a sense of joy and then a panic

France has lost all right to give any commentary on anything.

It seriously sickens me how many people outside France (especially liberal dumb-asses) romanticize this bullshit country.  The best part in the article is definitely all the attempts to compare the pieds noirs to Jews in the Holocaust.  Yeah.  Now that is a persecution complex.

As Professor Tiersten says of Algerians, "They were crying, all right, but they weren't crying their love of France, I can promise you that."

This is my problem with being an econ minor in an American college.  Studying economics is basically being indoctrinated with the capitalist system.  I don't want to say studying the capitalist system, because that would imply some kind of critical analysis.  Put another way, studying economics is pretty much studying Indonesian history under the Suharto Era.  Yes, that is how bad it is.  No, no, no, there was no coup against Sukarno!  He gave up power willingly on his death bed!

There's this great Gary Larson cartoon - that I can't find online, unfortunately - of a cow barbecuing hamburger patties while other cows look on, saying, "You're sick, Jessie!  Sick, sick, sick!"  That's pretty much my view of capitalism.  Ironically, in highschool I joked with a friend of mine (who's now at Wharton Business School) that we may as well just start serving "poor people burgers" and get it over with.  Hard to believe, but we are still friends.

Oh, dear God.  Somebody actually put "Death is a Drummer" up on YouTube.  It's a still picture, but who cares?  It only recently occurred to me how true that title is. 

1.  People who write slavery fanfiction or slavery fiction need to make sure to read something along the lines of Alienation and Social Death by Orlando Patterson.  Just so everyone understands that social death is not hot or fun.  As some guy in my Colonial Encounters class shouted today after listening to a bunch of girls defending Friday as more a subject than a slave to Robinson Crusoe because of sentimental attachment between them, or some passing veneer of respect on Crusoe's part, "that does not take away that he's still a slave!  He's a slave!  He's enslaved!" 

2.  Stephanie Meyer needs like, a lot of help.  Because if you're trying to encourage crossbreeding you do not want to write your heroine breaking her spine during the ensuing childbirth.  This after the vampire hero has shredded pillows, destroyed the headboard, and beaten up the heroine during sex (it's okay, she was in a state of rapture/unconsciousness).  That's not encouraging.  That's called "don't try this at home".  It's also called "not the start to a happy family". 

3.  No one species is like-OMG-so-much-cooler than any other.  You know the story about Prometheus assigning every creature special helpful attributes, and how humans didn't get anything except a ginormous brain?  That applies to the special made-up species too.  When vampires (or whatever) are portrayed as just the coolest race ever (and yeah, they're always "races" not "species", because we're living in the Fourth Reich apparently) whereas humans are dumb and weak and useless, all I can really wonder is where Darwin is in all this, and why the hell vampires haven't taken over the world and enslaved little human clans to breed with each other and create an endless supply of human blood.  I usually conclude that people who idolize some mythical race, and usually weirdly turn out to be closet rabid Christians (Stephanie Meyer, Anne Rice - atheists don't write this worship-of-magical-being stuff), are much like Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins in that they hate humans, hate life, and hate Earth, and just can't wait to be rid of it all. 

Oh, I shouldn't have brought up Left Behind. 

Because really.  What the hell do these uber-cool ultra-races see in humans that would make them want to breed with them, if humans are such piles of dog shit?  Or is it just the cracked-up supermen that can't handle a superwoman, and so decide to go after something they know can't threaten them? 

4.  Same with the sex.  And the OMG. 

Look, I write about this same exact stuff.  And that's probably why gross, unresearched (and quite frankly, uneducated) presentations of it bother the hell out of me. 

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Also, the Autumnal Equinox issue of Cezanne's Carrot is live and it contains my story about constantly reincarnated test animals, "On The Island".  Speaking of reincarnation this story has been reincarnated in the form of rewrites like a million billion times.  I arbritrarily named every section of the story after four great Criminal Intent episodes.  Also, I won one of the Editors' Prizes for the issue, woo!