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Some of the funniest emails I receive come from the American Family Association, a conservative Christian group dedicated mainly to gay-bashing.

Well, gay-bashing comes second only to distributing ‘disgusting’, ‘offensive‘ soft gay porn. Which is what’s so endlessly funnly; it’s hard not to wonder how many of their readers are only subscribed because they want a peek at those god-forsaken hedonistic gays. So the average email contains something like:

Ford continued to show support for the homosexual agenda, running a full page ad in the Dec. 07 – Jan. 08 homosexual publication OUT!

The ad, for Ford’s Volvo brand, was adjacent to a photo of three men taking a shower together. To see the ad and the shower photo, click here. http://www.afa.net/outdec07.pdf

(Warning! The photo is extremely graphic and offensive.)

Or:

To see all the behaviors covered by the term “sexual orientation,” please click here . Warning! This listing is offensive.

Their website is full of things like footage from Dallas gay pride (‘

WARNING! The video is highly offensive, but it is real footage from the actual parade.

‘), and a few of the offensive photos taken at the last Gay Games. Or they link to pictures from the Folsom Street Fair (hosted at catholic.org), with warnings like:

By clicking the link below, you are agreeing to leave the American Family Association website to view disgusting photos of the Folsom Street Fair event. These photos are provided for verificatons purposes only. Click here to see the disgusting photos.

So I was disappointed that yesterday’s email, titled

New DVD! Homosexual Activists Take Control of City Government

, didn’t include any links to ‘graphic and offensive’ videos of orgies in Town Hall. Maybe we should make some?

Bruce Sterling:

Pakistan could very easily smash to bloody pieces in 2008. If it does, nobody anywhere is gonna try and stitch Pakistan back together. Pakistan has a bigger population than Russia. It is just too big for any of the other power-players to handle. So if it ignites, it’ll burn.

I’m not entirely convinced – China benefits from Pakistan’s existence, and a breakup of Pakistan would be ’47-scale messy. But it’s well-placed cynicism, nonetheless.

Images from ‘carceri d’invenzione’, by 18th-century artist Giovanni Piranesi. Eisenstein called them ‘architectural frenzies’; they’re extremes that could never exist beyond art or film.

Missed this one last month in the UK: a woman was convicted for “possessing records likely to be used for terrorism”, whatever that means. As far as I can see, she had downloaded some documents on guns and bombs (like, er, just about every teenage boy in the country), and written some angry poems about killing people.

So, basically, she’s been fantasizing about being a jihadi rather than fantasizing about being James Bond.

For this she’s already been in jail for 5 months, and has a 9 month suspended sentence.

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“In 1989, the [Chinese] government didn’t know why Tiananmen happened. Now, by reading the Internet, they know what’s going to happen. They know about movements in their infancy and they’re able to kill them when they’re still young”

…according to Chinese blogger Michael Anti. Ethan Zuckerman’s summary of a Berkman talk he gave has lots of other fascinating comments.

Livejournal has just been taken over by SUP, the russian company that was already managing Russian-language livejournals. Compared to when SUP first started managing the Russian service, the reactions among Russian users seem surprisingly positive. i.e. more people are pleased to have LJ under Russian control than are frightened that they’ll be more vulnerable to government pressure.

Still, I’m not thrilled by their decision to announce this just after the Russian elections. It looks a lot like trying to bury the news while Russian lj users are distracted, even if it wasn’t intended that way.

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A phrase I never expected to read:

seat-of-the-pants jurisprudence