On dinner parties and war criminals

"Oh, your prudery; oh, your squeamish respectability; all the abominations are allowed to *happen*, but no one may mention them. Delicate women must not know anything or say anything about blood and filth... There is nothing indecent about death and killing as far as you are concerned, you well brought up little ladies..."

"[T]he way [respectable] conversation customarily handles a new movement that strives to create a big upheaval: with an expression of prudent doubt and reservation, gentle ridicule, condescending recognition of the noble cause --- and all of that against a background of unmoving, rigid indifference."

--- Bertha von Suttner, 1889

Awesome badness

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/03/iron-eagle-isra.html

Wired is great for this type of "awesome badness".

It's like they took a left critique of society and tried to tick off all the boxes:

Patriarchal, misogynist, jingoistic, phallic imagery, objectification, militarist, macho, capitalist, bourgeois, fear-mongering, warmongering, latent violence, statist, consumerist, mindless pop culture, fascist.

It's all there, yep, every one. I feel that this arms manufacturer, or their advertising agency, must have accidentally hired some radical feminist antiwar college student who couldn't find a job elsewhere, who had a great time producing such exquisitely comprehensive awesome badness.

Perhaps it could also be submitted to a feminist journal as a spot-the-gender-binaries game.