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

Bruce Baugh @16: I think it's appropriately high-minded to recognize evil and name it.

It is. And I in no way object to strong language used in politics - politics is the business of life and death, and appropriately excites strong emotions.

But naming evil is one thing - naming it "whore" is another. Should we countenance, say, racist attacks on Michael Steele on the basis that our cause is pure? The best on the left condemned sexist attacks on Sarah Palin as inherently wrong, because you can't stand for equality except for people you don't like.

K Street hack, K Street lackey, shit-eating K Street scumfuck, make it as strong as you like, but don't attack anyone who doesn't deserve it.

I don't understand why it's controversial at all that Roman Polanski has been arrested. Forget who it is: a man drugged and raped a thirteen-year-old girl, pleaded guilty and then fled the country before he could be sentenced. Why would you not expect him to be arrested as soon as the opportunity presented itself, even if that time was three decades on?

@Sarah, surprised nobody has mentioned the #1 thing that worked for me when I started getting panic attacks: cut out the caffeine. Stop drinking coffee (or Coke or whatever) completely if you can, and no more than one a day. Instantly cut my attacks in half.

The other thing that worked for me is the beta blockers my doctor prescribed - have you spoken to your doctor?

Nothing else worked for me, except cutting down on one drug and starting on another. Deep breathing didn't do squat, and I despise meditation. Mileage varies all over the place, but as far as I'm concerned, it's a physical problem with physical solutions.

Oh, except for one other useful thing: if anyone ever tells you, mid-attack, to "calm down", "relax" or "stop worrying", explain gently but firmly (or at any rate firmly) that this advice is both perfectly useless and insultingly vapid to somebody's who's panicking. The quicker you get everyone who knows you out of that habit, the better.

Candle: good to know I'm not the only one who gritted their teeth on seeing it.

I've heard a few times that socialised healthcare is Unfathomably Complex And Bureaucratic. I actually work in the NHS bureaucracy, and it is extremely complex (I work for the office that controls and issues guidelines for prescriptions in my borough, including five prescription targets per quarter - this quarter we're trying to get prescriptions of one particular statin down as a percentage of overall statin prescriptions because it's less cost-effective and blah blah blah forever) - but all of this is only your problem if you actually work in the system. From the point of view of the patient, you just go to your doctor and get seen to, with nothing more complicated to think about than how often you have to take these new pills.

Here is an example (pdf) of the sort of terribly complex form you have to fill out as a patient. It's not exactly Kafka.

It's a small thing, but surely the "in Britain they leave old people to die" thing can be refuted by one data point (well, two): life expectancy is higher in the UK than in the US. So if we really are murdering old people, we're clearly not doing it in anything like the numbers you manage in the States.

Dental care is the only healthcare I've paid for (except for prescriptions; unless you fall into one of various concessions and exemptions, prescriptions all cost a flat free of about £8 to fill). Can any USians tell me how the prices compare? I had three fillings (where my gums had receded) and it cost around £75, including the initial checkup when he told me I'd need them.

I can't believe, that when I'm trying to apply for jobs, TNH would link to TVTropes on the sidebar. I opened that link, then clicked "Friendly Neighbourhood Vampire". From there, I have now opened, simultaneously in tabs, the pages "Always Chaotic Evil", "Sealed Evil In A Can", "Immortality Immorality", "Horror Hunger", "Warm Bloodbags Are Everywhere", "Cursed With Awesome" and "Our Vampires Are Different". I AM SUPPOSED TO BE WORKING.

(I can't be bothered to find the xkcd strip relating to my current situation, but it's recent)

The obligatory reference to an earlier use of the punchline.

Giacomo, thanks for the correction. According to WikiAnswers, it's specifically that "no Roman Catholic or Jew may advise the sovereign on ecclesiastical matters", which explains why Brown hasn't had any trouble.

Amanda's is great, but is just handicapped by her being the wrong gender for the song, like if a male singer tried to cover something like "Sun Comes Up It's Tuesday Morning".

I've never been bothered by that sort of thing - Siouxsie and the Banshees' cover of "20th Century Boy", Placebo's cover of "Jackie", all these work fine for me.

Exactly how religious the UK is varies a lot depending on what question is asked.

If citizens are asked to tick a box next to which religion you are, with one of them being "no religion" and also a write-in box for less common ones, as on census forms, 71% of people are Christians according to the last census in 2001. But if you ask people specifically if they believe in "a God", less than 40% of the country does. 33% of people described themselves as "religious" (so we have lots of Christians who aren't religious), and of those who did describe themselves as religious, 50% "do not practice religion very much, if at all". And in only 17% of Britons is religion "one of the most significant factors in their lives". Church attendance on Sunday was 7.5% in 1999. (source for all this).

I think this presents a great snapshot of institutional inertia. A solid majority of the country is not religious in any significant sense. But various trappings of religion have hung around. Charlie above mentioned compulsory daily service in state schools (daily assembly in my state primary school frequently had a Christian theme, although Hindu stories were told quite often). Catholics are technically still forbidden from being Prime Minister (one of the first things Tony Blair did on leaving office was make his conversion official). For that matter, Bishops of the Church of England have an automatic seat in the upper house of our legislature! We are institutionally one of the more religious countries in Europe, and demographically one of the least. It's very odd.

Anna #72: hmm, somebody nicked the BNP's membership lists a little while back, so we should be able to see how many people we'd need to get a majority...

Unfortunately joining the BNP can have serious consequences. At my university we forced out a member of one of the student union committees who was on the aforementioned list, and I believe a police officer was sacked for the same reason.

Well, we already have a state-sponsored religion in the UK, that ship sailed a long time ago.

I don't believe religious schools should get government money, or be allowed to discriminate, secular lefty that I am. There was a minor controversy a while back over a government-funded school in the UK teaching young-earth creationism, which is exactly the sort of shit I thought we were above in Europe...

Charlie #31: yeah, it's quite depressing that I get an unpleasant twinge if I see a publicly displayed Union flag. It shouldn't be a symbol of nationalism and racism - but that is one of its meanings.

To clarify, two Members of the European Parliament are from the BNP, including the Man Himself Nick Griffin (yes, since you ask, it is a comment on how pathetic his party is that the head of the party is standing as an MEP, generally a haven for eighth- or ninth-stringers at best). They have also successfully infected a few local councils, one county council, and the Greater London Assembly. They haven't reached the UK Parliament yet, and god knows we'll be taking to the streets when they do.

And I don't predict them much electoral success with British Jews, not while we have all these lovely videos of Griffin denying the Holocaust.

Wait, why have we been calling Sotomayor a Democrat? (#122, #126 & I think elsewhere) I'm not aware of any party affiliation, and couldn't find any on her Wikipedia page. She's being nominated by a Democratic President to the SC, but she was nominated to the District court by the first Bush...

Summer Storms: recently faced a similar situation, but of less magnitude from the sounds of it. First thing I do is cut my caffeine intake down to a cup a day at most, or entirely eliminate it if that doesn't help. If I'm still paralysed by panic, I renew my prescription for beta blockers - they work wonders at keeping my heartrate down and stopping me grinding my teeth to a paste. My problems, though, are very much tied up with this disorder...

Weighing in briefly on the "African-American" debate: when we have an institution that uses this category (scholarships for African-Americans, African-American Student President, etc), its purpose is generally to act as a counterbalance for institutional discrimination. Given that intent, white people shouldn't be identifying as African-American for the purposes of these institutions, since they're not racially discriminated against in the USA. This is the heart of it as far as I can see.

According to the Beeb, the Fox execs were comparing Dollhouse to Firefly in terms of ratings (i.e. pretty bad), but also took into account that Firefly sold a shedload of DVDs and turned into a movie (that I recall actually made an okay profit), and apparently predict a similar trajectory for Dollhouse. This is encouraging news, as it seems to imply the ability for TV executives to learn from mistakes and associate past outcomes with future possibilities, activity previously only observed in mammals.

Looks like fun! Sorry Amsterdam is beyond my means for the moment - living day to day in London is hard enough...

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