abi@17: TFN are very explicit about that here:
"The term "Freecycle" in text must always be capitalized to set it off from the surrounding text. Example:
Freecycle groups are great!"
If I was going to get that motherlovingly anal, I'd at least try to come up with an example with "Freecycle" somewhere other than the first word of the sentence, eg "I think Freecycle moderators
sound like they've achieved a remarkable synthesis of authoritarianism and profound shiftiness."
David Harmon@381: Incidentally, what's backed me away from a lot of groups/techniques (notably NLP) was noting that no matter how enthusiastic the new proponents were... they didn't seem to have actually "fixed" any of their own personal problems!
What backed me away from NLP was how creepy the Speed Seduction crowd were.
Terry@315: Then again, you came in with your own paradigm, and then applied to to all, and made a hash of it (see above, about the affected plummy tone you used; in itself an interesting tell of class, culture and nation; in that you seemed to be using an affected British tone [hard to do in text, but hey points for trying, or not).
Possibly reading "a tad" too much into "Epslootlay, Abi, ole bean." I liked the way he reckoned "Umpty thousand years of structural oppression based on people being forced to listen to their local woomeisters has rendered me intolerant." as though he'd personally had to sit through all of it.
But he still brought us "woo", even if it has been around since the umpties. "Woo-woo" isn't quite as good IMO.
heresiarch@162: Also, I'm terribly glad we've all been using the word "woo."
A moment's silence for dave the banished, who left it to us. Not every day you get a satisfying new uncountable noun like that.
re 213: A solid glucose hit can be pretty mind-bending to a person on the edge of starvation, I hear.
Nightsky@194: I think that's fairly common attitude to Tarot - it's an alphabet of archetypes you can use to nudge yourself into looking at things you may have been sweeping under the carpet. There's no need to invoke woo-bosons striking the cards and dictating the spreads, though there's obviously a contingent who swing that way.
...the point of Christian fasting (and maybe Yom Kippur and/or Ramadan) isn't altering your brain chemistry or what not; it's to remind you of your religion.
That forty days in the wilderness stuff suggests there may at one time have been those who thought otherwise.
heresiarch@325: Eh, now I've gone and put my foot in it, I knew this would happen. There's a quote about how every time an Englishman opens his mouth, another Englishman despises him. I think it's that the UK still has a distinct upper-class variant - what's known as a "public-school accent", which is one of the things people send their kids to public school to get, and which I think can still help with access to privileged sectors of British society. The distinction between a more standardised educated accent and a more localised not-so-educated one is probably still pretty widespread.
Earl Cooley III@317 I suppose "Our racists aren't as classy as your racists" has to be one of the more backhanded compliments you can pay someone. And there was Enoch Powell, who had a bit of intellectual heft. But yeah, class. We've managed to keep accent as a class marker where most countries have ditched it somehow, at least to a greater extent. Don't know what you use in America, there must be more than just orthodontics.
Fragano Ledgister @303: I'd really hesitate to make the comparison - London's non-white population is more heterogeneous, and it's London, so there's a lot happening there. Georgia's problem sounds more like one problem, and the situation sounds relatively stagnant by comparison. So over time I'd expect more violence in London, but more real change.
OTOH, if you're saying that the toxicity metaphor is too ill-focused to be meaningful, you may have a point. In my case it's what I've picked up from reading the writings of racist whites - there seems to be a richer culture of racism in the US. The Brits by comparison...eh. Though I will be suitably horrified to read counterexamples if you have any to hand, I imagine you've gone into this stuff in more detail than I have.
Fragano@278: I had no intention of denying that slavery existed and racism exists in Europe, and of course the after-effects of that racism and domination came home in the subsequent migrations to some extent. But the differences between the two situations seem to me to justify describing the American one as 'toxic' wrt the European - toxicity is a function of scale, after all. This is not intended as some kind of one-upmanship, either, let me hasten to add, Europe has all kinds of horrendous problems of its own.
Nancy@267: I think it goes both ways, but I suspect the anti-assimilationist element of US black culture, small though it may be, has a large amplifying effect when filtered through the perceptions of racist whites, serving as a justification for a lot of their attitudes. This is just my model of the situation, of course, I'm not making any overarching claims for it and I mainly present it here so that better-informed individuals can shoot educational holes in it.
Fragano@260: I think the difference is that most of the black population of those countries consider that they or their ancestors came to them by choice, generally from the colonies, and their links to the effects of slavery were considerably weakened in the process, not that they've been exactly ushered into the corridors of power with deference and equanimity anywhere. In America the collective memory of slavery seems to act as a huge barrier to the assimilation which America is otherwise so good at.
Kelly@241: Immortal, amoral, collective entities created solely for the pursuit of profit are fundamentally/=people and should not have the same rights.
And companies can own other companies - not quite slavery but parallels can be drawn. I reckon they (and lobbying groups like AIPAC) are functionally the real citizens of all the western-style democracies - or the new aristocracy, as Charlie says. The rest of us have...individual votes, not greatly stirring to a legislator's heart by most accounts.
I suspect the prokarya are still muttering to each other about how the eucarya have taken all the best parking places, mind.
Serge@424: Not my Python. Though that could be because I'm the only one who uses it, at least until I can figure out a way to sneak round Google's anti-screen-scraping prejudices.
rule-brokered civility is the hobgoblin of the heteronormative patriarchy
In the sense that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds? So we should, er, dispense with it forthwith?
Could happen.
I am cursed with a running sense of humor
Dragging you around in its wake on a veritable Nantucket sleighride?
I hate when that happens.
Xopher@294: So a mere expulsion was the penalty for a racially-motivated attempted murder? I think that's excessively lenient even for a juvenile offender.
No no, of course he will have done some time in juvie hall or whatever it was back then as well, it's just we never heard about that.
What message did you leave? "Hey, glad and/or interesting to hear from you...what prison are you in?"?
No, just "Hmm...don't really know what to say here." Looking back today I appear to be a member of his "communities" as a result of doing that, this will not do.
It's one of those relentlessly positive sites, don't think they want to hear about members' pipe-bombing pasts at all.
I just idly googled my old junior high school and found a find-your-old-classmates site with a couple of hundred people from the place (which was converted to condos back in the eighties), and running down the list who should I see but one of the guys who used to bully me!
The weird thing is he was expelled for putting a pipe bomb in the desk of the school's only black teacher, which would have killed him if he'd been sitting there when it went off, so you could say he left under a bit of a cloud. But there he is, happy as a clam to claim alumni status.
Had to leave a message, of course.
I guess I need a primer on what cursing is allowed here, or not. I didn't think that it was that complicated.
Avoiding priggishness is good.
Of course, you all *will* take the opportunity to curse at me at will.
This is most unlikely. Though if you have other generalisations to make about the implications of word choice among "the Left" you may attract the attention of people who will have no need to resort to vulgarity to make you look about 2cm tall.
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