was probably her relentless public ass-licking of Madonna – which actually lasted for some years, if memory serves – during which Paglia repeatedly compared herself to Madonna in interviews, [...] At some point, she abruptly (and very obviously) turned on the singer and began snarling nasty little criticisms against the woman with the same level of ferocity she’d previously used in sucking up to her.

See also under “Paglia & Susan Sontag”.

Well, of course, I get what you’re saying, and in Paglia’s case, you’re very probably right: She’s not even all that “famous” anymore…even to the very limited extent that she ever was to begin with. She’s currently wallowing in an eminently well deserved obscurity, a fate I’m sure she considers worse than death.

I suppose it’s a matter of personal taste: I agree that most of the haplass schnooks targetted for ridicule by Sadly, No are easily dismissable gnats when you get right down to it. Why bother bashing any of them except for laughs? But even with her star significantly faded in more recent years, Paglia is at least slightly higher on the media ladder’s food chain (however undeservedly). She has some tattered reputation as an academic and an “intellectual” (again, however undeserved), and this makes her a bit more of a legitimate threat than the usual media buffoons…who are often quite bad enough just on their own meager terms.

She deserves whatever abuse is flung her way, IMO; goodness knows, she’s received very little criticism in Real Life terms. She’s not just a recklessly out-of-control Ego (though she was certainly that back in the day, and probably still is), vindictive and thin-skinned (though she’s defintiely that) and is as mean as a snake (though God knows, she’s that); the woman is a fucking ghoul, an “intellectual” version of the human filth that are currently unashamedly publicly celebrating the assassination of George Tiller. Her dancing in the blood of Nicole Brown Simpson and Matthew Sheppard – and all done for nothing more noble than the utterly petty, shallow and ego-centric goal of self-promotion – marks her in that same catagory of out-and-out scum as the drooling cretins gloating about Tiller’s murder. Such ‘people’ are not harmless, and ignoring them is the last thing we should do.

Have I mentioned the comprehensive collection of concertinas at the Horniman Museum in London?
Unfortunately the museum website does not seem to include images or sound files for the instruments [unlike the rest of their musical-instrument collection]. Instead they have invested their time and energy in digitising the production ledgers from the Wheatstone Concertina factory, so now you too can download this fascinating social information.