Bruce @37, word processors, printers, paper and postage aren't free, so I'm not sure why this is a 'class issue'. As someone has already pointed out before me, magazines do not accept handwritten manuscripts anymore either, but nobody is issuing ringing accusations of "classism" at editors for expecting the poor to scrape up enough money to afford a typewriter.
Tom @55, as again has been pointed out by others before me, requiring mailed-in-print-only submissions tends to exclude your entire international market. Not sure if that's exactly the quality barrier we want. As for effort, meeting any submission standard is going to require a little thinking by the author, and it's very easy to set up an email program to reject a lot of violations of submission policy ("We only accept plaintext in the body of the email, therefore all files with attachments will be deleted").
Lee @74: as heresiarch already pointed out, your defense of Spitzer omitted some very crucial information. Namely, that as a prosecutor, he went after prostitution rings, even though he was hiring prostitutes. Setting aside the rank hypocrisy, there's something very ugly about doing business with people you have the power to send to jail, whether or not the threat is made explicit.
And the flip side of "That's not fair" is that when somebody (oh, a parent) replies with "It's the wrong universe for fair" or "Life isn't fair" or something similar, sometimes they mean "Kid, you're just whining and we both know it, so clean your room" (or whatever).
But sometimes it means other things, like
- That's right, and since it's unfair in my favor, I'm cool with that.
- I'm all hip and cynical about how gritty and cruel life is, and I want to jam this down your throat because your optimistic view of justice, right and wrong grates on me.
- Perhaps, but I'm too damn lazy to do anything about it.
Personally I find the best way to deal with "That's not fair!" is to ask, how, precisely, it is not fair. This tends to sort out the actual situations of unfairness from mere grumpiness, with the benefit of not conveying to the children that talking to adults on any subject is pointless because you'll just get some thoughtless, asshole response.
heresiarch @81: please re-read my post for context, rather than using ellipses to change the meaning.
rm @110 wins the thread!
Andy @20 - I would not take my teen to see it, and this is a kid who I let watch George Romero movies. It's not the violence or the Infamous Sex Scene; it's the very intense, very grown-up subject matter. Okay, it is the violence, a little. This is not squibs and gravity-defying fu; it's very bloody, very real and ugly.
On the opening credits - I love all the little things tucked away in them. It took me watching it twice before I really got that in the "disco club opening scene" with Ozymandias, ur fgbcf gb pynfc unaqf jvgu Qnivq Objvr. That little scene added to his character. And yes, I was inordinately pleased to see that gur thl va gur Naql Jneuby fprar jub ybbxrq yvxr Gehzna Pncbgr jnf, va snpg, fhccbfrq gb or Gehzna Pncbgr.
Nancy @94, very dense urban areas may well be more 'walkable' because you live in the middle of everything, but they're probably more expensive than similar housing in Lower Ruralsville, KS, where the grocery store is a 45-minute drive away over dirt roads.
Walkability also assumes things about your lifestyle. My "walkable" neighborhood in Portland was just fine when I was single, but quickly became not so "walkable" when I started a family. Pushing a stroller through pouring rain gets old real fast. So does having to carefully plan all your grocery purchases so that you can get them and the children home without collapsing or something melting.
Share what you have. There's probably a school or a homeless shelter or a Friends of the Library group that will get more use than you out of those haven't-read-them-in-ten-years stack of books cluttering up your shelf; a newly unemployed person struggling to get a job appreciates that old suit of yours is in their hands instead of gathering dust in your closet; $5 may be a super no-fat soy mocha whip grande to you, but it's the day's meal for a recovering addict struggling to get out of homelessness.
We're all in this together. We get out of it by helping each other up.
Re walkability: I'd take a close look at how those scores are calculated before getting agitated about numbers. I've lived in very crowded, unpleasant, "walkable" city neighborhoods that I like a lot less than my "not walkable" suburban home now.
Lee @83: it's probably less to do with a frontier mentality and more to do with isolation and poverty. The latter breeds crime and the former encourages it; if the nearest police officer is 25 miles away over ice, who's going to stop you?
As for Palin, either she was unaware of the practice and she was an incompetent mayor, or was aware of it and was an evil one. I'm guessing Jim is right that it was an issue regarding emergency contraception.
Tony - your post boiled down to "You could be wrong because maybe there are facts somewhere that prove you're wrong, although I don't know what they are."
If that's not trolling it speaks very poorly of your ability to present a logical argument.
I thought Dr. Wharrgarbl was a fluid dynamics kind of guy.
There is no God but the FSM and Dr. Wharrgarbl is his prophet? That might explain the whole watched-pot-never-boils thing, at least when you're talking about cooking spaghetti.
Rather, I think there's a kind of idea in the US (and probably the rest of the world, but I know a lot less about that) that there should never be painful tradeoffs or tragic situations.
If we're talking generally about zeitgeist, it seems more that the feeling is the painful tradeoffs should happen only to the undeserving. Your 'welfare queen' example is exactly what I'm talking about; nobody really believed that upheavals in welfare would end all suffering, only that the people it would hurt were evil anyway, so big whoop.
But "life is pain" or "life isn't fair" are really STFU lines rather than explanations. There's a great difference between acknowledging life isn't fair, that's a terrible thing, and perhaps we should try to make it a little less unfair; and loudly insisting that's the way it is, so anybody who complains is not only unrealistic, but probably a whiner who just needs to accept what they're given and knuckle their cap in gratitude.
When there's a disagreement, it's a rare news story that doesn't make one side or the other into either villains or victims of their own prejudices/ignorance and the villains that prey on them.
Really? I'd say it's the rare news story that doesn't bend over backwards to be "fair and balanced" and "look at both sides," even if one side is crazypants hateful. You know - "on the other hand, Dr. Wharrgarbl of the Institute for Intelligent Falling disputes this characterization that gravity affects falling objects..."
I think what Evan's reacting to - and I see it there as well - is that you don't have to do more than push gently on many of these points in order to get some very nasty points of view that are less about thinking and more about shutting down dissent. As Wesley already pointed out in @40, "what is my share?" may have a different question when answered by the woman who's just discovered she's getting paid less, than when answered by her boss who thinks she's stealing money from men who have families to support. And the bits about responsibility and blame have gotten worn rather thin over the last eight years in blaming the poor and downtrodden for failing to pull themselves up by their Jimmy Choos.
(As for "life is pain," you know, really fucking sick of that posture. Because I've never heard it used in any other manner than to tell somebody who is complaining about appalling injustice that they need to STFU and stop being a big baby by, oh, calling attention to the problem and trying to stop it.)
Mary @10, Ralph @24 - I've only ever heard "hapa" used for half-Asian, half-white babies as well, both by Hawaiians and Californians. It's not used a perjorative in any way. I'm not sure if the "half-white" matters, but there's definitely the clear meaning that a half-Asian baby is hapa.
(And yes, on a meta level I realize how silly it is to talk about half this and half that as though "white" means much beyond an artifical construct based on melanin levels.)
As somebody who routinely picks juries in civil cases (and yes, we often settle before verdict), I appreciate all the willingness to serve. I understand people with genuine hardships, and usually I and the other side let those people off the panel even if they don't meet the strict legal definition of "hardship". But I meet so many whiners who simply don't want to be bothered that I have to remind myself: State Bar frowns on booting people in the head, even if they deserve it.
What? The new logo is SO clearly a Voltorb.
Lee @92, I know not everybody in Macomb and Oakland Counties is rich; but the Grosse Pointe-named suburbs, overall, are wealthy. (There are certainly working-class suburbs north of Detroit; my mother grew up in one of them.) But one of the reasons that school system was so good was the high-value properties taxed to fund it.
xopher @23, I'm pretty sure if you're from Grosse Pointe, you're rich(e) of some variety anyway. Detroit has a lot of blue-collar offshoots to the south and wealthy suburbs toward the north; the various Grosse Pointe neighborhoods are among them.
Linkmeister @71 is absolutely correct. And don't think for a minute that the fact that Detroit is a majority black city, with a history of unionization that (despite unions' history of internal racism) have provided many black workers with well-paying jobs, is off their radar.
Good gravy, you're right, it IS Laurier. See, this is what happens when you get old: first your knees give out, then you forget your Latin, and the next thing you know you get your distinguished Canadian historical figures mixed up.
He still looks like Spock though.
The only thing that would make this brouhaha perfect would be the arrival of Zombie William Lyon Mackenzie King*. Hey, if we can have Zombie Patrick Henry....
*reference point for Americans from the Great Lakes and New England states: he is the guy who you can pencil in to look like Spock on the old Canadian $5 bill.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 16 |
| 2008 | 38 |
| 2007 | 83 |
| 2006 | 42 |
| 2005 | 64 |
| 2004 | 25 |
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