Yonmei: [wrt fostering a Shia Muslim girl] A couple of years later, the family of a Jewish friend at her school offered to foster her, and she wanted to be fostered by them, but the social workers turned this family down because it was council policy only to home children with families of their own cultural/ethnic origin.
This encapsulates the damned-whatever-you-do problem faced by social workers; I've seen this policy described as the result of flamage about "genocide" by speakers-for-minorities, who may be right in some cases but certainly not all. Given such a shortage of time, it's hard to exercise judgment against the rulebook and not to be punished for it regardless of whether it works out -- and having followed the rules provides \some/ cover in case of a catastrophe.
Lydia: Sexual abuse has real potential as a way to screw with the victim’s head, precisely because other people view it with such horror.
This sounds to me like cause and effect being swapped. From what I've read, a victim of abuse will run from the possibility of consensual sex regardless of what the partner knows of their history. The pain of their experience was immediate and present (it did not begin with -"What did you do to get yourself abused?"-); even a child so innocent as not to understand any of the pleasure that can be connected to sexuality will have a harder time dealing with pain inflicted during "You want this!" than with pain that is \supposed/ to hurt (e.g. punishment).
Rachael: I agree with what you said about Koresh too, I think the “he was sleeping with the girls” was an attempt by the government to justify the fact that they got in a chest-bumping match that they couldn’t back down from.
There was very credible testimony afterwards about what Koresh was up to.
Not that it was an excuse for the mess the government made; IIRC, Koresh was in town several times a week and could have been picked up any time. The rest of the community might or might not have turtled up, but with the prime (or sole) abuser out of the way they would have had some chance to work themselves through; Waco does not appear to have been a place where most of the adult males were abusers as Short Creek is.
Mitch: - If both work, whose career takes precedence when the careers come into conflict? And they will.
I expect that depends on what they think of their careers. At one point my wife observed there was a lot of work for her in some centrally remote location; she was even less interested in leaving here (let alone moving to there) than I was. Our work was somewhere between job and career, which I understand is much more common now than the sort of "Daddy has to move to advance" psychodrama in Meet Me in St. Louis. (The change is recent; my uncle (b 1927) moved Austin-Dallas-Chicago-Nashville for Honeywell. But it is different for our generation.)
Even better: why were things allowed to get to this point in the first place?
Karen's given you a good answer: because the people who might know don't have the authority or the time. Another reason is that the U.S. still (mostly) believes in local sovereignty; without a clear indication something is (still) going wrong in a way the locality can't or won't handle, higher authorities -- especially in states that believe in rugged individualism -- are short a good reason to step in.
Karen: At least the kids in Short Creek have the comfort of a lifelong religious belief system when they are finally of an age to realize what their life has been and will be.
I am baffled by this attitude; it sounds to me like "At least they're so brainwashed that they can think what's happening to them is right." (I doubt that's what you intended, but that's what it sums out to.) And as for "what their life has been and will be" -- why? Why must their life be nasty and brutish if not short? (Some women can survive bearing many children; many can't, especially when they're abused and surviving on food stamps.) And if they do realize what their life has been and make it as it should be -- how comforting can a belief system be that put them in such a life? Yes, I understand some people try to find good in such beliefs, and some find others.
PNH: Potstickers: generic slang term for various types of small Oriental-style dumplings, sold out of grocery-store frozen-food cases.
Christopher Davis: Potstickers are generally known in Boston as "Peking ravioli" for whatever reason. Gyoza is probably a more useful term for these.
I do not speak or read Chinese (any version), so I've had to take someone else's word that the Chinese name (sometimes ~rendered as "guo ti'eh") actually \means/ "pot stickers" -- which would make sense as they're flat-bottomed and normally served scorched on one side. (They're more appetizing than that sounds.) It's a widely-used term -- the only meal I've eaten in San Francisco's Chinatown was at a place called the Pot Sticker. "gyoza" I've only seen used for the Japanese version, with a much thinner skin around a smaller bit of filling. Both are a ~circle of dough pulled up on both sides, crimped in a single seam, and bent into shallow crescents, around a bit of ground meat. (I'm sure somebody has made them vegetarian; I've just never seen them.) So they're in the same family as ravioli, but more like tortellini. (Sometimes the geeky details just spill out when I'm not sleepy and should be.)
Teresa: have you tried freezing the bacon-and-egg soup? (Has Patrick ever given you the chance?) It sounds good to me, but I've been told I'd have to finish it (twist my arm a little harder) and I'd hate to spend the time on a cut-down batch -- I was brought up to cook but have gotten very lazy.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 5 |
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