@22: Great, now I'm picturing ads for how to enlarge your bandwidth to please your partner better. At least they probably won't try to claim to be able to do *that* with all natural herbal products.
#69: I think we get the sensation of winning from the praise of people we respect and the pride of achievement. That doesn't necessarily come from other people losing
That's what is behind my personal definition of an essential (as opposed to occasional) bully: a person who doesn't value any win that isn't accompanied by someone else's loss.
This drives them to initiate conflict even where most people would perceive it as unnecessary or counterproductive. Because if everyone's just sitting around agreeing with each other, what fun is that?
It *does* seem difficult for me to see how such people could be taught to value cooperation, if at all, which seems like support for the "just get them to go away" position. But on the other hand, I'm not entirely sure that I haven't just described a mythical being we humans project onto people who annoy us in order to, as you put it, other and dismiss them.
Just encourages them to keep showing up, when what we really want them to do is Go Away.
I thought that what we *really* wanted them to do was stop acting like bullies, and Go Away is only what we'll settle for if we can't get the first thing.
ISTM that the underlying disagreement here is between a kind of essentialism (people who bully are bullies, and, it seems to be implicitly assumed, that's what they'll always be) and the ideal of, if the word isn't too ambitious, redemption.
The essentialist position would (I think) reply to your last post above by saying that you don't train bullies not to be bullies *at all*, and that's why it's necessary to write them off.
I've never been a fan of essentialism, and I hope I'm not attacking a straw man here.
Wow, Bob. Who told you that it was a clever plan to make sure the judge saw that?
Actually, they need the judge to see *something* like that, to prove that the defendants said something defamatory about the plaintiff. Which it certainly does prove.
Unfortunately for Fletcher, in order to recover in the lawsuit, it has to be FALSE and defamatory, which I gather was his problem.
I think what might be possible is a rule cracking down on the use of corporate (i.e. shareholder) funds to support the managers' political agenda without the approval of the shareholders. (Express and in writing, naturally.) That's a clear breach of fiduciary duty, so why do corporate managers keep getting away with it? We need clearer (and stricter) regulations in this area.
Of course, managers of hedge funds and similar holding companies would be required to vote no with their fund's shares unless they had themselves received the written authorization of a majority of *their* shareholders.
Pitfalls of Intercultural Relationships
Romantic attachments between sentients from different cultures (and, in some cases, biological species) are beset by many hazards, including conflict between the peer group or family and the significant other, and in some cases, outright bigotry.
Panelists:
Delenn
Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan*
Sarek
Dag Bluefield
Zerika IV
Zatar
Cordelia's moderating ability notwithstanding, both Sarek and Dag were initially quiet to the point of taciturn. Delenn's opinions were somewhat disregarded by several other panelists, who felt that the cultural divisions she had to face were relatively insignificant compared to their own. Zerika's point that even people with considerable power and influence in society can be bound by its prejudices was well taken, and led to an interesting discussion on the merits of the various political systems each of the panelists was familiar with, and how each of those addressed the issue of individuals making controversial lifestyle choices, with particular attention to the issue of whether society is justified in enforcing conformity upon its members and if so, by what means. As moderator, Cordelia eventually closed this line of discussion by observing that it would be an excellent subject for a panel in its own right, but was off topic.
Zatar's observation that rifts between the two cultures (and associated political entities, if any) could spill over and endanger the relationship itself, and that intercultural relationships do not always lead to happy endings, seemed understandably unwelcome to the other panelists (and some of the audience - it was at this point that Inu-Yasha had to be escorted from the room by nervous-looking security personnel). Dag's impassioned rebuttal that the culture could be changed by people sufficiently determined to do so was unfortunately interpreted as a personal attack by several of the other panelists and the panel had to be wrapped up.
But all these reports about people dropping into bankcrupty due to getting sick, or having no job and therefore no decent healthcare; and very many of their countrypeople just accepting that, sound very ... I cannot find a word to describe it. A bit SFnal, as if it were intended to showcase a truly different, almost alien mindset.
Dystopian, I think, is the word you are looking for.
Legitimate sites are going to get shut down. Not all of them are going to have 4chan’s ability to retaliate, but they’re still going to be upset.
Is this a little like saying, ordinarily police officers can arrest elderly black men in their own homes for no reason and get away with it, but when they happen to be Harvard professors, *then* they have a problem?
The fact that the rest of the world only occasionally hears about the little guy being picked on when he happens to be less little than expected doesn't make it not a problem when all the little guys *without* the ability to retaliate get picked on.
#49: My problem comes with him abusing his power and wasting money for a booty call.
Gratuitously, too. I'm sure the governor of any state makes more than enough money to afford the occasional plane ticket to Argentina. But why should he pay for something when he can make the taxpayers do it?
His marital problems may be between him and his wife, but using his expense account for non-official purposes is sufficient reason *on its own* to impeach him, IMO. He's stealing from the people of his state and there's no way it wasn't deliberate.
@#55: (1) is an instance of (2), which is a lot easier to do if you are (3). So, basically, all of the above.
@124: I live in a condo apartment; neither I nor any of my neighbors has a garage. Since the condo management takes care of yard work, probably at least half of them don't have cans of gasoline, either. (But several do have grills, which means lighter fluid, which probably works just as well, although I haven't tried.)
Everyone has clothes that could be torn into rags at a moment's notice, though, and probably most people have glass bottles, even if they don't keep any *empty* ones; the full ones can be emptied in a few seconds, if you feel like it. The whole *point* of Molotov cocktails is that they don't take much in the way of special materials to make; it's the same principle as martial arts based on agricultural implements.
When gasoline is outlawed, only outlaws will drive.
#69:
Terry, you've surely looked at Roeder's history. He actually served time in 1997 and 1998 for having bomb-making equipment. The conviction was ultimately thrown out because of an improper search, but there's no doubt he had the equipment. There was every reason, when he started his petty crimes against Tiller's clinic, to start watching Roeder.
20/20 hindsight notwithstanding, IMO we can't allow our government to start acting against people on the basis of thrown-out convictions. It undermines the whole point of throwing them out and holding law enforcement accountable to the law in the first place.
As Justice Brandeis said 81 years ago:
When these unlawful acts were committed they were crimes only of the officers individually. The government was innocent, in legal contemplation; for no federal official is authorized to commit a crime on its behalf. When the government, having full knowledge, sought, through the Department of Justice, to avail itself of the fruits of these acts in order to accomplish its own ends, it assumed moral responsibility for the officers' crimes.
....
Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means--to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal--would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this court should resolutely set its face.
Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (emphasis added). We've seen too much of that prophecy fulfilled already in recent years, if you ask me. We don't need to see any more.
I perceive it as a networking issue: does this person have a healthy network around 'him', i.e., is family healthy, are family/neighborhood pets healthy, are the social networks around him secure?
I sense a large danger of stigmatizing (or actually harassing) people who have a lower-than-average tendency to build and rely on social networks (and sheesh, it's not like such people aren't already stigmatized; I first wrote "lower-than-normal capacity", which I would be inclined to hide on revision, except that it illustrates my point so well).
Is that paranoid, or a rational estimation of what the fear industry will do with this idea? (Did we always have a fear industry, or is it newish? And either way, how dangerous is disproportionate and unreasonable fear? I'm inclined to say pretty dangerous, but maybe that's disproportionate and unreasonable.)
Kimiko is supposed to be a "stylized object of [...] lust" ?
No. Some jerk who "reviews" webcomics objects to the fact that the appearance of characters in comics is sometimes unrealistic and idealized. He also complains that complex intellectual issues are referred to without being discussed in as much depth as in books of several hundred pages. (Yes, really.) And did you know that webcomics are sometimes episodic with little overarching plot, or that when they do have one, it can be difficult to follow? And that they can be only infrequently updated?
IOW, he objects to features of the medium, but casts the objections as attacks on DC in particular, even though they're really not. (Also, people who regularly confuse their own tastes with objective measures of quality really should not review anything, ever.)
@#147: On the other hand, the fact that Boston was not destroyed by the Mooninite invasion didn't really have much to do with the swiftness of the emergency response. Some things really were never a threat in the first place.
This is particularly troublesome because people who overreact to non-threats are likely to raise the "of course nothing happened, because we stopped it!" argument to justify their actions.
If you're a citizen of a democracy and have the duty to help guide your government between the Scylla of overreaction combined with ass-covering hyping of the "threat" and the Charybdis of apathy toward real threats... you need some method of threat assessment that doesn't rely on the people trying to sell you solutions.
I think that swine flu is on the "genuinely dangerous" side. But it's not a silly question to ask - I wish more people had asked it about some of the "terrorist plots" "thwarted" by the Bush Administration, for example.
If it weren't for the fact that universal immunization is a good thing and helps protect us all, I'd say to the wonderful folks posting in the comment threads a prisonplanet.com about how they'll never, ever get an immunization, "Go, you! It'll help cull the morons."
That, and the fact that some of those people probably have children who will also never, ever get an immunization (at least until they're 18, and given parental indoctrination, possibly not even then).
"Evolution in action" sounds neat, until you remember what the methods of evolution are.
Damn higher reasoning, always raining on my Schadenfreude.
So if two viruses infect the same cell at the same time, the RNA can play mix-n-match, take virulence from one virus and infectivity from another, and come up with something both infective and virulent.
Why is it that a flu virus and an HIV virus never walk into the same cell at the same time and come out with something as easy to spread as flu, but that sucker punches your immune system like HIV?
(I infer that this hasn't happened from the fact that my species is not extinct, and given the number of viruses and virus-infected cells, it's hard to believe that it wouldn't have happened if it were possible.)
This is the sort of shit you expect to see (or at least I expect to see) from countries like Russia or Saudi Arabia or North Korea.
But not us, because we're better than them?
Tell that to the slaves, or the people who died at Wounded Knee or Hiroshima.
Has there ever really been any other kind of country, or have we just been fooling ourselves with American exceptionalism? (Even our exceptionalism isn't exceptional - other countries do that too, and always have.)
There's only one sort of shit, and ours stinks too.
This isn't a justification, or an excuse - hell, no. But we shouldn't be as surprised by this as we are, I think. We had too high an opinion of ourselves as a country, and I wonder how many others were laughing at the pride that went before our fall.
@20: I'm not so sure. Except for the earthquake, all the rest were caused by human agency or human error, and all happened in the Northern Hemisphere (and mostly in the temperate zone; the Bay of Pigs might have happened in the tropics, but the go-ahead decision was made in the temperate zone). This suggests that some kind of seasonal hormone effect could really be in play.
Does the Southern Hemisphere have a similar cluster in mid-October? (It might be hard to see because there's not much inhabited land in the southern hemisphere - Argentina, Uruguay, part of Chile, South Africa, half of Australia, New Zealand.)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 29 |
| 2008 | 94 |
| 2007 | 124 |
| 2006 | 8 |
Total: 255 comments. View all these comments on a single page. (May take some time to load.)
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Chris:
Show all comments by Chris.