This will hurt me...

Now, I have spoken at length previously on my distaste for extremists, so I shall not reopen that wound for all to see (and bore you in the process). That said, I could pass over the image of the menacing black and yellow Sea Shepherd anarchist AKTION patrol boat parked just across the road from work this morning. Now – and apologies in advance to all the Sea Shepherds reading out there – every member of that distinguished organisation that I have happened across has turned out to be of a frame of mind that I described in that earlier post. This tendency to drift into preposterous polarities, mutually exclusive ideas, deterministic dialectics (always hidden, excluding the individual doing the ranting, of course), all of which operate not just separate from , but in opposition to , each other. This is great fun when you happen to be in the public policy game and are looking to get a little harmony happening on an issue. They remind me of yet another presentation that I saw the othe...

The no bill posters building that I featured yesterday also seems to be a favourite of the anti-New World Order crowd (remember them?) I quite like their stencil work (it’s better than the “dick” written on our fence), even if you get a little tired of being told how horrid Americans are (and, consequently, how horrid anyone is that might take issue with lumping 400 million-odd into one vile basket). You see, there is something inherently offensive about people that are seemingly driven to lecture high-minded principles about the way one should or should not live (and indeed the way that one should or should not think ; yet at the same time exhibit a kind of hypocrisy that is as extreme as their political and cultural viewpoints. Of course, this tendency towards extremism does not limit itself to a particular set of pre-conditions (other than ideological certainty). I have seen it in libertarians and communists; Christians, Muslims and atheists; left and right. On one score, I can’t he...