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

punkrockhockymom @22:

I'm another severe asthmatic like you. And I can tell you how someone deals with it when they don't have health insurance, because I haven't had insurance for the last 9 months.

I had years of regular ER trips and a couple of hospital stays before we found the right mix of medications for me. Advair turned out to be my miracle drug, replacing two inhalers and a pill and cutting my dependence on my rescue inhaler down drastically. But the highest does Advair costs about $300 a month. So, I take it once a day instead of twice. I "forget" to take it on days when my breathing is doing particularly well. I rely on my rescue inhaler more, because those are $30 a pop instead of $300. With luck, good health and a general avoidance of strenuous activities I can stretch one month's worth into almost three.

I'm also bi-polar, although it took years for me to get a correct diagnosis. A circumstance which is in large part responsible for a 9 month gap in my employment history that I gloss over in job interviews as "an illness". On top of the asthma meds, my bi-polar meds cost another $300 a month. So, those too I stretch out, taking half the dose I really need and often going without for a week or so before I can afford to refill my prescription. It's dumb. I know it's dumb. And it effects my relationships and my quality of life, although it does keep me functional enough to work - if I don't mind taking jobs well below my skill or intelligence level.

When I was working as a temp I wasn't making enough to pay for all my meds on time, but I was making too much to qualify for any kind of medications assistance programs. Now that I'm unemployed, I'm finally (hopefully) getting on the free meds program from the drug company that makes all of my meds.

I'm looking for work now, and insurance benefits are a big part of my calculations, but in the present economy it's entirely possible I'll be forced to take another job that doesn't offer them. In which case, I'll at least have a year of the free meds program to cover me and I'll just have to hope I don't get sick with anything else.

John McCain's health care plan terrifies me. I'm relatively young (28), but I come with two pre-existing conditions and a long history of expensive medical care. I'm exactly the kind of person private insurance has no interest in ever covering.

David Dyer-Bennett @27: I don't actually think manual enforced evacuations are necessarily a bad thing. One of the things that always happens in these situations is that some people think they want to stick it out and they'll be fine and realize right before/just as things start getting bad that actually they really should have left. At which point getting out is either impossible or considerably more difficult and requires the assistance of rescue/emergency personnel.

Sometimes our first stubborn instincts are wrong, and sometimes it requires someone else bodily hauling them out of a situation for people to realize that.

I have just never, ever understood people who don't evacuate when they have the option.

I was raised in eastern Washington state. I grew up on stories of of the St. Helen's eruption, and I grew up in the reality of what the term "fire country" means. I will never, ever understand the logic of people who choose to stay behind when they have the time and resources to evacuate (and I know that not everyone always does), especially when their explanation for remaining is an attachment to or desire to protect their home or business. The desire to protect one's property is understandable, but in the end property can be replaced, people can't. No building, no matter how beloved, is worth dying for.

whump @23: I was really impressed by that bit. The "mean guys/girls in high school" complaint is so derided online because it rarely ever works. It's really hard to pull off credibly without coming off as weak of whiny.

I think the trick of it here was the focus on the witty quips. The Republicans in this scenario aren't the playground bullies, they're the class wits, the guys who always have the best one-liners, but nothing else.

Post-RNC the Obama camp have been doing a fairly spectacular job of turning one of the most popular complaints I hear about Obama from undecideds -- the fear that he's all talk and no substance -- back on the Republicans. It's really kind of beautiful to watch.

Great post. Thank you.

I'll second the comments about paying attention if you're on medications and particularly mention antibiotics, many of which already come with a warning to avoid too much sun.

Also, thank you for the mention of Water Intoxication. A good friend of mine died of hyponatremia last summer while training to be a DC bike cop. He was so concerned about keeping hydrated and not getting heat exhaustion that he went too far in the other direction.

Jenett: Thank you for spelling out so thoughtfully what I have been struggling, here and elsewhere, to convey.

Kathryn: keeping SmartFilter and the like off their back is exactly what livejournal's nudity policy is about. That's what several of us have been saying all along. It serves nobody's interests if livejournal gets itself blocked by the largest net-nannies. It's a loss to those users who lose their access and to the rest of us who've lost their addition to the community of livejournal.

We've had this discussion. Enough times we know each others parts by rote, I think. I'm not sure I'm up to rehashing it again in public tonight. However, in response to this:

(There are people on livejournal who are particupating from countries where FAR worse than firing could happen to them if they were caught looking at any number of currently perfectly acceptable default icons. Which is one reason, along with bandwidth issues, why I think there ought to be 'no pics' options on lj. But nobody is seriously suggesting that THEIR community standards be applied to this issue.)

It is in not only possible but fairly easy to set up livejournal so that on one's own livejournal and friendspage there are no icons at all and in communities the community default icon supercedes user icons. And frankly? I wouldn't be surprised if a "no icons anywhere on the site" mod isn't one that's being worked on for implementation, knowing lj and knowing lj users.

On the whole acknowledging vs. rolling over thing? I'm selfish, there I've said it. But I'd rather they roll over a bit on this one if it means that, for example, my niece can still access the site from her school and me from my office. And I still applaud them for having found a way to roll over only just as much as is necessary and no more, livejournal's line on nudity/indecendy/etc. is not perfect, but it's also a far cry from, to use an extreme example, myspace's hiring people to troll user journals looking for questionable content which I think was mentioned somewhere way way upthread

And none of this is regarded as "highly" or even 'mildly' sexual where I, or many hundreds of thousands of other LJ users, come from. There are pro nursing ads with graphics more graphic than that on the Ottawa buses.

That the servers and employees are in the US means that there are issues related to US law, but that is not, in fact, the same thing.

Marna: But that is ultimately what it comes down to.

I could in fact have been fired for reading/participating in this thread from work yesterday, and for making a post in my own livejournal with a nude icon. I chose to do so anyway. a) because I weighed the actual chances of that occuring and determined that they were pretty damn slim b) will be done with the job within the next couple weeks anyway and c) have a bizarrely self-destructive streak at times.

I'm all in favor of bare breasts. And I'd love to live in a world where pictures of bare breasts -- whether breast-feeding or not -- were not something that could lose people their lj access.

But I don't live in that world. It doesn't exist. Livejournal's restrictions on nudity solely in default icons is actually them attempting to tread a very fine line and frankly I applaud them for that. They could say "no nudity in icons period." They haven't and they've shown an admiral disinclination to go that route.

I'm glad that these things are not a problem where you live. I wish I lived there too. (Don't I just.) But they are an issue where a large percentage of livejournals users live and work and they would be doing their users a disservice if they were to refuse to acknowledge that.

Christine. Thank you for the clarification of that. For the sake of civil discourse and all of our sanities I'm glad that turned out to have been an error.

Yes. The rule against nudity in default icons is an arbitrary one. Yes, it's a stupid one too.

But honestly? I don't blame livejournal for adopting it, both for their own legal protection and in order to best serve the interests of a large portion of their customer base.

It is not in the best interests of LJs bottom line or of their users for them to institute practices that increase their likelihood of a) legal repercussions and b) being banned/blocked from schools/libraries/workplaces/etc.

I'm not going to argue that LJAbuse is a perfect system, because it's not. I've seen them handle some situations spectacularly badly in the past and to be honest, while I sympathize with them this time, I think they could have handled aspects of this whole thing better.

Which is why I have a problem with the classification of this as "harrassment" or an "attack" specifically on breastfeeders. LJAbuse responded to this situation with the same policies and actions they would have used regarding any other abuse report.

Framing the issue as a personal attack against a specific group is inaccurate and just serves to alienate many of the protestors most natural potential allies: those who've had issues with LJAbuse and the Abuse system in the past.

Louann? Both of Ataniell's posts are friendslocked.

This is the second time I've seen friendslocked posts linked in this thread (once from each side, I believe.)

The people involved may have very interesting and valid statements to make on the subject. However, they have chosen to make them in a controlled setting and not in a public forum and therefore their wishes on the subject should be respected and discussion of their locked statements kept within that post.

Standard lj etiquette is that it's rude to link to friendslocked posts in public discussions, both to the original poster who chose to control access to their post and to those within the public thread who are not privy to the controlled information being linked.

This is, of course, not lj, but I think it's a reasonable standard to abide by nonetheless.

Charlie, that link is to a friendslocked post.

The funny thing about this is that your blog is a syndicated feed for LJ users to subscribe to. So your images are showing up on LJ today

I'll be curious to see how the LJ Nazis react.

They won't. The issue is solely with default icons, that's it. It has nothing to do with nudity elsewhere on lj.

Further up, Aconite said: I think you're missing that this policy is targeted, by definition, at women performing a biologically female, non-sexual act. It's therefore implying there's something sleazy about this biologically female, non-sexual act. I have a problem with that.

Which is just simply not true. Livejournal has a stated and spelled out policy regarding what is and is not allowed in default icons. As these things often are it is somewhat arbitrary and not open to exceptions and special cases. Honestly, I can't say I blame them. When dealing with a site as big and diversely populated as livejournal, having directly stated, universal policies and applying them across the board seems to me to be the only feasible option.

I have a gorgeous icon that features female nudity. It's an art photograph of a female athlete taken by a famous female photographer. It's not porn. It's certainly not obscene by, I think, any US legal definition. But it is not appropriate as a default icon by the stated rules of the site.

I can only imagine the disaster if LJAbuse had to weigh each icon individually and make an arbitrary ruling as to whether it was "art" and therefore ok or "a natural act" and therefore ok.

Meredith Thank you for saying what I had been sitting here trying to figure out how to say.

I'm not really in her fandom, I just skirt the edges occassionally, but I've run into her in various forums. As much as I've never cared for her, I've always gotten the impression that she was a very genuine person, both in her beliefs and her actions. She's much more the type to say too much when others would be silent then the type to make up something like this as an elaborate hoax. My gut says genuine.

Oh, and hi all, I've been reading over here for a while, this is my first day posting anything.

I've run into this person elsewhere in fandom in the past. She's for real. She's not the only person I know of who's blogging from over there, but she is the only one who's been through something like this.

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