‘Stiletto (Blog)’ Archives
You, Too, Can Be Terry Krepel
As we've discussed previously in Stiletto, Terry Krepel is a somewhat... shall we say rationally challenged liberal blogger whose tiny tripod page serves as the virtual headquarters for his self-appointed "watchdog" function -- an alleged mandate that he takes very seriously in his "job" to "criticize the critics." Pursuant to this weighty [...]
A Fortiori: Poking Ideologues with Sticks
Merriam-Webster defines an ideologue as "an impractical idealist" and "an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology." Mike Reed's flame warrior roster is less kind; he asserts that the ideologue is "smug and self-satisfied" in his certitudes, "genuinely astonished, bewildered, and indignant that his views are not [...]
Ted Kennedy’s Dead; Was Red; ‘Nuff Said
Ted Kennedy's body has barely had time to assume room temperature, but already the lionization of this entrenched incumbent Senator from Massachusetts has kicked into overdrive across our popular media. The Chappaquiddick "incident" was referred to by one news reader as one of Kennedy's "personal tragedies." These revisionist histories were [...]
Conflict of Interest
If you have both an Obama sticker and a "Support Our Troops" ribbon on your car, remove one of them. I don't care which one. I know a lot of you lefties out there would like to think you can be both an ardent supporter of Obama <i>and</i> a patriotic American who stands behind your armed forces. You can't. The Democrats do not [...]
Ode to Joy
I was accused, not long ago, of being an angry person. Of being cold and unfeeling. Of being paranoid. Of expressing myself in a deranged, even dangerous manner, shouting my opinions at the world, railing against imagined injustices while frothing at the mouth in apoplectic, impotent fury over straw-man liberals who don't exist as I have [...]
Weakness, Distance, Anonymity, and the Internet
There's a phenomenon of "intellectual" discourse, particularly online, that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who's ever stated an opinion in the open ether. It's as simple as this: When you state your opinion, there will be those who disagree. Many of these people, however, cannot simply say, "I disagree, and here is why." They [...]
Was Ayn Rand Right? Politics, Philosophy, and Greatness
"What is greatness? I will answer: it is the capacity to live by the three fundamental values of John Galt: reason, purpose, self-esteem." - Ayn Rand Ayn Rand, the late Russian-born philosopher and novelist whose most famous works are Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, wrote extensively on the subject of greatness. Directly or indirectly, [...]
Barrack Hussein Obama and the Cult of Personality
On paper, it's an amazing success story: Barack Hussein Obama, after winning election to the United States Senate, having not even served a full term in that Senate, is now the President-Elect of the United States of America.What has been disturbing, however, is the cult of personality surrounding Obama. This fervently held, wide-eyed devotion [...]
An Open Letter to the Vaccine Deniers
I have written several times on the topic of vaccinations and autism, both in Stiletto and in my Technocracy column for WorldNetDaily. I write on this topic out of personal motivation, for I myself once adopted, by default and from exposure to popular culture, the mistaken notion that there was a real risk of the onset of autism based on [...]
The Coming Dark Times, Again
Throughout history, every religious and socio-political group has had or does have its dark times -- the times to which it refers and proclaims, "Never again," the times for which its members prepare with grim purpose and pessimistic proclamations. For the Jews, it was the Holocaust -- and it remains the spectres of anti-Semitism and, if you are a [...]
