The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Carolyn Davies:

I used to work in a big box hardware store that competes with Home Depot. There, either the cane or the XX chromosones would have got you ignored by the floor staff, and both at once is practically the kiss of death.

To do a bit of backtracking in the discussion- #45, There's known tech: "Who vouches for you?"-

In my experience, that wouldn't have made this situation any better. I joined an online fandom (in the fanfic-subset meaning of the term) that attracts fragile 13-year old girls as a fragile 13-year-old and worked my way up to the point where I'm the administrator giving support to the fragile newbies (and the experience is what inspired me pursue counselling psychology).

So in my experience in all the years that I've been in fandom, knowing that girls knew each other in meatspace always put us on alert; while I wouldn't call it a hard-and-fast rule, such a thing was often a prelude to really nasty infighting that got personal very fast, and drew in that person's entire RL peer group. I can't explain why--but anonymity (or rather, pseudonymity) seemed to make the fights that did happen less intense. Perhaps it was because the more "real" relationships got, the more they mattered and the greater their ability to hurt.

Maybe it was also that I could ban harassers from the messageboard, but not the classroom, and my twitchy banfinger made my site(s) an unusual case. But at any rate, what works for adult fandom, as has been pointed out, is not an exceptionally good indicator for what will work with the younger set.

Snow chains intrigue me in the vague, "Oh, how quaint" manner of most foreign things to do with snow (like a definition of a "winter jacket" that's half an inch thick). I honestly don't know why, but after a lifetime on the frozen roads of Alberta, the only time I've ever seen snow chains on a car, rather than a semi, was on a Christmas holiday to Lake Tahoe (Police Officer: "Why haven't you got snow chains on?! Can't you see the road?" My mother, sheepishly: "...We're Canadian?" Officer: "Oh, all right then. Merry Christmas").

However, I think this might be a case of familiarity breeding contempt.

To add in my very humble two cents here--I think part of what Clark may be saying is the huge dispute here rests on two pillars. The "he deserved it" camp says 1. Tabatabainejad was uncooperative and 2. the Tasering was justified. Opposing thought says that 1. Tabatabainejad was cooperative and 2. the Tasering was unjustified. So long as everybody disagrees on both points, no real progress will be made and those who have no problem with this event will continue to do so; why not take the fight to them and say, yes, even if the kid refused to show his ID, refused to leave, grandstanded and made a dramatic speech to his fellow students about racial profiling, and passively resisted officer's attempts to make him leave (which is a conglomeration of pretty much all the justifications for the officer's behaviour), even then he didn't deserve what he got. Even then this is completely unacceptable.

At least, that's what I'm reading. I actually kind of like that reading because it satisfies my need for internal logic. I cannot imagine a group of trained LEOs walking up to an innocent, inoffensive kid and Tasering him repeatedly. It defies logic. I can, however, see them getting pissed at someone who's mouthy, noncompliant and disrespectful and overreacting to the horrendous degree they did. It makes a twisted kind of sense, while the other explanation makes none.

Teresa- I honestly don't know how to do that. I don't know the dead; none of the names announced are friends or my friends' boyfriends or fathers. The dead are the people I am fortunate enough not to know. So far, at least.

I know the terror of living. I still remember getting together with my friends the morning after thr friendly fire incident in 2002, trying to figure out who wasn't there and whose father might have died. I still stop to listen every time they announce another death (every week, every two weeks, every month; each one is reported individually, nationwide). In the town I lived in, it was taken for granted that some people would not walk or drive across grass, and you just didn't force them. We are used to living with our scars, here.

But right now I don't know that I'm qualified to talk about the dead. I never knew them.

[A]s a result of the United States military, Taliban no longer is in existence. And the people of Afghanistan are now free.

As someone who spent her formative years in a bedroom community of CFB Edmonton... there really aren't words for the rage I'm feeling right now. I don't even blink anymore when local businesses have their flags at half-mast, because it's always for someone who died.

People coming back from missions say that Afghanistan's a war we're never going to win so long as it stays a War on Drugs; the peacekeepers won't succeed so long as "progress" means "stop growing your opium, which makes all your money; grow this wheat instead. So what if you won't be able to feed your family? At least it's ethical!"

I'm not an expert, but they're the only ones giving evidence that's more compelling than "they hate us and our democracy." But then, nobody else knows what the problem is, because nobody even cares.

I, for one, would rather live in naive complacency and get killed for it than spend the rest of my life in paranoia. But maybe that's just me.

Bernita: you say that like it's a bad thing.

Also, Rhandir, currently the pages have an anchor link when they load (like, this page comes out as /006897.html#006897). In mozilla, if I chop the anchor link off (and just go to /006897.html) then it loads okay without needing the back button.

CHip: Everybody sees bus drivers, hamburger flippers, and so on at work, and can see that the jobs suck -- and even if they heard of an occasional bus driver becoming a prize-winning racer they'd still have all of the counter-examples. But nobody sees unsuccessful writers

I agree with that; the only writers I ever meet at parties are the wistful, unpublished ones who haven't done anything silly like quit their day jobs and tried to make a living off it yet (or sent it off to a slush pile--they'd (sigh) love to, but you know that publishing business, so it isn't even worth trying). Though once at a family reunion I met somebody whose history of a small town sold fifty copies. She thought it was great.

Well, that's excepting parties thrown by publishers, but they don't count.

I tend to surround myself with people who have novels in them. They make funny sticky-out shapes in our torsos, so we have to hang together or people look at us oddly. Fortunately, not all of us see the burning need to get these novels published.

Very nice, indeed!

Teresa, add me to the list of people who desperately want your job (I'm sure there must be one somewhere).

It's amazing what you can do in a computer lab full of geeks by saying, "My God! The Serenity trailer!" where everyone can hear you. This made my day.

I've been trying to imagine Thich Nhat Hanh as the Antichrist and I just can't see it. I too would be interested in seeing where this is said (but considering that I've come across some strongly anti-Buddhist stuff from Catholic sources, I would only be mildly surprised).

So, I was Catholic for all of a week when JPII died and I've been watching the whole Benedict XVI deal come out with no small amount of trepidation. I've also been watching the debates unfold with no small amount of trepidation and tried to stay out of them as I've been sloughing off the religious afterbirth (and isn't that a mental image). I just really had to ask: is there anything good that can be said of Ratzinger's election?

Lenora Rose: and, my favourite, "What about the child's right to have a sibling?"

Which caused my older brother, who was peering over my shoulder, to ask, "Does it work the other way around? Where's my right to get rid of you?"

About the alleged Tourette's case-- I know from experience that with Tourette's, you learn really fast how to deal with it in public and I, for one, became totally desensitized to people being weirded out by my tics about six months in. I think the kid would be more "traumatized" by having the mom act in such a mortifying fashion in public than having other people act in a completely reasonable manner.

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