As for these Zizians:
The Zizians have been described by authorities as an “extremist group”. A woman who knew one of their alleged members described them as a group of “highly intelligent, transgender, vegan” individuals. Social media posts attributed to the group have mentioned “evil people ganging up to kill off good people”, and a wish to “strip society of morality”....
About that figurative use of "lapdogs," the OED finds it first in the 1838 novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton novel "Alice, or The Mysteries," where a character says:
"I allow that your beauty and talent were sufficient of themselves to charm a wiser man than Doltimore; but had I not suppressed jealousy, sacrificed love, had I dropped a hint to your liege lord,--nay, had I not fed his lap-dog vanity by all the cream and sugar of flattering falsehoods,--you would be Caroline Merton still!"
Now, that's writing! Perhaps you remember The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which "challenged entrants to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels."
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68 comments:
" Imagine riding lies around like they're some kind of bicycle."
Haha! Excellent.
Sometimes the memes write themselves.
…that contest was ninth grade english. We were charged with three pages of fiction with an essential opening paragraph. I can’t recall mine but echos of Chaucer reigned. ‘mosaic of filth’ was the gist. I earned an enthusiastic A, then swore off fiction…
…we’re all our own PR firms now…
but certainly they are satan's side sitting hand poodles.
I have never pictured the hounds of hell as lapdogs. On the other hand, I can easily imagine most writers for Mainstream Media as pedaling in bike lanes to their internships at the NYT, WaPo et al.
Roko's Basilisk isn't theoretical. It's real, and the Zizians are proof that it tortures you mercilessly if you're batshit crazy enough to make obsessing over it your mission in life.
These nutcase transvestite mall-ninjas actually killed someone with a katana. Stylish...but insane nonetheless.
It’s a wonderful lie, and they try to get by on those.
Zizians. They sound like a badly named group of antagonists on a Star Trek episode.
I didn't make it past the oxymoron "highly intelligent, transgender, vegan...". But who needs editors to spell-check, when they publish transgender stories where the sex of the alleged murderer is left undefined and ambiguous, out of deference to their highly intelligent, transgender feelings? One can't take stories like that seriously to begin with.
At least they can take comfort that they aren't grannies walking the grass in the Capitol on Jan 6th. They would be terrorists, then.
More leftist cult delusions. They really feel entitled to their above the law murders.
Brits are the worst writers, and they don't give a shite.
"The Times doesn't seem to know the difference between "peddle" and "pedal.""
Or "her" and "his."
Go home to Zzyzx, you freaks!
Imagine riding lies around like they're some kind of bicycle!
Like Lance Armstrong.
They wanted to call themselves 'Satan's Shih Tzu's', but people kept stumbling over it, enraging them further....
Wasn't Bulwer-Lytton the author who started a novel with "It was a dark and stormy night?"
Looks like a Satanist. Close enough.
Althouse said...
Imagine riding lies around like they're some kind of bicycle!
A Zizian needs a gender like a liar needs a bicycle.
Liars pedal around the world before the truth can put on its bike shoes.
JSM
Look at that guy's nose. Satan's piglet.
"Hold off on the sex change for now and get a nose job, bud." would have been my advice. All hindsight now, I suppose.
wild chicken said...
“Brits are the worst writers, and they don't give a shite.”
And they keep putting extra u’s in words. And can’t spell or pronounce aluminum correctly.
The title states the alleged member when his statement of the inclusive we indicates he is a member. The overuse of alleged by the media allegedly drives me mad.
Iman said...
“Go home to Zzyzx, you freaks!”
So they’re from California? That fits somehow.
Wasn't Bulwer-Lytton the author who started a novel with "It was a dark and stormy night?"
That's him. But pre-contest, does anyone recall where his opening line was repeated by a character so often that it led to the trivia question of who penned it?
(Hint it was a comic strip character.)
Also the context was founded a full 17 years after the comic strip character started imitating ol' Edward. It was a long-running gag and let's face it, things happened more slowly back in the day.
Lawnerd said...
The alleged overuse of “alleged” by the alleged media allegedly drives alleged me mad.”
FIFY (allegedly)
Bob Boyd said...
“Look at that guy's nose. Satan's piglet.”
Another great band name.
Why couldn't these guys just be normal queers and wear stolen dresses and bondage gear in Master Brinton's Puppy Play Posse. If Sam wouldn't let them play with samurai swords while pedaling the clan unicycle then joining a cult has gotten considerably gayer since the Manzon days.
To be fair, they DO credit Snoopy in the referenced article.
I am reminded of a popular 70’s bumper-sticker usually attached to a VW: “I’m peddling as fast as I can!”
Why couldn't these guys just be normal queers
They prefer insidious evil rather than run of the mill out of the ordinary sexual attraction.
Joe, correct and LOL I didn't read that far in; just wanted to know the founding date.
This could create problems if anyone wants to form a cult around the teachings of Slavoj Žižek.
According to Google Engrams, lapdog, lap-dog and lap dog go back well before Mr. Dark and Stormy Night.
I remember one book series in school libraries that featured the novels of Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Kingsley, Charles Reade, Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper and others. I can't imagine anyone ever charged out any of those books, though a few might have encountered "The Last Days of Pompeii" in the Classic Comics format. And yet today you can find Bulwer-Lytton's works in an abundance of print and e-book editions. Does anyone read them?
I read that yesterday and was struck by the fact that everyone mentioned seemed to be the opposite sex as what was presented.
@CJinPA, some of the accounts maintain these wackjob's pronouns along with their preferred names which makes for journalism so strange there should be a Pulitzer just for incomprehensibility.
The Bard didn't believe in phrenology: "There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face." But I'm suspicious of heads shaped like footballs like Mademoiselle Zajko and Adam Schiff.
You can be Transgender and vegan all day long; it's your life to live the way you want to. But if they have actually killed people....well, that can't be tolerated.
As a pianist, I imagined pedaling lies to involve the use of the lie pedal, which controls the flow of mendacity. Put it down and the lies pour forth unobstructed.
“ Look at that guy's nose. Satan's piglet.”
Yea, the nose and he has the Eddie Munster point in the middle of the hair line, these are not just myths people, Demon spawn bastards.
Where is the Democrats' Jim Jones when we really need him?
After decades of the media, the government, and activist groups falsely claiming that "transgenders" are targeted for murder more than the rest of us (which is not true), why should we be surprised that brainwashed, angry, not particularly attractive trans, especially younger ones groomed up by the current madness, are not lashing out with violence to demand even more attention? These young people have been told they are special and especially victimized their whole lives. Good training for murderous cults and psychopathic behavior.
I infiltrated a Stop Cop City group last year, and there were three of these types, one of whom sat on a piece of cardboard in the middle of the floor screaming at the top of her lungs about how the other several hundred activists weren't being as committed as she was, and babbling about the pure evil society they were attacking. She could turn it on and off, and others deferred to her. I've encountered a lot of this disordered gender type on the Left. They're violent, brutish, adult toddlers. She needed to be in a locked ward and was entirely capable of killing someone.
There's also jealousy at attractive male to female "trans" and attractive women in general.
So many deifying myths. Neither Teena Brandon nor Matthew Shepherd were actually killed because of their gender. But Audrey Hale murdered six innocent children and adults.
They've got decades of work ahead of them before they're anywhere near the Manson Family. Have they attempted to start a nationwide race riot? Have they done enough LSD to float a small yacht? Have they murderred celebs, prosectuion witnesses, group members? Have they attempted to murder a head of state, failing only because they didn't practice shooting the handgun first and didn't know how it worked? Did Tarantino do a film fictionalizing them? More like Monty Python's Doug Dinsdale, if you ask me, using sarcasm and ... lytotes.
"Imagine riding lies around like they're some kind of bicycle!"
can i assume that would be an recumbent bicycle?
Who are the Zizians? I asked Google and it took me to Wikipedia:
The Zizians are a group of rationalists allegedly involved in six violent deaths in the United States, three in 2022 and three in 2025.
My first thought, I’m sorry to say, was that the Zizians have a long way to go to equal the murders attributed to Tren de Aragua and MS-13, much less the Bloods and the Crips. Do they at least kill their victims slowly and horrifically with machetes, the way MS-13 is fond of doing?
As to why Zizians are “Satan’s lapdogs” and MS-13 are “good family men,” well, I don’t get that.
Transgender? Homosexual? Bisexual? Some other queer orientation, emulation?
Society shouldn't obsess over these retards. They should be fed feet first into a large wood chipper. Fuck their right to a trial.
"Note the caption — The Times doesn't seem to know the difference between "peddle" and "pedal." Imagine riding lies around like they're some kind of bicycle!"
This just begs for a portmanteau: "Liecycle." Good description of TV News.
"It was the best of times and it was the würst of times as I watched my sausageer, Helga, slowing turning the handle of the meat grinder with her sinewy left arm. While I had found this sight irresistably erotic in the past, I had learned the previous evening that 'Helga' was born Abe Froman and wasn't even German."
Snoopy!
"Now that's writing!"
It's certainly compact, but it is hard for me to accept it as part of a natural dialogue, if that's what it purports to be. Two Bulwer-Lytton works inherited from my father sit on my bookshelf, though not this one. Both are half un-read, and I dare say will remain so. Bulwer-Lytton's style has... (I grasp for a word here) an unappetizing style. It's like two things delicious unto themselves can be disgusting when combined, like spaghetti with chocolate sauce. However, I like his Doltimore, obviously an insulting wordplay on Baltimore, the noble English Catholic family whose heraldry is echoed in the heraldry of Maryland. Baron Lytton would have made an amusing internet troll on a dark and stormy night.
The Legend of Pig Nose the Kid.
However, I like his Doltimore, obviously an insulting wordplay on Baltimore …
@Quaestor, the mystery is how a Brit writing in the 19th century could so perfectly summarize a 21st century American city.
Mikee: if you look upon them as a subset of the current transgender movement, they are indeed a bellwether of the harms being done to a vast portion of impressionable young people. And they already murdered a police officer. In the Sixties and Seventies, small, indulged vanguards like this one did incalculable harm to society as a whole.
It's a good thing that Keir Starmer banned "ninja-swords" and the Zizians are in custody or those trans-erasing UK magistrates would be in a lot of Kafkaesque bizarro trouble.
"Note the caption — The Times doesn't seem to know the difference between "peddle" and "pedal."
Academics are not an unalloyed good. Education and journalism as institutions have declined precipitously since these long-standing vocations became professions in the 20th century. Our teacher can't teach, and our journalists can't even spell. Consequently, we shouldn't be surprised that our children behave like drunken monkeys and our newspapers are composed of allegations rather than facts.
There's a classic movie out there, Teacher's Pet starring Clark Gable and Doris Day. It's often dismissed as a risible excuse for a romantic comedy, but it's worth watching for its hard, almost clairvoyant, edge.
Gable is James Gannon, the city editor of a major metropolitan newspaper as interpreted in the Hollywood style of the 1950. Disheveled, sleeves rolled up, necktie loose and askew, Gannon barks out his orders like a top sergeant in the heat of battle. One cub reporter because the helpless target of his wrath. The cub has misspelled a common word on a final draft he has submitted for typesetting. Gannon isn't a man of formal education. He left school as a child to work selling newspapers on street corners. From there he graduated to the printing plant, then to the city room as a cub, and after forty years of doing every job it take to publish a newspaper, he's the boss. He excoriates his college-educated poor speller and slams down an eight-inch thick dictionary on his desk. "You'll learn to spell the same way I did," he roars, "one word at a time!"
“” "Now that's writing!"”/It's certainly compact, but it is hard for me to accept it as part of a natural dialogue….”
I didn’t say that’s good writing. I just said that’s writing. It’s clearly writing and not a transcript of anyone’s actual spoken word. It’s squarely in the category – writing.
Actually I can imagine it as speech by thinking of Connor on “love on the spectrum.”
@Big Mike. In Baltimore today, doltishness is an aspiration.
Giving Trans people a bad name, one murder at a time. These Trans-activists have accomplished several murders, 5? 6?
"And yet today you can find Bulwer-Lytton's works in an abundance of print and e-book editions. Does anyone read them?"
I've read a few of his short stories. They were better than most of the stuff in the collection that contained them.
Italics begone
"I didn’t say that’s good writing. I just said that’s writing. It’s clearly writing and not a transcript of anyone’s actual spoken word."
And I wasn't offering criticism, just commentary.
Realistic dialogue is a slippery concept. We can only judge realism by how we've perceived realty though the filter of experience, which is why I referred to my personal experience trying and failing to enjoy Bulwer-Lytton's works. As was wisely said by somebody, (Orson Welles?) I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like.
Mark Twain far more clearly and wittily expressed this idea I'm taking potshots at. Like Richard Wager's music, which is better than it sounds, Maybe Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton's books are better than they read. We can't hear the conversations of Victorian aristocrats, that's beyond our experience, so who's to say that snippet isn't realistic? As I wrote above, accepting it is hard. But not impossible.
For instance, Charles Portis tried to reconstruct the everyday speech of Americans of the 1870s West, people of middling means and scanty education, by studying their correspondence. Those people peppered their prose with bits of Shakespeare and the Bible. Consequently Portis's characters in True Grit speak in an easy yet structured style that flows with a natural gravity that doesn't seem forced or stilted, at least to my ear. In other words, they follow the maxim made popular by auto mechanics: Make sure your brain is in gear before engaging your mouth. Even the criminals are well-spoken.
Maybe we could profit as a society but talking like we write rather than writing like we talk. Taking the time to compose something slightly elegant gives us the time time to reconsider what we intend to say.
That Eddie Munster point in the hairline was called a widow's peak. If the Zizians keep at it, the feature may be called an incel's or a vegan's peak.
According to research by Shawn Rosenberg of the University of California, Irvine, "widow’s peaks (though more so on female candidates) were a clear positive. It was associated with being seen as more competent and with greater integrity".
We can't cut that research funding, people.
"Honey? What do think of the new neighbors?"
"highly intelligent, transgender, vegan”. They're atheists, too.
But if they'd been cross-fitters too, they might have been able to make an escape.
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