Not the best morning

Blood sugar's elevated for no good reason, the left ankle is one big slick of lymph fluids ditto, and I'm feeling too scattered to deal with work. So I'm going to check in with one of the clinic doctors ~1030 and very likely take the rest of the day off sick. Not exactly what I had planned, to say the least, but all the late nights and early mornings (to say nothing of that long, long drive to and from Cedar Rapids) have taken their toll and now my body is collecting.

I may be on AIM from time to time, or not. I suspect I'll be going back to bed after I see the doctor, but we'll see how that works out.

Oh, yeah...with the Twins kicking ass lately, the fantasy team is in a solid fourth place. Yes, fsf_rapier, that's with Carlos Silva in the lineup. ^_^

Not the best morning

Blood sugar's elevated for no good reason, the left ankle is one big slick of lymph fluids ditto, and I'm feeling too scattered to deal with work. So I'm going to check in with one of the clinic doctors ~1030 and very likely take the rest of the day off sick. Not exactly what I had planned, to say the least, but all the late nights and early mornings (to say nothing of that long, long drive to and from Cedar Rapids) have taken their toll and now my body is collecting.

I may be on AIM from time to time, or not. I suspect I'll be going back to bed after I see the doctor, but we'll see how that works out.

Oh, yeah...with the Twins kicking ass lately, the fantasy team is in a solid fourth place. Yes, fsf_rapier, that's with Carlos Silva in the lineup. ^_^

Weird linkages

Sometime yesterday, when I was extremely scattered and not concentrating well, I ran across a link to this Eric Raymond article on memetic warfare, or rather on the family of memetic weapons unleashed by the Soviets against us during the Cold War which are still percolating away in academia and the NYDCLA media axis.

I think ESR is wrong about Falangism being just another branch off the fascist tree; certainly the original Falange was every bit what he describes, but under Franco the Falange was an awkward combination of the original hardcore Blue Shirts (though many of those had gotten themselves killed off in the Division Azul on the Russian Front) , the Carlist royalists, and the Army. For excellent reasons of history and culture, you're not going to get that in the US. We've never had a single state religion intimately combined with the state and society as the Catholic Church was in Spain, and there simply isn't any kind of Fascist corporate state movement here. We had a brush with that in the 1930s, but one has to give FDR credit for pulling the teeth of the Union Party before it could become a serious threat.

If an American Falangist movement were to take hold, it would have to be pan-religious and more libertarian in its economics than Franco's party, and I don't see anyone of his political skill out there.

That having been said...fandom has its own problems with damaging memes. The best conventions manage to handle the crazies better; the worst self-destruct under the load that these "social fallacies" impose on the staff and membership. divalea discusses some pretty ugly examples of those fallacies in this post, which is well worth reading.

And now, having narrowly avoided inflicting tedious metapolitical speculation on my Loyal Readers, I think I'm going to call it a night and go to bed early. For once.

Weird linkages

Sometime yesterday, when I was extremely scattered and not concentrating well, I ran across a link to this Eric Raymond article on memetic warfare, or rather on the family of memetic weapons unleashed by the Soviets against us during the Cold War which are still percolating away in academia and the NYDCLA media axis.

I think ESR is wrong about Falangism being just another branch off the fascist tree; certainly the original Falange was every bit what he describes, but under Franco the Falange was an awkward combination of the original hardcore Blue Shirts (though many of those had gotten themselves killed off in the Division Azul on the Russian Front) , the Carlist royalists, and the Army. For excellent reasons of history and culture, you're not going to get that in the US. We've never had a single state religion intimately combined with the state and society as the Catholic Church was in Spain, and there simply isn't any kind of Fascist corporate state movement here. We had a brush with that in the 1930s, but one has to give FDR credit for pulling the teeth of the Union Party before it could become a serious threat.

If an American Falangist movement were to take hold, it would have to be pan-religious and more libertarian in its economics than Franco's party, and I don't see anyone of his political skill out there.

That having been said...fandom has its own problems with damaging memes. The best conventions manage to handle the crazies better; the worst self-destruct under the load that these "social fallacies" impose on the staff and membership. divalea discusses some pretty ugly examples of those fallacies in this post, which is well worth reading.

And now, having narrowly avoided inflicting tedious metapolitical speculation on my Loyal Readers, I think I'm going to call it a night and go to bed early. For once.