The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Debbie Notkin:

Interesting how many people come up with literary references. I'll put mine in as well and see who recognizes it:

At least the ad doesn't say "Use Snivly's Soap."

(Tom W., I know you get it; no need to reply.)

I'm given to understand, by a progressive believing Catholic whom I respect hugely, that the Frontline program on JPII was absolutely brilliant and extremely balanced. She raved about it enough that I'm thinking of checking it out myself.

For what it's worth, WebSense blocked LJ for me from my work for about 48 hours some six or so months ago and then it came back with no problem.

This could be a temporary glitch ... or not.

Guess I should have read Electrolite before posting to Making Light ...

Teresa: Is there another class of people whose rationally-expressed concerns you'd dismiss, if they told you that the way you refer to them alienates them and hurts their feelings? Are there others whom you'd then lecture about how they have it coming?

To name three off the top of my head: fat people, people who do/don't want children talking to people who don't/do, and anyone with a chronic disease, illness or condition.

Okay, here's my problem with this discussion and the one on Washington Monthly. I'm seeing a lot of back-and-forth about whether or not it's okay to mock "religion" (which is being used as code for "Christianity"). I'm seeing discussion about whether the choice is to mock or to pander. I'm seeing questions of what is most useful, or least damaging to the left, and who is calling who names.

I just searched the whole thread for the word "respect" and basically never found it used in a positive fashion. I see "lack of respect;" I see "views we don't respect;" I see "respectability."

Speaking as more of a secular humanist than anything else, I have a deep respect for the religious beliefs of the people I know: Christian, Jewish, Islamic, pagan, roll-your-own. I've been known to envy them ...

I also have a deep and abiding belief (you could call it a religious belief, I suppose) that no one ever benefits from a conversation in which they are not approached with respect. Want to change someone's mind? Don't approach them with that want on the table. Approach them to find out, from a position of respect, what drives the way they feel. Offer them your position as a gift, or a specimen for them to examine. Let them look at it from all sides. Do the same thing with their position with open mind, value for how they got where they are, and (yes) respect.

Maybe they'll change your mind. Maybe you'll change yours. Most likely you'll both stay right where you've been. But you'll feel better about the other position and a tiny bit of common ground will have been reached.

It's not only not about mockery, it's not about pandering either. If God doesn't speak to me (and he doesn't), how could I possibly know whether or not he speaks to you?

First of all, despite my enormous admiration for Beth, I believe the "legally stupid" concept was coined by my brother, David Notkin. It seems very likely to me that I brought it with me to Tor when I worked there in 1987 and 1988.

Secondly, without feeling the need to jump into the did-so-did-not fight, I want to say that I wholeheartedly object to the t-shirt in question. In the interests of free speech, I support anyone's right to sell it, but I also support my right not to shop anywhere where it is sold.

Am I the only gay-supporting punctuation-loving person in the whole country to be skeptical about this? In one sense, I'm all for it, and absolutely delighted. In another, I keep wondering how I'd feel if a Republican judge delayed for two weeks a ruling that I really cared about and that he said he thought was the correct ruling because of a misplaced semicolon, when he acknowledged clearly that he knew what the pleading meant.

I think this is exactly a stunt, and more humorous than it is laudable. And I think it's more worthy of the infamous and ubiquitous Them than it is of the ineffable Us.

I am neither a lawyer nor an expert on this topic, so take everything with salt.

As I understand it, the doctrine of corporate personhood (referenced above) is really what keeps Mitch Wagner's statement "Corporations are simply groups of people who have banded together to do some specific function." from being the truth that it should be.

Because it was legally Enron and not the Enron officers and directors who perpetrated the theft from Enron employees, no one is fully liable for the damage, though some individuals can be prosecuted for their part in it.

Along with the doctrine of corporate personhood comes the repeatedly upheld legal American doctrine often described as "money is speech." In other words, the right to free speech is legally considered equivalent to the right to spend your money however you want to, including to influence policy. Free speech gives you the right to try to convince people to your point of view; because money is speech, it gives you the right to spend money to convince people to your point of view. And because corporations are persons, corporations thus have the right to spend their money to convince their (our) legislators to write laws in their (not our) interests.

The problem goes a lot further than that, in many directions. I personally have never heard an extension from "get rid of the doctrine of corporate personhood" to as Randolph suggests, discarding the shield for investors as well. But I do know that I don't want entities that don't breathe and don't shit having the same rights that I have, and a lot more money to shore up those rights.

Great dead phrases of our culture, RIP:

"They should be ashamed of themselves."

And just who is "consuming" the hurricane? Wouldn't "consumees" be more appropriate?

Wow, what a bunch of intellectuals!

Me too.

But right now, I don't want to split hairs, make definitions, or argue points.

I want to recognize that Patrick is sad, and he has something to be sad about. I happen to be sad about the same thing.

But even if I wasn't, I'd like to make some room for sadness without endless analysis. When your friends die, do you feel the need to endlessly pick apart what they meant by dying?

Some things are just sad.

I've missed the twitter about Tonasket on the left-wing blogs, and it made me feel like I might actually be living in the "early days of a better nation" to read it. Thank you, S...., for your on-the-site comments! They mean a lot.

I spend a week a year in the county next to Okanogan, a tourist-visitor, and I salute you.

Returning to our regularly scheduled topic of election fraud and the surrounding issues.

Uncharacteristically, I took the time and trouble to download the report of the California Task Force on Electronic Voting and submit my comment to the state secretary of state (this will only be even conceivably helpful if we still _have_ a state government in three months, of course).

My favorite line is "While the commission disagreed about the risk of inserting malicious code, the computer scientists on the commission felt that the risk was high."

My underlying concern was that the report went into some detail about background checks and protections guarding against programmers and designers with malicious agendas, and NEVER MENTIONED, let alone recommended, any controls on ownership of voting machine companies.

Bay Area resident and acquaintance of many on this blog, Doug Faunt, has been a polling place supervisor for over a decade. He voiced a polite concern about our new touch-screen, no-paper-record technology at a meeting before the last election, and was not asked to resume his regular duties thereafter.

Finally, I much agree with Patrick that it isn't so much the specifics of electronic balloting but the underlying concerns. I have a deep belief in the resilience of our system and its ability to get around horrifying periods of corruption, but if reasonably free and reasonably fair elections are undermined, then I have no trouble visualizing the path from here to rampant dictatorship.

Which is why I wrote to the CA secretary of state.

Without taking a position either way on Raimondo's article and the role of direct action (I'm conflicted here), I do want to say that the Civil Rights movement is neither the appropriate analogy nor the most recent comparison.

What should be used as a standard of comparison is the direct action component of the anti-Vietnam War movement. All the things that Raimondo is saying here were said then, and they were all valid: most direct action _does_ alienate the people who are inconvenienced; it _does_ give the government more power to use against legal demonstrators; etc.

However, it is my personal historical sense that the direct action component of the anti-Vietnam War movement was, in the end, a significant positive factor in ending the war and redirecting (some) national policies, as well as terminating the Nixon presidency.

Once again, I'm the voice for valuing a variety of voices, approaches, and perspectives, and for not dismissing approaches simply because some of their consequences will be negative.

Just for the record, I too am _vehemently_ opposed to the "things have to get worse to get better" argument. I do not espouse it, have never espoused it, and hope fervently that someone I love will drown me if they ever hear me espousing it. When things get worse, more people die and more people suffer.

Although I voted for Nader, he said many things that I profoundly disagree with. This is one. "There is no difference between Gore and Bush" is another.

And a thank-you to Patrick for his gracious apology for "spluttering"; not necessary, but welcome.

To Julia:

Me: "Blaming each other in lieu of the enemy has been the downfall of so many progressive movements in this country; I hate to see it happening again."

Julia: "You don't see a certain bitter irony in a Nader voter saying this?"

No, I honestly don't. Can you explain?

"I hope they choke on it."

"Choke on it."

"I hope they choke to death on any assertions that there's no difference between Gore and Bush."

Well, I didn't (and don't) make the last assertion.

Folks, I don't hope any of you choke on anything. I wish you could offer me the same respect.

We agree on so many pieces of what you have to say here that it's hard for me to understand the point where we diverge. Yes, our leaders are stupid, vicious and crazy. No, I don't feel the slightest urge to deny it. Yes, we will spend the rest of our lives explaining to each other how we got here, unless His Idiocy gets us blown to pieces first.

But those explanaions will take longer, hurt more, and work less well if we spend our energy blaming each other for principled stances with unexpected effects.

I'm not going to engage here in all the "why it wasn't wrong to vote for Nader" arguments, or even all the "look, Gore was elected anyway" arguments.

I'm just going to say that I voted for Nader. It was a thoughtful principled stance which felt right to me at the time; I'm still not sure it was wrong; If I and my ilk are the best people you can find to blame for the vile and despicable leadership in this country, I personally think you're looking in the wrong direction.

There are people whom I very much would like to see choke on their own vomit because of the state of this country--but most of them voted for Bush ... and some of them didn't vote. And, just to make myself clear, there are people who voted for Bush _and_ people who didn't vote, who did so for thoughtful and principled reasons, and I respect that as well.

Blaming each other in lieu of the enemy has been the downfall of so many progressive movements in this country; I hate to see it happening again.

Comment statistics for Debbie Notkin on the Electrolite blog

Total: 19 comments. View all these comments on a single page.