Warning: Trolls will be bahleeted! One of the basic assumptions of you having arrived on this site is that you can understand the concept of subjectivity. Thank-you.

NB: If you are squeamish, or have a problem with modifications - skip this post. Links are NSFW.

So for a while there have been these niggling little issues bothering me about how there is such restricted cross-over in the blogosphere between areas that I love dearly in their own ways. Allow me to expand: especially with regard to personal decisions such as the choice to modify your body - there seems no room for discussion. Comments threads descend into repeated exclamations of judgementality. There’s some kind of tangible sense of resentment towards a cultural critique coming within 10 yards of body modification. It’s ridiculous, but on the flipside there are some F.A. (Fat Acceptance) blogs out there that seem to over-critique everything to the point of which choosing to lose weight is equatable with succumbing to societal pressure and thus abhorrent. Admittedly that’s anecdotal because it would take me so long to find the specific posts I’ve read that on, and besides in this post I’m mainly focusing on discussing the Body Modification scene. I want to preface this by saying that I really don’t want this to read as some kind of brochure for all the horrors out there - modification is life-affirming, progressive, fun and not to mention a skill (that’s rare in a lot of studios) to be respected.

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The other day, we noticed a new link to us on our wordpress admin page. It was, disappointingly, merely someone hotlinking to a picture we were hosting (and thus using up our bandwidth). This was especially annoying as the site in question was ‘American Papist’, which apparently has had over 1,300,000 hits. Understandably, we felt aggrieved and left a polite comment asking the webmaster, a certain Thomas Peters, to kindly refrain from his hotlinking.

Sadly, this did not seem to have the intended effect.

At this point, we decided to investigate Thomas’ website somewhat, and - I am sad to say - he let us down again. Besides linking to vendors of ‘The Pope’s Cologne’  and ‘Papist Hoodies’, Thomas also seems to enjoy attacking feminists, Democrats, liberals and others for their pro-choice (or ‘culture of death’) views, equating foetuses with ‘persons’, and even criticising other Catholics for their ‘flat-out dissent from and opposition to Church teaching’, and/or being ‘un-Catholic’.

And his attempts at news programming are fairly amusing. Did you know, for example, that MSN’s online clipart gallery contains NO images of God? That’s right, none. It’s run by atheists.

Now, before I reveal what happened next, (the punchline, if you will), let me preface it by saying that I don’t have any problems with religious belief. It’s a basic assumption of this website that such issues are matters of personal judgment, and that dogmatic atheistic beliefs are no more justified than dogmatically theistic beliefs. Clearly, many Christians are admirable and thoughtful human beings, whatever Richard Dawkins says to the contrary.

However, if you are going to dogmatically base your beliefs solely on the pontifications of one extremely powerful man, who wears a dress but says gay marriage is immoral, who is conveniently deemed by his own organisation to be entirely infallible, and whose job consists in the main of promulgating dogmas supposedly derived from divine revelations… and you then go on to criticise others for not believing the same, to the extent that you feel you have the authority to decide what other people should do with their lives and bodies, (not to mention hotlinking to our website), then you fully deserve this…

Forgive us Father…

So, remember kids, hotlinking is a sin.

Not much to say about this one, apart from - wtf? (This comes from the same Powell interview where he endorses Obama).

Around 2:38, Powell states, and this is verbatim:

‘There’s gonna be a crisis come along on the 21st or 22nd of January that we don’t even know about right now’

Now, I’m studying paradoxes in one of my university modules, and I have to say that statement qualifies. You know it’s going to happen, but you don’t even know about it? One resolution: perhaps this is a sentence with two distinct subjects, one an informed insider and the other the unaware general populace (hence ‘we’, not ‘I’)?

And, um, why so specific on the date, Colin? Presumably he’s aware of the significance of the date, since its only a day or two after the presidential inauguration, Jan 20th…

Who knows what we should make of it (or the interviewer’s neglecting to ask Powell what in God’s name he was prophesying). But remember this in a few months time, if and when some supposedly unforeseen, external threat is being invoked to justify military action and/or the erosion of hard-won civil liberties.

Here’s your daily dose of propaganda, kids: Dangerous and depraved: paedophiles unite with terrorists online. This is one of the worst examples of Rupert Murdoch’s ‘journalism’ I’ve seen - I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Yes, two of the best excuses for the erosion of civil liberties are now apparently colluding online to ‘exchange operational secrets’. It’s now even been discovered (by an unnamed and unbiased ‘anti-terror source’) that terrorists and paedophiles are psychologically similar. They’re both ‘obsessive’, ‘paranoid’ (surely they should be paranoid?) and - this is the best one - they spend a lot of time ‘going to the mosque or going off to internet cafés’. That’s an actual quote, I’m afraid.

Never trust an ‘anti-terror source’ with your psychological well-being.

Not only are the terrorists and paedophiles in league with one another, apparently they’re often one and the same. The article proudly declares that ‘The link might have remained unknown but for the case of a Muslim preacher from the East End of London [Abdul Makim Khalisadar]’. Right. Except that they then admit that Khalisadar was never convicted of anything relating to terrorism or paedophilia. (He was a convicted rapist though, so hey, they’re all the same right?) All through the article ‘terror suspects’ are treated as if equatable with convicted terrorists.

We then get the incredible claim that terrorists actually communicate through child porn. Yes, Al-Qaeda have decided to encode pornographic images of children, possibly the most illegal, graphic and conspicuous medium thinkable, with secret messages as a mode of ‘clandestine communication’. I’m not making this up (although I suspect the Times is).

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Just needed to post these two videos of Naomi Wolf speaking. She’s the author of The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot and Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries. The first video, referencing the former, was recorded in October 2007. The latter is an interview from this month. Well worth watching.

Today I just want to promote/congratulate this guy. I’ve never really been into hip-hop much, but having come to a growing realisation that most good things in any genre will be hard to find, I did some research. And Sage Francis stood out for me - he’s a proper artist. It’s surprising enough when any given contemporary performer comes across as a self-aware, socially conscious, intelligent human being. Add to that captivating lyrics and you deserve some respect! This particular song, by way of context, was written a month after 9/11. (And yes, that’s Bob Dylan at the end).

Anyway, I’ll let the song speak for itself.