The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Lis Carey:

Randall, the reason that most people go along with vaccinations without much complaint is not because we're sheep, but because our parents and grandparents had clear and painful memories of the large numbers of people who died of "childhood diseases"--which were often even more devastating if you missed them as a child and then got them as an adult.

My parents, both of whom had lost family members to these diseases, made sure I got all of the pitifully few vaccinations available. Lining up to get the polio vaccine (twice! I believe a single dose version came along shortly after) is one of my first memories of a community event rather than a family one. For measles, rubella, and chicken pox, she made sure I was exposed, to try to make sure I got them as child, rather than getting hit worse by the same diseases as an adult. (The difference between this and the "passive immunization" silliness Lucy describes is that my parents didn't have the safer and more effective option of vaccination for those diseases; they'd have gotten me vaccinated if that had been possible. Oh, and they expected me to get sick, and "wanted" me to get sick, in the pragmatic sense that it was the only way to be sure.)

I once closed down my nursery school for a week because I was the first one to get the mumps, and it then swept through the entire school--including the adults that hadn't had it yet. My sister, ten years younger, got more vaccinations and was sick a lot less often. My niece--if she has to miss a day of school, it's an event. She's never experienced a school closing due to epidemic disease.

Sound minor? As Lucy has said quite eloquently, people died. People were maimed.

We have no broad-spectrum vaccination for influenza, because it mutates so fast. And so I line up for my flu shot every single year, because I have asthma, and if I get flu, my life is at risk.

What our parents and grandparents could only do for their kids by trying to cause them to get sick, you can do for your kids with a pin-prick. In not doing it, you're not only placing them at some degree of risk; you're also increasing the risk for everyone else, that variants will evolve that won't be blocked by the current immunizations, and that also may be drug-resistant. You might want to do some reading about drug-resistant tuberculosis.

The current anti-vaccination movement is the comfortable delusion of people who have not listened to their grandparents, and have not stretched their imaginations to grasp what life was like, and would be again, without vaccinations.

David wrote:

But there is a marked price difference for the adult and YA markets vs. those for children. Allow me a day or two, and I will respond with a specific title -- or ten. It has been too many years since I had homework! ;-)

Yes, there is a marked price difference, and it's in the direction of children's and YA novels being significantly cheaper than adult books. You were so specific in your previous remarks (I do believe, however, that publishers miss the gravy train when they charge extortionate amounts for childrens' books; e.g., $45 for 25 unpaginated pages), that I assumed you had some specific example in mind and that no "homework" was necessary.

I'm confident that you can come up with an example, of a "specialty" book not really intended for the normal children's book market. However, I'm highly skeptical that you'll be able to find ten recently-published examples.

Books cost what they cost; I do not begrudge that charge. I do believe, however, that publishers miss the gravy train when they charge extortionate amounts for childrens' books; e.g., $45 for 25 unpaginated pages. They have an opportunity to create their audience of tomorrow but think only of today. Is it any wonder that their readers grey?

????

Presumably you have some specific example in mind, here, but I'm not familiar with it, and I have to wonder about its general applicability. Children's and YA hardcovers tend to be noticably cheaper than books aimed at the adult market, and adult books aren't, as a normal thing, close to that kind of prohibitive pricing, not even with the increases in the last few years.

Abigail wrote:

Harry's innate ability, on the other hand, is treated by Rowling as downright ordinary. He's one of thousands of wizards, one of hundreds of Hogwarts students. Some of them are more talented than others, but all of them possess magical power, and take it completely for granted. After the first few chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry becomes practically jaded. His magical studies are neither solemn nor of great importance to him - he'd prefer goofing off with his friends to learning how to transform a hedgehog into a pincushion. Harry doesn't strive to be normal because he perceives himself as normal - a normal teenage wizard. The things that make Harry special within the wizard world have very little to do with his magical powers. They are the circumstances of his birth, his ancestry, and most importantly his personality. This was the point A.S. Byatt missed in her infamous takedown of the series in the NYT last summer. The magic in Harry Potter is ordinary! She wailed. Well, yes. What's your complaint?

No, what makes Harry special in the wizard world is not his birth or his ancestry, primarily; it's the fact that he is alive, when anyone else who took the full blast of Voldemort's power would be dead. What makes him special is that he has already defeated the most feared and malevolent wizard in the world once--and he did it when he was a year old.

Harry is not ordinary. The elders who care about him encourage him to think of himself as ordinary, so that he'll have a chance to grow up. They leave him to be fostered by his hideous aunt and uncle so that he'll be overlooked as long as possible; then they put him in a setting where he'll be as "ordinary" as possible. He determinedly shuns reminders that he's not ordinary. In fact, though, he's the least ordinary person in all of wizard society, and every book hinges on that fact, on the reality that both Voldemort's supporters and his opponents know that Harry is the greatest threat to Voldemort that exists.

How you get from that to "boarding school stories" with the fantasy elements slathered on extra, completely escapes me.

By the end of the speech I was thinking, "First black president of the United States of America."

Yeah, yeah, I know: one speech.

But that was one impressive speech. Terry, he talks at least as well as he reads.

Xopher, the overlap goes down when there's an active MCFI worldcon bid, and drops even lower when a Noreascon is is in the offing. Granted, the overlap is pretty high during the periods when MCFI isn't actively bidding for or running a worldcon.

Right now, the overlap is probably the lowest it's ever been, what with N4 about to happen and N3 having been in 1989, a few years before Al Gore's crazy "information superhighway" idea opened for easy access by significant parts of the general public.

Laura, it looks like no one has answered, so I will:

"*" is a request for a footnote explaining a reference that the requestor has not understood.

"IOKIFYAMCFI" is a reference to the acronym commonly seen on blogs of the more liberal persuasion, "IOKIYAR", meaning, "It's okay if you're a Republican", refering to the common winger tendency to find perfectly unexceptioable behavior identical to, or significantly worse than, behavior that allegedly heralds the imminent end of civilization, when committed by Democrats--provided that behavior is committed by Republicans.

Patrick, silly me, my reaction to lists like this has always been to smile or laugh at the items that make me smile or laugh, mostly ignore the rest, and judge the list as a whole by its overall tone, not by its worst/least successful/dullest/crabbiest entries.

Andrew, the Windy City is a fraud. Boston's much windier, in every sense.

Patrick, several of the contributors to that list have so much contempt for democratic government that they've not only run for but actually won, and served in, elective office in their towns, as well as in some cases participating in party caucuses and state party conventions.

Also, many of the contributors do actually live and/or work in the immediate Boston area. It may not be apparent, outside eastern Mass., southern NH, and RI, just how successful the current powers that be have been at crafting "security procedures" that will shut down the city for the week, making the DNC as unpleasant and disruptive an experience as possible for John Kerry's home state.

And given that, in reality, both John Kerry and George Bush actually won their parties' nominations some while back, through a series of somewhat more direct exercises in democracy than their respective national conventions, grumpiness about the national conventions doesn't at all plausibly connect to contempt for democratic government.

Obviously, putting out a press release or making a statement that someone else might or might not decide to publish or report on is much more egotistical and attention-grabbing than actually publishing it yourself.

Isn't that obvious to everyone? Well, perhaps not.

Bravo, Teresa. Beautifully written, too, as always.

Nancy, the fact that, to some especially cold and narrow people higher up on the socio-economic scale, a degree of social order and social mobility that lets those further down make plans and work their way up looks like "chaos" doesn't make it chaos. Lack of 100% predictability is not "chaos." Other people having a reasonable amount of predictability in their lives, so that they can make halfway useful decisions, is not "chaos."

I called Inhofe's office to tell him what I thought of his disgraceful spewing; the line was busy for several hours, and when I got through, they were only taking voicemail "because of the increased volume of calls."

Apparently John McCain got up and walked out during Inhofe's tirade, and told a reporter he just couldn't listen to it.

Patrick: The problem isn't that they're being "quiet"--they're making as much noise as anyone could ask. The problem is that the media pretty much ignores them save for an occasional man-bites-dog story, because, you know, everybody knows that "religion" and "right wing" are pretty much synonymous, except in the special case of black people.

AvramSo how do we get you folks to bite more dogs?

You're missing the point--religious believers of liberal politics are in fact out there in great numbers "biting dogs" all the time, but the media are usually not interested in reporting the story, no matter what lengths they have to go to to not report it.

CHip,

A) Mr. Maron does not need to be the center of a substantial trend to be criticized for his own public bad behavior. Nevertheless, the comments here, and on Political Animal, and on Eschaton do rather tend to support the idea that Mr. Maron is not an entirely isolated phenomenon. That portion of the left which is virulently anti-religious is a tiny minority, but it's a very vocal minority, and to some extent it's representing "liberals" to people whose economic and social interests are better defended by liberals, but who, because they don't ordinarily follow politics close and do rely on the mainstream media, are easily led to believe that "liberals" are a threat to their freedom of religion. We need to reach those people; Mr. Maron and others like him are an active impediment to doing that.

B) I don't believe I've ever questioned your right to be offended by people attacking your beliefs or attacking other people because of beliefs you share. I have questioned the idea that the mere expression in public of beliefs you disagree with constitutes an "attack."

C) What Avedon said: Liberal Christians are speaking up; the media just doesn't find that "newsworthy." The SCLM is in love with the storyline, "Religious right, secular left," and anything that challenges that is mostly ignored. Catholic bishops are being asked right now for their opinions on Kerry's pro-choice votes, and whether he should receive communion; they're not being asked whether Scalia, who supports the death penalty, criticizes the Church's stance on the death penalty, and has and will rule on death penalty cases, should be refused communion. (And let's not overlook the fact that the Kerry question became a public issue because reporters raised the question; the bishops have mostly been trying to avoid becoming political tools in this election.) Or take the flurry of astonishment a few years ago when the Pope publicly described evolution as a scientific fact; this would have astonished fewer people has the news media been in the habit of reporting on Catholic bishops opposing efforts to force "creation science" into public classrooms. And I've already mentioned the marked difference in media attention to the conservatives threatening to pull out of the Episcopal Church over its liberal positions vs. the media attention to the Southern Baptist congretations that pulled out of the Southern Baptist Convention over its conservative positions.

It's very hard to get out a message that the media isn't interested in reporting.

Chad, I've been seeing a number of people apparently deciding whether or not any of the Air America hosts have said anything offensive about religion solely on the basis of the LA Times review. And when I say that I actually heard the remarks of one of those hosts, and found that host's remarks offensive on the basis of the remarks, not on the basis of the LA Times review, I've been confronted with a demand that I explain why I hadn't first condemned certain comments in the review which at that time I had not read.

Strangely, I feel no guilt over that. I feel no sense of omission. In basin my remarks on Mr. Maron's, rather than the review, I was attempting to introduce to the discussion of whether or not Mr. Maron had engaged in religion-bashing somewhat more direct evidence than third-hand discussion of the review.

I didn't comment on the other host who was supposed to have engaged in religion-bashing, because I hadn't (and still haven't) heard that show, and had no basis whatever for an opinion. I have now read the review, and if I had only the review to go one, I'd almost certainly conclude that the reviewer was an idiot at best, and quite likely looking for reasons to run down Air America.

Strangely, I still feel perfectly free to base my opinion of, and my remarks about, Mr. Maron on what I heard him say, rather than on a crummy review of dubious intention.

Jeremy & CHip--I have heard Marc Maron's comments, and it's his comments I'm reacting to, not the LA Times review. I realize that this cheating, but, hey, what do you expect?

Mr. Maron is indeed indiscriminately bashing religion; the single line of the mock prayer the review quotes is not in fact what offended me, regardless of whether it's what offended the reviewer.

CHip--in fact, there's a lot of denunciation of chinos by Christian organizations, including churches, but that doesn't get nearly as much media attention as what they say about abortion. The conservatives leaving the Episcopal Church over ordaining women & gays and electing a gay bishop gets more media attention than all the Southern Baptist congregations that quit the Southern Baptist convention rather than go along with newly-adopted reactionary agenda.

Some other comment somewhere upthread--I don't feel "oppressed by secular society"; I do, however, sometimes feel mightily annoyed with certain individual, otherwise-liberal, otherwise-tolerant secularists who appear to lose the use of their brains when the subject is religion.

Avram--Although neither of those two stories mentions it, a Vatican cardinal, when questioned at a press conference, said that politicians "in a state of grave" sin, including politicians who vote for pro-choice legislation, should be refused communion. This is closer to being an official position of the Catholic Church. However, when a follow-up question specifically asked about John Kerry, he said that that was a matter for the US bishops to decide. And what Archbishop O'Malley said is in fact the long-standing practice of the Catholic Church, with a strong grounding in theology: You can't know the state of another person's soul, and so you always presume that someone presenting themselves for communion is doing so in good faith. Only in the most extrardinary circumstances should someone be publicly refused communion, and merely voting for legislation the Church disagrees with will usually not qualify.

What you've noticed, Avram, and Jeremy has missed, is that this is a highly contentious question among Catholics. What not only secularists but Protestants often miss is that Catholics argue a lot. In some ways, the Catholic Church is a two thousand-year-old argument. (And we wouldn't have it any other way.)

I do think it's important to remember that Marc Maron isn't all of Air America Radio or all of liberal radio. Al Franken's show is great. And I'm listening on the KPOJ feed, which for some reason has The Ed Shultz Show right after The O'Franken Factor, rather than Randi Rhodes. Ed Schultz is very good, too. (They seem to have Ed Shultz stuck in there in the middle of a complete Air America Radio; someday I may take the time to figure out how they're doing that.)

The problem is not with the idea of liberal talk radio. The problem is that Marc Maron is an offensive, unfunny jerk.

Rich, some of your confusion about my remarks may be due to the fact that I'm not going by the hearsay of having read about Marc Maron's comments in the first two blogs to blog about it. My reaction to Marc Maron is based on having actually listened to his show on several occasions. It's not one or more hosts on AAR mentioning that they're Jewish that offended me. It's Marc Maron's repeatedly expressed opinion that religious believers--all religious believers, presumably including the Jewish ones and the Buddhist ones and the Wiccan ones--are delusional, stupid, and dangerous, and that he intends to be as offensive to them (us, me) as possible. It's the "Morning Devotions" segment of his show, which is a regular feature devoted to highlighting things that Mr. Maron believes proves his opinion to be incontestable fact.

I haven't commented on the content of the original AAR review that touched this off because I haven't read it; I found the discussion of it and of AAR already ongoing on Political Animal, and then here. I chimed in here with my comments about the actual show, which I have heard, and to some degree about the comments here and on Political Animal, which I have read.

But you're quite right about one thing--I am utterly unable to provide you with transcripts of the segments that offended me, because I didn't record them and type up transcripts afterwards. Sorry, but I've got better things to do, such as listening to Al Franken and the O'Franken Factor.

Compared to the Manchester Union Leader, the Wall Street Journal is a "left wing rag."

Incidentially, I note that Lis Carey, who is rightly insistent upon the spelling of her own name, has indulged in the exceptionally sophisticated rhetorical technique of referring to Marc Maron as "Marc Moron".

My two defenses, feeble as they are, are that a)I was being intentionally insult toward someone who has gone out of his way to make it clear that he's being intentionally insulting, and b)I expected to be called on it immediately. I've been watching in wonder and amazement as my rather childish misspelling has been repeated by others. Repeatedly. With no apparent suspicion that I'd made even an innocent mistake, much less that I might have been intentionally insulting.

It has strengthened my impression that most people commenting on this are completely unaware of the very nasty remarks that sparked this discussion originally, and that consequently they're finding it much easier to believe that it's just those Christians being oversensitive, or passive-aggressive, again.

But Kevin Maroney's right; it was childish and inappropriate of me. I shouldn't have given in to the temptation originally, and I really, really shouldn't have given in to the temptation to quietly continue it when I saw it being innocently copied by others.

(I don't know whether to advise people, "Listen to Morning Sedition, see for yourself what the guy's like," or "Don't listen, spare yourself the heartburn." Either way, Al Franken comes on at noon Eastern time, and everyone should listen to him.)

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