alexsarll | First degree mayhem

Wrongcoqs who shall remain nameless but who saw the Lemony Snicket film trailer*: the girl playing Violet Baudelaire is legal now, but wasn't when it was filmed. Square that with your consciences and your gods as best you can.

I don't read much crime fiction. Not through any objection in principle, I just never quite developed the habit. When I'm in a library, there are shelves I scan and shelves I don't, and Crime is one of the latter. I think the last thing I read which would be filed on those shelves was a Ruth Rendell novel of

vivid_blue's which I picked up at hers and then realised was set in Finsbury Park.
But recently the recommendations for the work of James Ellroy finally reached critical mass and, seeking a more specific target from

dr_shatterhand, I decided to try The Black Dahlia. I'm 100 pages in and loving it. Sure, being a novice there are times when the forties LA cop argot gets away from me. But I grew up on SF; so long as there are no more than three incomprehensible pieces of jargon per page, you can cope with it**.

Robin and I were talking last night about hypocrisy. He couldn't quite see why it has such a privileged place in my hierarchy of sins, why it arouses my hatred like none of the others. I think it's mainly because for all my stridency, I am still a moral relativist. Other people may do things like steal or kill or stand on the left of escalators, and while I wish to bludgeon them for it I am aware on some level that perhaps by their own lights, theyt're doing nothing wrong. And while I naturally place higher value on my version of events than theirs, there's no authority which can arbitrate between those moralities.
Hypocrites are the only people who, by definition, must know they're wrong. That either their moral code or their actions needs amendment. And yet they persist in both. That's beyond forgiveness.
(and no, you paranoid sods, this is not an oblique dig at any of you. Unless I have some very surprising lurkers)

*Those of you who haven't seen it, be warned: they have got every single thing utterly wrong.
**Note that upper limit. It's why I don't read Peter F Hamilton.