The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Nancy Lebovitz:

Palin on hospitality to vegetarians

As for feeling compelled to repeat mistakes, once upon a time I had an apazine called "The Gostik Nospels". I still think it's a cute name, but decades later, I have to think very carefully if I want to refer to the gnostic gospels.

#117 ::: heresiarch:

I think the skills needed for reading science fiction apply for historical fiction if you're reading hf about a period you're not familiar with and you're interested in deducing what's going on.

If you're familiar with the period or you just want a preferred flavor of exoticism, not so much.

Any theories about why the popular version of Frankenstein is so different from the book? Is it just that it's more fun to think about monsters than responsibility, or is there something deeper?

Speaking only as one reader of the stuff, I still like big cool ideas, and find accurate prediction very satisfying. There's lots of wonderful things about Simak's City, but it also starts off with an automated lawn mower.

I'm not totally bored by vampires or elves, either. I consider this to be good luck.

#54 ::: Jacob Davies:

Interesting essay, and I do think that purpose is harder to identify as life gets easier.

Afaik, many religions don't use heaven as a major motivation. Judaism doesn't.

I'm not sure where health care fits into your argument -- it's an indication that basic survival stuff isn't solved.

#79 ::: Wesley :

It may be that the temperament which drew you to science fiction that makes historical fiction accessible for you, rather than the time you spent reading science fiction.

I don't think that's all there is to liking historical fiction, or to liking history for that matter.

There's a particular pleasure in thinking that something really happened, just as there's a particular pleasure in the imagination which isn't bound by facts.

Not everyone is strongly motivated by both pleasures.

#227 ::: heresiarch:

The issue isn't that businesses fail to make people efficient profit-maximizers--it's that the employees aren't being paid to maximize profit. They're being paid the exact same hourly rate whether the company turns a profit that hour or not. People with no stake in doing their job well won't do it well--in fact they'll do it poorly, because doing it poorly is easier and they'll trend towards maximizing their effort/reward ratio.

It's not just what employees are being paid for-- it's hard to devise an incentive payment scheme which only rewards what you want and doesn't damage cooperation.

My point was that if management really cared about profits they'd set up an environment (point covered in detail in other comments) which encourages and makes it feasible to offer good customer service.

#210 ::: Evan:

People in business (at every level) are exactly like people. Both free market and Marxist economists seem apt to think that business magically makes people efficient profit maximizers, and I think the Marxists are a little worse about it.

People are apt to lose out personally because of prejudice (not making friends they might otherwise make, for example), and being paid doesn't automatically mean that prejudice is no longer a habit or that fear of other people's prejudice goes away.

If there's prejudice in a society, there will be be (generally unprofitable) prejudice in that society's commerce.

Your point about ignoring something taking more work than paying attention to it is a half-truth. It's work to ignore something or someone when it or they have registered on your consciousness, but it's also work to notice whatever you have a habit of not letting into your consciousness.

#677 ::: Terry Karney:

What's the formal difference between a reward for good behavior and a bribe?

#97 ::: Xopher:

Without going into any details, I've had some problems with noticing people, and I assure you that it doesn't require training.

#114 Janet backs this up.

#117 ::: Caroline:

Sudden improvements in service in a bad economy make me nervous because it reminds me how bad the economy is.

I started going invisible when I was 40, but talking a little louder seems to have solved it.

As for general attitudes about middle-aged and older women, I'm very tired of "not your mother's X" and "not your grandmother's Y". It's almost as though anything associated with women past 40 or so obviously inferior.

#604 ::: heresiarch:

Unfortunately, we don't have the alternate universe with Colin Powell as president for comparison.

I don't know whether it makes a difference, but I'm wondering how many of the people in that sweat lodge had so much money that 10K wouldn't make a big difference to them, how many had enough to spare that they could splurge on a hobby of self-improvement, and how many were making a last desperate throw of the dice.

I've read about teaching a small child that cars are dangerous by putting a bag of sticks in the street and then letting the child see what happens to the sticks when they're run over.

Do people here who've had experience with children think it would work?

Minor point: my name is Lebovitz. If you don't look at the spelling carefully, the odds are high of getting it wrong.


****

So far as the availability of spiritual sustenance goes, I think it's there in the mainstream religions, but the locations aren't clearly marked.

My take on the problem is influenced by Idris Shah, who made the point that when you start on a spiritual quest, you don't necessarily know what you're doing. It's amusing (this is me speaking, not Shah) that people are so sure about something they don't have experience with.

****

As for Ray, it's intriguing that he may have gotten entangled in malevolent magic without intending to. At the moment, I'm more inclined to think he had a mean streak (got a kick out of not letting people have what they wanted), and he got away with a little more and a little more until he overreached and killed people.

After all, there are a lot of sociopaths and sadists running cults and scams, and very few of them kill people. Maybe the interesting question is what make Ray take the brakes off as much as he did.

#93 ::: Constance:

That reminds me-- the cliche about WWII in the US is "we all pulled together", but aside from the people (blacks, Japanese-Americans) who weren't well included in the "we", was there any increase in inclusiveness, or was it more that people were making greater efforts, but with a little more division than before the war?

#330 ::: The Raven"

It seems to me that a big part of the reason these "instant enlightenment" scams are so popular is because there are no legitimate outlets for spiritual hunger in our society.

It seems to me that there's any quantity of outlets for spiritual hunger-- but there are no high quality mainstream, more-or-less vetted outlets.

If your judgment isn't good enough to start out with recognizing what's worthwhile, you're screwed unless you're very lucky.

#283 ::: C. Wingate:

I did look at the amazon reviews, which were mixed, as well as at the "worse of" web page. He advocates hitting children for defiance, presumably until they give in completely.

Now this could work out reasonably well if the parents' demands are doable, and the child basically trusts the parents.

If the demands are impossible or too extreme, or if the child just isn't compliant with being hit, then Dobson's advice is going to lead to abuse.

I also don't much like his advice to use an object to hit with. Not only does this result in less feedback for the parent as to how hard they're hitting, but I can't imagine being stupid enough to physically trust my parents' hands just because they happen not to have a hitting object in them at the moment.

Also, that "worst of" page has rather a lot of insults about children. One of the underlying points seens to be that if the parent wants to discipline, the child is never in the right.

I'm not sure I see a huge difference between "invites abuse" and "advocates abuse", though there is a difference.

#216 ::: C. Wingate:

I'm not sure exactly what in the quote you're disagreeing with.

However, here's a list of the more offensive bits from Dare to Discipline-- "beating a child into submission" doesn't seem like an unfair reading.

The amazon reviews may imply that the effect of the book (on both parents and children) is pretty variable, but it does seem to be an excuse for abuse at least some of the time.

#236 ::: KeithS:

This reminds me of something I've read: that believing pain = failure is a symptom of having been abused. It sounds plausible to me, but I don't have evidence or a system that it's from.

Any thoughts?

#198 ::: JESR

Good point. I'll avoid that mistake in the future.

I've also seen somewhat from Native Americans that their religion is about their ancestors, and what's wrong with these white imitators who are neglecting their own ancestors?

Republican Gommarah is a book about the current Republican party being dominated by the politics of personal crisis.

In particular, there's a lot about James Dobson (Dare to Discipline), a child psychologist who's built a movement of people who come to him (his staff) for advice, and who then get lots of advertising to push them into political action.

If the teabaggers seem crazy, there's a reason.

Fair warning: I've read about the book, but haven't read it.

I would like all this much better if it were fiction. It works very nicely as fictional villainy. See Purdom's "The Barons of Behavior" (bad guys manipulate neighborhoods to be attractive to particular psychological types, thus making political control easier because propaganda can be precisely targeted) and Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky (dictatorship rules by creating and ameliorating Emergencies).

Comment statistics for Nancy Lebovitz on the Making Light blog

Total: 104 comments. View all these comments on a single page.