Patience my good friends.
This video is insufferably dull and pointless until 3:30
At which point it begins to shine like a diamond. A very sick and wrong diamond.
But you can't just skip ahead, you need the context. So watch from the beginning:
[Vimeo direct link]
Afterwards, go ahead and skip over the 2+ minutes of credits to the 9:45 mark. A lagniappe for you.
Age check
9 hours ago
Actually, were this not a fairy tale, were this lil girl real, I'd want to stick around long enough for her to grow up so I could be a part of a groundswell of public support for her candidacy for (darned near any) public office.
ReplyDeleteShe's almost sure to pass L. Neil Smith's acid test for candidates... ;-)
Link unhelpful, Googled it, came up with:
ReplyDeleteOne reason that I agree with L. Neil Smith when he suggests that the most direct interpretation of the 2nd Amendment be used as an "Acid Test" for politicos running for office.... Far as he's concerned you shouldn't ever trust a candidate that doesn't strongly believe in, and trust YOU with a gun, no questions asked.... The only reason that a politician has for wanting to take your guns away is to make it easier to do something to you that you would object to if you had the means!
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For the record, I've read some L. Neil Smith - he's a great libertarian, but sadly he's only C+ as a fiction writer.
Although I found "Pallas" to be quite good, and I'd recommend it.
Premonition of the activity to come -- around 3:11: Dogtags.
ReplyDeleteI'm just hoping that when I buy a house again the previous owners are kind enough to leave me weapons of that quality
ReplyDeleteTangential to Grau - I'm watching the old A-Team series (and liking it), but I can't help noticing the number of times they get held prisoner by the bad guys in an old barn with a working vehicle, slabs of sheet steel, and welding equipment for BA to make use of.
ReplyDeleteAlso on the A-team front, I'm in season 3, and I've seen exactly one episode that doesn't include a vehicle going up into the air and landing on its roof or side.
Pretty much a signature move of the show.
"Link unhelpful... "?
ReplyDelete*huh?* I hit the link and it took me directly to Smith's home page where "Why Did it Have to be ... Guns?" was prominently featured. I thought the explanation of his "acid test" in the essay was pretty explicit and an easy transition to a "militarized" response to fairy aggression by the lil girl. *shrugs* Oh, well. Horse races and all that, I suppose.
"...he's a great libertarian, but sadly he's only C+ as a fiction writer"
Agree. Not who you'd go to for gripping stories. All his novels are really polemics advocating his libertarian POV, and serve well as such, IMO.
David - I think my comment reads more harshly than I intended. I just meant that when you go to his page, it doesn't say "L. Neil Smith's Acid Test for Politicians" anywhere, and his essay - while displayed prominently - does not contain the words "acid test".
ReplyDeleteSo as a reference link, I thought it was a little ambiguous. And because you made an important point, I wanted to make sure it was obvious enough so that no one could miss it.
(I too noticed the dogtags in the misc. box.)
ReplyDeleteSomething about this appealed to me. Flamethrower definitely, but also perhaps because it was the Nerd Girl version of Tank Girl.
Harvey, Harsh? Nah. I was just surprised that the link apparently "was unhelpful" since I thought Smith was fairly obvious in his presentation of the one issue that is his acid test, his shiboleth, in deciding who his vote might go to.But both your reading of that essay and my reading of your comment above demonstrates that the printed word can be read differently by different folks.
ReplyDelete