Opinion
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Sydney, NSW, AUS. I am as concerned as the next inner city liberal about right-wing militias in America.
The latest group to come to attention are the Oath Keepers: a militia made up of current and ex-military personnel and law enforcement officers who believe President Barack Obama is on the verge of instituting martial law across the United States.
I fear for Obama and anyone working for a federal agency that these boys with guns will take matters into their own hands.
I am neither surpr... |
03-07-10
Word count: 1151
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Western Sydney, NSW, AUS. Our teenagers are becoming increasingly alienated. Their existence within their technology defined lives is one of segregation. Isolated by the technology that continually accompanies them, they have effectively become estranged from each other and the immediate community that surrounds them.
The symptoms of this estrangement are everywhere. Youths who have no sense of compassion for their acquaintances gatecrash parties en masse. Young adults who have no loyalty to ... |
03-06-10
Word count: 1167
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Texas, USA. Sharon, a friend of mine as well as one of the editors over at TS-SI suggested that perhaps I should define Christo-fascism as people react rather harshly to my using that phrase.
I am an atheist.
That means I think the very idea of their being an invisible patriarch in the sky or for that matter an invisible matriarch in the sky is pretty absurd. I don’t take the cop out of declaring myself spiritual rather than religious because I find all the New Age stuff equally absurd.... |
03-04-10
Word count: 1934
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Somewhere, Planet Earth. Ariablue recently published an essay she titled An Object Lesson in which she discussed the possible motives for the tragic suicide of Christine Daniels. [N1]
For those who may not be aware of the story, Christine had a very successful career as a popular sports writer in a national journal.
When her transition was announced she received tangible support from colleagues and public alike. I don’t think you could say everyone was overjoyed but she at least kept her ... |
03-03-10
Word count: 2260
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Fairfax, VA, USA. Elsewhere on the internet, in the web blogs and their knee jerk ranting comments, the world wide transgender range wars rage on.
The proponents see themselves as white hats and the targets of their philippic harangues as unscrupulous villains dressed in black from head and toe.
I read very few of these blogs, other than those pointed out to us here at TS-Si as possibly being of interest to us on these pages. [N1] But that doesn’t mean I am ignorant of the essence of what... |
03-02-10
Word count: 1623
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Brisbane, Queensland, AUS. The phrase, human inventions, calls to mind technology: the control of fire, the wheel, the computer and all the other techniques and devices that form our society.
Language is also an invention. Our language shows ethnicity, nationality, class and other attributes that separate human groups. Modern society is unlike tribal society in that there is a great deal of change in a life time. Most of us are uncomfortable with change.
In the first sentence of this essay I... |
03-01-10
Word count: 2026
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Fairfax, VA, USA. I am half Sicilian. Both my mother’s grandparents arrived in the United States from Palermo. The rest of my genes come from the British Isles except for a sliver of Iroquois. My facial features are classic American Italian with the high cheekbones of the Haudenosaunee.
My father was one hundred percent mongrel British Isles, less a generation more Haudenosaunee than I have. [N1]
His skin was as dark as my olive but with distinct reddish tinge to his tan. In photographs a... |
02-28-10
Word count: 1230
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Fairfax, VA, USA. We live in an age that calls into question the qualifications for excellence. No single person is allowed to be a success: no one can be that good. In a world full of queers, some of us are queerer than most.
We must have cheated, we must have been lucky; we could not have succeeded on our own. The game must have been rigged from the start.
Just when you think you have finally achieved success, the democratic American mass attempts to pull you back down. This is nothing new... |
02-23-10
Word count: 1067
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Fairfax, VA, USA. Country music is often seen as the soundtrack of the Republican Party (read White America). Many times the Democratic Party (read everyone else but white people who aren’t college students or professors) sniffs down its well educated, northern nose at country performers.
When a Democrat sees a deer, she sees Bambi where a Republican might see antlers up on his den wall.
A Democrat might see a lake as a great place for family picnic but a Republican might see a perfect pl... |
02-22-10
Word count: 1932
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Fairfax, VA, USA. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar: the once enthusiastic backers of President Barack Obama are frustrated by his inability to speed up the political processes of a democratic republic. He has failed to act on the promises he made during his campaign for president.
The President is in danger of breaking the spirit of solidarity and hope. More than a broken promise is the danger of breaking people's sense of hope. Issues that were important in the campaign have taken a ba... |
02-21-10
Word count: 1159
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Earth. Once when trekking in the Himalayas I had to follow my Nepalese guide as he chipped footholds into a sloping sheet of half frozen snow on the side of a mountain. One slip and I would have been on my way — and it seemed to me to be a long way down. That traverse took four minutes. They were four minutes that I as a non-hero would never want to experience again. I am in awe of the courage of mountaineers who live life on the edge.
When climbing, mountaineers are exposed to sub-zero tem... |
02-19-10
Word count: 1472
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Manchester, England. In the Hollywood version of the life of Oliver Cromwell he is confronted by a sneering, condescending party of the Establishment and taunted by the leader there with the words But we have the majority. At which point he bangs the floor with his staff and a detachment of the Army marches in and Cromwell rises to his feet and says Gentlemen, I think you will find I now have the majority. [N1]
OK, that wasn't strictly historically accurate, the reality was that Colonel Pride... |
02-18-10
Word count: 2262
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Fairfax, VA, USA. Some of us have been hookers in the Sixties and Seventies, early transitioners in need of money while completing our transition. Whores, harlots, women of the night, streetwalkers, call girls, courtesans, trollops, strumpets, prostitutes, working girls, and, the politically correct, if intentionally misleading, sex workers.
In our salad days, when we were green in judgment, yet cold in blood, it was not uncommon that, cast out from home and families, we turned to the street... |
02-16-10
Word count: 1461
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Texas, USA. Many, many years ago I went to LA for the first time. I went there accompanying Jan, who was going to an outlaw plastic surgeon for implants and orchiectomy.
I was excited, it was my first trip to Los Angeles. We spent the night we got in at a house in Venice and went to Hollywood early in the morning where we checked into the Hollywood Roosevelt.
Dr. Gaunt’s office and quasi-operating room were next door, across Orange Drive in the old Max Factor Building.
I left Jan there.... |
02-15-10
Word count: 1557
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Perth, WA, AUS. Apparently post feminist women are reinventing hen’s nights in order to (re)claim a male activity while men are becoming more “classy” with spa visits and golfing days.
Yet for Hannah Pool, the hen’s night is a traumatic, humiliating experience where feminists are expected to disregard their political beliefs. Pool contends that the first step in reducing the “very specific tyranny” of a hen’s night is to make them bunny ear free.
My cousin just got married and... |
02-15-10
Word count: 1166
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Fairfax, VA, USA. How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem most all transsexual youthful remembrances. Our stories are filled with great trains of fire and comets trailing dews of blood and disaster.
We feed upon childhood memories, noting each doomsday eclipse and ill-fated harbinger of deconstruction. Heaven and earth conspire to drive our climatic tales. The salt of most righteous tears seasons our emotional catharses.
You must go elsewhere if that is what you are searching for. Wha... |
02-12-10
Word count: 1899
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Fairfax, VA, USA. Psychological assessments are not magic. I no more believe in the inerrancy of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) than I do the proclamations of any other itinerant preachers prowling the back roads thumping away on a big book in their hands..
The quality of APA practitioners follows the same bell shaped curve as any other group of professionals.
Some are very good at what they do, some are average, and too many would misspell cat if you spotted them two letters. ... |
02-11-10
Word count: 1817
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Somewhere, Planet Earth. My early life was a living nightmare! I’ve talked about this before so I don’t intend to bleat on about it all over again.
So having put that entire trauma behind me I moved on with my life and being in the fortunate position of being able to blend in, that is what I did. It wasn’t an unconscious thing I planned to do just that. I never wanted anything else even as a small child crying myself to sleep all I ever wanted was to be like other girls. What was amazin... |
02-10-10
Word count: 2111
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Fairfax, VA, USA. Unless you have been hiding in a National Football League locker room, you have read, or heard, or seen that the weather gods have been angry at the mid-Atlantic states along the eastern seaboard of the United States. Last weekend’s blizzard is morphing into this week’s blizzard.
Out my back door, twenty-six inches (66 cm) of white stuff fell on the small wooden deck above the patio. Both Sharon and I measured the depth independently to be sure. Late this afternoon thro... |
02-10-10
Word count: 1090
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Washington, DC, USA. “This may be the most calamitous fiscal year states have known in decades,” reports Rob Gurwitt in Governing, the 23-year old bible on coverage of state and local governance across the continent.
And the coming fiscal year, the experts are predicting, may be almost as grim as the states run out of their budget gimmicks, rainy day funds, and the infusion of federal stimulus money that helped them, finally, to balance their current unbalanced budgets. The states’ cumu... |
02-06-10
Word count: 969
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