perfidy

J,
Can't follow up now, but does the link explain whether the jockeybots are also equipped for buggery?

I rather think that's one of the under-reported purposes for little boy slaves in that part of the world.

GL, that's a horrible terrible awful thought. And, unfortunately, a relevant one.

Man's ability for cruelty is apparently unbounded.

Johno, as a holder of a Masters Degree in capital-H History, what ever made you think that man's capacity for cruelty was bounded?

Even a cold-hearted conservative such as myself found that feature a tiring thing. It's one thing to know that people are cruel, another to wallow in it. It's a lot easier to consider inhumanity in the abstract, painful to view it in its particular unholy glory. You can't help but put yourself in the shoes of those in the crosshairs.

It's exactly the opposite for the other side of things: I'd rather skip thinking warm fuzzy thoughts about humanity as a whole, and read a story about kitten rescue.

Re: Warm fuzzy thoughts about humanity as a whole

What makes me a (classic) liberal is that I'd prefer them to be true, even if such truth required effort from me to effect.

What keeps me from being a leftist is that I recognize them to be false, yesterday, today, and for all tomorrows.

Even in the face of that, I don't know that I could have come up with as many TWiEHB pieces as you all did. However, a half pint of JD following a really bad day of my own might make me able to mimic such art.

Ha! It's a paradox!!

You know, 's funny. For being a misanthropic grump, I'm surprisingly devoted (against my better conscious judgement) to the notion that people are basically nice. Not to get too mechanistic about this, (or too manichaen, to misappropriate that concept), I think it's that tendency that makes me gravitate toward the center-left. I don't know if it's the same for other left-leaners, but I think the notion that people generally mean well and could just use a hand to get out of their tough spots is an essential one for modern liberalism. Not leftism; liberalism.

Then I remember that people are all basically jerkholes and get over my lovey-dovey self. Remember that feature that we used to do, "This Week in Exemplary Human Behavior"? That was a tough one to write, because every week came fresh examples of offhanded cruelty, tragic self-interest, and outright evil. I've thought from time to time of reviving that grand Perfidy tradition, but the mental toll is a surprisingly steep one. Not that I go home and break into crying jags in the middle of the night, but if you read enough "Islamic girl killed by family for being raped" stories and chase them with enough "rebels burn village to save it; hundreds die" stories, it can really wreck your day.

J,
That's precisely why I stopped contributing a TWiEHB. I loved the feature, and felt it worked great for our purposes. But doing it consistently is hard work.

Not because of the writing; we all know that composition is work, of a sort. But compiling the articles, thinking about them, and then trying to riff on them is work of an entirely different sort. It takes a certain...spiritual, maybe, toll.

And I'm a total jerkhole. It's much harder on gentler souls.

Sooner or later one of us will put out a new TWiEHB, I expect. And hell, maybe even get to a place where he doesn't need a half-pint of bourbon to finish it.