For all that we think of germans now as the epitome of ordentlich, the centuries before industrial unification were full of drama queening out the wazoo (think where all those stories with castles and princelings were set) and deep, deep self-indulgence. So this is exactly the kind of thing that a pastoralist like Fontane would have written.
(I have a soft spot for him, because a couple copies of his books once got me quite closely questioned by two nice young men with submachine guns.)
WBC's gig works because all the lawyers in his cult/clan work essentially for free. So even in cases where the suits that are filed are completely bogus countersuits are a more-expensive option.
When his crew came to my neck of the woods they protested on the (narrow) sidewalk outside the local high school while students were arriving. The school is at the corner of the main road into town. So it was pretty apparent they were looking to get a kid to "assault" them or to get pushed out into traffic to stage an "accident" or (twofer) get a kid pushed out into traffic so they could be wronged by seeing a traffic injury.
We systematically underfund mass transit systems and beat up on them every time they forgo some revenue opportunity. So why should we expect them to forgo this one, even for a company as sacrosanct as Google? And why should they spend some undetermined number of IT hours to massage their internal data into the formats that Google or some other party requires? To benefit that horrifically underserved slice of the public that carries iphones?
In Washington DC, as I recall, a big part of the kerfuffle was that the Metro folks could point to something like $300K in revenues from people accessing their (partly ad-supported) web site for the information.
In some ways the guy has a point, even if it does lead to pretty much the opposite of what he's saying. As Orwell and so many others have remarked, satisfying sex does make you queer -- at least in the sense that you're no longer straight, aka wound up, anxious and willing to jump to the commands of authoritarian leaders.
On the other hand, mainstream porn isn't necessarily going to point red-state adolescents in the direction of the kind of sex that would queer them (hence the huge consumption of said porn in red states). But Schwartz can't take that chance.
I think this may be one of the relatively few cases where a wingnut, instead of using "liberal" as a code word for "homosexual and/or jewish", is using "homosexual" as code for "liberal".
For their sake I am not myself #32
One thing to remember, though, is that hate is still a kind of involvement. If one can get to the point where one just doesn't particularly care, it can be less toxic. (I realized at some point, "these people's interests aren't similar to mine, their ways of thinking about things aren't similar to mine, their opinions on the few things we have in common are in unpleasant conflict with mine, so why should I go out of my way to be with them or worry about what they think?")
There were times in my 20s when I wished I'd been physically abused, just so there'd be something to show. Or wished I'd had any physical contact at all.
The only physical abuser I know of in my family was my grandmother, who couldn't understand why her daughters-in-law didn't beat their children, and who (after one really bad event early in my oldest sibling's life) was never left alone with us kids again. Except the one time she was, which I don't know anything about because I was 2 at the time and all my older siblings remember is their father paying attention to them for once in their life.
The hardest thing all the way through has been the reality check. I see my siblings a few times a year, and have learned to pretty much say nothing about our supposed shared history because the version they remember is very little like the one I recall. (The same is true outside the family -- all of my father's friends and business associates uniformly reported what a charming, thoughtful person he was.)
OK, the other hardest thing is being in a relationship and having kids. I avoided the thought of kids for 20+ years because I was sure I would abuse them. Even now, under stress, it's kinda frightening sometimes, and that makes things a little fraught. And my spouse -- the idea that two people can disagree, sometimes fairly strenuously, and still love each other: that's a learning experience every time.
Can't imagine adding anyone from my family on facebook or similar sites, at least not until I get that different-kinds-of-friends thing going, so that they'll only see the sanitized stuff...
heresiarch #217 et al:
The Prodigal Son version of the squeaky wheel proverb is particularly pernicious, because the answer to the nonprodigal son is basically "suck it up". The generic squeaky wheel story can be read as a that's-the-way-the-world-is fable, but the prodigal son version is more "The Lord thy G*d really couldn't care less about you non-drama-queens, because face it, He doesn't have to."
You can see how it would be a very attractive story, along with the laborers in the vineyard, for attracting converts to a fledgling religion, especially a persecuted one, but as a tenet of a mainstream religion or culture it really encourages manipulative acting out.
I think the modern incarnation came with the "recognition" that bullying and other forms of delinquency may be a "cry for help".
Janet Croft # 163
In addition to the issue that others have pointed out about whether people can walk away from bullies, there's also the big question of whether walking away is a workable big-picture solution. The fora in which people get bullied are also the ones in which they discuss matters of importance to them, in which they have learning and teaching experiences they care about, in which they form and maintain lasting friendships. Depending on how a forum is organized and how the other members respond to seeing bullies, disengaging may mean walking away from a significant chunk of one's life.
albatross #143:
It might make more sense to call it trolling, but in large part it comes off as "I have the status to interrupt your conversation and call you out as rude/intolerant/hypocritical if you refuse to devote yourself to educating me me me."
It's a variant, I think, of the "not all things are up for discussion all the time" subthread above, and sometimes of the "prove to me that you're human" bullying gambit, only more respectfully couched.
One probably sees it more at some political-ish sites, where "please explain to me how laws against same-sex marriage differ from laws against incest" might pretend to be an honest question.
Way late, but a reminiscence from an old, now moribund forum: even facially perfectly reasonable requests for information can be a form of bullying in the right context, if they act to force (fsvo force) the participants in a conversation to repeatedly put aside the things they were interested in talking about so that they can educate the requestor. You also sometimes see this in corporate settings when someone insists that a particular subject be explained from first principles before any more substantive work gets done.
Oh, and let's not forget the "change your password every six months" issues...
The thing about 15 and 23 is that ignorance is really no excuse. If a school decided to arm teachers' aides with machetes to enforce disciple, no one would be saying, "Oh, but they just thought machetes looked imposing, they had no idea you could actually lop off a limb with one."
So very many things wrong with this, opening the school up to civil and criminal liability if anything goes wrong, but yeah, the parents are probably thrilled because this means they don't have to do it.
@Lizzie in 93. It seems likely that surviving spouses' ideas about how to die are strongly colored by the style of the first spouse's death. (My mother watched my father die by inches, mind first, and when she fell ill denied and ignored her symptoms so assiduously that it was less than a month from the time she was diagnosed with stomach cancer until she died.)
We don't have a lot of modern role models for how to do a good job dying of disease or old age. I'd like to go like a poet I knew, who when his cancer recurred spent a few grand putting a picture window in the bedroom. (Which of course you can only do if your health care is paid for and you're not worried about losing the house...)
The report about self-reported religious people asking for more care suggests to me that the term "religious" really needs to be split into more descriptive subterms. But also that families including religious members may have more intrafamilial conflicts of the type that make "pulling the plug" difficult. (I still remember my father, when his long-senile mother was diagnosed with pneumonia at the nursing home, saying "One wouldn't want to think that one hadn't done everything possible.")
Meanwhile I think Krauthammer's reference to his own living will is pretty clearly designed to spread the FUD just a little further. The impression I got from it was "Sure, it says DNR, but I don't actually want a DNR order, and anyone who knows me knows I wouldn't want a DNR order. But ZOMG if those evil Obama people get their way someone would take the legally-binding document I signed seriously, as if I'd meant it."
As the ephemeral-text part of the Kindle market grows -- newpapers, blogs, textbooks -- the remote-deletion capability is going to be ever more important for Amazon and/or the people who publish through it.
(And here's a thought: how many textbooks would have to be loaded on a Kindle to make it cheaper for someone to buy the used Kindle than to buy the texts new in either paper or digital form?)
linnen @130:
Not The City and The Stars?
Another one for grief issues: Always Coming Home
Oh, and let's not forget all of Bujold's vor books for body-image issues...
Of course, there are also sff books and stories that would exacerbate pretty much any condition you prescribed them for. (I just left an anthology containing "The Cold Equations" on the shelf at the local library book sale.)
Just one minor note: that "debunking" at fivethirtyeight.com relies on some statistical assumptions about the order in which provincial votes were reported that a) may not be true and b) strongly predispose to the result arrived at.
One of the quirks of american jurisprudence that has always fascinated me: if you get found not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity and locked up indefinitely, then as soon as you "recover" and are determined to be sane, you're free to go. I know the arguments for this are good on the face of them, but it's weirded me out since I was a kid.
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