The Guardian has a sample passage from a book by Carolyn Jessop, who escaped from a fundamentalist, polygamist Mormon community after being married off to the “community leader” at the age of 18 to a 50-year-old man. If your reaction is “you are just picking on nuts, real religion isn’t like this”, then you are an idiot - ‘liberal’ religion enables this kind of nonsense.
Jeffrey Shallit gives ten good reasons not to vote for Mike Huckabee. He is, of course, one of us dirty liberal atheist types, so he would say that.
Who are the real fascists? The quintessential liberal fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.
This kind of thing makes my brain explode. (See: Crooked Timber)
On character encoding issues
Character encoding is a hard problem. I’ve written about it before, and have gotten really annoyed getting it right. I wish there was just a magic function that I could push strings through that would fix them and make them usable in whatever context is under discussion.
Currently, I am running iconv to solve the problem - it is currently storing data as ISO-8859-1, and using the //IGNORE option to remove anything that’s not ISO-8859-1. This is one of the main reasons I will, despite previous promises, not release the source code for this blog’s software. I don’t want to spread this inelegant hack. If you are looking for blogging software, look for something that supports Unicode properly, because my software isn’t it. This is not my fault. I am working within certain limitations, which I won’t spell out. Legacy data is a pain, and it’s one of the reasons why we need to be careful to design specifications and software the is going to stand the test of time.
