The Hall of Fire

Reading this thread I've realized that the inside-out nature of calling what should be rights "privileges" is indeed the POINT: if you belong to the group that suffers from the bad treatment racism still produces, then what other, luckier people consider to be "rights" function f...

[aside] V, I like the avatar, too. Did you draw it yourself? Have you said anything about it anywhere? [/aside]

"Idealism" and "pragmatism" aren't incompatible. I don't think anyone has said increased protections for civilians are a bad thing! I'm deeply grateful for every step toward a less cruel world. I'm just saying that IF we reached that happy moment when non-combatants were truly le...

His characters were not just funny, but so very human and kind.

I really enjoyed those GoT videos, I have to say. The building up of landscapes is extraordinary. I am relieved (on the actors' behalf) to see that some of those swords are CGI. :D Also the giant works extremely well. Much more convincing, to my eyes, than the Hobbit's trolls. HOWEVER, what I really...

I think a world based on non-aggression would be an excellent place. We still have the problem of convincing everyone to non-aggress. Even on the small small scale of families and friendships, it can be so hard to reconcile people who feel wounded by each other. It's hard to know where to start on t...

I wish I weren't feeling so depressed today, because in a better mood I might at least be able to enjoy the irony of being labelled "morally offensive" for saying people shouldn't murder each other. Let me try again, from a different angle: IF the backdrop of our beliefs and habits were no...

nel, pacifists also live with that "jarring reality" of human cruelty. What I objected to in the figure of speech was the way it wished violence on someone (even if figuratively) to make a point. It isn't because of somehow blithely ignoring the horrible things going on in the world that I...

I was just taken aback by that particular sentence. Of course it's a figure of speech, but a jarring one. I understand the general hypothetical intention behind it: imagine THIS awful scenario! Imagine someone doing THIS horrible thing to THIS person you love! THEN you would hit back! I've had peopl...

And for the moral absolutists in this thread, I would really like to see how many injuries and deaths of loved ones and days living under the threat of personal injury or death it would take before you reconsidered your absolutism. I hope you would not REALLY 'like to see' such a thing, nel. :( I'm...

Pacifism for me is the opposite of "moral relativism." I tend to think that things are "relative": in other words, that the context is always important. A crime in one context may not look like a crime in another context. I decided (long ago) to make an exception to this principl...

Let me just say that I don't think Anybody should be killing Anybody. I used "children" in my complaint above, because I know that my radical pacifism is probably a little extreme for some tastes. So I was toning myself down. Mortality is enough of a tragedy on its own. Earthquakes and tsu...

I think it's just plain wrong to kill children, even if they're being used as shields. I am against the US drone strikes for the same reason. (I also think it's wrong to shoot rockets at anybody.) One evil does not excuse or justify another evil. How can the cycle ever end if both sides always feel ...

This is a terrible day for the Netherlands and for Malaysia, for Australia (where so many of those poor people were heading), for Ukraine, for Russia, and for the world.

Alatar, how WONDERFUL!!!
You must just be walking on air!

Oh! I saw him play once--amazing!!

Now that's my childhood soundtrack! There was one Pete Seeger record in particular that my mother would play every night as we (in theory) fell asleep--one side of it ended in this slooooow go-to-sleeeeeeeep-now-children called "One Grain of Sand." I hated that song (because it was so obvi...

Just to osgiliate the osgiliation a bit more, let me say that one of the most satisfying periods of my (long-ago) life at TORC was my work on the campaign to get osgiliation (noun) and osgiliate (verb) into everybody's general vocabulary. Still working on the "everybody" part of the equati...

To the Professor!

Yesterday I snuck off on my own between Christmas guests and dog-walking to watch Gravity, and I did find myself very moved by it. I wish it had been filmed entirely in Mongolian or something, so that we could have avoided the sentimental chit-chat, and I wish George Clooney hadn't been in it, becau...