(And is still studied in film schools, apparently, for being ground-breaking effective and technologically ahead of the time.) Historically, there was never such a massacre on the Steps, but the sequence served as a kind of cinematic shorthand for State brutality aimed at essentially harmless, unarmed, unthreatening civilians in a public place civilians who were seen to be defying the authority of the State. The early Soviet propaganda movie, The Battleship Potemkin, culminates in a prolonged and shocking sequence of local citizens – men, women and children – gunned down by remorseless Czarist soldiers on Odessa’s famed harbor-to-town staircase. Read more Categories Civil Society, Conservatism, Current Events, Human Behavior, Just Unbelievable, Law Enforcement, Personal Narrative 15 Comments Eventually, he put up all kinds of industrial fans around his yard, intended to blow the fumes away, and became notorious as the “Fan Man.” But that came later. He became convinced that his neighbors were all part of a vast conspiracy to manufacture drugs and that there were tunnels and pipelines running the drugs between all the houses around him, and that odors from the drug manufacturing were poisoning the air around his house.
Like bankruptcy, it happened slowly and then all at once. A good block away from Hilltop house was a cul d sac of about half a dozen houses one of the residents in the cul d sac was an older couple … and the man, who I will call Felix S. When I wrote about my family, I called this residence Hilltop House – a post-war bungalow perched on the knee of a range of hills, surrounded by similar and rather modest houses on half-acre or quarter-acre lots, spread out along a rambling tangle of narrow roads above Sunland-Tujunga. I was reminded again, of the damage done by malicious accusations, upon reading this horrifying story, linked through Insty – because there was such a malicious person in the neighborhood where my family lived for more than a decade – a person given to making random and spurious accusations about his neighbors. Read more Categories Civil Society, Conservatism, Current Events, Deep Thoughts, Human Behavior, Just Unbelievable 46 Commentsĭepending on the version of the Ten Commandments, the eighth or ninth is “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” – in simpler terms, you shouldn’t tell lies, especially a lie intended to falsely accuse another person. You do not hitchhike wearing Daisy Dukes and a crop-top, unless you really want to personally discover some weird and probably fatal (to you) sexual kinks on the part of the sickos offering you a ride. ( Male senior citizens toting an oxygen tank are probably OK, though.) You do not walk out alone to your car in a darkened parking lot or structure at midnight, not without your having store security or a gaggle of co-workers walk with you, or you are carrying something concealed of a caliber starting with the numeral 4. You do not get into an elevator alone if there is a lone man already in it – especially a fit-looking and vaguely menacing man. This acute sense of danger has been instilled for decades into every sensible woman over the age of fifteen or so – that there are situations which you turn around and avoid if you value your life, physical health, and sanity.
What Hulking Guy In A Dress didn’t know, or perhaps really didn’t care, so eager was he to count coup in the Trans Sweepstakes and make a harvest of likes on Twitter, was that his presence as a Hulking Guy In An Empty Room sent every antenna warning of danger vibrating like one of those sensors around the Pacific ocean which send out tsunami warnings after an earthquake. The most disgusting post on Twitter – among a whole library of disgusting posts created by the largely insane freaks who inhabit that archipelago of the Internet – was a picture of a hulking guy in a dress, boasting of his achievement as a transsexual, of scaring a woman into turning around and leaving the bathroom almost the minute that she (most likely a genuine XX female) walked in and spotted she/him/shim/it immediately, unconvincingly masquerading as a delicate flower of femininity.