Demon Clown Baby

Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past has just gone to the top of the list of best fanfics I’ve ever read.

Not that I’ve read that many, because there are so many bad ones that it’s easy to not give them a chance, but MAN this was good.

Better than books 5, 6, and 7 of the actual Harry Potter canon.

The hook is that Voldemort is finally defeated when Harry Potter is 30, and everyone Harry loved is dead. He has nothing to live for, and manages to send his soul back in time to merge with his 11-year-old self. Bottom line: Book One starts with Harry having a complete knowledge of the future.

Of course, this taps into a fantasy I’ve long had, about “if I knew then what I know now.” I’ve often daydreamed about such a thing myself, either when life gets cruddy or just to make things better or more interesting…

(Of course, when my daughter was born, that put a stop to that kind of fantasy. I could never, even in dreams, go back in time to before she was conceived, as that would undo her existence. She’s so important to me that I can’t even entertain the notion, not even in a daydream, about her being erased; none of the amazing benefits of this sort of time travel come close to outweighing the devastating cost of such a thing.)

So Harry has future knowledge, but he’s also got horrible nightmares from seeing everyone he cared about murdered by Death Eaters, and he has guilt of all the manipulating of his friends he’ll have to do to make things turn out better this time…

It was started in 2005 and isn’t finished yet. There are 38 chapters, all of them brilliant. Some fics have good plots, this one has that and has very high quality writing as well.

I went to the author’s site and donated some money to hopefully encourage him to continue, sooner rather than later.

Radio Free Cyberton is a podcast that was created back in 1999 before there was any such thing as podcasts. It’s about the Transformers shows and toys. What with such a resurgence in popularity since the new movies have come out, it’s got a bigger audience than ever before.

Take a listen to the 10th anniversary spectacular show, featuring the long-awaited part IV to the radio-play parody version of the 1986 classic film, The Transformers: The Movie.

So the big thing in the news now is that a guy murdered a doctor who performs abortions for a living.

And pro-life people are mainly condemning the murder, because while they are against abortion, they are also against adults murdering adults as well.

But I’ll be straight and tell you how I feel about it. And yes, I’m breaking Godwin’s law here, but bear with me. And if you don’t understand how analogies work, please stop reading now. In fact, close your browser and sign off the internet. We don’t need you here.

Anyway. Imagine an SS Officer. He goes to work at Auschwitz, and kills some Jews, and comes home to his family, in the suburbs. He plays with his kids, he eats his dinner, and then he goes back to work the next day, and his job involves killing people. He doesn’t feel bad about it, because they aren’t really people, just Jews, and they are in the way.

Now, imagine that some German citizen, who happens to think gassing Jews is bad, breaks into his home and kills him. This is a violation of German law against murder, of course.

Now, let me ask you this: do you feel sorry for the SS officer? Do you feel the one who killed him should be punished?

People that believe abortion is wrong usually do so because they think it is killing a baby. KILLING A BABY. So to them, an abortion doctor is someone that kills babies for a living.

Now, if you don’t think a fetus is a baby, if it’s a lump of tissue, then yeah, murdering an abortion doctor is like murdering a dermatologist who removes warts for a living.

But at least try to look at it from the opposing point of view. If people don’t feel sorry for George Tiller, it’s because they think he killed hundreds or thousands of babies. They would be horrified if a dermatologist was murdered, but they don’t think that’s what happened. To them, an SS officer was murdered.

Was it murder? Of course. The pro-life people who are denouncing it would probably have also denounced the murder of an SS officer. Even if you don’t feel sorry for the victim, even if you think it’s better that he’s dead, it doesn’t mean you support a vigilante taking justice into his own hands.

But let’s not kid ourselves. The pro-life people denouncing the murder of George Tiller don’t think an innocent man was murdered. They think a murderer was murdered. Perhaps they feel the same way as when one drug dealer kills another. Murder is bad, but not because we always care about the victim. A murderer murdered a murderer.

I would certainly never kill an abortion doctor, or a rapist, or a child molester, or a murderer, because I don’t think it is my place to do so. But if they get hit by a bus, I am not going to weep.

Why is that I can see the abortion-is-fine point of view (though I think it’s borne of self-deception) and understand their outrage, yet they can’t understand the anti-abortion point of view at all? If a fetus is a baby, then killing it is bad, and someone who kills babies for a living is a bad person, and if that person is murdered, while we don’t celebrate one more murder (since murder is bad and all), we’re also not really sorry?

To me this seems a pretty easy concept to figure out. If you want me to feel bad that an abortion doctor is murdered, you’ll have to convince me he’s more like a dermatologist than a member of the SS. Because it really doesn’t bother me when murderers die.