Another Fine Fix Bear's Gotten Herself Into

And you thought the mess I got into for "Talking Points: Three Cheers for White Men" was bad!

For my encore:

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Draco Layer Four: The Anagogic or Mystical Sense

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“Hail, Mary, full of grace, punch the devil in the face!”

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Fountain of Fate

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Milo is dangerous, everyone agrees. Well, not quite everyone. ( Me , for example.) Certainly journalist Jeremy Scahill thinks he is. Invited to appear with Milo on Real Time with Bill Maher , Scahill  refused , insisting, along with almost everyone else who has written about Milo except Tom Ciccotta and me that Milo incites violence. (He doesn't; the only person Milo has ever called for violence against is Dylann Roof, in the form of the death penalty ). In Scahill's words: "Yiannopoulos has shown he will use his appearances to publicly attack and shame specific ordinary people by name, a practice which could lead to violence or even death." Bill Maher would beg to differ . "You are so, let's say, helped, by the fact that liberals just always take the bait," he acknowledged in his interview with Milo last night. And then Maher cautioned his side: "Stop taking the bait, liberals! The fact that they all freaked out about this little, impish, Br...
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I first read The Lord of the Rings  when I was eleven. My mother gave me the boxed set (see above) for Christmas, and I read all four books in one trip to our grandparents’ house by New Year’s. Imagine my 11-year-old self struggling with the hobbits across Middle-earth as my mother drove us across the middle of America from Kentucky to Texas (and back again), and you will get some sense of the effect that it had on me. Of all the things that drew me to become a medieval historian, reading (and re-reading, and re-reading, and re-reading) Tolkien is at the top of the list, although it took me decades to admit it. Tolkien lived in my imagination somewhere between stories I remembered reading as a child and my first (magical) visit to England with a school trip in high school—not really real, certainly not the stuff of serious scholarship. Latin and Chartres drew me to study the history of medieval Christianity, not elves, hobbits and dwarves. Or so I told myself. And then...
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