False witnesses

Brilliant, and I mean absolutely flippin’ brilliant, essay over at The Slactivist on the pathology of false information and rumor, and the willful suspension of intelligent thought. Here’s an excerpt:

“I used to believe that maybe some people were that stupid. They were acting that stupid, so I went along. I believed that the people I was sending that dossier to were merely innocent dupes.

But in truth they were neither innocent nor dupes. The category of innocent dupe does not apply here. No one could be honestly misled by such a story. The only way to have been misled by it is dishonestly — which is to say deliberately, willingly and willfully. They are claiming to believe a foolish thing, but they are not guilty of foolishness. They are guilty of malice.”

First lines

I’ve got a  dozen of em, and here’s one - first lines to short stories which never panned out:

“On Tuesday morning Jack spotted his neighbor’s hippie wife, who used to be fey but now looks like a feral tribeswoman, running around in her sleeveless print dress, her toes pointing in all the directions of the compass after years of shoeless abandon, her legs coated in a wiry fir, her skin perpetually swathed in the dusty residue of the garden, from which she had recently emerged.