As someone who was bullied, I doubt this would do a thing to help me or others like me.
As someone who protested the school board stripping the student rep of all rights, if I lived anywhere near I'd be writing letters to my senator.
As a Christian, this is so far from being one of the things I've had to defend myself or my religion for, it hardly registers.
(Though at least it's current. Trying to convince people that neither Jesus nor I should be held personally responsible for the Crusades or whatever gets a little tedious.)
@5: You ought to listen to more folk music; the Irish, at least, have such a disregard for the song's gender that my husband has been trying to research whether it's actually traditional to sing from the opposite gender's POV.
Deciding to take Irish Gaelic for fun. Five years later I'm married to the teacher and have a degree in linguistics. We're planning to have children soon, and we hope to raise them speaking the language.
@29: I feel you. I loved the concept of The Graveyard Book so much when I first heard about it that it could never have matched my expectations. A matter of Platonic ideals and all that, I suppose. But other than the slight niggle of disappointment, I very much enjoyed it.
@26: Oddly enough, I had never considered that aspect of it, though I have occasionally wondered about the reliability of whoever plucks the votes from the mail and counts them.
@23: What state do you live in? Because I'm now a fan.
@9: Oh, my mom, husband and I all vote absentee; the mail part wouldn't bother me but for two points: I think that requiring people to pay a fee to vote (though granted, a stamp is a small one) is illegal, and secondly, anyone hearing about this today and trying to vote by mail is SOL.
As for where he went, I got this all from my mom, so I'm not sure how that part of the story played out. But my parents are dedicated voters and their polling place has suddenly changed the last year or so. He would have had to check the back of his voter info pamphlet to go anywhere. (It used to be in the National Guard Armory, but at least the primary and possibly the election before that were at an old church.)
As for how my dad felt about it... I'm not sure I can repeat his sentiments in polite company.
I don't know who's behind it, but my dad just got hit with some 'irregularities' as he went to vote-- they refused to let him on the grounds that, since no one in the area had offered their garage or whatever as a polling place, all the area votes had to be submitted by mail.
I will pause to let that absorb.
He made a scene, got to vote and got a complaint form... but I can't help but wonder what happened to all the other people they fed that line to. Absentee votes have to be received by today to count here, I believe. And it's not even like it's a rural area and they can claim that driving out to the polls is a hardship; this is a suburb of San Diego, for god's sake! I am livid, and I don't even want to know how my dad feels about it.
@12:
What's the matter with you today?
When?
What?
Are you deaf?
Am I dead?
Yes or no?
Is there a choice?
Is there a God?
Foul! No non sequiturs! Three... two, one game all.
Yeah, our Navy is getting retrained and shipped to Afghanistan whether they like it or not.
[delurks also]
Today I'll spend my time sewing a nightgown for a dear friend who is getting married at the end of the month. After that I will finish packing for vacation--our very first as a married couple.
"Congresscritters." I like it. And it's off to their respective webpages I go...
Though I don't mean to be a wet blanket when I say that the cynic in me dourly predicts this changing nothing.
But hey, there's always hope.
If your basic reaction to the UCLA story is to tut-tut over people making generalizations about cops, allow me to suggest that you have some priorities you need to reconsider.
As my sister goes to UCLA, my first thought on the story was something along the lines of, oh my god, was she there? And general worry about her safety on a campus like that. My second thought was about how much that incident completely sucked.
My first reaction to the comments is what I posted. If I'd been the first one to post (which I wouldn't have been, as I only hang here occasionally and have never posted before) I would have commented on the incident itself. Instead I read other people's reactions, and it just bothered me personally. It's a personal beef more than anything else.
Not that it's unusual for police to beat and torture their victims...
Sherwood, #3. The basic answer is, "They're the cops."
I acknowledge that all cops, LEOs, etc are people-- but that's my point. They're people. Individual, different, not some amorphous mass of Other. My biggest problem with the reporting of incidents like this is the tendency of the discussion to go "cops did such-and-such..."
A while back here in SD a man used his own baby as a human shield in a shoot-out. When "the cops" rescued the baby and brought the guy down, what was the headline? Not "Cops save baby". No, it was, "Cops shoot man with baby".
Sure, what these particular guys did was evil. Pure cruelty by anyone's measures. But by generalizing this way you discount every officer who spends his or her life fighting to do the right thing and protecting the same people who call them brutes.
And if you've never met one of the good guys, you need to get out more.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 5 |
| 2008 | 8 |
| 2006 | 3 |
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