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How to signal you are a Random Layperson*: wear some f#@king history!


I’m with Mary. And Milo!



*How do you know that you are a Random Layperson? You read Fencing Bear!


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What I Learned Writing About Jordan Peterson

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Some of my Facebook friends are very  upset with me for the blogposts that I have been doing these past four weeks since watching Jordan Peterson’s interview with Cathy Newman . One has just left this post on my own Facebook page about yesterday’s blogpost : Another shameless post of mind-reading and armchair psychoanalysis with a bit of shock language thrown in for drama and clickbait. And unless you’re suggesting that a boyhood playground tussle is similar to a crucifixion your example of Mary is histrionic to the point of absurdity. If one were to play this same game directed at you they would say this is an example of an Oedipal Mother defending her sick need for her son’s dependence. That would be wrong to do of course—just as wrong as your misguided and unfounded attack that you have cloaked in fake compassion. This is not a friend whom I know in person; she friended me almost exactly a year ago because she liked what I had said in Milo’s defense . She is much less happy abo
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Tyrian Purple

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Thou shalt make also a veil of violet and purple, and scarlet twice dyed, and fine twisted linen, wrought with embroidered work, and goodly variety:  And thou shalt hang it up before four pillars of setim wood, which themselves also shall be overlaid with gold, and shall have heads of gold, but sockets of silver. And the veils shall be hanged on with rings, and within it thou shalt put the ark of the testimony, and the sanctuary, and the holy of holies shall be divided with it. —The Book of Exodus 26:31-33 The foundations thereof are in the holy mountains: The Lord loveth the gates of Sion above all the tabernacles of Jacob. Glorious things are said of thee, O city of God. I will be mindful of Rahab and of Babylon knowing me. Behold the foreigners, and Tyre, and the people of the Ethiopians, these were there. Shall not Sion say, This  man and that  man is born in her? and the Highest himself hath founded her. The Lord shall tell in his  writings of peoples and of princes, of them that
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The Female of the Species

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This time last year, I was looking forward to competing as a member of Team USA at the World Veteran Fencing Championships in Stralsund. I had also just started blogging about what I had seen in Milo’s campus tour, and I was eager to enter the fray on the side of the Dangerous Faggot. Little did I know what adventures my blogging would bring! The sense of being caught up in an archetypal story , playing a character I had never thought to be able to imitate . Watching a friend rise in popularity and fame , only to be brought down by the betrayal and calumny of those whom he had called friends. The attention of the media, for good and ill. It has been quite the whirlwind of adulation and infamy, love and hate, all the while I have been attempting to chronicle what it feels like to be  living a myth . And you wonder what fencing has to do with it? Nothing – my competition year was more or less completely shot, so preoccupied have I been since Worlds with finishing my book and b
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God's Fools

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Like Jesus , Francis of Assisi did some pretty outrageous things. Everybody knows how he went and preached to the birds, but not everybody knows why he did it. It wasn't, as certain 1970s movies would have it, because he was a nature-loving hippie (although I do love Donavan's soundtrack, especially the theme song). It was because the human beings he was preaching to wouldn't listen. He had wanted to preach the word of God in Rome, but when he arrived there, the people scorned him because he was dressed poorly, so they thought him an idiot. He tried for several days to gain their attention, but could not overcome their hardness of heart. "I grieve deeply over your misfortune," he told them, "because you are not only spurning me as a servant of Christ, but you are also really despising Him in me, since I have been preaching to you the Gospel of the Redeemer of the world. And so I am now leaving Rome. And I call as witness of your desolation Him who is t
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A few words of advice to Trigglypuff--and her teachers

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I would not want to be this young woman. By now, five months after the event she attended at the University of Massachusetts Amherst featuring a discussion with Christina Hoff Sommers, Steven Crowder, and Milo Yiannopoulos on the problems besetting university campuses with speech considered "triggering," she has become a favorite meme among those who see such concerns as at best mildly hysterical, at worst a symptom of the total breakdown of our national character (I paraphrase). Audiences at several of Milo's recent talks (which you can see here ) have made reference to her, imitating her arm gestures (which I am having a hard time ignoring on the gif as I am writing) and laughing at her expense. Milo, to his credit, has admonished them: "No, we love Trigglypuff! Trigglypuff is wonderful!," while insisting that it is not she, but those who have lied to her about what will make her happy that are to blame. "She is going to be miserable," he has said (a
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