1. A notice to collect a package at a house 11 doors down. Luckily the houses here are very narrow so it's not a long walk. And luckily I'm able to collect the package from a couple of kids who answer the door in their underwear and are very excited to see me. (I don't know them)
What's in the package? Three books and a Laura Cantrell CD. The three books (ordered by Vol-in-Law) are the worrisome thing. They are:
- The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's assault on free speech and free minds by Tammy Bruce
- All Must Have Prizes by Melanie Phillips
- The Abolition of Liberty: The Decline of Order and Justice in England by Peter Hitchens
2. A cat in the closet. I came upstairs and heard a faint mewing. I followed the sound and discovered that Fancy has been left in the closet all day. Vol-in-Law must have shut her in when he got a shirt out this morning.
Fancy seemed to take the whole thing remarkably well, but then I haven't showed her the books yet.
4 comments:
>>These all look disturbingly right wing and when they arrive together; it's suspicious.<<
Heh, just trying to meet amazon's minimum amount for free postage...
>> Must remember not to let the Vol-in-Law watch FoxNews unsupervised.<<
I only watch it ironically... >:)
Actually, the thing about Fox is that it's totalitarian, the producers will lie and misrepresent to further their agenda; I've even seen them take an interviewee's own words and paraphrase them to make it seem he said the exact opposite of what I just heard him say, eg:
General Honore in New Orleans:
"You see any snipers? Baghdad has snipers. I've never worn a (bullet proof) vest here."
Fox:
"General Honore there in New Orleans , talking about the danger of snipers and the need for body armour..."
OTOH if I mix viewing Fox, BBC & CNN liberally enough I reckon I get something approximating the truth. And for the first 5 days of the Katrina disaster I was watching nothing but Fox (the BBC didn't have anyone there yet) - the Fox journos' reports from the scene (qv my Shepard Smith post) were utterly horrifying in the tale they told of government ineptitude & mendacity, and no amount of editorialising from the studio could conceal that.
I'll also comment that at the institution I work in, to pass the probation period I had to sit and pass a compulsory (and quite difficult) Diversity test to demonstrate my commitment to Diversity. Just today I had to read a whole bunch of Diversity instruction on how I'm supposed to police my thinking. Though I quite liked the bit about how objecting to someone else's not respecting Diversity could itself be a crime against Diversity. Hm.
I don't think this is entirely in line with academia's commitment to free thought & free comment. The previous place I was at, teaching Intellectual Property, the politically correct line was pro-business pro-enforcement, that made me an anti-IP "information wants to be free" libertarian. I'm a bit iconclastic I guess.
Methinks we might have to send the ViL an Al Franken book for Christmas...
I loved Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them: A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right". I don't like totalitarian attempts to create an unquestioned Truth, whoever is doing it. My philosophical heroes include John Locke & Jeremy Bentham.
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