(no subject)

[mosellegreen.livejournal.com]

Hope this article hasn't been linked here before, but in case it hasn't:

Jimmy Carter: Compassion For Mordor.

Incidentally, I just remembered something funny. A few years ago, one night on impulse I took a peek at the LJ of a former fannish friend who turned on me when she found out I was a Republican. She had a recent post up ranting about how she'd taken a long time to discover the wonder of Spike/Xander fic (a pairing which makes no sense to me, but hey, this is fandom) because she was scared away from that fandom by the "Evil Blonde Thing", namely Buffy. Apparently someone had recently asked her why she hated Buffy, so she was explaining how insensitive Buffy was for enforcing her personal morality on poor lil' Spikiekins and even using physical force to do it.

That the poor and victimized Spike was using physical force to drink people's blood and kill them didn't seem to blip on her radar. Also that Buffy didn't just pick up a stake and decide to persecute vampires for their lifestyle choices, but was part of an ancient organization dedicated to fighting demons, so it wasn't exactly her "personal morality". But of course, plenty of slash fen are willing to forgive anything a character does if he's played by a hot actor, and hate any female character on principle.

About a year after reading this LJ rant, I came across a conservative editorial which tried to point up the absurdity of leftist moral relativism by comparing it to charges that Buffy was engaging in cultural imperialism, forcing her morality of not killing people onto vampires who only want to peacefully engage in their own alternate and equally valid morality of killing people.

That's the problem with parodying the left: they make your parodies come true. Or in this case, beat you to the punch.

Some links of interest to conservative fangirls

[mosellegreen.livejournal.com]

Trying to pull my weight around here. ;-) But really, I've been saving these links for months, so I'm glad to have a chance to share them. Especially since yesterday's "Compassion for Mordor" was so well received, for which I thank you all!

LOTR analogy to Rathergate

A Christian Perspective on Slash Fiction
I'm converting to Judaism myself, but this essay was still of interest to me, and might be to those of you who are religious.

BRiSK
Fanpage for Ainsley Hayes, The West Wing's Blonde RepublIcan Sex Kitten. I'm hoping to write an Ainsleyfic one of these days, but despite my crush on her, it won't be femslash. She's just too straight in canon. She even says she's straight. And it's my personal preference that characters only get slashed if there's "probable cause" in canon to believe that they're gay or at least attracted to some particular member of their own sex. Yes, I broke this rule with my first pairing (Brom\Ichabod), but I was new to fandom and didn't realize how many ludicrous pairings were out there.

And I hope you'll indulge me if I plug my own website, Belladonna, a bit. I've been building it for 8 years, so it has lots of stuff and I'm quite proud of it. It has tons of fic, both by me and by numerous other writers, and I only put good stories up. The main fandoms are From Eroica With Love and Sleepy Hollow, but there's quite a few others represented. All of my own fics, slash or gen, have an implicitly Republican worldview, naturally.

And while I was exploring the LJs of you in this community, I noticed that a lot of you are Classic Star Wars fans. Well, one branch of my website hosts the excellent SW fic of Karen Winters, formerly Karen Osman. Except for one fic, her SW fic is all gen. She wrote it in the early 80's, before ROTJ came out. I discovered her work because there was an interesting passage about her Darth Vader novel Knight of Shadows, now hosted on my site, in the excellent book on fandom Textual Poachers. I read it, loved it, found a bunch of her other fic, and eventually found her and wheedled permission to put her work on my site. I've often wondered what she must have thought; she writes these fanfics, and twenty years later someone emails her out of the blue raving about how wonderful they are and declaring that they must be shared with the world!

I need your help - questions about political blogs

[hildigunnur.livejournal.com]

My thanks to lemonlye for allowing me to post this here.

I'm currently writing an essay about political blogs for my post-graduate course on political propaganda and I would really appreciate your help. I have few questions which I would love to get your answers to. This would be most beneficial for my research for there hasn't been written much yet about blogging on an academic level.

So here are the questions:

1. Basic information: age, location, education, occupation.

2. Do you read any political blogs and if you do, what blogs do you mostly read?

3. Do you yourself write political posts in your blog and/or have a blog mostly dedicated to politics?

4. Do you feel that political bloggers are an important part of how democracy works today or will they become an important part?

5. Compared to other online resources, such as news sites, are political blogs a reliable source of information?

6. Do you feel that political bloggers have similar or more power to persuade people than for instance, political campaign advertisements?

7. Do you think that political blogs are a form of propaganda?

You can either comment with your answers or e-mail them to me to ingathora at gmail dot com. Any questions, suggestions etc. are also welcome.