She stalks the Internets

by Kieran Healy on March 15, 2005

Via “Elayne Riggs”:http://elayneriggs.blogspot.com/2005/03/estrogen-month-day-14-welcome-any-new.html comes Tild~’s “She-Blogger”:http://tildblog.blogspot.com/2005/03/return-of-she-blogger.html. Enslaved to the conventional wisdom, constantly whoring for attention and desperate for validation by the polite society they affect to despise, these sad creatu– I’m sorry, those are the He-Bloggers. That should have read, Sharp-tongued, lurking in the shadows and heedless of their proper place in life, these slatterns tempt innocent young boy-bloggers to “subvert the dominant link hierarchy”:http://www.google.com/search?q=subvert+the+dominant+link+hierarchy. Disgusting. Yet strangely alluring.

Needles Under the Nails

by Kieran Healy on March 15, 2005

The effort to normalize torture proceeds on two fronts. The first comes up with scenarios where torture seems justified — the “ticking bomb”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/13/torture-2/ case that we “know and love”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/18/by-the-power-of-stipulation-i-have-the-power. As we know, real torture never meets the criteria that even seemingly reasonable ticking-bomb hypos demand. The scenario depends on the prospective torturer knowing everything relevant about the circumstances _except one thing_ (viz, the location of the bomb and the time it will explode), which the suspect knows, and we know they know. This never happens. Instead, torture is generally a much more protracted affair, carried on with much less information about what the suspect knows or even who the proper suspects are. Nevertheless, as we saw the “other day”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/13/torture-2/, the ticking-bomb still exerts a “considerable hold”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18709-2005Mar8.html over people’s minds. Why?

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