Strictly in the interests of accuracy, the LiveJournalist in question appears to be in her early twenties, rather than a teenager.
Which doesn't make it any less disgusting that some anonymous reader of her lj decided to harass her and waste the Secret Service's time while they were doing it.
For whatever it's worth, today another person on my LJ friends list is reporting a new inability to read or reply to LiveJournal from work because Websense is blocking it as "tasteless." (She is, oddly enough, able to post to LJ at work via Semagic, one of the third-party LJ client programs, but she can't read what she's posted.)
Given that Websense has a page on its site where absolutely anybody can suggest a URL for blocking, the party ultimately responsible for the block could be anyone from a Colonel in a snit to the manager of a cubicle farm somewhere in Iowa.
When I set up a livejournal, I used a pseudonym -- partly because it appeared to be the custom of the country, and partly because I've also got a web page with my real name on it. I'd just as soon not have people who are trying to look me up for professional writing-type reasons getting sidetracked into personal natterings about daily life up here in moose country.
It was never meant to be a particularly opaque pseudonym -- anybody who ever knew me while I was active in the SCA would spot it at once -- and I've never bothered using it anywhere else on-line. And for whatever it's worth, I've always posted here under my own name . . . again, the custom of the country and all that.
Re: Atwood and Heinlein: I've been of the opinion for some time that The Handmaid's Tale is actually Heinlein's unwritten future-history novel The Stone Pillow as filtered through a feminist Canadian late-20th-century consciousness as opposed to Heinlein's libertarian/engineer/whateverthehell Midwestern early-20th-century one.
We won't even get into putting Virgil's Aeneid to "The Stars and Stripes Forever."
And it's probably descending deep into trivia to observe that one can sing Anglo-Saxon four-stress alliterative measure to "Haul on the Bowline."
On a broader note: some cultures have a tradition that \everybody/ contributes to entertainment. (This shows up in a variety of cases, e.g the not-too-recent movie about Michael Collins (the Irish rebel, not the astronaut) and Ecotopia both have scenes in which everybody does their bit, not as staging but as "we're all friends and it's past supper and too early for bed.") I won't argue the worth of the contributions -- obviously they'll vary -- but some of that worth is the personal connection between performer and audience.
It was recording technology combined with radio that killed that culture in the first place, or at least rendered it moribund: When you can play a recording of the original artist performing the latest hit, or tune in to a radio show of the same thing, who's going to settle for somebody's-sister-who-took-piano-lessons doing her damnedest with the help of sheet music and the family upright? Art, especially musical art, became something that even ordinary people paid professionals to do for them, instead of doing it for themselves, and "musical amateur" became an insult rather than simply a description.
If relatively cheap and easy-to-use recording and vidding technology -- Apple's or anybody's -- turns out to contribute to the reversal of this state of affairs . . . well, I think it's only fair, and a good thing to boot.
The logic of it is no different than arguing, "But what about all those people who make their livelihoods in the drug trade? Not the drug kingpins, but the poor kids in the inner city who earn money by being distributors, the peasants in Peru and Columbia who earn money growing the drugs, and let's not forget all the DEA agents, who would be out of a job if we stopped the War on Some Drugs."
Argument by analogy is a dangerous thing. Equating the legal farm-raising of game birds for hunting with the distribution and sale of illegal drugs is iffy to begin with, since the only obvious point of similarity between the two would appear to be that stopping either one would affect more lives than just those of the people involved at the end point of the process -- and since the same thing could reasonably be said of any complex human endeavor, it doesn't seem to get us any further along.
Of course, if the point of the esercise is to argue by assertion that raising game birds for hunting is the moral equivalent of dealing in illegal drugs, then I suppose the analogy serves its purpose.
I don't think anyone, irrespective of class or station, should be enaged in shooting animals released from pens for the purpose. I've already said that in this discussion. I don't understand how you can conclude I might think it's ok on a class basis, when I've said I don't think it's ok at all.
I'm trying to disentangle and categorize the various objections in my own mind, is all, since the discussion as a whole has gotten them thoroughly cross-connected. And for me, at least, it makes a difference why someone is disapproving of something. "Because it's inherently immoral", while an assertion that (as we've seen) is open to argument, is at least to my mind a more valid objection than, say, "Stupid rich people do it," or "I think it's icky."
If the core of the matter is to obtain the experience of wealth, rather than the enjoyment of the experience, I do think that's a bad thing.
Which is where the 'experience of wealth' descriptor comes into it; what you do for fun might be very expensive. It might be the same thing someone else does to feel rich. I don't think those are the same activity in the shape of their practice, though they might be very similar in the structure of their events.
But how are we supposed to determine, from outside observation, whether a person is doing something for the pleasure of the experience or doing it for the experience of feeling rich? Given the opacity of other people's motives at the best of times, I'm inclined to do those people who say that they're enjoying the experience for its own sake the courtesy of believing them when they say it.
I think that what's starting to make me feel uneasy about this line of thought is that it's edging perilously close to saying that there are some pleasures that blue-collar and middle-class people simply shouldn't enjoy -- not because they are cruel pleasures, or because they are wasteful ones, but because they are not pleasures that properly belong to blue-collar and middle-class people.
"Buying an experience of wealth" is what you do when you buy a narrow, and quite limited, opportunity to act how the wealthy presumptively get to act all the time. The all-expenses-paid -weekend-for-two prize is (I think) the most basic example. It's necessarily not something you can sustain. (Rather like the way people dress for proms and weddings; it's very often in immitation of the expected dress of a social class to which they do not belong.)
I'm still a bit confused -- are we supposed to regard this as inherently a bad thing? The wealthy presumably do things like shooting pheasants, dressing up in frivolous but good-looking garments, dining at really good restaurants, and so forth because they find the experiences enjoyable. Presumably, so do those blue-collar and middle-class types who choose to take advantage of the levelling power of cash in order to purchase the same experiences for themselves.
I'm a bit confused here. Are we opposed to shooting (and, presumably, later eating) pheasants on the grounds that it's cruel to the pheasants -- in which case, anyone who eats a factory-raised chicken is party to something a lot more unkind and unnatural, if they're of a mind to worry about such things; or are we opposed to shooting pheasants because it's a tacky bit of aristocratic excess -- in which case, counter-arguments about middle-class or blue-collar pheasant hunting and similar sports would appear to merit some consideration?
(I also admit to stumbling, for a moment, over the phrase "buying an experience of wealth", but eventually decided that "wealth" as used in the present case has to be a term of art meaning something beyond the mere possession of sufficient money, so I let it go.)
New York is also a more significant state in the national eye than Texas.
I don't know. My guess is that in terms of national and international recognizability, iconic status, and the quality of inspiring strong feelings of either love or hate (but rarely neutrality), the honors are about even between New York and Texas, with California making a third in the category. They all loom larger in the public eye than places like, say, Indiana or North Dakota or Wyoming.
Speaking as someone who has been there and done that with regard to small children and sf conventions (there is nothing quite like turning into a full-time sf/fantasy freelancer the same year that your youngest child turns out to be twins), I have to say that Kathryn Cramer has a point. Several points, in fact.
At best, sf/fantasy cons tend to be indifferent to issues of parenting and childcare unless something like the presence of active parents of very small children on the concom happens to focus their attention on the matter. I was fortunate; the years when my children were most in need of childcare and babysitting at conventions turned out to be the same years when a large portion of NESFA seems to have had the same problem. This made Boskone in the early through mid-nineties one of the few cons we could attend and actually count on having an hour or two now and then to ourselves.
It's all very well to say that it's up to the parents of small children to make the adjustments, and in practice that's what's going to happen anyway, because if it comes to a choice between adjusting or staying home . . . well, one adjusts. But life as the parent of a small child can seem, at times, to be about nothing but adjustments (if there are crowns in heaven, there's a special set adorned with extra-glittery diamonds for those unbechildered friends of people with children who don't flinch and gradually fade away once the kids show up) -- and I certainly don't think that one should have to suffer implications of Bad Mommyhood simply for having the temerity to point this out.
Now I'm hiding in Honduras
I'm a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns and money
The shit has hit the fan.
The only one I'd strongly argue against is Woodrow Wilson, who was very possibly the most personally racist President in US history, and whose administration was a calamity for the small moves toward interracial comity and black civil rights that had been happening over the previous decade or so.
Not only that, if you start digging around at the roots of most of the US's less-than-completely-savory involvements in Latin Anmerican politics, you'll find Woodrow Wilson at the bottom of them. He sent Marines into Haiti and Santo Domingo; he sent troops into Mexico on at least two separate occasions; and while strictly speaking the US first sent Marines into Nicaragua a couple of months before his inauguration, they stayed in Nicaragua all during the Wilson administration.
Wilson appears to have been all for the right of non-brown-or-black-skinned people to determine how they should be governed.
I would imagine that they have received a c'n'd letter, and that the reason why is that French artists tend to be a little more robust in their behaviour toward such things than comic book fans with websites.
French artists (and this was, after all, the point I was trying to make in the first place) have got (a) official high-art -- as opposed to mere entertainment or pop-cultural -- status, and (b) the financial backing of major museums and art galleries, not to mention private customers with money to burn. They can afford to take a robust attitude.
Anatole France, who pointed out that "the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread" would not have been surprised by any of this.
For better or worse, the copyright system forces companies to be very aggressive about enforcing their intellectual property rights, lest they drift into the public domain.
I think that the case is increasingly "for worse" rather than "for better" -- and I say this as somebody for whom copyright is a bread-on-the-table issue. Art exists in dialogue with other art, and quotation is a part of that dialogue; to the extent that an aggressive defense of intellectual property rights inhibits artistic dialogue, it constitutes a malign influence.
It's always hard to judge these things without the aid of body language and tone of voice, but what the sergeant major actually seems to be saying is that (a) he's anticipating that the assembled troops will want to catcall the president, which says some interesting things about troop morale, and (b) that the president will either imply that the Iraqis are heathens or refer to them as "heathens" directly, an action which while distinctly regrettable shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody here.
About my puppets essay, a student activist wisely observed to me, "It doesn't matter if we don't let the Spartacist in the crowd anywhere near the podium, or even if we boot him out of the march: if he's within a half-mile of us, someone's going to take his picture and say, 'Look at the antiwar freaks'".
This appears to be the specific political application of the general observation that the media gravitates toward the visibly loony members of any group being observed. Lord knows we've seen it happen often enough at sf conventions, when reporters ignore the rooms full of more-or-less soberly clad individuals discussing art and literature in favor of an interview with the individual in a badly-fitting chain-mail jockstrap who's learning an alien language through past-life regression.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
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| 2005 | 1 |
| 2004 | 6 |
| 2003 | 21 |
| 2002 | 3 |
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