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

I don't properly have SAD... I just hate the cold so much that I stay home 90% of winter, and then get depressed naturally from spending so much time home alone breathing foul air staring at the TV screen eating junk-food.

Plastic cutting boards are bad for your knives. I'm pretty sure glass boards are too, but *shrug* It's wood, wood, or wood... for my money.

Then again, if you're using cheap serrated knives, it doesn't much matter, does it?

I'm not an expert on paying for spiritual guidance... but is it normal to pay $10,000 to not eat, not drink, and not breathe air?

From my very limited experience with self-help people, their line is that they're doing THIS because they want to share their happiness. If that's your line, how do you really justify exceeding expenses?

Then again, paying more money sometimes makes people feel MORE comfortable for what they're getting regardless of what it is. (In America, I'd be nervous about buying sushi for a dollar a plate, out of fear of bad fish... because I don't feel able to judge safety myself... see also Bruce Schneier's stuff about assymmetric knowledge in the security industry?) is that the sort of thinking that makes somebody pay $10,000 to be deprived of bodily needs? (assuming I'm interested in being deprived in the first place))

Truthseeker @20

It's been a long time since heads of state were actually expected to chop off heads in battle, or design castles. They give speeches. It's the primary work-day task of their position.

So, what has he done, other than his job? Well... pretty much, just the other tasks involved in his job.

Michael Roberts @8

Have you ever tried to be sarcastic in a shrill tone of voice? It doesn't work. Next time you're hanging out with your friends, try it. You'll find that you've totally hit the mark on the, "unconsidered pejorative for progressive speech," but kinda fell short of, "things that form effective symbols in the real world."

Summer Storms @2

If they didn't have the decency to do the right thing because it was The Right Thing, why would they do it to honor the memory of somebody else who tried (I'm not going to speak to his success) to?

Are we so driven by the personalities around us, that only that will drive us to the proper actions? Aren't there better reasons to do The Right Thing before and beside Kennedy's death? If those reasons failed to move behavior...

Bill Higgins @1
Everything that you don't already specifically know you're only "okay" at, from carefully studying it and discovering that you don't know as much as there is to know.

Rob Rusick @77

That was a big part of the Christian Science sect. But it's certainly not a mainstream religious belief (that modern medicine is thwarting God's will for how and when people die).

The simplest counter-point is "God helps those who help themselves." Not that I have the SLIGHTEST idea where that expression came from, and am TOTALLY aware of its "God doesn't actually do anything undercurrent," it still expresses a popular attitude among religious people. (That you should do whatever YOU can to make your life better, and not SIMPLY expect God to hand you a good (or in this case, long) life).

Lee @73
I'm not confident that it's a way of avoiding the sin of suicide. More likely, to me, is the over-reliance on anecdotes of full and unexpected recovery. The belief that doctors aren't competent to judge a probability of regained consciousness (or whatever else was lost) despite the fact that they're paying lots of money to those same doctors to extend the patient's life.

They hear a story like my oldest brother...

He had a stroke at a young age, and my parents were told he'd never feed himself, much less have the mental capacity of an adult.
Of course, he's approaching 40, and just finished school. AGAIN. (his 2nd master's degree, following his Ph.D) So, maybe he is mentally retarded, right at the age of post-graduate education! But I kind of doubt it had anything to do with the stroke.

And they decide that when a doctor says "It's grim," that the doctor in question just doesn't know what he's talking about.

What I like about this story is that 4chan was under a DoS attack for several weeks, and kind of rolls its eyes and keeps on doing... whatever they do there. AT&T, in the process of carrying that DoS attack says "Oh my god, we're all going to die."

This is not unique to IT. The other American woman in the village and I often feel that our failures in Dutch language and manners reflect badly on every one of the 307 million people in the United States. Individually. Sorry about that.

As a relatively rare breed in my current country of residence (white, in Japan), I feel a huge pressure to be as polite as I'm capable of. If I am walking down a street, and an old lady says something in my general direction IN AMERICA, I'll ignore it 99% of the time. Here, in Japan, where somehow, I feel that my behavior can/will impact people's perceptions of white people in general (or even just young, long-haired, white males) I'll stop and see if she was trying to talk to me, and if so, see if I can figure out what she wanted. I cross against traffic lights much much less. I take off my headphones when dealing with convenience store cashiers...

Yes, those are things that I should do anyway. But when I'm the only thing on the line, it's often not worth it (to me).

I have no idea if it's a good thing, or a bad thing. But there is a certain way in which people become representatives, whether they want to or not...

Thanks to the assorted and several for jostling my highly inaccurate view of the Pope's absoluteness in authority.

Steve Buchheit #24
The cardinals would rebel
See, this is back to the heart of my question... What happens if The Pope believes a religious doctrine (in this case, the rumored belief of Mary's equality to Jesus) and the Cardinals rebel?

Can they say, "Wait wait wait... he's not really the mouthpiece of God! When we consulted with God to help us choose the next Pope, we were all wrong!"

Do the Cardinals (or anybody else within The Church) actually have power over The Pope? Or power to make his job difficult? Can they obstruct his work (short of physical violence)?

Julia #14:

Right, I guess that's a more complete reason why he'd say that... but it fails to answer the more important question: Is there actually any reason why The Pope would do that.

I am not a Catholic, and to be honest I don't know all that much about Catholic doctrine, but I'm surprised to hear that a recent convert to Catholicism claim that THE POPE needs to play politics.

I thought the whole deal with The Pope was everybody else on the planet has two choices (here presented in Papal Preference Order):
1- Follow his lead
2- Go to Hell

The idea that The Pope would make official signed statements to maintain order among subordinates seems really weird to me.
Can somebody explain to me why The Pope would do such a thing? Or was Weigel simply falling into the trap of an over-extended metaphor ("It is politically astute to point out political motivations of my political rivals. The Pope is an important person so he plays the same political games that I'm personally surrounded with. I can be politically astute by disparaging The Pope by pointing out (imagined?) political motivations.")

But like I've indicated twice already, I might be assuming The Pope is more independent than he truly is...

Xeger @17
I really don't think the "pride" situation in Japan is what you think it is. Shame is the primary social corrective force here, but the struggle to succeed doesn't seem to me to be based on fear of shame. Fear of disappointing your superiors, and your co-workers. Which, at least to me, seems very different.
There is collective responsibility (companies officially apologize when their employees do illegal things unrelated to their work (particularly in the case of celebrities)), but I don't have any evidence that it really applies to most people. If you're the child of a famous family (as a concrete, real-life example, you're Taro Aso, and your sister is married to a cousin of the Emperor, and you're the Prime Minister of Japan, people complain to YOU about how your family ran mines during WW2) you are capable of actually damaging your family with your actions. If you're just a normal person, and you flunk out of college (which is relatively difficult in Japan) your father probably doesn't brag about you, but it's not going to change his place in life give or take jokes (which may or may not hurt his feelings).

Heresiarch @22
Amusingly, until I reached the footnote, I wasn't sure if you were disagreeing with me, or giving an example!
At any rate, it certainly seems that getting everybody on the same ship before the meeting is a good idea. But it also doesn't seem like it's always possible (emergency "What happened" meetings, meetings with clients or suppliers, probably others)

And, here I must disclaim, my knowledge of Japanese history is spotty, I just live there, I didn't grow up with 6 years of it in history class or anything, BUT it was my understanding that the Imperial Army of Japan did whatever it wanted because it had all the political capital at the time. The diet was, for whatever reason, out of favor with the citizenry and the Emperor had been a figure-head for centuries. (arbitrarily drawing the line when the Emperor handed enough power to the Kamakura Bakufu that the first Shogun (as we know the term) took control of the country and claiming that while the Meiji Restoration supposedly restored the Emperor to power, it actually gave the power to a bureaucracy staffed primarily by the people who overthrew the Edo Bakufu).
With nationalism and military pride at a relative high-point, people were answering to the military leadership rather than the other way around.
Then again, I may have just said exactly what you did. The Emperor, in his official capacity could have ended them... but there weren't other practical/political options.

Bruce Cohen @23
It's definitely not the way things were ever presented to me in America. There, at least inspiring it was, "You do this much or you're fired." (working on campus during college) And at most inspiring "Do as much as you and we can all get filthy rich!" (at a few different internet start-up companies, none of which made ME rich, but did manage to make other people varying levels of rich). The idea of maintaining a company's existence, standards, and brand for the sake of my co-workers was new to me when I got to Japan. Of course, that's just my personal story, ymmv, etc.

That emphasis on the group over the individual continues to this day. I noticed that when the management of my company presented our code of conduct, they emphasized that these rules expressed what we owed to our colleagues, even more than to the company or to our clients.
This matches, essentially identically to things I heard when I started to work for Japanese companies. You do your job correctly, because otherwise your co-workers are out of a job. You don't misbehave in front of clients, because if you do, your co-workers are out of business.

One thing we certainly might learn: the polder model requires both unsparing bluntness in stating one’s own views, and nearly endless patience in listening to the opinions of others.
Interestingly, this is kind of the opposite of how Japan seems to have come about. The community aspects led to a "fuzzy" language where speaking one's opinions, needs, and desires clearly is a (usually) tolerated personality flaw. They seemed to figure out ways to agree with their neighbors while actually disagreeing. Ways of saying "Of course you're right, let's do that," that don't actually settle the discussion. (I've heard, from Japanese businessmen, that meetings are frequently long...)

It's just another page in the book of "Wow, they do the same things in totally different ways." In this case, that large lumbering masses of collected humans found totally different ways to culturally enforce habits that don't lead to frustrated murder.

TruePatriot @114

Is it honestly your intention to state that nothing in those memos causes severe pain and suffering? Really? Seriously? Even if you don't like that wording, the Red Cross is the designated body that defines torture, and it said that stuff that some of what happened in GitMo was torture (I don't know whether the stuff the Red Cross declared as torture was stuff in the memos)

Or is it your mistaken belief that international treaties to which the U.S. is a party are not part of US law? (This belief would allow the US to define torture in its own way, and would then allow a different definition to demarcate violations of the 8th Amendment). And that's just on the unimportant side topic of whether it was legal under US law, because it certainly wasn't under international law, and the US has an obligation to prosecute those crimes anyway.

Wyman @100

Stopping it isn't enough.
As it stands now, Obama has said, "My administration doesn't torture, because it's against what America is about." Which is fine for the next 3.5-7.5 years. I mean, it's better than nothing. But it is explicitly taking the stand that it is not a president's responsibility to fix the oversights of a previous president. That's out and out foolishness.

"I didn't do it, and I won't do it," is definitely not enough. The correct message here is, "If the president commits crimes and encourages his staff to commit crimes, he will find that when he is out of power, he is in jail."
Yes, it encourages criminal presidents to not lose power... but the other way encourages criminals to become president. (You should note that it makes as much difference either way.)

On a personal note, President Obama's refrain of looking forward, not backward gives me the "who did he have to cut deals with to become president" willies. But I know there's a simpler, truer explanation. Also, on that topic. "Looking forward" and "moving forward" should both include prosecution. It's not as if legitimate prosecutions ever occur in advance of the crimes. Prosecution is always backward looking, and it annoys me that President Obama is just broadly, generally, platitudinally (pardon me for not finding a real word that carries this meaning) uninterested in prosecution.

Zander @26

You are, of course, correct. Skin-thickness and talent are orthogonal. But the question is, if they're thin-skinned, and did things correctly, why are they getting offended?

Are they're so thin skinned they're getting offended on other people's behalf... well... the world is a tough place, and it'll probably take thicker skin to bring their work into the world. I'm not sure if editors and agents are midwives of work, or authors... but I have my suspicion.

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