The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by pericat, the not terribly bright some days:

We'll be thinking of Scraps, and Velma, and pushing for a speedy, healthy, happy outcome.

Happy Anniversary, Crumbled Wall! I got a piece of you. A friend of my mom's brought it back from a trip home 20 years ago, I guess. You can't be remade without this piece, and I'm not giving it up.

Hilary Hertzoff @ 319 You may be able to screen the vents, if you can get the covers off. Cut screen to fit behind, then put the covers back.

David Harmon @299 Teresa was actively snubbed rather than 'not seen', and I agree inexcusably so.

I was thinking more of some of the other experiences related in preceding comments. The bad behaviours in many of those appear to have one common point in that the customers needing assistance did not, for whatever reason, match up with the floorwalkers' idea of 'customers'. The floorwalkers may have narrowed their signal range from 'all of humanity present within these walls' to a manageable subset. I suspect the big box or mall environment is itself a root cause of that.

I'm not trying to defend or excuse it, mind. I'm just looking at it.

I suppose it's possible that big box floorworkers may have vision fatigue. I only rarely go into such stores - haven't been to a mall in at least a year - and they wear me out. Between all the bright lights, and shiny things and competing colours and Important! Graphics! everywhere, it's all I can do to toddle after my partner while she locates whatever it is we're there for.

The selective gender/ableness invisibility thing is real and I've encountered that, but I don't think it's the only factor. How can anyone offer reasonably responsive customer service when the entire store is screaming at you to notice it?

albatross @ 486 no, no, Cholesterol is a traffic court judge compared to the Wrath God of Poutine. You can practically phone in your regrets, with cholesterol. Pay your fine by paypal. "Very sorry, please don't kill me, gotta go, Magic Chef's on pay-per-view."

Think about it. Cheese curds. Brown gravy. Deep-fried potato pieces. Is there anything here that resembles virtue? There is not. Any one of those three could be passed off, perhaps, with an apology to the court and a promise (fingers crossed, even) to never do it again. But all three together on one plate, steaming hot, is blatant defiance of all known nutritional precepts.

The Wrath God of Poutine admits of no wiggle room. If the diner is not fresh from the field of heroism, still bedecked with garlands bestowed by a grateful and loving populace, one standard serving will tack on poundage to match the caloric needs of whatever deed of valour the Wrath God thinks is most pressing.

Seriously. There's rejection of all that is good and holy, and then there's poutine. You should just have the fish, with a squeeze of lemon and a side of fried ice cream. None of the nutrition deities have taken an interest in fried ice cream yet.

Poutine is an irredeemable source of calories. You can't make, fake, or buy your way out of an evening that includes poutine. If you didn't need those calories to rebuild your body following a week summitting Mt Everest, or rescuing schoolchildren from a flaming train wreck, you will keep the result for the rest of your life, or until you DO summit Mt Everest/rescue flaming children.

Poutine is the hammer of an angry god. An angry, snarly, accountant kind of god. With a hammer.

Lexica @ 33

You've seriously misread Charlie's comment, which had to do with gaming the system, and how a prosecutor in California did so in working a two dollar theft into a 3rd-strike felony, and was rewarded for it. Conversely, in the UK, police who attempted a similar gaming were slapped down hard by the magistrate hearing the charge.

Nothing about California's fire-starting laws. Not a smidgeon. Honest.

There are a number of punishments available for criminals, depending on the type of crime, its severity, how committed, and so forth. Financial restitution, community service, restriction of personal liberty to a greater or lesser degree, are some examples. Which ones, or combinations of these are imposed usually depend on the nature of the offense.

Revocation of an offender's franchise is not one of them. It's an add-on. There's no direct connection between the crime and the punishment, the way there may be in restricting the liberty of someone who has committed a violent offense, or in appropriating the goods and bank accounts of someone who has committed a fraud.

There's no rehabilitative goal in revoking franchise, as doing so only further alienates an offender from society.

There's not even a social good goal, but rather the opposite: the more politically involved anyone becomes, including convicts, the more stake they have in society.†

Voting is a political act, and the only kinds of results you can attain by restricting the vote are political. Step 1: establish that a subset of the citizenry may not vote. Step 2: ensure that the 'right' people fall into that subset.

I seem to recall that as recently as 2000 was a scandal involving voter suppression of supposed felons in Florida and Texas. If felons did not automatically have the right to vote stripped on conviction, that attempt would not have been possible.

Other classes of persons denied the right to vote in the US have in the past included persons of colour (including Native Americans), women, persons declared mentally ill or incompetent, persons who did not own property, persons who could not pass a test of some kind, or pay a poll tax. If you think of the right to vote as something that is bestowed on you based on merit (earned or not), and which can thus be revoked based on lack of merit, you might want to take another look at that list: at the times those restrictions were in force, they seemed reasonable and right to the people who got to make such decisions.

For my part, I hold that the rights guaranteed by the Constitution in the US, or Charter in Canada, may not be set aside by the agents of the state unless they can show clear and compelling benefit to society in each and every individual case. That declaring a particular class of persons only gets some of the rights some of the time, is to allow the state too much slack.

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† If anyone's interested in the reasoning of the Canadian SC's decision striking down prohibitions on prisoners' voting rights, link.

Prisoners in Canada can still exercise their franchise if they so choose, is last I heard.

Voting is both a right and a responsibility. As I understand it, it takes more than being convicted of a crime for the state to be empowered to strip a convict of his or her rights as a human being or as a citizen. For the state to also strip a convict of his or her responsibilities as well is, practically speaking, seriously counterproductive.

Lee @181

I believe it is crucial to not allow bullying children to get away with it, but calling what they're doing "assault and battery" is to label their behaviour as felonious. It's not a fair response.

We have to treat them differently. They're not mature enough to be felons. They're children. They may be the nastiest, most odious little monsters spawned, and dangerous in the bargain, but I don't think it helps to erase the distinction between child and adult, if only because it elevates the child-bully's status too high.

OtterB @162 Here's a link to the GAVSD's internetsy form, if anyone's curious. Like I was.

but with this, men and women will interpenetrate each other, multiply,

Run for your lives. The seventies have come round again.

abi @40

In that scenario, if it was infrequent sort of thing, I would say that person had forgotten themselves, rather than that they were by nature or training a bully. The initial made-in-good-faith comment is not (at least for me) tainted.

But if the poster continues to do that sort of thing, then I would start to wonder if the initial posts were not intended as subtle trolling.

So far as whether a bully can nevertheless say interesting things of value to a conversation, there may well be valuable things at the bottom of an acid bath, but that doesn't mean I'm going to thrust my hand in to find out.

There is a difference between incisive commentary and sneering. Between critiquing a work and mocking its admirers' taste. Between making an argument and setting up an ambush. Nor is it always good to do the former or always bad to do the latter, but a very little goes a long way.

Cheer the man on, by all means! Positive reinforcement works wonders. Enough cheering, and he might be inspired to apologise for Thatcher.

He's pleased and proud, and it's a bit weird, but I put that down to inexperience in apologising on behalf of other people and other times for whom one is nevertheless the spokesperson. I read it as Brown being much more used to praising the notable deeds of the past than acknowledging inherited responsibility for collective wrongdoing.

It's a step forward. A very necessary step, and overdue, but good on him for taking it.

There's also worrying about them falling on you if you get feisty in a room full of books.

Fade Manley@548 Yes, Passage, that's it, thank you! That was a remarkably hope-filled story, considering, as was Doomsday Book. I'm very much looking forward to when the local library lets me have another.

There are two books off the top of my head that I class as "depressing". This is a highly personal judgement and I do not expect others to agree with me nor would I want to persuade anyone that I'm right. They are Mary Renault's Funeral Games and MZB's The Mists Of Avalon. It's been years since I've read either, but what I remember about them is the main characters could not catch a break if they'd nailed leprechauns to their foreheads.

I enjoy, and indeed seek out, stories where however much the characters may be pawns in the hands of an angry god, they're making something of it. They're growing, changing, learning, they are transformed by the experiences, or at the very least, they're still willing to come up to scratch.

Xopher brought up Connie Willis; a wonderful writer IME. At the end of her Doomsday Book a whole lot people have died, and it's sad, but it's not depressing. Same with the one about near-death experiences, I've forgotten the title, but it's all in what the story is really about that makes the difference. If I get to the end and am left thinking that nothing we do serves to brighten the corners where we are, as it were, then there's a story I can do without.

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