The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by guthrie:

Ajay #38- where did that (all too true) bit of doggerel come from?

IN all this I couldn't help but think of this simple quote:

"Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures?"

(From "The Dosadi Experiment")

I am aghast at people having to pay as much as my mortgage was, in order to have healthcare. Sure, here in the UK the gvt takes a fair chunk off me in taxes, but not that much.

(For context, I earn quite a bit under the {alleged but only by numbers not by actual people recieving it} average wage)

MArilee #45- here in the UK we have a toll road north of Birmingham that was/ is supposed to help relieve the Birmingham ring road which is overloaded. As expected, what happens is that the tolls are high enough that lorries use the public roads, and richer car drivers use the toll road, but to be honest, in terms of sheer traffic numbers, I'm amazed they make any money at all. I've used it twice, both times I was bypassing Birmingham and knew the ring road would be packed, and so it proabbly saved 30 to 60 minutes and a lot of hassle. But my impression is that what is planned in the USA is many times greater than the Birmingham road.

Monopoly? Sounds like a good game to me.
But at least with the toll roads in the 19th century you could wander through the fields, or break the gates if the toll got too high, as happened quite a few times.
Whereas you have your toll road to work, it'll cost you, and you can't just drive around it. No doubt someone is writing a computer program to optimise the charges such that the average user won't find it worthwhile to get a new job, or to drive around the toll road.

I was reading that there are plenty of investment opportunities in infrastructure in the USA just now, and the bodies in charge of bridge and roads etc are looking to privatise a lot of them to get rid of the necessity of paying for improvements.

Of course nobody seems able to explain to me how it is cheaper to privatise the roads and bridges. So it looks to me like it will cost the average american more to simply live and go about their daily business. Unless of course you are rich enough to have invested in the kind of company which buys up infrastructure.

Thanks Connie.
So does taking meth make you so incapable of rational thought that you take a rifle, ammo and bulletproof vests to a conference, and talk about shooting the presidential runner?
I don't know, I'm in the UK, and I've not knowingly met a user of methamphetamine.

Connie H #25- you need some sort of link to evidence for that. It sounds like exactly the sort of thing we like to hear, but we need evidence, otherwise its just scaremongering.

Here in the UK, they arrested (last year I think) a right wing racist who had one of the largest hauls of chemicals and bomb making stuff they'd ever seen. It barely made the national news but was covered by the local news, so that enough word got out about it that you could see it wasn't made up. Of course the story got much less coverage than the possible moslem terrorist plots, but that is what we expect.

A small experiment suggests itself- someone post a negative review, and see how long it lasts.
Of course there should be no reference to "Making light", and ideally they should have at least glanced at a copy of the book.

ACtually, the first thing I thought of when I skimmed this post and the boing boing thread was that this was something of a love note from PNH to TNH.

Xopher- the old "nobody travelled more than 10 miles from their bithplace" thing has been around so long I thought it was dead. Yes, the majority of the populace were serfs and freemen, but they would have travelled to markets and to shrines, albeit not necessirily more than 10 miles away. More importantly, the rich folk and the merchants travelled hundreds of miles, as often did the clergy. Assuming you are talking about the high and later medieval periods, this fairly extensive travel by an appreciable fraction of the populace helped knit Europe together. I'm afraid I don't quite see the relevance to the current chat, unless we go into much more detail about the dates, times, numbers of people who travelled, and what they did with their travelling.

OK, so this Kondratiev, obviously you can't just ask him where he got the idea about the frosts from. It sounds logical enough to convince people, but as it obvious with "celtic" discussion, its better to stick to the evidence rather than mere logic. Suffice to say that I don't agree with it at all, mainly because its not possible for you to provide enough evidence to make me change my mind, without putting yourself to some trouble.

Lets mosey on over to wikipedia- it suggests that Samhuinn was held at the end of the harvest. Further down the page, it says that Celtic reconstructionist pagans, whatever they are, tend to celebrate it on the day of first frost, or when the last of the harvest is in and the ground is dry enough to have a bonfire. Now, applying the "I'm the local expert 'cos I live in Scotland" approach, I can assure you that first frost and end of harvest don't always happen near each other, let alone the chances of having dry earth at the correct time of year, although global warming seems to be altering that, and I supose our ancestors wouldn't have been bothered about keeping it on precisely the same day each year.

Mind you, a random google on the topic of first frosts finds this:
http://www.personal.dundee.ac.uk/~taharley/weathermiscfrost.htm

Which suggests that the end of October is a reasonable average for the first frost. However, you can also see that such dates vary. So, on that basis, perhaps its not such a silly idea, but I have not come across any writing anywhere saying that the "Celts" timed Samhuin by means of the first frost. I would have thought such an interesting piece of information would have surfaced somewhere.
Oh, and I've stewarded at Samhuin and Beltane for this:
http://www.beltane.org/
Maybe I'll ask around next time I seem people, theres some hard core pagan Celtic people there.

And another random link, maybe someone with some knowledge of Pliny can comment:
https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0803&L=celtic-l&P=37740
Suggests that the moon was rather important to the "Celts". But again, we have to consider dating carefully- I see little reason to suspect that the "Celts" of 0AD are the same as the "Celts" of 800BC or, the people that DNA testing suggests havn't moved around too much for the past 5,000 years, in Britain at least.

To my mind, what makes most sense is to consider that large parts of Britain were merely "Celticised" in terms of material culture, and changes in language occured as their languages which would have been related to the continental ones, altered over time, but ultimately Britain was different from the continent precisely because of the large reservoir of paleolithic people still present. The local variations were such, 4000 years ago that different styles of burial tomb and stone circles were being built in different parts of Scotland.

How about "irreligious", or if that sounds too confrontational, "non-religious"?

To me, it seems most of the terms that could be used suffer from correlation, positive or negative, with religion. We could do with a term for something like this:

"Which God do you worship then?"
"Whats a God? What is this religion thing you are talking about?"

Comment statistics for guthrie on the Making Light blog

Total: 12 comments. View all these comments on a single page.