ewps - it might be easy to misunderstand context in the way I used the word 'books'. I am referring to their numbers, not their words.
Just a thought. Is it possible that Harlequin's books look worse than they're letting on? Is this perhaps more a desperate move than a greedy one?
Granted that's unlikely; romance still dominates the paperback shelves and it's not as though Harlequin has any competition. But still, I wouldn't be betting on any for-profit media sitting pretty right now. These 'tubes are awfully disruptive to the market.
I must protest against this abomination of using a W to indicate extra knoledge. Anyone who survived the last eight years knos W is the opposite of knoledge, and putting extra Ws in the word is an oxymoron at best.
SeanH @ 100
It's important to differentiate valid from invalid emulation. All science (and all learning) depends to some degree on emulation working - if you do the same thing over again, it should work the way it did the first time, unless something changed. If emulation didn't work, nothing would ever work twice.
Where cargo cultism diverges from valid science is, in a way, a matter of degree, not kind: it is emulation only of the surface, most obvious, features of a phenomenon. Cargo cultism equals superficiality.
Once one understands the essential elements of a thing (and only then), one can emulate it successfully -- sometimes by stripping out inessential elements, improving on the process and making it more efficient. A cargo cultist, on the other hand, sees the superficial aspects of a thing and believes herself to understand the whole of the thing.
Huh. Until I wrote that, I never realized that excessive focus on efficiency can lead to cargo cultism. But it's obvious now that I think about it.
> anagram for Mongo?
Why, yes. I have gone by "Image" (or, where the pretension is properly recognized as ironic, "iMage") in some online fora, but this common name tends already to be taken in most mature environs. But yes, Peart proved they're equivalent.
And since I don't game nearly as much as I'd like, it's appropriate on another level.
ObTopic: when you were called "intolerant", it seems like it is more rudeness that was being objected to than intolerance. Consider the genesis of this thread, where Sanders was intolerant, but the person who posted excerpts of his letter was (by some social yardsticks) rude, and all sorts of people are hiding behind their objections to the latter in order to avoid confronting the former.
(It's safe to shun rude people. It's not safe to shun racists; racists are typically armed, crazy, and stupid: a bad combination to piss off.)
Having been in enough situations where I alienated people who agreed with me by being too strident, I've started to recognize the virtue of finding ways to express displeasure with another's values politely. Not terribly good at it yet, though.
Re Anna way back on #14 - I think "to illicit sympathy" is one of the most malaproppriate phrases I've ever read, and I think it deserves to become an idiom. "To illicit" is to elicit illicitly.
My father once compared Clarke to O. Henry, and said Clarke did O. Henry endings better than O. Henry did.
Not just the twist at the end but the particular sort of twist at
the end that you really could have seen coming, but only if you were
already cosmically attuned in the right way.
Rendezvous with Rama was my favorite of his works: one of the
best instances of a novel changing its entire feel in the final
sentence. He never shoulda written sequels. (I refused to touch them.)
This election has the potential for a whole slew of vanity candidates -- Nader, Bloomberg, R*n Pa*l, hey, maybe we can get Roy Moore to run since the wacky evangelicals need to vote for somebody. Don't just limit yourself to Nader. The opportunities for throwing your vote away on some delusional egomaniac will be plentiful.
In the earlier discussion about fear vs power, may I posit that one of the reasons for people to drive to acquire power over others is the fear of what's otherwise going to happen if "those people" are allowed to do what they want?
I.e. seeking power and reacting from fear are not mutually exclusive. Wanting the power to enforce heterosexuality is not even remotely divorced from the fear of what God will do to cultures who tolerate gays (or, alternatively, the fear of how you yourself might react when propositioned by a gay person). The desire to exert power over the Middle East certainly wasn't divorced from the fear of what Middle Easterners were doing.
I think it's hard even to come up with any movement toward authoritarianism that didn't have lizard-brained fear at its root.
"And that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown."
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|---|---|
| 2009 | 5 |
| 2008 | 4 |
| 2007 | 1 |
| 2004 | 1 |
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