The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Graydon finds comment spam:

Jim @278 --

Why you want to make sure you don't have anyone along to share the laughs and share the memories I don't know.

Kinda not much in the way of optional?

Not married, and few friends, all of whom have lives and are busy. If I want to get much done, I'm going to be doing it myself.

Also, introvert; groups of people are exhausting. It's a real shock when someone's protracted company isn't tiring. I'm not sure that's happened with above five people in my adult life.

Jim @267 --

I spent from 7 to 13 on a farm; went to a lot of 4H clubs. Heard much discussion of weather. My kid brother had a good honest run at dairy farming before the capital requirements managed to change his mind. Don't recall a one of them regarding the weather as hostile; something to plan pessimistically about, sure, but there seemed to be a general attitude that if you started taking things like that personally you were going to have a heart attack at 40.

Jim @253 --

The farmer is dealing with the weather. The weather is the weather; it has no agency.

If the weather had agency, it would be like annoying Maggie-Sue from Bad Magic; tornadoes would tear the roof off to give the lightning a clear shot.

Albatros @257 --

I think there is a c.

Everybody lives in the world they construct in their own head; it's what having a people-type brain does, model the world.

The modeling process has horrible limitations; people are more afraid of bears than dogs, though this is (statistically) precisely backward, we've only got two and a half dimensions to model with, and so on, but there's an element of choice.

Modeling one's surroundings as a construct of threats and risks greatly limits one's opportunities for joy and co-operation, and to a large extent opportunities for joy and co-operation at the point to being alive.

Put slightly differently, a message that says "you are vulnerable; be constantly aware of this; these people may hurt you" isn't statistically accurate, and greatly limits the possibility of good things in life, and life is short.

So there's a built in tradeoff, and I think the flat assertion of habitual high caution isn't justified without at least addressing the tradeoff. (There's also the problem of figuring out which bits of common sense are actually factually accurate, which is hard work and rarely done in the case of social risks; too much pre-existing narrative.)

I also think it's both possible and practical to do risk management on a response basis, rather than a scenario basis, which uses fewer brain cells and leads to a lot less fearful narrative. Some of what Terry was talking about way up there in terms of "think about the situation" would fit into response, rather than the usual "you're increasing your risk!" scenario spinning.

Serge @59 --

Great Harry was, in his youth, highly athletic; I am not sure if it is claimed of him what was claimed of Henry V, that he ran down deer afoot, but it wouldn't surprise me. Then he blew out a knee and didn't change his eating habits, and you can see the transformation in his suits of armor, which the Tower collection still has.

Not, let me hasten to add, that there aren't monumental other problems with that series in terms of historical accuracy (and I say this having seen naught by the subway ads!), but the young Henry VIII as an athlete is not itself objectionable.

Albatross @248 --

The "crime as weather" idea is fundamentally fucked up.

Weather is an entire planetary atmosphere and hydrosphere and the output of a gods-be-feathered star; crime is specific human choices, often those of individuals rather than organizations. Equating the two is an attitude for peons.

No one

Fear makes people stupid—tends to collapse their perception of their actual choice space—and makes approaching sex with something approaching joyful consent more or less impossible.

This "they might all be rapists" outlook is not any kind of win, not even a short term palliative tactical necessity. Just like "they might all be thieves"; it sells a lot of locks and alarms but doesn't ever make anything better.

Mike @245 --

I think you would benefit greatly from acknowledging you're wrong on those occasions when you are, in sober truth of fact, wrong.

I myself, and numerous persons of my various acquaintance, think for fun and more or less all the time. It doesn't involve pain or cruelty, though it sometimes involves effort.

There's a plausible analogy between those folks who find going for a ruck run to be inherently grim, irrespective of what kind of shape they are in, and those folks who consider hard exercise a necessary recreation for the full enjoyment of their lives.

Mike @236 --

People only think when we have to

Do, please, speak for yourself, sir.

Terry --

In principle, if you have got a largish (4 GB or so) USB key, another computer with net connectivity, and a bios that will boot from USB, you can download and create a USB image and boot from that.

If that seems like a good idea, this distro is probably the place to start. It's got what appear to be complete instructions for getting the USB key set up using a Windows machine, and how to do things like run virus scanners from Linux.

Current Ubuntu live distros (and most other current live distros) can do anything to an NTFS partition and its files that a Windows machine can, and a few things Windows can't.

Rikibeth @232 --

Thank you!

If you can't say no, you can't say yes; certainly. That's another one for the preferred axiom set.

As is the bit about how carbonated hormones are neither proof of True Love nor The Enemy; they're carbonated hormones, and there are these pretty-decent sets of coping strategies for each of the three predominant cases, which you get taught and even get quizzed on. ("more hormones than brain cells"; "more brain cells than hormones"; "neither the brain cells nor the hormones have a reliable clear advantage".) Heck, one could even teach kids that the really carbonated hormones generally last about seven years, on average, and really long term relationships have to not count on being stupid in love.

Heinlein heroines seem to me to all suffer from being types, rather than individuals; it's writing from the elder world, before it was widely understood that individuals aren't examples of an abstraction.

Terry @46 --

Oh, that does suck rocks.

I consider that sort of situation a really good reason to install Kubuntu, myself. You may need specific software that makes that a bad idea, but the "pay us twice" thing makes me a trifle peeved.

Terry @43 --

Formatting vfat (pretty much all USB keys, CF cards, etc.) isn't guaranteed to get something; it can be clever, and hide pointers and a teeny amount of boostrap code in the partition table.

I'd be considering taking the data drive, sticking it an enclosure, and trying to do data recovery on a machine that doesn't run Windows at this point. Whatever you've got seems exceptionally determined.

Fiendish Writer @221 --

The women are people thing doesn't work; lots of folks with the head-dent that insists it doens't matter what happens to other people, or those not of the same tribe, or whichever, however that gets constructed. It will not necessarily mean anything that women are people; someone can decide that what they want is more important.

The appropriate cultural trope is "If you rape, you are not a man. If you rape, you are not worthy to live; the best use you can make of yourself is to cut your throat in silence." That has to be pounded in as an automatic axiom, one that holds when blind drunk, angry, and horny.

This takes defining rape as sexual contact under circumstances where you are not justly certain of prior consent, and hashing out and agreeing on and promulgating with the iron voices of the militant angels what "certain" and "prior" and "consent" mean.

It takes teaching children how to talk about desire; what constitutes consent, and the threshold of certainty appropriate to first sexual consent (sober, overt, etc.) with a specific partner, how that's different from subsequent instances of consent, and why specific enthusiasm one can take personally is the only kind of sexual encounter that's really worth anything.

It takes a real push in art to create a widespread narrative for consent that valorizes an explicit yes; it takes a real push to replace the "all effectiveness is autocratic violence" trope with something better. It takes making female sexual enthusiasm in specific chosen cases an unmarked state.

This is all generational-slog stuff; shoulder to the wheel and keep pushing.

In the meantime, there's good advice for maintaining personal security; Terry's been talking about some of it.

Scott @41 --

The Ubuntu family of linux distros, and (though I do not recommend it for web-browsser-and-email installations) Fedora ship in a tolerably tight state. Selinux is on in enforcing mode, the repositories use reasonable crypto to sign packages, and the standard kernel packet filtering firewall is deeply and appropriately sullen about who it wants to talk to. So for the standard user case, any of the Ubuntus aren't going to be any worse than OS X.

Absolutely no one, irrespective of operating system -- not even if they are running OpenVMS -- should be connecting to a service provider's network without a hardware router with firewall, that's doing NAT ("network address translation"), and the NAT set to something other than the shipped default settings. That way, the router has the address your ISP assigns to you; your computer gets its address from the router. Anything external has to suborn the router before it can even find your computer. (If you leave it on default settings, the attacker can safely guess that your computer's IP address is 192.168.0.2.)

Generally getting low-end SOHO gear is better than the consumer stuff; it will have options to turn off external configuration. (The stuff your ISP gives you will often have external configuration hardwired on; try to avoid that.) Nothing that uses WiFi is, or can be caused to be, secure. You ideally want a router that has no WiFi at all. (If you want to use WiFi, put that router inside the firewall.)

Mary Frances @192 --

I last had anything directly to do with a university environment in 1997; the "overt consent being mocked" stuff I remember from the early 90s.

That poster sounds like an encouraging sign, but there's also a friend of mine, who teaches as a community college, who got a "I could just take you by force" response to a "no, not interested". (A response that was not acted upon, thankfully.)

This is in Toronto, where the subway ads include gay matchmakers, public service announcements for (quite good) government-supported sexuality information websites, and the board of education teen sexuality clinics with no-questions-asked free contraception and STD testing. There's always the wretched generational lag.

Every time I see one of these notices, I do what I usually do, which is to go and tweak selinux's paranoia up a bit.

Lots more spam, of a sudden, though; 1.5 MB in about 12 hours.

Bruce @33 -- various of the linux netbooks work, or can be caused to work, like that. You can put the whole shipped image and your bookmarks on a 4GB USB stick.

debcha @179 --

I'm arguing for judging people, in part, by how they judge art.

albatross @182 --

I think you're wrong about that. Lots of people are quite willing to make women solely responsible for sex; there's that really long (centuries) heap of justifications attached to the notion of the sin of Eve supporting this. There remains a whole lot of the "dressed like that" idea as a living thing, and the to-date pinnacle of widespread responsibility training for men has been "no means no", which is precisely backwards. (It should be something like "Only yes, and a specific, voiced, calm, sober yes, means "yes". Absolutely everything else means "no", the kind of no that involves being devoured alive by rats. Get this wrong and you will deserve the rats." This can be shortened as "Only yes means yes" but the long version is important.)

Attempts at advancing specific permission as a standard in some university environments were intensely and concertedly mocked, too. (Which is hardly to be remarked at; a specific and wholehearted yes is a more difficult thing to obtain than a fearful absence of screaming, and there's going to be quite a number of fellows out there in late middle age who are both well-provided with social power and who know just how guilty they'd be under a "wholehearted yes or nothing" standard. There's quite a number of women who think saying yes would make them morally depraved and objectionable persons, too.)

albatross @183 --

Try thinking of it as "your bright 14 year old neeve comes to you and asks for a book recommendation. What can you recommend wholeheartedly, and why?"

Art matters; what art is presented as exemplary really matters, in the way that all those semi-random sand grains become sedimentary rock.

---
Generally? If teens, of any conceivable gender, don't have an opportunity to do risky, scary things in a relatively controlled way, they'll create one. Bad things will happen. Sometimes those things will be relationship choices.

albatros @169 --

This seems to me to go far beyond deciding you don't want to read books written by a person with sufficiently evil beliefs. I read that as expressing concern that the evil beliefs of a writer you like will be ascribed to you, perhaps with the sense that this is a reasonable or good thing. That's what I'm disagreeing with.
[...]
It's one thing to decide you don't want to read the well-written books of a bad person. It's another to fear guilt-by-association from reading him or being enthusiastic about doing so. It's still another to apply that guilt-by-association.

I don't subscribe to the notion of diseverability of artists. The artist is all of a piece; if I am going to valorize their work by advancing it as in some sense good or worthy or of artistic note, I can't point and say "only this specific bit"; I get all of it, or I get none of it.

So Chesterton, splendid poetry and art in service of laudable causes, comes with, inescapably, the anti-semitism and racism and woeful ignorance of science. Old Prof Tolkien comes with the beauty that is an enchantment, and the world of types[1], not populations; Ian M. Banks comes with many cool ideas, interesting writing, and some very large palmed cards about a hierarchy of value constructed on the basis of quantified intelligence and a society of nominal hedonists none of whom appear to know how to actually relax.

So, yes, I think that if you are going to hold up something as art and say "this is good", you are excusing in some degree the evil beliefs. You may not hold them yourself, but you're saying that they're not that bad. (This is the "pardons Kipling for his views" thing, whatever one might think of Kipling.)

This is not the same thing as reading (viewing, any process of artistic apprehension of a work) something to form your own opinions about it.

I also think evil beliefs and wrong beliefs are different things; someone from 1700 who constructs a universe of types is wrong, but not evil. (However much evil that wrongness may have done.) Someone from 1950 with a world of types, it's a much murkier question. By 2050 or so it's not going to be a question.

[1] Are things examples of fixed types ("a bird of the air") or individuals that may be grouped into populations and from which population some common characteristics might be determined. (The actual diversity of gulls; "We can't learn how much they interbreed until we can distinguish them, but we can't distinguish them because they appear to interbreed." [Steve N. G. Howell, writing about Thayer's and Iceland gulls])

albatross @161 --

I think there's a difference between disagreement on a subject where persons of countenance may differ (e.g., my views about the social utility of Abrahamic religions and those of Mr. David Weber are not meaningfully congruent) and those subjects where the opinion removes a person from social countenance. (Women not being people, lack of melanin necessary for full humanity, desirability of chattel slavery, profit as a sole sufficient justification for otherwise objectionable conduct...)

In the case of artists who express views that remove them from social countenance (and for me, Mr. Card's views on homosexuality do this quite entirely), I think it is appropriate for the discountenance to be commutative. This is more or less how a consensus is reached on what constitutes civilized conduct.

That is different from assuming that because you like Mr. Banks' fiction that you must be an atheist, or at least so I see it. It is also different from assuming that you hold the reprehensible belief, in the case of artists with reprehensible beliefs.

Mike @155 --

Consistent presentation in art counts, just like inference over a large set of data points counts.

debcha @151 --

Thank you!

That "choice, not a function of type" formulation is something I've had trouble getting into clear language; very glad it worked this time!

dakine @152 --

Of course one can like one facet of an artist's work but not another; Chesterton uses language in vivid, brilliant ways, sometimes to espouse ghastly racist and anti-Semitic ideas, and sometimes to espouse a laudable concern for the common good, for example.

Miller's issues around consent and definitions of masculinity (real men beat people to death...) seem to me to rise to the point where it is perhaps possible to produce extremely guarded praise for specific elements of his work; anything broader than that opens one to the risk of being regarded as agreeing with Mr. Miller's take on those category issues.

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