That’s how low The Thread has gone. What can I do but…feed the beast.
Oh, sure, now try to talk about something other than “squeee!” and “how cute!” and “mmmm, now I’m hungry” after that.
(Latest tally: 10,034 entries swamped by 965,742 total comments.)
Actually the discussion was about how nasty dogs could be.
Jadehawk, from last subThread:
Really? Don’t get me wrong. I can see that a more multi-party system has positive aspects. But in some countries, it gets to a point where, in order to form a working government, you have to bring either Communists, far-right nationalists, or ultra-religious kooks into your cabinet.
Of course, it depends on the stability of the country as a whole. New Zealand seems to have done alright since they introduced PR; if I understand it correctly, the three NZ parties that have benefited substantially are the Greens, the Maori Party, and a free-market centre-right party called ACT. Certainly, NZ hasn’t become ungovernable.
But in those countries with a flourishing far-right nationalist movement, which includes Britain and much of Europe, PR means that the far-rightist nuts get a lot of seats and become a not insignificant political force. And in order to keep them out of government, this sometimes means that unworkable coalitions have to be formed, often including groups of left-wing extremists.
===
Sili: Don’t misunderstand me. I advocate more-or-less absolute freedom of speech in political matters, protected by a strong independent judiciary. Everyone, from neo-fascists to neo-Stalinists to religious kooks, should have complete freedom to say what they want, organise how they want, and attempt to affect politics. As you know, I am strongly opposed to censorship, “hate speech” laws, and the like.
But at the same time, Jadehawk is partly correct about my position: I think too much majoritarian rule is extremely dangerous. A lot of the time, the majority of the voters are influenced by ignorance, prejudice and irrational fears. Look at Proposition 8 in California, for instance, or the Islamophobic lunacy that led to the ban on minarets in Switzerland. Or pick up a tabloid newspaper some time, and see how a substantial proportion of the voters get their political information. Democracy is better on balance than any other political system, but the power of the majority should still be limited. There should be checks and balances, to limit the pace of change and ensure that the rights and interests of minorities are protected.
This doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that we should be ruled by some sort of authoritarian elite group. That never ends well either. Rather, we should have a constitutional system that makes it hard for anyone to achieve power or implement their wishes. To that end, I’m in favour of checks and balances, a strong independent judiciary, protecting fundamental rights, and maintaining a parliamentary system that isn’t too susceptible to changes in popular mood.
Carried over from the last endless thread.
Wow, what a shitstorm I helped stir up. If you do not like dogs fine, if you do not like cats fine. Liking both or one is fine. If you are not a dog lover then you will not see they can bring joy to me and others. I cannot see how a cat can bring happiness and have never liked them. So, to avoid being a hypocrite, I retract everything I said to Walton. It is just that he pops up the same line every time someone mentions dogs. As someone who despises cats, I manage to keep my mouth shut about it when others descend into the are they not cute stuff ad nauseum here. It is easy to skip posts.
I feel dirty enough without having to go look for a cute dog video.
Squeee!
How cute!
Mmmmm, now I’m NOT hungry.
(Dutch vegetarian, had diner some hours ago, don’t eat cats, just a funny habit i know.)
One scene could be a “Cat Who” title, The Cat Who Chased Bears.
Caine,
Of course dogs bite. But that’s not a reason for a mother to panic as soon as her child wants to carress a dog, especially when both her and the dog owner are present. A minimum of judgement and precautions are sufficient to avoid most risks. You can never be certain of anything with a child, doesn’t mean you have to become paranoid with trying to prevent every possible harm that might possibly occur.
The vast majority of mothers with child thankfully don’t react that way when they see my dog and let their child carress him. Golden Retrievers are known to be particularly safe with children, and it’s not that difficult to tell when the dog is super friendly. Asking the dog owner is actually less relevant than exercising judgement and taking a few precautions. Seems to be more important to educate one’s child that way, than to systematically panic as soon as the child wants to carress a dog.
No, PZ, you’d have to find an ugly dog video like this one:
Or parents.
As for dogs…
I had my carotid artery punctured and my sinuses slightly torn by a dog biting my neck and face when I was two. I was pretty apprehensive around dogs for a long time after that. We had a few dogs in my family, but I’m pretty sure I can count them on one hand. I only ever really loved one of them, but tragically, we didn’t have her long. It wasn’t until meeting my wife’s family that I learned to really appreciate dogs. My father-in-law is a dog trainer and obedience judge. His dogs are somewhat more well-behaved and socialized than I was used to. And my wife taught me understand dogs better. Now we have one of our own. She’s an energetic pain in the ass, but I love her.
Likewise JeffD. I do understand why and how you could love dogs.
I just happen not to myself. I am much less nervous around them than I used to be, but I still don’t get that much out of them.
Is there some dog out there that might be perfect for me despite it all? Sure… it’s a world of possibilities.
I still love my cat.
(still the singular with that)
I also loved my snake, and most people really can’t relate to that.
Turns out I’m capable of girlish giggling! Not really a surprise… I just learned what the French word for “dandelion” is. Yes, dandelion is just a misspelling of French dent de lion “tooth of lion”, compare German Löwenzahn “liontooth”, but that’s not how they call it anymore. Instead, they call it after the side effect of eating the salad made of its leaves:
pissenlit.
En means “in(to)”, lit means “bed”, and the rest means exactly what you think. :-)
Oh, this reminds me… part of why the US military budget is so inflated is that senators and representatives so often insist that useless stuff be bought just because it was built in their constituency and therefore artificially props up useless jobs.
Isn’t that a bit like sending more and more soldiers to Vietnam so that their predecessors won’t have died in vain? I mean… just… one… little bit? :-}
=8-)
Caine (comment 643) is the exception that utterly proves the rule. =8-)
There are tardigrades out there, I tell you… ^_^
I don’t care about any of that. I care about two things:
– they run towards random strangers who are then left to figure out whether the dog wants rough play or is actually being aggressive (or defensive, which, to a dog, is the exact same thing);
– cats actually know they’re too small to attack you with any success, so they don’t bother; dogs don’t, no matter what their size.
(Never mind the horrible dog-owner culture of Austria in general and Vienna in particular. For starters, “dogs only allowed with muzzle and leash” only holds for other people, you see…)
Just for the record, I haven’t been bitten.
Well…
I don’t know about Walton ;->, but… are you really implying that people in general need to learn that? Do you mean they don’t figure their instincts out on their own?
Fails on two fronts: our frontal lobes are entirely unspectacular, in fact relatively smaller than those of many small primates; dogs were only domesticated late last
weekice age.Indeed. Babies tend to trigger an oxytocin binge for me, even when they’re not chronically happy like my little sister was.
…Wow.
Fitting you got comment 666 for it ;^)
I think the only reason I’m not getting that pressure yet is that because it’s currently all going towards my two uncles… of course, everyone also knows I’m now going to hop around the globe as a postdoc for an unknowable number of years, so it would be rather irresponsible to have any children before I get some kind of fixed job, not to speak of… more… direct prerequisites…
I’ll comment on this later, I need to go watch the TV confrontation between 2 of the 3 candidates for president… the 3rd candidate, the incumbent, isn’t there because he doesn’t like the other 2. Sounds silly, but he’s right. I’ll tell you. B-)
I’m a dog person. Love them. I don’t mind cats, but I don’t completely trust them either.
I’ve no time for cats. I just don’t get it.
You know, cats bite too. I’ve been bitten by cats but never by a dog, despite the fact that I’ve spent my entire life around both.
” Asking the dog owner is actually less relevant than exercising judgement and taking a few precautions.” Actually, unless you are good at reading dog body language, which many people really aren’t, asking is very important. My mother has a dog that adores women and hates men, so knowing that is pretty crucial when deciding who should and shouldn’t pet her. Also, you can’t judge by breed, our dominant, agressive collie mix was much more likely to be approached unthinkingly than our absurdly friendly pitbull who was treated like a monster.
You shouldn’t trust cats at all. Look at them. They’re snakes with fur and legs.
Yes, I have two cats. Want some?
You know what else releases oxytocin? Petting your dog or cat!
I do wonder if people gravitate towards the animal that causes them to release more of the chemical and by what mechanism the release of oxytocin happens when petting one animal as opposed to another…
David:
LOL. I didn’t even notice that. Good thing my mom’s name isn’t Rosemary, eh? ;p
as opposed to the places where you have to incorporate these into your party to swell your ranks? *coughsouthernstrategycoughreligiousrightcough*
Not really, just ate. Thanks anyways.
Lawyers reject calls for Christian-sensitive judges
We like dogs and are, at best, indifferent toward cats. It has something to do with a deep-seated suspicion that, like Gollum on the road to Mordor, cats are secretly plotting our destruction.
On a more serious note, we find dogs are a better return on the investment of food, shelter, and medical bills. Case in point: Once we were accosted by a rather large and brutish dog, when our little schnoodle (schnauzer-poodle) leapt into the fray, unmindful of his own well being. We rather doubt a cat would have done the same.
And then there’s that creepy undead baby noise that cats make, providing the best evidence yet that cats are in league with the dark forces that haunt the spaces between this world, and beyond.
In other news, we see that the Pope has gotten lawyered up. We can only imagine how he came to this decision: “Damn, this praying shit isn’t working. Time to get a lawyer.”
if you could sneakily deliver them to my front door, looking extra cute, that would be splendid…
I only like other people’s pets. The kind that don’t crap and pee on my floor anyway. And yes, they can be trained, but I’ve barely trained myself to do it.
Jadehawk #18,
I love you :-)
Cats are the gangsters of the animal world. On second thought, I’d best stay out of this discussion, as I dislike cats, with the heat of a thousand white-hot suns.
Non sequitur. I can see perfectly well how dogs bring joy to certain people. They just don’t bring joy to me. Not liking something doesn’t mean not comprehending how other people can.
But you’re saying that you not liking something means you can’t comprehend how other people can?
I had a dog for 10 years. I liked him very much. Then later I got a cat. Now I like cats better, and wouldn’t even dream of getting a dog. Too much hassle, too much stink, too much grossness. But it’s completely useless to have a “people who don’t like X are stupid/unexposed/traumatized/heartless” reaction to any type of pet preference, because everyone is different. I also don’t see the appeal of having a snake, or a chameleon, or a fish tank. That doesn’t mean I think people who do like them are weird, just different than me.
Some people might overreact with their children, but it’s perfectly fine (and smart) to teach children to be wary of dogs. You never know when little Fifi is going to choose that one time to bite, and even if one person’s Fifi is harmless, that’s no guarantee that the next one will be. Teaching children that dogs aren’t toys to be manhandled is a good thing.
well, judging from my different emotional states around cats and dogs, I’d say probably yes. cats make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. dogs, when their slobbering and smell don’t just plain disgust me, make me react exactly the same way I react to overly needy people: I have the urge to get the fuck away from them, and their attempts at getting attention make me angry. no fuzzy caring feelings involved.
Get one. It will change your mind, teach you how to be a better person, and teach you how to love.
*roll eyes*
also, the video is Teh Awesome. I laughed so hard I started crying :-p
It’s a good idea to teach your kids that no animal is!
lol
Cat bites are fierce. Then in some places they have not outlawed the Savannah breed either. I don’t think people should be keeping cats that large in their home.
I do work to train my male cat (regular house cat), but cats are very good at killing things. A cat the size of a cocker spaniel is going to be potentially dangerous, especially if you have children.
Me, too!
Caine @663:
You put ’em on a plane back to Russia.
Me, I like kids, went out of the way to adopt one, but I’m well aware that others’ mileage may vary. The notary who stamped all our forms asked why we were adopting when “you’re so lucky you don’t have to have kids”. She, evidently, went from high school to marriage to her first kid 9 mos. later, because that’s what was expected of her. Another friend got a vasectomy at 30; he had no desire to father children, still doesn’t in his mid-40s. ‘Try it, you’ll like it’ may be OK for cereal and sushi; it’s just stupid when it involves children.
That you don’t like them is one thing. I can understand that. But just because they don’t bring happiness to you doesn’t mean they don’t bring happiness to others.
The myth that cats are aloof, stand-offish, and selfish is untrue in many cases. I have a cat who enjoys being with people. She insists on sleeping with me, walks up to strangers and purrs, and is presently draped over the top of my chair gently stroking the back of my neck.
What I can’t get over the cuteness of is these, but it would be entirely irresponsible to have one seeing as they’re not domesticated and are still in the “fad” phase that usually results in horrendous breeding and selling practices.
Neg:
It’s a perfectly sound reason. You’re also assigning the word panic, which may not be true in most cases. Seems to me you’re taking offense if all the lil’ children aren’t allowed to come and worship at the paws of your incredible dog. No dog owner can absolutely guarantee their dog won’t bite in any given situation. Personally, I don’t like kids around my dogs, and appreciate adults having caution.
That’s bullshit. Asking the owner is paramount. I know warning signs/body language in *my* dogs; I certainly don’t expect anyone else to know them. That’s utterly stupid. It’s also not the mission of every dog owner to get all the strangers they meet to interact with and love their dog. Parents can figure out how to introduce their children to pets by themselves. An obnoxious dog owner can directly interfere with that teaching and be distinctly unwanted.
I’ll put in a firm I’ll agree to disagree here, because we are obviously on extreme ends of the argument here.
you’ll make a careerwoman very happy someday.
DominEditrix:
Yep. The ideal situation is, of course, for children to be actively wanted. It’s moronic to try and push the idea on people who know better, simply because they can’t see outside the standard life script.
Awww…
No. They are furry freeloading colons. Loveable, but damn. They are expensive to feed and, with indoor litter boxes (all four-and-a-half are indoor cats), expensive when it comes out the other end.
They are also pricey when it comes to doctor’ bills. One of our cats broke my toe (the roast beef toe). When I was at a fire, our 30-pounder bit (((Wife))) (she tripped and stepped on his tail and he defended himself) on her ankle (two puncture wounds on each side of the achilles tendon) and almost ended up in the hospital due to an infection.
Yunomi:
Join us. Partake of the felininity. Share. Enjoy. Don’t be afraid. Join us.
Ol’Greg at #10 – I did not mean to make you or anyone else defensive. I was just frustrated with Walton and dog haters in general. I really do try to live by “to each their own”. I pretty much stayed out of the conversation after my post because I did not like the direction it was taking. My last post was just an attempt to balance things, and to repent my hypocrisy.
BTW, I love snakes, had some of my own, also like playing with tarantulas and things like that.
Time to go back to lurk mode and catch up with the rest of the posts. Then stay in lurk mode.
You have a 30 pound cat????
*looks at her 8 pound cat*
Wow. That’s a lot of cat.
The Biophysicist & I live with two cats, rescue kittens who are now approaching age two. One looks like a miniature Maine Coon cat, the other is silver grey with faint underlying stripes. Izzi, the former, is scary smart, smarter than any other cat I’ve ever lived with. Kiri, the latter, is the feline equivalent of a dumb blonde. She’s sweet and beautiful, but she’s thick as a plank.
I like dogs, but I don’t think urban apartment life is fair on a dog – the last time I had one, we lived on an acre of fenced land, so the dog could run free. Cats do much better in an apartment, IMX.
Cats and babies: When the Offspring was a baby, my elder cat allowed him to crawl over him, hug him, generally maul him. When he got tired of all that, he’d just leave, and jump up onto something where the kid couldn’t get to him. When the behaviour first started, I’d pull the kid away from the cat – who was, in fact, purring – only to have the cat cozy up to the kid again. Never was there claw-extending or biting, so I can only deduce that the cat liked the attention, however drooly and uncoordinated.
When I was growing up, my family had dogs and I loved them. When I moved into my own apartment, I started getting cats and I loved them. Over the years I’ve turned into a real cat person, but that doesn’t mean I dislike dogs now. I just luvs mah kittehs better. :)
And, for my first attempt here at linking to a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk7yqlTMvp8
It’s all fine sir.
I’m just used to a life time of pile ons when I don’t show proper love of dogs.
I’ve never experienced that with like or dislike for any other animal.
I happen not to like horses much, for instance. No one cares.
Ol’ Greg @ 28:
I know how to love, from my partner and my three rescued dogs. I’m learning to be a better person by refraining from setting out antifreeze for my neighbors 8 outdoor cats, which crap in my yard, torment my dogs, and kill birds at my feeders.
However, I am fond of one of my cousins indoor cats. I call him Big Sexy, because of his cabana boy demeanor.
LOL. Yunomi, I was just being snarky. I promise.
For the record I don’t think people should have that many cats, or let their cats roam outside!
Carle@34:
Hedgehogs have been pets in Britain for ages – I had one when I was a child, and that was a loooong time ago. They’re easy to take care of and fairly friendly. And, of course, terribly cute. And they eat bugs.
Carlie: Yes, thirty pounds. He is a fixed Maine Coon/Rag Doll (at least, that is the best guess from our vet (the breed, not the fixed part (that he knows for sure))).
(((Billy))):
How, pray tell, did a cat manage to break your toe?
And by the way; “the roast beef toe” made me squirt IPA out my nose. Thanks for that.
@46
That’s OK. I wasn’t going to enter this discussion, initially, because the ongoing cat wars with the neighbors don’t do much for my blood pressure. But there are other things to talk about, eh? How bout them Astros?!?
Dogs, hedgehogs. cats, babies, nah… what everyone needs is a pet Cthulhu.
One summer in Dah UP, we were living on the edge of town, and a bobcat picked the bit of woods behind our rented house for his home. Sunned himself in the back yard. We had various students from the college come and observed the bobcat according to the Redhead. Since I was invariably at work most days (us lazy academic types ;) ), I never saw the bobcat.
boygenius: I am not responsible for any damage to keyboards.
Our 30-pounder was sitting on a kitchen stool. I picked up the small rug by the back door (if I don’t, the neurotic cat (Sherman) will piss on it) and placed it on another stool. Dust (the huge one) decided it was time to leave, or maybe I surprised him (he is easily surprised) and he jumped off the stool. When he jumped off the stool, it fell over. And landed on my toe as I moved my foot out of the way. It hurt.
I went to bed, got up the next morning and went to work. My toe hurt all day. No surprise. That evening, when I got home, I pulled off my boots and socks and looked at my middle toe.
The toe was the size of a large grape and was the most amazing shade of pinkish-purple. When (((Wife))) got home, she took me to the local hospital.
When the doctor came into my room, she asked what had happened. I told the full story, in four part harmony, with full orchestration. She asked which toe.
Before I could answer, (((Wife))) said, “Roast Beef.” The doctor blinked. She opened and closed her mouth. She blinked. “Oh. The middle toe.”
The last phalange was shattered into six pieces. Nothing they could do about it, of course, but I got a note to keep me home for a week. Which was nice.
Are you sure there actually was a “bobcat”?
Oh, dear . . . “roast beef toe.” Best laugh of the week. I’m still snorting.
Will try one more time. I said I do not understand how someone can love a cat the way I love a dog. Statement of fact. What I do understand and fully accept it that people do love their companion/pet of choice as much as I love mine. My not understanding is immaterial, only my acceptance that everyone gets to make their choices – to each their own. I do not understand why certain couples are together. Hell, people did not see why my former spouse and I were together. I get it.
Back to lurk mode.
My daughter walked in when I was reaching down to my bare foot and saying “This little piggy….” When I explained I was figuring out which was the roast beef toe she laughed.
JeffreyD:
Stop that. It’s as bad as apologizing all the time.
I can sympathize. Sort of. I like dogs and I absolutely love cats, but I don’t like babies or children. Don’t get me wrong, I can’t tolerate any kind of cruelty or injustice towards children and I get very angry when parents don’t treat their children well. But I’d rather not have to care for them and for some reason I can’t find babies cute, even though I know I should.
Kittens, lots of oxytocin. Human babies, no oxytocin. My instincts are all messed up. :S
I have only just begun to overcome my misanthropic tendencies; vertebrate pets are pretty much out for me. If only my wife felt the same. She once had a hedgehog (rescued from some irresponsible buyer). I once stepped on the thing barefooted*. It really freaking hurt. The hedghog was nonplussed. She now has a cat that I hate without mitigation, and a guinea pig that I find repulsive for her proclivity to somehow launch turds up to 24 inches from her enclosure. I have never actually seen this done (she’s shy?), but I have imagined a prolonged pucker followed by a small popping noise and a cavian sigh of relief. There is also a fish to which I am indifferent.
I do have an irrational love for spiders though. I have kept several as pets…all but one rescued from irresponsible previous owners. They require no affection, and seem content to 1) sit, and 2)occasionally bite something. So we have that in common*. I can also get into insects, although I have never reared one.
Although I was raised in an enormous baby-dense family (40 some first cousins on my mother’s side), I have never been able to say that I “like” children as a class of people***. Much to my surprise, when my sister started having children, I found that I liked those…and then we had a kid, and I like her even better. I still distrust other people’s children the way that I distrust birds–with more acuity when the damned things are gathered together in groups.
The point is, I guess, that I have a long way to go. Secondarily, I no longer feel excited about the lecture that I am writing, and I find that complaining about things sometimes reinvigorates me. Refreshed now, I charge back to the fray; Darwin’s Abominable Mystery, I will have you!
*Don’t have a cow. It was an accident.
**Although we differ markedly in the order in which our mouths and assholes develop. This hasn’t caused any undue friction, though.
***A rancor that was palpable even when I was one of them.
Yeah. And we like having you around.
Yep, word does get around in the academic community, and bobcats are in the area. That was 30 years ago. I have a vague memory of coming home early one day and a small group of students with binoculars on the porch at the side of the house waiting for an appearance. IIRC, the bobcat was shy that day.
JeffreyD, the following is the reasons for you to just lurk:
*crickets chirring*
:)
I had a cat once. It didn’t like my flatmate – shat on his duvet, while he was in it. One of those independent types, you know.
But we forgive, don’t we?
Shortly afterwerds, little Asterix was playing in a pool of sunshine in the lounge, so my flatmate had the ahhhhhhhh (oxytocin?) reflex and reached for his camera in the nearby camera case to get just the shot.
He put the camera to his eye and….ewwww…that smell.
Turns out that the worst thing to have inside your camera is cat pee. Like, new camera bad.
Shortly afterwards, Asterix disappeared.
Ivo was and is a very nice guy. I’m almost sure he had nothing to do with it.
But Jeez guys, for a bunch of god-hating atheists you sure are sentimental about animals…
Geez, I musta missed something during my formative years. I didn’t know that cats and dogs were so polarized. I grew up with more cats, dogs, cows, horses, chickens, pigs, mice, magpies, deer, moose and people than I can account for. In all, they share a common trait. That is, they respond to human influence. As such, they are all just like little guys. They all like to be treated with measured kindness and frequent reassurance.
Fact is, the last cat I was privileged to live with behaved like a dog. Why? you ask. Because I taught him to, that’s why. It occurred to me during this cats young days that there was nothing but taxonomy to differentiate him from any dog or horse or little birdie. Thus it came to pass that Louis the cat was more than willing to sit, lay down, roll over and shake hands like any “normal” puppy dog. He also knew the ritual of chow; ask, wait at dish and when the chow is presented, give me worship before supping.
If I mentioned the word “brush” with an inquisitive inflection, Louis new to get up on his chair with front paws stretched up to the top of the seat back, therefore presenting his brushable parts to me in a convenient manner. He did this because I treated him in the same fashion I would treat a dog. Rewards for the good behaviors, none for the bad. For bad behavior the proper response is usually no response. Experience shows this approach to be much more productive than punishing unwanted behavior. Something to do with trust, I suspect.
Amazingly, many animals catch on to this method much faster than many humans do. This makes me consider how easy it might be to raise a child to become a cow or a sheep. The basic principles seem to be well established and I’m sure there are protocols . . . what? It’s already being done on an industrial scale right under our noses?
“Oh, my lands and stars.”
–Lila Johnson, a friend of my grandmother. Both long dead.
Well, gods don’t exist.
Not even Bast.
*snorts milk through nose*
Nerd; sorry, I was attempting to make a crass insinuation about the reasons why young college students might be dropping by the house while you were away at work. ;)
Run, don’t walk to the new Butterflies and Wheels site at butterfliesandwheels.org. Total makeover, great new site design, new functionality, the works.
Ophelia Benson – the site’s proprietor – is one of the most incisive social critics on the scene, and she’s an unbelievably good writer. If any of you aren’t regular readers, you might want to be.
With regards to the cat video. Can’t win with it. Can’t play with it. It doesn’t include the stupid cat jump so can’t even make the top 10 list. Sorry PZ your taste in cat videos leaves a lot to be desired.
Trust? Why would you need to get into a situation where you’d need to trust a cat in the first place? :-)
Or indeed places where the boss of the ruling party (2/3 of the vote) simply says “there shall not be a party to the right of my party” and – successfully – makes his party open-ended on the right, even now, long after his death *coughBavariacough*.
<pft> We’re not important enough for that. They don’t care.
Of course not. As I said, cats know how big they are and thus what they have any chance of actually accomplishing; dogs don’t.
“Breed”? Isn’t that the cat-serval hybrid?
That type of person couldn’t stand my… autistic laziness for 24 hours.
Not even if I relabel it as “Epicureanism” or something.
(Unsurprisingly, my mother can’t stand it for 24 h either, and she has never tried to progress beyond her job as a teacher. No, as for yours, I don’t know how she has managed to stay sane in these almost 28 years [I was already late for my birth, LOL]; probably she works too hard for insomnia to arise in the first place, or something. Yes, she suffers. :-( )
QFT.
Desperately assuming you’re talking about my sister and not about me, I feel compelled to mention how she behaved when she learned to walk. Several times a day, she’d suddenly find herself sitting on the floor, of course. Whenever that happened, she waited for a second: does it hurt, or does it not hurt? When it didn’t (and it almost never did, globular as she was), she laughed.
…awww… :-}
:-}
~:-|
Dang it! I lost my long rant on irresponsible dog owners. Oh well, I’ll sumerize: Leash Law, it’s a love line.
Would rather pet a horse or a cat than a dog, but don’t own any amimals at this time.
And whoever has the cat named Dust…good name!
Not an apology, agree with Caine on that note.
I am tired and fidgety. Been working hard all week on my books and lecture plans so I would be free when my spouse arrives on Friday from the US, departing Thursday. Now, with the ash cloud thing, there is a possibility the flight will be canceled. We can reschedule, but I have commitments in early May which will eat into our time. So, yeah, not in a great mood and do not need to take that out on Walton and others.
Okay, I understand that some people don’t like one type of pet or another, but I have to admit to a bias. I do not trust a person who does not have a pet of some kind unless there is a very good reason why it is not possible at this time (too much travel, that sort of thing). It’s not absolute, I can get around it. I’ve known one or two very good people who never wanted the hassle of a pet. And I did say it was a bias.
I knew a guy once who lived alone and had to be out of town a lot. He had a gerbil that he took with him everywhere. He brought it to work with him and let it wander around on his desk. He took it to the field and kept it in his motel room. He said he needed the company and I understood that.
Here is one of my favorite cat videos.
Sisyphus, that video is hilarious. Can’t stop watching it.
doesn’t matter. a careerwoman with the desire for children will overlook all other flaws, as long as the man in question will take the spawn off her hands and mind. some of them have even written long and whiny books about this :-p
anyway, my point was that the entire subsection of women who’d like to be “daddy” will consider a man willing to be “mommy” to be worth his weight in gold, almost regardless of anything else.
You think I was born yesterday? (I’ve had my AARP card (thanks to the Redhead) for years.) No offense taken. Just remember, the straight man gets top billing…(echo chamber in here, I think I’ve said that before.) (With everyone adding epithets to their monikers, “old fart” would fit me. ;) )
Good to know! I’ve tried it a few times but been frustrated and stymied by the layout, so I’ll definitely try again.
Seconded. You’re a regular now, live with it :-)
:-o
We simply know there isn’t some metaphysical difference that makes us not animals. :-)
Now I’ll watch the two videos, and then I’ll talk about the TV confrontation…
JeffreyD:
Damn. That’s enough to put anyone in a sour mood.
Amen Brother and Sister…
Oh my, I have been called a bitch on the Sunday Sacrilege thread. I wonder if it’s time to change Fleur du mal to my former usenet sig: extra bitchy all the time.
Yeah, felt it was worth explaining the bad mood. Well, late here in the monarchy so think I will pull the plug and seek bed and Discworld. Nite all.
You guys are all wooses. Now these guys are real pet owners:
at home with…
I wonder how that turned out?
Also, cats, dogs…spiders…do none of you have unusual pets? Sugar gliders? Monkeys? Snakes? Blue-ringed octupuses?
And no, lice and tapeworm don’t count.
G’night, Jeffrey. I hope you and your wife are reunited soon, have fun on Discworld. ;D
Video in the post: LOL! Some scenes look like they hurt, though.
Impressive acrobatics in there!
Failed cat jump: ouch. I’ve seen such a jump work so often that I really didn’t expect that…
I can’t resist.
An excellent reason for a delay in your posts, dear sir…
AnthonyK, does rabbits count? if so, yes…
I forgot to jump in when Teh Thread was about science fiction. Thanks to all of you for the excellent reading list – it was just the sort of thing I was looking for. I’m mostly a non-fiction guy, but *good* sci-fi is definitely my thing.
I highly recommend buying the yearly anthology, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois. I love the short story form, and this massive tome of 300,000 words is just a treat to dig into. Comes out every year.
ahem.
I’d like to take a moment to point out that it’s April 18th, and we still haven’t had a Molly thread.
Nerd,
Gotcha, I guess I’m the dense one. Can I be an “old fart” when I grow up?
Jadehawk #89, I can’t hear you. Speak up. Maybe Dah PoopieHead will hear you…
But I couldn’t stand that type of person for longer than maybe 30 h either…!
Other than careerwomen, how common are they…?
* * *
Speaking of timeframes measured in hours, I’m too tired to talk about the TV confrontation. Anyone interested will have to wait for at least 11 hours. So far I’ll just say it was pretty entertaining: a nutty and a kooky candidate, both utterly untrained in how to deal with the media, and a somewhat incompetent moderator who clearly despised them both…
Oh yeah, I also wanted to address Walton’s point about coalitions with parties of madness. Happened to Austria in 2000, when the conservatives and the xenophobes (the latter having 433 more votes than the former) formed a right-right coalition. The xenophobes were incompetent, and the power-grubbing and -hogging conservatives just wiped the floor with them (and with the rest of the country). After two such years of conservative madness, the xenophobes split, there were new elections, the conservatives won like mad (zooming past the Social Democrats), and one of the two xenophobe parties formed a coalition with them again. After four more years of xenophobe powerlessness, people finally had enough of the conservatives, the Social Democrats won again (in spite of their continued bumbling incapability), and the country has returned to its <sigh> natural state of a Grand Coalition where the Social Democrats and the conservatives partition the country among themselves.
While it is commonly said that people sometimes fight like cats and dogs, I cannot recall any feline/canine conflicts that amounted to more than a spat. Why, most often the warring parties can be seen later curled up together taking a bit of a nap.
It takes intelligence to turn a issue of mere personal comfort into a struggle that involves strife and death across generations. Strike that; it takes the misuse of intelligence to accomplish such.
Not that humans have a lock on such misuse. My father once owned two horses that could not be corralled together. They would not only hurt one another but they would tear up the fences and gates. Just like many aspirants to public service, they showed their character by being confrontatory and assertive based not on knowledge but on emotion. They were also knotheads who were untrustworthy as solid mounts.
While I may be able to countenance the justification of each horse’s sense of self and territory, when seeing commensurate behavior among human “leadership” figures my tolerance thins markedly. Why should I be expected to endorse strategies that I know are self defeating and why should anyone be surprised that I don’t? Just another reason that I have registered as an independent voter. To claim fealty to the major parties these days is to justify idiotic behavior. I choose to not be led by idiots. Tall order, I know.
[begin waiting for viable third, fourth, umpty-umpth party to arrive . . .
continue waiting . . .]
Exactly! Now that’s what I call a complete mess.
…End result: the xenophobes had increased their share of the vote in every election from 1986 to 1999 (with one small exception) and had moved the Overton window; that time is over.
That being said, honestly, I can see a lot of reasons your personality would be attractive to some one as a mate.
Why? Except for university students, it was all in all worth it; and the students at least got a few demonstrations out of it.
WTF? I’m insane. 97 was addressed to David and the one before it has messed up block quotes.
Yeah, I don’t know about the laziness thing. I have that a bit, things that aren’t what I want to think about or things I can not focus on for some reason pile up.
Not the best trait. Only seems to affect my personal life though, never bothers me at work. Probably because I prioritize work while I’m there.
quite common. they just don’t get to say it out loud, because that makes them somehow deficient in the minds of too many people. I’ve heard a lot of co-workers and co-students say that to me, privately, because my only contribution to public baby-conversations are usually limited to saying: “I’ve not the faintest clue what to do with a baby, so the only way I’m ever going to be willing to spawn is if I can hand it over to someone else after birthing it.”
That generally earns me weird looks and stunned silence, but it also keeps people from handing me their infants to coo over, so it works out :-p
Well, they can definitely multiply.
Anthony K #85
But tapeworms make excellent pets. They go where you go, eat what you eat, don’t crap on the carpet, are quiet, don’t need to be taken for walks or have their litter box cleaned. What more could you ask for?
and in case you haven’t noticed, that sentence wasn’t about “career women”, but about women who theoretically like the idea of a family, but practically know they can’t (or don’t want to) be a primary caretaker. careerwomen are a separate but often overlapping group (think of it as a venn diagram)
We’ve been through this… scroll up to comment 193 of that thread afterwards.
The world population being as big as it is, stochastics alone is such a reason :-þ
LOL!
haha! FTW. The ultimate pet, except my understanding is that once they’ve been there a while they *hurt* and that’s not good.
It’s all right Jadehawk I know you didn’t mean it that way. I really do. I’ve just been kind of snotty today.
I actually fit exactly into that whispering crew you mentioned. Housework is real work, that’s for certain. So is taking care of a kid.
Hell. They even cause anemia, and will help with that weight problem.
If you’re considering a tapeworm for a pet, be responsible and don’t overdo it. A tapeworm is for life, not for Christmas.
ok.
yeah, I tend to use “mommy”, “wife”, “daddy”, and “husband” as job descriptions, because really, they still are distinct and relatively well-defined jobs. Unfortunately, they’re jobs assigned by gender rather than ability and inclination.
I’ll leave you a cane, a CD of “you kids get off the lawn”, and a pair of sweatpants.
And I’ll personally welcome you to club in twenty or thirty years if I’m still around.
Not if they are brothers. Not that the dominant didn’t try anyway.
Ugh you just reminded me that we had a rabbit for a while.
It was soft and cute and tried to put it’s weird rabbit penis in everything. Gross.
Tapeworms?
They make me sick.
Parasites my arse.
Josh & Tis: My (((Wife)))’s joke. She’s the funny one (unless you are speaking of looks); I’m just inapropriate.
Dust: That would be me. When he was a kitten, a tiny kitten, he had a tuft of white on his back which looked like a speck of dust. The name stuck. As did the food.
Crudely Wrott: When we moved from Arizona to Maryland, my sisters stayed in Utah at a private school until the end of the semester. We brought our cats (Kipling and Baloo) with us. When they came home, they brought a pupply named Avatar (it was 1978 and there was a movie . . . .).
When the puppy was introduced to the cats, Kipling, a gangly orange and white ‘tough guy’ cat, walked up to her, sniffed, and then raked one pawfull of claws down Avatar’s nose. Four long bleeding slices.
The dog (a German Shepherd, Doberman, Golden Lab mix) spent the rest of her life with a sever case of feliniphobia. No fight. Just a pre-emptive strike by a cat which recognized a future problem?
(And I now have a Moveable Type account, so my name is now what my name was and is and will be, not who WordPress thinks I was, am and will be.)
Yeah, a Disney movie comes out with one as a main character, and suddenly every little kid wants one. Same old story. Dalmatians, rats, it never ends.
Aaaaarrrrgggghhhh!
???
?
*patpat*
There, there.
o.O
Oh are you guys in the Sunday thread? I can not do it.
I’m here already because of inertia. I can’t seem to get things I need done… done today.
But I did make a lovely loaf of fruit & nut filled bread.
Baking some Salmon now for dinner, some wine… maybe later in the eve I’ll get moving more.
But I just don’t have the emotional tenacity to deal with a subject that affects me on an emotional level.
I agree with PZ on that one. But I just don’t have the energy to jump into it today!
Hopefully I’m no the cause of that. If not, we’re listening (paraphrasing Frasier Crane)…
Thank you, Sili. Yes, it’s the Sunday thread. I’m fine. Really. Just a lot of people I’d like to slap up one wall and down the other.
I’ve got a cuddly cat, an affectionate dog, and two (sometimes affectionate) kids. What can I say, I’m an oxyctocin junkie.
I like cats because they can be both affectionate and independent. I’m a junkie for babies, but at this stage of my life I’m happy with my two teenagers. The dog is ok, and keeps the raccoons away from the house, and is (for a dog) pretty low maintenance.
But the thing I like best about kids is that they grow up. When we were first filling out the papers for the adoption agency, I stressed that I didn’t want a *baby*, I wanted a child. Because people who focus on wanting a *baby* frequently can’t deal with it when the kid turns two and learns how to argue back.
So I got two kids, one of whom likes to argue back and the other simply agrees and does what he’s going to do anyway. Their birth mother is a woo-soaked flake, so mostly I feel like I got the best of the deal.
could/would/should a smaller Cephalopod survive in a home sized aquarium (or would i need a really big aquarium — don’t really need a giant squid or humboldt though)? Could I just feed them goldfish or crayfish or clams or something? Now that would be an interesting pet, if i could talk the boss into letting me have a big aquarium that is.
That would tide me over until chromatophore implants become available. First color flashy mice and then humans!
But will it be gene therapy or spray on??
Nerd:
No, of course you aren’t! It’s the Sunday thread. I’m going to get a drink now.
Yum!
I haven’t cooked anything lately. Made an omelet with asparagus and brie tonight, though.
Can’t blame you, Caine. I don’t usually get involved, myself.
Apropos of o,
This site is very strange in one way, rather retro.
(Clearly it’s gr88888888888) but there are no bells and whistles here, no avatars, no big blocks of space with a motto at the bottom, no post counts, no easy way of posting, say, photos or videos, no nested threads – just plain ‘ol messages with dull old HTML commands.
No complaints – no really – well sometimes the tone ;)
But is there anywhere else on the intelligent interweb which is so plain and unvarnished?
Not Dawkins, not bad science…where else?
Don’t care anyway, just interested.
Another cat & bear video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57VbE0J9niw
They sure are feisty little buggers!
BTW – someone on this site suggested FireFox’s html toolbar add-on, which really worked great. But, alas, it no longer works on their latest update (curse you FF!). Any suggestions where I might be able to find another one that works with FF?
Can’t argue that there isn’t a certain stupidity there. Cheers! (meant as double entendre.)
Caine (@82):
So, if I understand it correctly, the question you’re asking us is… “Original recipe, or extra bitchy?”
Original recipe, please, and I’d like an extra biscuit. Thanks!
I’ve seen the video before. Lots of aaaaaawwww.
The shots of the cats jumping on toddlers’ heads make me cringe, but I must say that the cat who went after what looks like a three-quarters-grown bear cub must have been the bravest (if not stupidest) feline that lived to breeding age.*
.
.
.
.
.
.
*The all-time honor for bravest/stupidest/meanest cat goes to the very late kitten known to his humans as “Kitty Kung Fu”.
Kitty Kung Fu was known for spending his time atop the kitchen refrigerator, which just happened to be next to the back door of the house. Anyone entering the house through that door was liable to have a psychopathic kitten with razor claws and teeth coming straight for them at eye level; if you were lucky or quick, you closed the door before the beastie could reach you, in which case the next thing you heard was a thud, then a long, drawn-out scraping sound as the cat slowly slid by his claws down the door.
Humans were not the only things that Kitty Kung Fu would attack. Oh, no. Kitty Kung Fu would attack things thousands of times its own size. In fact, Kitty Kung Fu met his end after he made the mistake of attacking the white sidewall of a car tire. While it was attached to a car. A car in motion.
And that was it for Kitty Kung Fu.
Hypatia’s Daughter, go to http://codefisher.org/format_toolbar/ for the updated format bar. :)
Bill:
LOL. Today, I think I’ll have to go with extra bitchy. Hmmm, I haven’t eaten today. Perhaps I should eat.
David Marjanović:
I’d like to think I can trust mine not to crap in my headphones.
How about a song? Here’s The Fraternity of Man doing their greatest (only) hit “Don’t Bogart Me”:
This just in: We are so massively screwed!
*grumpy b/o workload and lack of sparetime*
If I ever decide to get a pet to have something resembling a relationship(you know, relationship, that thing where you give someone all your money and they purr on your lap every now and then to keep you happy), it will be a cat.Hate dogs, and hate most dog owners.
There.
Caine – it’s driving me to drink, let me tell you.
What those numbnuts don’t realise is that “big government” beats the alternative, any alternative.
But they can find that out for themselves when they, after overthrowing the government, move into their 1-bedroom cave.The ones that saved some candles will be the lucky ones.
*Quick looks around* Since Patricia is still out with “prince charming”, the bacon sandwiches are still half price, and the mimosa’s/daquari’s the same. Grog over 5 days is free since it is past the expiration date, but I would need your car keys first…
Hate is such an ugly word. Rosharch. I prefer “rebarbitive” , “micturate” and “paraphyeletic” – but right now, I favour “sleepy”
He’s really cute, he’s small in stature, and he’s mine.
I wish.
G’night all :O
Re my link @134: I recently listened to a radio interview about whether the portrait of U.S. Grant on the $50 bill ought to be replaced with a portrait of Ronald Reagan. (Apparently this is being pushed by an organization headed by anti-tax whacko Grover Norquist, whose famous quote is, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”)
Opinion polls, like this one, reflecting deep and abiding distrust of government are the direct result of the transformational ideology so effectively promoted by Reagan, and it is this fundamental distrust of community action through government — which has become so embedded in our political culture that many even of those who think of themselves as liberals nevertheless tacitly accept the notion that smaller government is better government — is the single thing that most makes me fear for our future as a nation.
I used to admire Reagan for his political talent, and for his undeniable ability to raise the public’s spirits… but the more I see of his ideological legacy, the more passionately I oppose all efforts to venerate his presidency. If this nation fails, its blood will be, to a very great degree, on Reagan’s hands.
I do not think my blood pressure could take having to use money with Reagan’s picture on it. Good lord.
ditto
In general I agree with that statement, that I do not trust big government and do not think it can solve our ills.
That being said I can guarantee I would probably disagree with every single point line by line that the article then associates with that stance.
I think an educated and active population of citizens, a real mistrust of corporate oligarchy, and a small but targeted government would be ideal.
By ideal I do realize I’m admitting it would probably never happen.
@ Redhead, #56 & 62
Are you certain it was a bobcat & not a lynx? The two are similar in habits and in general appearance; they are often mistaken one for the other. Lynx are reputed to be as shy and unobtrusive as bobcats, yet it’s my experience in quiet surroundings a lynx can actually be rather blasé even if aware that it’s being observed. I camp, hunt, fish, canoe & guide clients extensively in all 4 seasons in the Maine woods which are not unlike the UP is many respects. In more than 40 years I have seen several lynx but never a bobcat – even is sections where professional and amateur trappers make good money off them.
Big fan of cats here. They’re hairy anarchists which is why I like them so much. Completely mercenary. Coming to think about it I think that this is why I do like them – they don’t give loyalty unconditionally and if they sense a better deal elsewhere they’ll move out.
I don’t have one at the moment but the guy in the neighbouring apartment has a 15 month old tom. Beautiful animal and a monumental attention whore so I get the feline fix without being in any way responsible.
Not a dog person in the slightest but another neighbour is trying to convert me with her terrier…
Isn’t a bobcat a type of lynx?
I don’t know much about them so don’t scream at me if I’m wrong! :P
I have seen one near where I live, but I couldn’t tell the difference. It was a golden colored BIG cat with cool pointy ears, clearly a wildcat. It was only there for a second and then disappeared into the woods.
They’re rare here, but I’m told that way back when the area was settled there were some panthers and that’s why Panther city was called such.
Of course they probably weren’t really panthers here.
I’m pretty sure I saw big cat tracks when we hiked out from my home to the trinity. We did some mud/rock climbing and reached a pretty unreachable part of the river bed.
Saw all kinds of cool tracks. Lots of coyote paws, raccoons, deer, and then … ooh that looks like a cat. Big cat. Hmmm, maybe we should… get moving now.
Ol’ Greg (@143):
I think we disagree (though I also think it’d be fun to talk about over a beer or a cocktail): I’m not promoting “big” government for its own sake, but I also don’t believe a society as vast (in terms of both population and geography), diverse, and complex as ours can be effectively or fairly managed by any government that could rationally be described as “small.”
But the real problem is that the acolytes of Reagan/Norquist/Gingrich ideologies aren’t really interested in “right-sizing” government; they’re interested in drowning it in the bathtub! And they also don’t limit their hatred of government to the federal government: They’re just as happy to eviscerate state and local government, right along with the feds.
In fact, many of the rank-and-file voters who subscribe to this POV don’t really have a principled objection to government at all. They’re really just happy to have intellectual “cover” to excuse their essentially selfish desire to vote for lower taxes at every possible turn… even if it does mean the second-grader next door attends a class of 40 with one teacher and no aides.
I’ve told this story here before, but when I lived in Korea, we used to shop in the district that catered to (which is to say, sold gray-market goods to) foreign tourists and American soldiers. Each shop had a “drummer”: a guy who literally danced on a drum and shilled passersby into their stores. The most famous of these guys (who was profiled in the local English-language newspaper) had a distinctive tagline: “Eeeeeverything is freeeeee!!!
I think that’s the real dog-whistle message of right-wing politics: Underneath all the ideological mumbo-jumbo, they’re just telling their supporters (i.e., people who are well off, people who think they’re well off, and people who’ve been seduced into thinking they’ll be well off in the sweet bye and bye) that living in society is freeeeee!!, and they shouldn’t listen to (or, God forfend, vote for) anyone who asks them to pay for anything.
On this we agree. Despite what I said I do not agree with the right wing agenda of that group. Oddly enough they do not want to end the force of government only the name of taxes. Take, for instance, the use of toll roads rather than state highways. It’s all the rage here. I have paid over 1000 dollars in toll fees because of the amount of driving I must do and the quality of other routes in this area. That is far and above more than I pay in taxes!!!!
Yet taxes return more immediate good.
That, is the kind of non-taxation the Regan model leads to. What happens is extortion. Toll roads can charge what they want, people have little recourse. There is no free market influence, and so unchecked, people are essentially taxed for driving… however those taxes go completely to private profits and people see no benefit from them other than the ability to go to work.
Much like a gang that charges a protection fee, people here are being abused in their effort to avoid taxes.
Now, that I disagree with…
Well, I know they say they hate the government but that’s not entirely accurate. They seem to love government when it comes to making wars or helping the rich. What they really mean when they say they hate government is that they hate programs that help the poor and middle class.
I too don’t trust the government, but I trust big business far less. I’ll favor government only because it seems like the lesser of two evils.
Those are common names for two (in North America) different species of the genus Lynx.
Not sure where “here” is, but the settlers called mountain lions/cougars “panthers” and they were pretty much continent-wide not so long ago.
Feynmaniac (@149):
Yah, my post was by no means an exhaustive catalog of all the ways right-wing ideology is disingenuous; even in the Endless Thread©, we don’t have that much time.
The torsos of bobcats & lynx are similar in proportion, but the lynx has a more uniform coloration, tawny above & light below, whereas the bobcat is distinctly spotted over some or much of the torso. The Lynx has far longer legs and great, puffy paws which enable it to chase its favorite prey, rabbits & hares, in deep snow whereas the bobcat would wallow hopelessly. The lynx has pointy ears ending in dark, narrow tufts; the bobcat’s ears are more rounded, much in proportion as a house cat’s. The lynx’s tail is short & stubby while the bobcat’s curls upward in a near full-circle and has no dark tip. Here’s a lynx shot through the windshield near the Allagash Waterway:
Guess I can’t embed a JPEG; here’s the photobucket link:
http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m272/pogo_02/Lynx.jpg
Carlie:
You are so *not* alone on that one.
It’s getting late, I’m getting tired, and I’m really annoyed by Skatje Myers’ misogynistism on the Sunday Sacrilege thread.
Good night all.
Nerd:
That sounds wonderful…but I don’t give the keys to my ’71 El Camino to anyone. I guess I’ll have a rummage in the fridge and settle for cider. ;p
This thread is too cute. I’m a gonna call in one of my characters to be nasty for a bit.
Tatter-robed Wanderer of the Wastes With the Splintered Staff: *Kicks the kittens, chops off Caine’s head with a sword, kicks P.Z. in the voonerables, and leaves three dozen fundamentalist’s corpses on P.Z.’s doorstep, just to give a nod in the direction of the feline nature of the thread.*
Me: Er, well… at least the thread isn’t as cute anymore. And don’t worry about the blood. Bit of baking soda, it’ll wash right out… I think.
G’Night, ‘Tis. Sweet sleep and dreams to you.
Kieranfoy:
Pfffft. Like that will work…
;D
Here is Dallas Tx. But I’m pretty sure mountain lions were really what people saw here.
I’m sad. :( I felt much the same at her age, but I was also a strident Southern Baptist then. I feel a bit of despair that such an attitude is also held by people not on the fundamentalist spectrum. I imagine it’s because she’s just never had to think about it before. She’s never encountered women who were in dire situations. She’s never had that day or two of absolute shrieking panic waiting for her period to come. She’s had a good life that has so far sheltered her from the nastiness of a lot of the world, and it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t really grab you by the heart until you’ve seen how women can be destroyed by a pregnancy that isn’t all cuteness and bows and matching crib sets. It’s good that she hasn’t experienced that; it’s just that it’s blinding her to thinking about other types of situations.
Yes it bloody well will. It’s made of soulsteel, ferchristssake.
There is no such thing as a “panther”. Anything called a panther is actually a leopard, jaguar, or cougar.
If they put him on the $50 I won’t ever have to worry about it, because I never have that kind of cash :)
I won’t be around as much for awhile. I just got a job with the census as an office clerk, so I’m working a full 40hrs a week.
Congrats, Pygmy Loris! My spouse also just got a job with the census, as an enumerator (hoping his knees hold out!) and starts training week after next. Hope it works well for you.
ditto. smug young privilege is so fucking annoying.
Ol’Greg @ 44:
I would like to express solidarity. I don’t like horses, not even a little; unfortunately, my sister was always mad keen on the carnivorous monsters, and kept trying to ‘educate’ me.
@152 where Peter H said:
A lynx shot through the windshield? Didn’t know they had ’em. Lynx, that is. Whoever fired that shot is a dastardly devil. A bastardly bevel. Whatever, it ain’t right. Not on the level. Oblique, obtuse, distressing.
I think it’s high time we faced the epidemic of feline windshield abuse and for once make a difference! All cats have a right to a clear view of the road ahead and that makes their windshields important to not only them but to all they share the road with. Safer cats mean a safer driving experience for us all.
So, c’mon, kids! If everyone does their part the roads will be safer for everyone. Mom, Dad, Buddy and Sis. And you! Keep your cat’s windshield clean so we all can see and be seen!
(and thanks to Peter H for the easy opening. he really doesn’t think felines have windshields. however, his opinion on spectacles is as yet unclear to say nothing of monocles)
You’re calling my daughter smug? YOU’RE ALL BANNED!
Nah, go ahead. She’s dived into the hurly-burly, and she’s my kid, so I know she’s tough. Argue fiercely if you feel like it.
I probably won’t even disown her.
Carlie,
Thanks and congrats to your spouse, too. The one question my phone interview consisted of was “Are you familiar with PCs?” It’s nice to feel qualified to work in the “real world.” :)
Actually, Crudely #168, that particular lynx was looking into the underbrush. I was looking through the windshield. The rest of your post I don’t understand. Did you actually open the link to my photo?
There’s prolly n0 Ceilin cat.
Now try to enjoy life.
From 1:17 to 1:19 in the video. It appears that ceiling cat has moved from watching you masturbate to trying to stop it.
No, Peter, I didn’t open the photo before I commented. I was just being silly. Your pointing out the differences between lynx and bobcat is most proper and informative and, to the extent of my knowledge, correct. I appreciate your effort to promote clarity as I know many others have. I was just being silly.
Now pardon me, please. I need to go and throw the horse over the fence, some hay.
The video shows that PZ’s herding Lions is too limited. Did you see those pussy-cats takin out postfetuses? And chasing bears.
Instead of Lions we should open this up to any felid. What self respecting skeptic would not want to show up to the pub a little late and say: “Here I am, the missing lynx.”
Go Tigers.
Kieranfoy:
Oh, well, there’s your problem. That stuff doesn’t work against extra bitchy evil.
Jadehawk:
Another ditto here.
Pygmy Loris, congratulations!
Ugh… stumbling drunk tipsy and irritated back into the endless thread.
I feel like a dirty worthless whore that will always be judged as vile or worse yet non existent by the likes of Skatje.
Sad world that it is.
Whatever.
Ol’Greg:
That’s something I think Skatje honestly doesn’t get, that her views are demeaning and degrading to women. Hopefully, she’ll gain some insight on that score. I just hope it isn’t one of the various bad ways that insight is often gained.
she might; I did. On the other hand, I crashed rather thoroughly from comfortably Middle Class to Bottom Of The Barrel, which will never happen to her unless we get the promised End Of The World As We Know It and the US completes its transformation into a Third World Country.
see here is the thing about dogs. They jump on me and slobber on me and I’m obviously backing up and trying to get away and the owners are always saying, “oh isn’t he/she so CUTE! puppy just LOVES people!”
So no, I don’t like dogs. They are fucking RUDE. But I dislike their owners more.
I love my cat. When cats meet new people they want to get to know they come up slowly, and if you want to touch them, you put your hand out. They sniff. If they like you, they’ll then touch your hand with their head and you may touch them. If you don’t put your hand out they won’t bother you.
And if my cat DID start touching a guest without the guest first indicating interest in petting the cat, I would pick her up, ask if it was ok, and if not, put her in the other room.
That has *never* happened with a dog.
Cat’s have manners. Dogs don’t. And much worse, most dog owners think not having manners is cute and such a good thing.
A PSA for those confused on the molly thread: Josh, OSG does not have a molly. Geology Josh has one.
I think this has to do more with owners than the animals. It’s very strange. When people come over I lock my cats up unless I know that the people like them.
I have never had the same treatment coming to a dog owner’s house. To the point where I have had strange dogs jumping into my bed at night when staying with family or friends :(
Jadehawk:
*Nods* One of the things which will most likely prevent any insight is her family, not just her particular class or privilege. She has the fortune, that if she found herself unexpectedly pregnant, that she would not have to make a choice in regard to have a baby and give up my education and career paths or have an abortion so I can keep my education and career paths.
I don’t, of course, know this for sure, but it’s a fair bet PZ and his wife (along with the rest of the family) would help out, so Skatje wouldn’t have to face a hard decision.
while I concur with the current view that Skatje is quite privileged and thus kind of out of touch in the debate on the other thread….
this isn’t that thread.
I kinda came here to get away from that subject.
And it kind of smacks of talking about someone behind their back, even though, as it’s the internet, she’s completely free to come read here.
It just seems weird.
I recall all those radicals from my undergraduate days. I think most of them voted for Raygun ~ten years later. Only about 25% of college graduates, even engineers, are still working in their major after 5 years in the workforce. I suspect Skatje’s opinions, which appear to be very black/white at the moment, will become more nuanced with shades a gray over the next few years.
Applause to Pygmy Loris. Paychecks are great, but addictive…
Jemand:
Then talk about something else. It’s not as if there are no topics to choose from in the preceding 180something posts.
It isn’t. Skatje knows how this blog works. She’s free to defend her views in either thread.
LOL. Yeah, me too. I need to get ready for bed. Painful things, and it does no good to cry.
sorry, you’re right. it’s just that it’s touching on VERY PERSONAL MATTERS, and this thread is where we come to vent our personal frustrations. It’s a bit weird and fucked up that it’s the same blog and all, but there is.
Anyway, I’ll refrain from unloading my further personal frustrations on that topic here. You can go to my blog if you’re masochistic and want to read it :-p
Caine, Nerd,
Thanks for the congrats :) It’s a temporary thing, but it does give me a little cushion as to when I’ll run out of money to pay off my bills.
On the dog vs. cat issue, I love both, but at heart I’m a cat person. I also agree with whoever said upthread that it’s a little weird to be around people who don’t like pets at all. The specific kind of pet (dog, cat, snake, fish, hedgehog, lizard, tarantula, etc.) doesn’t matter to me, but not liking any animal just gives me a bad feeling about people. The people who really bug me, though, are those who come over to my house knowing full well that I have a cat and then complain about the cat. Fucking tough. It’s my house.
So, I normally dive head-long into the abortion debates around here, but the one going on over at the Sunday Sacrilege thread is too damn depressing. Now I’m going to sleep. Y’all have a good night.
change of topic.
so apparently me going to Copenhagen has resulted in Rorschach and David M going, too. If it results in Knockgoats going, too, that would be epic, and it would mean that the the cool kids like me :D
That is so awesome! Ya’ll take pictures :D
I grew up with dogs, cats, chickens, ducks, fish, and horses. I wish my children could do the same. But we’re a “military family” which means we move every few years, and often to places that are not conducive to keeping anything more than a cat or two.
Our current cat, Sasha, will be eighteen this fall. She’s old and grumpy, but she’s been a constant companion. Born in Detroit, she’s lived in Virginia, Japan, Italy, and now Washington. She’s older than my oldest (human) child, and will leave a gaping hole in our family’s hearts when she is gone.
Names of pets. Let’s see. . .
The ducks were Sir Drake and Lucky. The rooster was Chanticleer. The cats were Checkers, Penelope, Sweetums (the only Tom), Persephone, Gretchen and (now) Sasha. The dogs were Prince Pilule (Pill), Tiger, and Jake. The horses were Koda Kelly, Chocolate Sundae and her daughter, Chocolate Chip. The fish never lived long enough to be named.
That being said, I’m really quite painfully depressed now. And I just embarrassed the hell out of myself on the other thread (JeffD? You’ve got nothing on me, dude).
So imma go sleep now and maybe lay low for a little while. I’ve got a busy week anyway and need to get ready for my flight.
Peace.
the the = all the
oh, I will. I might even get around to edit them and put them online (given the relevant permissions, of course)
good night, and I hope you’ll be better and back here as soon as possible, Ol’Greg.
Shit, I knew I shouldn’t have read that other thread and now I’m too pissed at the world to sleep, which just stresses me out because I have to get up early to go to work. Damn.
Ol’Greg,
I hope your flight goes well. I always enjoy your comments including those you left on that other thread.
Jadehawk,
I bookmarked your blog. Just keeping up with the Thread is tough, but I really like reading what you write, so I’m going to make an effort to remember to click over there :)
For the record, Katrina, may I add a few names to your list of beloved friends? I’m sure you would have loved these dogs:
Old Puddin. Zipper and Buttons. T’Chaka and Mercury. Gypsy (GPC). Big ‘Un. Bad Eye. Ol’ Pete. Whitey P. Dawg. Tri-Star.
One of those hounds used to keep an eye on me when I was just old enough to roll over. Pap said that if I rolled near the edge of the blanket that old dog would use his nose to roll me back to a more centered state.
Life without dogs and cats would be tolerable but it would lack something. Something we take for granted but I think is an important part of human existence. They share with us sort of mutual dependency and exploitation. A kind of allied purpose. A kind of comfort taken in alliance, we with them, that makes life a bit better somehow. Or provides a welcome diversion from life’s trials. How fortunate and how curious if they feel similarly. Would that they could talk . . .
Bill Dauphin, from the SF bit on the previous NET – email me & I’ll tell you which books the ex illustrated. DomineditrixATgmailDOTcom
Ol’Greg:
No, you didn’t. And if you persist in thinking you did, please see my response to you in that thread.
Sleep sweet, and have a good flight.
Ol’Greg #194 – Hey, I have faith in the ability of others to embarrass themselves, but I think I still hold the records for both TMI and the self pity boring level of achievement. (smile) I like you and enjoy your posts. Maybe that is not much of a recommendation for you, but there it is. (goofy grin) Hope flight goes well and the depression is manageable.
Debating whether I want to dip my toe in the other thread this morning. I do have work to do and not sure I want to raise my blood pressure if I am not going to stick with it.
Pygmy Loris – Congrats on the job. Please advise how it goes, curious on how a census really works on the inside. Carlie, congrats to your spousal unit and would also love his reports.
Jemand, like me with cat posts, you just need to skip reading some things. The endless thread is good for blowing steam off about another thread. Also, sometimes, you get better conversations about the topic on this thread as the trolls, drools, and fools seldom seem to follow over here.
JeffreyD:
Thank goodness for that too. It’s great to have a place to let off steam.
Coming in late to the pets/animals discussion, but someone has to say it:
Cats, dogs, tapeworms, hedgehogs and spiders make LOUSY riding animals. There. Horses rule. And they smell better.
(From a dressage-rider-wannabe)
On another topic: Jadehawk, Rorschach, David all coming to Copnehagen, Sili seems to live here already. I’m here already. Seems like beer-swilling will be going on in june. I don’t mind.
Did a high speed read through of the Sunday Sacrilege thread. I feel like I need a shower. I am amazed how polite some people are, afraid I would have been screaming, “Oh, fuck you!” about half way through a reply.
Ol’Greg, for what it is worth, still think I have you beat on the embarrass oneself scale. (Trust me, no need to research back in old posts prior to your arrival. I was a regular once before.) I thought it was a honest post, hard to read, but worth reading.
Caine, I had nominated you and Ol’Greg for the OM before reading the Sunday thread. I see I was correct to do so.
JeffreyD:
Enough of my responses got way too close to “Oh, fuck you!” Difficult thread to keep myself reigned in.
I thank you. I replied that I needed to add you to my molly nomination list, and have done so. (Yes, I gave my very specific reasons for doing so.) The warm fuzzies I’ve gotten for being nominated have been extremely welcome in light of the Sunday thread, which has had me feeling not so warm and fuzzy.
Caine, Fleur du mal, a smile for you. I need to get off of the net and do some work. Also need to check on the status for flights, still hoping spousal unit will make it as scheduled. I am sometimes about as stable as a bag of rats in a burning meth lab without her. ;^)
purr-fect.
Ol’Greg:
:-D :-D
Haven’t looked at the abortion thread yet. I’m somewhat daunted by the 550 comments and by the subject itself. Being a man (in the biological sense, at least), I don’t really feel that I’m entitled to an opinion on it. Is that unusual or wrong?
I have known (and loved) women who have had abortions, and I would never vote against their right to have them or think less of them for having made that choice.
I’ve had a couple of downstairs-wardrobe malfunctions that have wound up with girlfriends and I going to the doctor to get prescriptions for morning-after pills (after the doc has retrieved the recalcitrant rubber with the old barbecue tongs). It was not at all pleasant for the girls, and I can’t imagine what imagine what an abortion must be like.
What really makes me seethe is the fact that the people who are most vocal and cruel in their opposition to abortion are the very people who are most vocal in their opposition to sex education and contraception. Old news, I know, but it still sucks.
All I can say is “Moar sex ed! Moar condoms! And loads of morning-after pills. ”
Ooops, that last line wasn’t sposed to be there. It was part of an ill-thought-out draft. But I still agree with it, apart from what might be taken as enthusiasm for the morning-after pill. Prevention is the best thing.
Yep. As I pointed out on the other thread, the best way to reduce the number of abortions would be to maximise the availability of contraception. More birth control = fewer abortions. This is both common sense, and consistently borne out by the statistics. Another good move would be to provide enough welfare, childcare and social support to single mothers so that they don’t have to worry about being plunged into poverty by giving birth.
With this in mind, it’s sad that the authoritarian wing of the “pro-life” movement is mostly against birth control and sex education, and tends to be in favour of cutting welfare for single mothers.
History shows that the criminal justice system is a very bad tool for changing society. Just as prohibitions on alcohol and drugs have always been a disaster, so too prohibition on abortion is a disaster. It doesn’t stop abortion: it just makes abortion less safe, and leads to more women dying unnecessarily.
Y
Bloody hell Walton. You really have come on in the last 18 months or so. Whatever happened to that callous youth who did not give a fuck for others ?
I might have to travel by boat, however, if the current vulcano situation doesnt fix itself quickly.
Newest Condell : What I know about Islam
full frontal collision with reality ;-)
I don’t like reality very much, though. Delusions are a lot more fun. :-(
JeffreyD:
I know that feeling all too well. Currently, I only get to see my spousal unit on Saturday & Sunday. I really hope she’s able to get on a flight and get to you quickly. It’s difficult, when circumstances keep you apart.
*A smile right back atcha. :)
I know. it’s no coincidence that being asleep is my favorite part of the day: the worlds in my dreams are much better than the world i live in when awake.
ambulocetacean:
Yeah. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any telling of that to some people who consider themselves a non-religious, rational anti-abortionist.
And I’m very jealous of everyone who is going to Copenhagen.
IIRC, Skatje is nineteen. When I was her age (about a year ago) I was a pro-lifer too. People change.
weeeelll…. rorschach may be right that the volcano might fuck with our plans after all.
we should sacrifice a virgin to it, just in case. any volunteers?
Walton:
Let’s hope so.
Jadehawk:
Don’t look at me, I’m seriously not qualified. ;p
*runs away*
Walton, Caine,
Yes, people do change, a lot. I know I have. I cringe at the person I was 20 years ago. Things that seemed black and white have become grey, and things that seemed grey have become black and white.
A person is only a snapshot of themselves in time. Don’t hold it against them :)
On the subject of eating cats (#5), this is an obsession of someone called Saffy commenting (practicaly spamming) on this radio program on the idea of keeping native (Australian) animals as pets. One of numerous animal-rights nutters commenting there who completely missed the show’s points about conservation and familiarizing kids with native animals.
And I didn’t know the French for dent de lion, but an equivalent name does exist in English: my mother-in-law calls it ‘wet-the-bed’, though I haven’t heard it elsewhere.
PZ’s comparison of cats to snakes is not all wrong, but snakes are generally more serious. Sleep, bask, forage, no time for play.
ambulocetacean, yes, I know people change. My reservations in this particular regard were expressed in #184. Still, there’s hope.
Evil scum running Sonoma County CA:
Open Salon
Re: Video, ‘Say something that isn’t squeee’
Actually the first thing I did was get to the cat that was batting at the kids head, then immediately close the tab, and google “Omae wa mo Shindeiru Cat” to get that video with a particular edit. Youtube did not disappoint.
Also, I’ve just heard something that makes me rage a lot. Apparently in europe, when they talk about cutting taxes, they talk about what you would cut from public spending at the same time. That is, “Well, we will lower your taxes, but it will negatively affect X.”
Ffffffffffuck that makes me angry at American politics.
Lack of food on this thread.
I am currently letting my British Bloomer rise for the second time. Never tried to make the bread before, but it is coming out nicely. I think. I hope.
Rutee: Well, here in America, we’ve been fed ‘taxcuts pay for themselves’ and ‘the government is evil/incompetent’ for thirty years and enough idiots still believe it that they can’t suss why the government debt is so high.
Rutee – also, if you haven’t yet, search youtube for Maru. Wonderful cat.
If I can throw out a help line, youtube now tells me to go upgrade whenever I try to watch anything. A week or so ago it was only on certain videos, but now I get it all the time. I have the current upgraded version of flash (re-upgraded just to make sure), and my noscript allows everything from youtube (and always has), so I don’t know what the problem is. :(
Here in the UK all the parties talk about “efficiency savings” that will allow them to cut public expenditure or taxes, or even both. Outside of the parties no one has a clue what they are on about.
Did you restart your web browser, Carlie? I’m guessing yes, but it’s possible you’re like me and rarely if ever actually close it.
Billy: While true, the really enraging part is that honest discourse is possible. Well, more precisely, “Honest discourse is possible, but doesn’t happen here”. I’d at least feel better if someone said “But your roads will get less” or “Your mother won’t get her meds”.
Aww, kitties.
I want a kitty, but I live in a studio apartment, I’m gone for 10 hours a day, I take a lot of trips to other parts of the country / world for several days at a time. It would be unfair to the kitty, I think.
@Jadehawk (#221)
Quick! Someone sleep with me before I become a human sacrifice to appease the angry volcano gods!
Carlie, your U-tube problem is probably your browser. It may no longer be supported. I got the same message a week or so ago about IE6.
Nerd – it’s Firefox 3.6.3. Rutee – good point; I have closed it a few times, but I don’t know that I restarted my computer (I tend to make it hibernate instead).
First, Haiti. Now, Iceland.
When will the madness stop?
Isn’t the Central Bank part of Big Government™? It doesn’t make much sense to put St. Raygun on bills then. Perhaps we could go for the pennies, instead – then there’s a chance people will finally get rid of the damn things. You really are a third world country.
Hey! Imma gonna take the train. Find someone else for your silly rituals.
By the way, windy seems to be coming, too.
The Sunday thread finally attracted me here, where I can vent about my desire to whack people on the side of the head until they can see that other people’s lives vary from their own. Sometimes children of educated progressives are quite aggravating – I had a huge argument a couple years ago with a 16 year old who scolded me for saying that I would run over a squirrel with my car rather than endanger myself, my kids, and possibly other drivers and passengers. She told me that she did not believe that the value of (multiple) human lives outweighed the value of a (single) squirrel’s life. I decided not to argue this point, as I didn’t think she was willing to change her mind without a few more years of myelination and life experience. Grrrrr.
I don’t know where you got that idea. It’s not true, in Britain at least.
Just as I wish right-leaning Americans would stop acting as though “Europe” is some homogeneously evil demonic sink of depravity, I equally wish left-leaning Americans would lose the rose-tinted view of “Europe” as some rational secular liberal paradise. It is neither. “Europe” consists of a large number of countries, some of which are very liberal and others very conservative, and with widely divergent politics, societies and cultures. It is not possible to make a blanket statement about all of Europe like you did.
I will post an actual introduction later. Despite the bad language and lack of concern for “tone,” you guys seem like a lot of fun.
Well, Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh (let’s just call them “Prat Limbertson” for ease of reference) will both die eventually. And if we’ve got it wrong and there is, in fact, a God, I expect He (or She) will reserve the lowest circle of Hell for those who made a lot of money by claiming falsely to speak on His (or Her) behalf. If I were God, I’d be pretty embarrassed about having idiots like Pratbaughtson making up offensive bullshit and blaming it on me.
Indeed, the best evidence that there isn’t a God is that no freak accident has yet taken out either Robertson or Limbaugh. :-)
Anybody have access to JAMA?
I need to read this.
Carlie, Flash upgrades are kind of crap sometimes. You may need to run Adobe’s uninstaller, then grab the recent version again.
You mean like this?
That is to say, the usual Flash uninstaller that integrates with Windows’ “Add/Remove Programs” function is not always complete; downloading this special uninstaller may be necessary.
I do (I didn’t realise I did, but I just clicked on the link and realised that, as with a lot of online journals, I get automatic access from within the University intranet). Do you want me to download the PDF and email it to you?
I have a problem!
Despite the fact that I have more than 100% in a class, I am shit-scared of possibly not getting a good recommendation from the instructor because I am one of those people who asks a question every other second which usually goes over the head of the other class, or at least that’s what I can tell from the instructor’s reaction and the class’s reaction and she can probably tell from the fact that despite my general kind, calm, and even helpful demeanor, I generally can’t stand anyone else in the class and am getting really fucking tired of micromanaging the lab and being the only person in the class who apparently reads the fucking manual.
HAAAAALP (or listen, that’s okay too.)
@Katharine:
Breathe.
I’m one of those students who answered every question in class because I didn’t care to sit there for five minutes of dead air waiting for someone else to answer the same question. You’ll be fine. Every one of my instructors has told me that they appreciated my willingness to learn and to show that I understood what was going on.
I doubt your instructor will be any different. Ask your instructor if you’re frightened about it, I’m sure that she’ll show candor in letting you know what she thinks about you as a student.
Kevin, I have luckily had the luck to have a class taught by an instructor who encouraged it.
This one, however, took me aside and was all ‘Katharine, I enjoy your questions! – just email them to me or something instead because it intimidates the rest of the class.’
I hate the latter half of that response. It truly irks me. At least she’s not the sexist bitch whose class I managed to transfer out of who, almost verbatim, told me to ‘shut up because [I’m] scaring half the class’.
“”Europe” is some homogeneously evil demonic sink of depravity.”
Nope, not homogeneous at all. (grin)
Hello all, again.
I’m new as I’m sure you know or can tell. Now I missed out on the sci-fi and fantasy book discussion but I did google and book mark all of your wonderful suggestions for my too read list. Now, during the whole discussion I was thinking why isn’t someone mentioning the Sword of Truth Series by Terry Goodkind? I am currently on the 9th of 12 books and fucking LOVE the series. Its fantasy not sci-fi but I think its amazing. Maybe you guys have not read, didn’t like or know something I don’t about the series? I’m just curious, I learn so much here. I just wanted to throw that these books into the mix since I tell everyone to read them. I got a friend of mine reading them, now we spend hours and hours discussing them. Hell, we spend hours on a single chapter sometimes LOL
Also, please no spoilers, one thing I love about the series it the fact that it always keeps me shocked and guessing. And that’s no easy thing to do,I’ve been an avid reader my whole life and was reading college level in middle school. So not trying to boast here btw.
You’re awesome, Walton.
TrineBM
Your correct of course! :) If you are a dressage wannabe, isn’t Europe considered one of the best places to be? Great riders come from Europe, I’m thinking Anky van Grunsven among others.
I don’t currently own a horse, but am getting the itch again, gotta get a job first tho. I rode endurance and loved it, something about distance just does it for me. Yeah, horses rock.
Anky
I am a cat person. My brother is a dog person (though through his wife, they have had a couple of cats they have fed and semi claimed through the years). He finds cats cold, stupid and loveless.
I was at his house recently when he came in the door. His dogs jumped and loved on him. He said he bet I never got that kind of greeting from my cats. Not so. I have one cat that jumps on me when he comes in the room and damn near rams my teeth down my throat loving and marking me. The other cat comes in the house and reaches up to me with his paws in the air like a toddler asking to be picked up. He’d be happy to be held for hours if I’d let him. For both cats, this is a multiple daily occurence.
My brother never saw this behavior in his cats because there was always a big ass dog getting in the way of any affection his cats had to give.
I like the fact that I can go away for the weekend and leave my cats to fend for themselves. You can’t leave a dog in the house for more than a work day. I like the fact that other than the cat box (which is my responsibility to keep clean and fresh, not theirs), there is no stink. Face it, dogs are smelly. And slobbery.
I’ll give dog owners the fetch factor, the kiss ass adoration factor and the protection factor (though our cat DID chase down a neighbor’s pitbull when she came into our yard).
Male cats tend to more doglike behavior and are usually more affectionate than females. I’ll never have another female cat. Mine females have always been petty bitches.
Mine females? Ack.
Thanks, strange gods. It took two complete uninstalls and reinstalls with a full system reboot, finding it worked on IE but not firefox, downloading the exe file itself and running it, then going back to the download plugin page AGAIN to get it through the firefox interface, but finally it seems to work. For some reason it was like Firefox would only take it through one particular method, and I think that was hampered before by the lack of uninstall and reboot. Sheesh.
I’m glad Walton had the paper – I was sure I did, but then found that my access is only to 1998.
Atheist wins in court.
Short summary: CA Corrections sent the guy to an AA created God bothering drug rehab program and part of his parole. When he protested too much, they sent him back to jail. Federal judge says that’s a denial of his Constiutional rights.
I hope this puts an end to the “freedom of religion doesn’t mean freedom from religion” arguement.
Katharine, look at it this way – your teacher has the responsibility to look out for the rest of the class, too. Many people take longer than you do to think things through. Many are shy and take a few moments of screwing up their courage to manage to ask a question. If you are the one who always talks first, then you are dominating and taking up the time that they could be using to ask a question that might be worlds different than what you were going to ask, but still insightful and useful and may even teach you something about looking at things from a different angle. The teacher isn’t your own personal tutor; he or she is trying to foster discussion among all of the students. And if you’re asking that many questions, making that many comments, it’s likely that you aren’t slowing down enough to really engage with the material, either. Yes, you ought to quiet down a bit if even you realize that you are dominating the majority of every class period. Waiting to ask questions until after class isn’t an undue burden, especially if it’s a tangent that isn’t exactly about the material that needed to be conveyed during that time frame.
Constitutional? However you spell it.
Hiya JustALurker. Thanks for the tip, never tried Goodkind although I think my eldest daughter likes the series and has her own daughters interested.
One series I forgot to mention, the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. Usually fun reads, Sam Spade meets Harry Potter. Best to read them in order.
Also, I cannot believe I forgot to mention the four volume series begun with Night Watch (Ночной дозор) by Sergei Lukyanenko. The series continues with Day Watch (Дневной дозор), Twilight Watch (Сумеречный дозор), Final Watch (Последний дозор). Not comfortable stories to read, but compelling.
strange gods, it should be in your inbox now.
You can thank Oxford University Library Services. :-)
My my my …
Walton rebelling against the System™.
And actually, Katharine, your teachers were both being nice to you by asking you outside of class to tone it down (even if one framed it as “shut up”) – their alternative would be to simply ignore you in class altogether. They are providing an alternative that lets you save face instead of sitting there for ten minutes with your hand up and everyone noticing the teacher avoiding your section of the room.
I’m guessing that this:
is really not “helpful” so much as “give it here I’ll do it you have no idea what you’re doing” based on this
and although you’re trying to get through the whole thing at your own speed, what you’re doing is impeding the learning process of your labmates by whisking through everything faster than they can manage and doing everything in spite of them, rather than with them.
JefferyD,
I have actually read all of the Night Watch books, but thank you. It makes me feel better since unfortunately most of the books mentioned I had never heard of before. But like I said I learn so much here. It’s so hard to find great books, thankfully now I have a full list of them to read. =)
Sili: I don’t think it’s illegal – you’re allowed, IIRC, to copy or reproduce one article per journal for non-commercial purposes. (Admittedly, I haven’t studied copyright law – I didn’t choose it as a final year option because it looked boring – so this is in no way informed advice.) Unless strange gods is planning to use the article in some nefarious way, I’m probably OK. :-)
@251 Justalurker
Yeh I’ll second the Terry Goodkind goodness, I liked the series a lot actually, some really good stuff. But then again i’ve always been more of a Fantasy man rather than Sci-fi
As for the Cat/Dog debate, I come from a doglovers family though i always liked cats too, however my dad was allergic to em, so was a no-go.
Now my partner is a crazy cat lady and i’ve managed to persuade her from originally wanting five down to two, and i might possibly be able to get a dog too… will have to see, wont be a while yet as we need our own place for that (damn credit crunch razzer frazzer sherxsz…)
I do like cats, but I’ll always be a dog person at heart I think. Cats are to mercenary… you know they are only keeping you alive because it benefits them, if you cease to become useful i’m sure the cats would rise up and exterminate us all… Dogs are just to stupid to do that.
JustALurker, I finally have a handle on my “to read” list now that I am in my 60’s. Simply put, if I add no more books, read 23.7 books a day, and live to be 325, I will cover everything I want to read. Once you have a system, it is easy.
Carlie is offering wise advice.
To the highest bidder! (And then all the money goes to Bob Avakian. Nefarious enough?
Rush Limbaugh:
Health care in the U.S. causes volcanic activities in Iceland.
For once, it isn’t us gays that caused natural geological activities to occur.
Rutee (@228):
I’m mindful of Walton’s corrective (@239) about not taking “Europe” as a monolithic whole, and I honestly don’t know what the character of public discourse about taxation is in (various parts of) Europe, but I share your anger over the disconnection, in American politics, between taxes and programs.
This is not, BTW, because American voters are stupid (many of them are, of course, but you could say that about any large population of humans), but because they’ve been subjected to a deliberate, decades-long program of right-wing ideological propaganda (see also my earlier comments about Ronald “Ronaldus Maximus”¹ Reagan) designed to delegitimize government per se, encouraging them to think of their own government as an external, inherently tyrannical force, rather than as an organic expression of the will of the people. The right has insisted that the government is entirely separate and distinct from the people, and from (to the extent they’re willing to admit any such thing exists) society.
At the same time, there has been a slanderous campaign to denigrate the work performed by government as invariably incompetent, ineffective, or unnecessary. Thus, the consistent political “teaching” from the right has been that [a] the government doesn’t represent you; [b] the government doesn’t do the right things, and in any case doesn’t do anything well; and, therefore, [c] all taxation is equivalent to theft.2
So, instead of seeing taxes as the membership dues we pay for the benefits of living in a well-ordered society, people think of taxes as inherently confiscatory, and any connection between beneficial features they enjoy in their daily lives and the taxes they pay.
Once again, it’s the eeeeeverything is freeee!!! mentality I talked about upthread. My favorite example is a radio talk-show caller I heard back in the early 90s: This was immediately after Bill Clinton had submitted his first budget request, which (Horrors!) included a tax increase. I was listening to a general-interest radio call-in show that occasionally covered political topics but was nothing like the intensely partisan talk radio of today. A caller was announced as calling on a cell phone from his car on I-95 (I was living in FL at the time), and he said: “I’ve never received one single thing of value from government, and I don’t see why I should a dime in taxes, never mind having my taxes raised!”
He was speaking by way of a broadcast medium that arguably couldn’t exist without some degree of public oversight (i.e., without some orderly allocation of the radio spectrum, the over-the-air broadcast industry as we know it would be untenable), from a car (itself vastly safer and more reliable than it would be without federal oversight) traveling along a federally funded highway, using a telecommunication device that, like the radio station itself, probably couldn’t exist without the benefit of federal regulation… and what he’s called to say is government never did anything for me!
Oy! People think all the taxes they pay go, if not into the personal pocket of some 19th-century caricature of a politician, then to pay for underserved handout to lazy (pssst!… don’t say “brown” or “black” out loud) people, or perhaps so other people’s children can get a godless libruhl edumacation.3 What they don’t see (because they’ve been taught not to look at it) is the extent to which government is responsible for stuff they really like and use, and the extent to which that stuff costs money.
People who would never even consider shoplifting even the most trivially cheap item will nevertheless freeload off their neighbors at every turn… and that’s because they’ve been given political cover to do so.
</rant>
¹ Note that this appellation is not snark on my part; it’s how his admirers refer to him!
2 Before you say that this summary sounds so extreme that nobody could possibly actually believe it, and I must be presenting a strawman argument, let me just note that [a] I’m explicitly describing an extreme position; [b] notwistanding its extreme character, I personally know people who would enthusiastically endores the notion that all taxation is theft; and [c] in any case, plenty of people who wouldn’t sign on to this extreme statement nevertheless support policies and candidates that are consistent with this ideological position… that’s the nature of politica persuasion.
3 Interesting, isn’t it, that the same people who think public education is irremediably broken and incompetent also seem to worry quite a lot about how effective it is in teaching “bad” ideas?
sudomabinusri:
Heh! I hope so, too, but I ain’t waitin’ underwater: I suspect this fight won’t be one ’til the last “America is a Christian nation” believer shuffles off this mortal coil and joins the bleedin’ choir invisible.
Bill,
I agree with some of the rest of your post – in particular, it’s very much true that we all do rely on government for a variety of services, whether we want to admit it or not, and that government is not inherently bad at everything it does. But I have qualms about this bit.
I really don’t think there can ever be such a thing as “the will of the people”. Who are “the people”? And do you really think that a democratic government can’t be a tyrannical force?
Unless all decisions are made by consensus – which would be unworkable – any community will, at times, have a minority of members who are deeply unhappy with the direction of public policy. But because these people are outnumbered, the views of others are imposed on them against their will. They are under the external rule of other people, just as much as if they were subjects of a king or a dictator. The fact that they have the right to vote doesn’t make any difference to this, unless they can persuade a majority of their fellow voters to agree with them – just as the subject of a king can only get his own way if he can persuade his king to agree with him.
As I said, any working political community has to make some decisions by majority, rather than by consensus. But the point I am trying to make is the mere fact of a decision being made by a majority of “the people”, through a democratic process, does not stop that decision being a tyrannical one. Proposition 8 was perfectly democratic; it was also tyrannical. Switzerland is possibly the most democratic country in the world, yet it enacted a tyrannical ban on minarets. And there are thousands of examples of elected legislatures taking away civil liberties, with strong popular support, in the name of fighting crime or terrorism. A decision can be “the will of the people”, to the extent that “the people” even exist, and still be a tyrannical decision.
In the end, any force which requires a person to do anything against his or her own will is an “external force”, and potentially a tyrannical one. All government power, democratic or not, has the potential for tyranny. The only way to avoid this is by having strong guarantees of individual civil liberties, and an independent judiciary to protect those liberties against the will of the majority. Democracy should not be confused with freedom, and “the people” should not be confused with actual individual people. We need not just democracy, but also a liberal constitutional order with independent courts, in order to avoid tyranny.
@Bill Dauphin:
Will never happen, sadly. America may not be a Christian nation, but its people can sure make you think it. They’re crazy, and I’m scared for living in my state…
Arrgh! @272, one should be won. Homophones suck!
Looks like Walton’s read his Nozick.
Your bigoted against homophones! No fare! Equal writes for homophones…!!!
/Ficksed!
Walton (@237):
Well, “the people” are the people. I don’t mean to be obtuse, but “the people” are (ideally) the entire population of society, including children and dependents whose interests are represented in the voices of their parents and guardians.
Of course, the real difference between you and me is the extent to which I believe that all those voices can be synthesized into a collective voice, and you believe (apparently) that they can only properly be seen as a collection of distinct individual voices. Your position strikes me as a lingering symptom of your recent addiction to L-word-arianism, and I fondly hope it will continue to moderate as your recovery proceeds (“I keed, I keed!” ;^} ).
But seriously, I do believe there’s such a thing as the will of the people, and I think it’s that compromise position that best satisfies the diversity of overlapping similar-but-distinct positions within the majority, while remaining at least acceptable to the minority (or at least the majority of the minority) and conforming to the minimal guarantees of the underlying social contract.
Well, I think a nominally democratic government can certainly be tyrannical to the extent that it fails to be actually democratic. But I would measure how democratic a government actually is by how well its outputs conform to the definition of “the will of the people” I’ve offered above… so, no, a government that is truly democratic by my definitions cannot be tyrannical. (Which, BTW, is not the same thing as saying a democratic society can’t oppress other societies. The measure of how democratic a government is consists in how well it reflects the will of its own people, without regard to the wishes of other people. Many have claimed that democracies are better international citizens than nondemocracies, and I’d like to think that’s true… but I don’t take it as an essential aspect of the definition of a democracy. A government that accurately reflects the will of its people might theoretically nevertheless act like a jerk on the international scene if the majority of its people were in fact jerks. But I digress….)
Of course, the implication of your assertion that there’s no such thing as “the will of the people” is that every government is tyrannical to some degree. You correctly note that there will always be people who disagree with the actions of even the most representative government…
…but I think you’re a bit rash in assuming that all the “losers” in the political process are necessarily “deeply unhappy.” If the structures and processes of government are perceived as just and responsive, then it no more follows that the minority need be “deeply unhappy” than that the losing team in any given match should conclude that soccer just sucks. I dislike using sports analogies for politics, but as long as the game isn’t rigged, there’s the possiblity of a “we’ll get ’em next time” acqiescence to any given outcome.
Of course, no system of government is perfect in discerning and reflecting “the will of the people,” but that doesn’t mean, IMHO, that no such thing exists, nor that every government is tyrannical.
More to my original point, the right-wing agenda I was originally ranting about is not concerned with improving government to make it more representative; their agenda is about convincing people that government is evil, and that it’s fundamentally not theirs. Reagan didn’t say, “government as it currently functions isn’t a very good solution to our problem, so let’s fix it.” Instead, he said, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem [emphasis added].”
He was, IMNSHO, fucking wrong!
Owlmirror:
Yeah, I know: I’m a homophonophobe. It’s my secret shame!
How is blog-pimping viewed? Is there a proper way for a noob like me to link to a blog post I’ve done on a relevant topic and ask for feedback from the Horde?
Thanks.
Look what I just discovered by accident:
Fluffy sheep-pigs of awesome
These pictures cheered me up. :-)
@Walton:
Fluffy pigs… that’s so neat.
Baaa!
I find those pigsheep offensive. They ruin a perfectly good German bon mot, so I’m all for their extermination.
And then for the next 8 years he set out to prove it.
The thing you’re ignoring in your analysis is that government isn’t the only source tyranny. Businesses (amongst other organizations) can be just as tyrannical and unjust as any government. With government at least people have direct influence on the decisions that will affect them.
We can’t also rely too heavily on the judiciary. Like any source of concentrated power it’s influenced by the rich and powerful. People will ultimately care more about their rights and needs more than an independent judiciary ever could.
mmmm….wooly bacon……*salivates*
Walton,
Thanks for the sheep-pigs. They have cheered me up. I really needed that.
So Proposition 8 wasn’t tyrannical? Anti-terror laws involving arbitrary detention without trial aren’t tyrannical? Censorship of “extremist” political views, as practiced in many democratic countries, isn’t tyrannical? The Swiss ban on minarets isn’t tyrannical? The War on Drugs, and the consequent fact that both the US and UK are imprisoning thousands of people a year for non-violent drug “crimes”, is not tyrannical? These things are certainly democratic, in that the majority of voters in the relevant countries supported them. But they are examples, IMO, of the tyranny of the majority.
The right to vote, and to be involved in political activism, is not enough in itself to guarantee freedom. If you are part of an unpopular minority and are deprived of your liberties by a popular vote, you are just as oppressed as if you have been deprived of those liberties by an arbitrary executive act. The effect is the same.
Rather, history suggests to me that the best way to restrain tyranny is to have independent courts which are empowered to protect rights and liberties even against the will of the voters. It doesn’t work all the time, but courts have a far better track record than democracy in this respect.
To some degree, yes. But some are much more so than others. I would say, though, that it is the substantive policies imposed, not the process used to arrive at those policies, that makes a government more or less oppressive. Authoritarian policies are equally authoritarian whether they’re imposed by a dictator or by the majority of the voters. The tyranny of the majority is still tyranny.
So, for example, I would point out that the government of, say, Texas is more authoritarian in many respects than the government of the United Kingdom: Texas has a much higher prison population, uses the death penalty frequently, and is notorious for its corrupt and brutal criminal justice system. But this doesn’t imply that Texas is less democratic than the United Kingdom. In fact, the opposite is true: Texan voters have more control over government than British voters do, since so many officials (judges, prosecutors, sheriffs, coroners, county clerks, the Board of Education, and so on) are directly elected in Texas and are directly responsible to the public. Rather, the reason Texas has crazy authoritarian policies is because most Texan voters want those policies – an example of the tyranny of the majority in action. And the greatest force for liberty in Texas, and America generally, has been the Supreme Court, in progressive decisions like Lawrence v Texas or Miranda v Arizona. If it were left completely up to the voters, the majority-backed oppression of minorities would be even worse.
Indeed, if the UK were more democratic, it would probably also be more authoritarian. Many polls suggest that the majority of Britons want to bring back the death penalty, severely restrict immigration, and impose “tougher measures” against terror suspects and against juvenile crime. We have a relatively liberal society because we don’t let people vote directly on those things, and because we have a political system that insulates policy, to some extent, from public opinion. And I want to keep it that way. The tyranny of the majority is still tyranny; the only way to prevent it is a strong judiciary, and a constitution with checks and balances.
Well, apparently they’re worth £1,000 per pig, so that’s an expensive rasher of bacon.
Ever wonder who is considered a “genius” in Utah? Okay, maybe you haven’t wondered. There are some inventors and scientists on the lists from past years, but the quality is uneven.
This year the Utah Genius Life Achievement Award is particularly galling. Here’s a description of the “genius”:
http://www.utahgenius.com/
Sheri Dew, a genius at fitting into the constraints on mormon women, all the while, never getting married! Now that’s a miracle … or maybe a clue to her vituperative attacks on gays. Come out of the closet, and live, Sheri.
Sheri Dew, a genius at keeping anything interesting out of Deseret Book Stores. She even opened a coffee shop in one of the larger stores, without offering any coffee. I think it was a Salt Lake Tribune reporter that said, “A coffee shop without coffee, in a bookstore without books.”
Sheri Dew, a genius at comparing gays to Nazis. The blockquote below is an excerpt from a story written in September, 2004, after Dew had compared the gay rights movement to the rise of Hitler; and after she had given the invocation at the Republican Convention:
http://www.affirmation.org/media/2004_09.shtml
“Genius” must have a broader definition in Utah.
True. And there have been plenty of awful judicial decisions. (Kelo v New London springs to mind, or, on this side of the pond, Liversidge v Anderson).
But they still have a better track record than the voters. Like it or not, the single greatest force for social progress in American history has been the Supreme Court. It was the Supreme Court that desegregated schools (Brown v Board), protected the right to interracial marriage (Loving v Virginia), eliminated the oppressive Texas “sodomy laws” that until 2003 criminalised private sexual conduct between gay men (Lawrence v Texas), guaranteed the right to due process when arrested (Miranda v Arizona), struck down arbitrary and inconsistent death-penalty laws (Furman v Georgia), and so on. All of these are cases of individuals or minority groups being oppressed by the will of the majority. And in every single one of these cases, it was nine elderly judges in Washington, not the voters, who stood up for liberty.
Yes. But they won’t care about other people’s rights and needs. The majority of the voters care about excessive government power only when it affects them. They don’t give a damn about what the government does to Muslims, or gay people, or drug users, or those falsely accused of crime, for example. As we saw with recent tragic events in Sonoma County, people are often willing to stand aside and let unpopular minority groups be oppressed.
So yes, you can trust the majority to look after their own interests. But you can also expect them to screw over minorities. Because like it or not, there is a not insignificant proportion of voters in each country who are prejudiced, stupid, irrationally fearful, and easily manipulated by propaganda; and those people vote to take away the rights and liberties of others. The evidence is clear.
In the case of the “War on Drugs” that simply isn’t true. Americans Strongly Favor Treatment Over Jail for Drug Offenders.
You simply can’t assert this. You need to show it.
And what’s to stop the judiciary from being corrupted and/or authoritarian? The sense of judges and lawyers to uphold some abstract laws?
In many of these cases the courts were simply responding to the activism by grassroot efforts. The civil rights movement came before Brown v Board and LGBT movement came well before 2003.
like sniny new foreigner-killing machinery?
True. But the activists couldn’t have won, at least not so soon, through the democratic process.
Do you really think that, in 1967, any Southern state would have voted to abolish school segregation? Do you really think that, in 2003, Texas would have voted to abolish sodomy laws? While activists certainly laid the groundwork for winning these victories, it was in the courtroom, not the ballot box, that the victories were actually won. Because sometimes, the will of the majority has to be overridden to protect the rights of the minority. And only a court has the constitutional ability to do that.
Hmmm. I’m always interested in new techniques for avoiding death-by-grizzly-bear, but this is not one of them:
More to the story here, if you can stand it. Oh, and there are pictures of Michael Dunn with his damaged sunglasses
@Lynna, OM:
Delusions of the saved, yay.
Back when I was a fundie Christian, I was leaving the video store near my home and a car very nearly ran into me. To my recollection, it was as if I was transported several feet away – I was directly in the path of said car one second, and on the curb the next.
I realize now I probably reflexively jumped the remaining distance between the car nearly killing me and the side of the road, but back then I swore it was my Guardian Angel protecting me, carrying me over to the other side of the road.
Dunn’s bear probably saw he wasn’t a threat, or got bored, and decided to leave him alone. That’s what bothers me about fundies, they never ask ‘why’ something happened, it’s suddenly because god did it.
Those courts are the ones enforcing the punishments of the “Drug War” you wrote about.
The way the courts actually function is that those with the most money can hire the best lawyers to find the best loopholes and rationalizations that favor their clients. Justice doesn’t really care bout you if you’re too poor or can’t afford the time to pursue a case. A good way to predict how a Supreme Court decision will go is to look at which side is more rich/powerful. That’s the horse to bet on. The bigger the divide, the better the odds.
Don’t get me wrong, the courts have their place and we should be looking to improve these deficiencies rather than eliminating the courts. However, they’re hardly the vehichle we should be looking to for social progress.
Spent my dinner hour watching the 1954 BBC version of 1984. The Richard Burton one is still the best, but this one, with Peter Cushing was interesting. You can find it for free here – http://www.archive.org – just search in the video section. Neat time wasting site, by the way.
Given my recent viewing and the current discussion, thought I would share this Annie Lennox video.
Sven:
Actually, that’s one of the few things government does that the right wing seems universally willing to see as worth paying for, for better or ill.
Mind you, I’m not a pacifist, and I think a capable, adequately equipped military is a necessity for any nation state. (Note that the appropriate values of capable and adequately equipped vary, and are dependent on the size and geopolitical situation of the nation in question.) But the extent to which one segment of our political culture teaches that the only thing that government can or should do is “kill people and break things” is more than a little bit distressing.
Well, the series after book 4 consisted mainly of him ranting about how Libertarianism (not popular around here) and the free market are the One True Path to happiness, along with such wallbangers as the evil pacifist Strawman Political or the one were head of state Bertrand Chamboor and his wife Hildemara Chamboor (hm, those initials look familiar….oh, and Bertrand was raping poor naive young women in office and HC knew about it) are evil people who run their country in the ground (by secretly allying with and then being betrayed with the evil empire known for raping and killing all in their path), then get an STD and die….well, it was bad enough that I don’t suggest people that aren’t already attached to the series get started on it.
Walton (@287):
True enough… but there’s a distinction to be made (which I’m afraid I think you’re failing to make) between being deprived of your liberties and simply not getting your way. That the government takes particular actions you don’t agree with is not tyranny… and even that some specific government policies or actions are unjust or oppressive doesn’t necessarily mark that government (nor certainly that system of government) as tyrannical. Tyranny consists of the systematic and deliberate deprivation of human and political rights; the fact that a system is liable to particular failures (and what system designed by humans is not?) does not imply that it is oppressive by design.
Nothing guarantees freedom, and even the best imaginable political system will inevitably fail to protect every individual’s rights in every case… but so what? Should we therefore just throw up our hands and revert to divine-right monarchy or feudalism?
If you’re saying that direct democracy is inferior to other forms of democracy (as it seems you might be, based on your Prop 8 comment and other previous comments), then I have to agree. I have stood at the
barricadespolling places to (successfully) fight attempts to bring the insanity of California-style initiative/referendum to my own state. But at the level of nation-states, that would be something of a strawman, since (AFAIK) no major modern democracy really practices direct democracy.If you’re saying that the constitutions of many individual American states represent fairly flawed implementations of democracy, I’d agree with that, too.
But if you’re saying that democracy, per se, is inherently tyrannical, I can only wonder what you offer as an alternative? You have already asserted (correctly, in my judgment) that some form of government is necessary, so what should it be if not some form of democracy?
My own nation has plenty to be ashamed of in how it has treated its ethnic, cultural, and social minorities… but I lay that more at the feet of our political culture than the structure of our government. Honestly, while I can imagine any number of tweaks to the system (e.g., instant runoff voting) that might make it perform better, and I can certainly imagine improvements in the political discourse here, I have a hard time constructing a better governmental structure than ours: Separate executive, legislative, and judicial branches, each representing individual voters at different degrees of remove, over different timeframes and geographical extent, but none serving as a “dumb” conduit for the strictly numerical accumulation of opinion… and all constrained by a written guarantee of minimal political rights, as embodied in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the other Amendments.
I’m not arrogant enough to think it’s a perfect system, nor to assert that it’s even the best possible one… but I’m eager to see a better one.
New stings in the comparison between US and Japanese education:
My 4th-grade son goes to two schools: a US public school during the week and his Japanese “Saturday School”.
This weekend I learned that in his Saturday school his science teacher is a qualified dentist in Japan, and is currently in grad school studying virology.
In the US public school, his science teacher is a certified elementary teacher with no special background in science, and he’s caught her making several scientific misstatements. He’s given up even bothering to correct her.
Bill, what if tyranny is better understood in a structural sense these days, instead of the short momentum of a four year term?
ambook:
Hi, ambook. Tone is seriously overrated. ;D
JustALurker:
My husband like’s Goodkind’s books, but I haven’t read them. I’ll add them to the never ending list.
JeffreyD:
They’re nice, like sorbet for the brain, but I really wish Butcher was a better writer. Some of those books are on the painful side.
Walton:
Ooooh.
Even within a democracy with separation of church and state as one of its basic principles, some people are not free. Some people live as if they were in a theocracy. This was posted today on exmormon.org:
*Grumbles* I have to actually work tonight, so I’m off. G’day, G’night, everyone.
Ugandan MP to be banned from UK if his gay death penalty bill succeeds.
excerpt –
I knew how evil this guy and his supporters were, but I didn’t realise how insane they are.
Death for having sex with a disabled person? (And presumably it would also be a life sentence for “failing to inform” on “disabled sex” – so everyone will have to spy on their grandparents).
I wonder how “disabled” you have to be, and who decides. What counts? Missing a finger? A leg? Blind? Deaf? I bet they mean to include mental disablities as well.
After they murder all the people with HIV, the sexually active “disabled”, and any young lovers, they’ll be able to lock up most of the remaining population for not informing.
I got a chuckle from this:
Old Blind Dogs singing Glenlogie aka Bonnie Jeannie o Bethelnie (it’s a Celtic folk song, Child Ballad 238):
Here’s the lyrics.
@299
Wow. I’m not going lie, I so did not get that while reading it. I guess I failed reading comprehension. I just read the story and liked it. I guess I didn’t look deep into what he was trying to mean. Although, I have to say I don’t care what his political views are, I thought he did a great job of writing the books. I didn’t find the characters to be one dimensional. Its also not going to stop me from reading the rest of the series though. I’m just going to read it, enjoy it and remain blissfully ignorant of what the author is actually trying to say. I am NOT a fan of libertarianism and I have to admit I see it now that you point it out and its kind of disturbing. Maybe you guys shouldn’t read it if you, you know, actually comprehend what you’re reading. =( Sorry.
Toothier and toothier goodness! Today’s installment features ornithocheiroid pterosaurs with lots and lots of teeth that get longer and longer toward the tips of the jaws… and longer… and longer… till the longest ones are as long as the feet.
Admittedly, the feet are tiny, but still.
In other news, it turns out I haven’t forgotten how to drive a car (haven’t done so since August, I think), and I saw a hedgehog. ^_^
Daiquiri. I’ve even seen it spelled Sili-style, daïquiri, in France (otherwise they couldn’t square it with its pronunciation).
On a totally different note, Lech Kaczyński was buried in the place where the Polish kings, national heroes, national poets, and the fascist dictator Piłsudski are interred. There’s some controversy over how appropriate this is; it was engineered by Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, JPII’s Number Two.
Having read the entire Sunday thread in one sitting (and lost pretty much the entire day to it), I don’t think it’s so much the thinking as the lack of knowledge… what surprises me is that that knowledge is easy to get. I mean, I haven’t witnessed any of the scenarios mentioned above or heard of them – I’ve read about them, mostly on the Internet, probably mostly on Pharyngula or sites linked to from here.
:-)
Bah humbug! Lies, I tell you! One of the cats at the dig in Poland simply walked up to where I stood and scratched her head against my fingers as if I were some kind of tree trunk. :-)
I liked it, in any case ^_^ ^_^ ^_^
:-S
Day saved.
^_^
I just hope you’re not counting me among the cool ones. I am seriously and consciously uncool. :o)
Good, that means I won’t need to mooch my sister’s digital camera or any other “heavy” equipment.
I don’t know how boring my self-pity is, but… dude… never mind the detailed discussion of underwear we’ve had… never mind the highly instructive, detailed presentations of our sex lives or lack thereof… I’ve talked about my phenotype, and not just here, but also on at least one circumcision thread, if you know what I mean. You’re not autistic enough to come within sight of any TMI record.
I don’t remember…
:-D
QFT.
The “welfare, childcare and social support” part (especially childcare) is also how France has managed to bring its birthrate back up to 2.1 children per woman. Sorry, I just have to point this out at every opportunity. ^_^
I do like sleeping, but that’s because I’m tired so much. My dreams are hardly ever pleasant. Most are as boring as my wake life (only a lot more confused… man, the convoluted nonsense I dream… <headshake>… <sigh>) and contain lots and lots of barely veiled references to it; sometimes that’s so obvious that I notice I’m dreaming. Fortunately I hardly ever have nightmares anymore, but I used to have fair amounts of them, including several long and recurrent ones.
Actually, I think there’s a reason I don’t engage in a lot of wishful thinking while dreaming…
The airspace above Austria is open again, since today.
That would defeat the point of not disappointing Ol’Greg, wouldn’t it? … If Walton and Kevin cannot be retrieved, there’s a sister I could probably do without ;-)
:-)
ROTFL!
ROTFLMAO! I can attest that the presentation of Italian highway behavior is correct. X-) However, some of the other Italian attitudes are very widespread, if not universal, in Europe. And the coffee culture is Viennese, too.
Here is the same thing with Bulgaria. Remarkably, I understand every word:
0:00: “Bulgaria in Europe”
0:08: “Transport in Europe”
0:19: “…in Bulgaria”
0:30: “Parking in Europe”
0:42: “…in Bulgaria”
0:51: “Parliament in Europe”
1:01: “…in Bulgaria”
1:11: “Neighbors in Europe”
1:18: “…in Bulgaria”
1:33: “Cleanness in Europe”
1:40: “…in Bulgaria”
1:50: “Work in Europe”
1:59: “…in Bulgaria”
2:12: “‘Yes’ and ‘no'” – alluding to the fact that, unlike fucking everyone else outside of India, the Bulgarians indicate “yes” not by nodding, but by tilting the head from side to side; “no” is shown by throwing the head back, as AFAIK in Greece and southern Italy but not many other places.
<snicker>
I was taught that in elementary school. Made me shy. :-)
Frankly, I’m surprised you still haven’t figured it out.
Indeed, has there ever been a case where two democracies were at war with each other?
BTW, compromises are what coalition governments are for.
Die eierlegende Wollmilchsau?
I’ve seen one such pig live. The stench was remarkable (but probably due to the bad conditions in which it was kept).
Reminds me of how those who like Blackadder say “oh, I’ve trod on an Edmund” when they step on dog shit.
And then there’s Bush v Gore and hundreds of thousands of corpses.
If you pray, God will send a bear after you 24 h later…?
Any? Even Austria?
<headdesk>
That’s Michael-Crichton-level assholery.
Now (and after all that talk about St Ronnie!) I feel morally obliged to buy one of these.
QFT.
Switzerland, on the federal level, is about half direct.
<headdesk>
For what it’s worth, my wife thinks I’m oversensitive and silly! She read the whole thing, I stopped at Naked Empire. She does insist the books at the end are decent, although she admits 5-7 were pretty weak.
It’s enjoyable at that level. I rather liked the first few, partially as I have somewhat…kinked propensities (and I’ll leave it at that :-)).
Respectfully disagree. What I didn’t like is how anyone who disagrees with Richard is evil. In general, you either agree with him or you’re evil (and with no basis or grounding for your convictions, either. I mean he converts Nicci from Communism to Objectivism by making a statue of a man and a woman? wtf?). There are no well-intentioned extremists or enemies doing things “for the greater good”. Anyone who sees things differently than he does is a sadistic bastard (or too stupid to be a believable character).
It’s fantasy, enjoy it as fantasy. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise, I just pointed out some reasons why it might not be on people’s suggestion list (Goodkind has quite the hatedom on the internet, and has since the beginning, although early on it was mostly because it appeared he was just ripping wholesale from The Wheel of Time).
Eh, I think it’s good practice to read things that forward views you do not agree with, if for no other reason than to be better informed about them. Of course, after 3 books of it (it really wasn’t bad before Soul of the Fire) I wasn’t willing to stick to Sword of Truth anymore, as the scales were too far towards Author Filibuster and away from good fantasy literature. But mileage varies, and there’s little point in getting that upset over escapist fantasy.
A mailing list informs me…
Enjoy.
Spouse really likes Goodkind books and is a Republican, so if there are Libertarian leanings in the books he hasn’t noticed them.
@311
Sorry, I haven’t gotten that far into the book so I have no idea about how the Nicci situation get resolved. I’m not that far in, I just got to the part that describes Nicci and the girl with lice. Admittedly, I haven’t been reading in to it much so maybe others can see the flaws in his writing I’m missing, like you for example =) lol. I will concede here since I’m obviously doing shallow reading but like I said I’m ok with it. Especially since I’m so far into the series I really want to know how it ends.
And I must say, at the beginning I was whole heartedly in love with Richard the character but now he’s kind of annoying. I mean he left everyone to fend for themselves because one stupid city fucked up and rejected him. It made me think of the fucked up situation in America with religious idiots being so fucking immoral and everything. They are clearly lying and not “fighting for the truth” but you have to actual tell people the truth, get the word out, the evidence out or they won’t believe you. Because the lies are simpler, nicer and it makes them feel better in their point of view. I was thinking instead of hiding why not go around and make a campaign for the truth? It makes me wonder definitely. (I hope I’m getting my point across correctly, I’m tired haven’t slept much keeping up with the Sunday thread. I throughly understand why now all the commenters are tired. LOL) And the whole “I’m just a woods guide” bit is old already. I still root for him and everything but I’m not about to jump down anybody’s throat for not being his fanboy. lol =)
I’m also blissfully unaware of his hatedom on the internet, I don’t get around much lol
kinked propensities? I’m intrigued but knowing Pharyngula know better than to ask what exactly LOL =)
Either. Hasn’t noticed them either. I meant to say that the seem not uncommon to overlook, not that they aren’t there.
Goldman Sachs is being prosecuted by the SEC! Score one for populist lawsuits timed to help press the case for financial regulation! I think GS might be screwed, and a high powered corporate lawyer who helped create some of the “toxic assets” they sold agrees…
And here’s a pun fer ya:
From a Krugman NYT column: “Last October, I saw a cartoon by Mike Peters in which a teacher asks a student to create a sentence that uses the verb ‘sacks,’ as in looting and pillaging. The student replies, ‘Goldman Sachs.'”
@313
literally LOL’d at that!
Leanings? Faith of the Fallen‘s climactic statue scene is practically a clone of a scene from The Fountainhead. Most of said book is showing just how stupid Communism is, and how much the free market kicks ass (his companion thinks he must be a major thief because of the largesse he earns just by exploiting the inefficiencies in the Communist-run marketplace). It’s not even the Libertarianism/Objectivism that bothered me most though, as much as the fact that anything he wants to show as a bad thing is treated with a complete strawman (like the evil pacifists in….I think it was Naked Empire).
I need to correct myself, I said I was on book 9 of the series, that’s wrong. I’m currently reading Faith of the Fallen. Also, I looked it up and yes, the evil pacifist that refuse to fight for themselves and chose death instead because they abhor violence is in the Naked Empire.
Hey! Let’s get this thread back on topic, i.e. kitty-cats. For your viewing pleasure we present: Cat Herders http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk7yqlTMvp8
(I sure hope this link works.)
LOL the link certainly does work =)
I thought so! After my last post I felt bad for spoiling book 6 when you hadn’t finished it yet by your description, but the main reason I felt free to openly talk plot in the first place is you said you were on book 9. My conscience is assuaged! :-)
@322
LOL All is right in the world of Pharyngula ;) jp
And no worries, you didn’t spoil much. One of the joys of shallow reading, is how it leads up to the conclusion and all. So my shallow reading is not ruined or stopped =)
huh.
Book-club thread?
Truly, teh Thread is
what it is
scooter posted a different vid of this tune on another thread, and it cracked me up:
If there is one, I might look in, but I doubt anyone here reads the same kinds of books I do. And I’m on one email list doing an in-depth discussion of the Bujold Vorkosigan books already, and follow a bunch of other book review sites… so I can get books anywhere. Godless biology, liberalism, and bacon, not so much.
nice cover of a great Sandy Denny tune I’ve posted before:
OK, here’s my official introduction. I live in Maryland, work part time as a nature educator at a local parks and rec department, and homeschool my 14 year old twins. I have a Ph.D. in psychology and a law degree, but actually enjoy teaching kids about bugs more that practicing either law or psychology, and I actually think it’s more therapeutic for kids than a lot of the stuff I did as a therapist.
I started homeschooling my kids when we learned that my son is gifted and dyslexic and wasn’t likely to get special services for either in our local school system. It’s turned out to be one of the greatest adventures in my life and led directly to my work as a nature educator, which I really love.
I’m either a pantheist or an atheist, depending on the day, but am a mildly observant Jew as well (the great thing about Judaism is that most strains spend remarkably little energy worrying about heaven, hell or the afterlife and almost no energy at all focusing on ensoulment…) Comparative religion is a bit of a hobby for me as well – another reason why it’s pretty hard to take the whole religion thing seriously as anything other than a human enterprise. I’m reading a book on the philosophy of craftsmanship and Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God (which treats religion as a human enterprise as well).
I do knitting, spinning, and a variety of other fiber crafts and work with natural dyes quite a bit (astonishing how 80% or so of all plants give a greenish yellow-brown color as dyes…)
I’m enjoying Pharyngula a lot. And a member of my family went to high school with John Kwok, so if the overlord ever comes to DC, I can regale him with stories…
oh, oh, oh! The Kwok has been Kwok’d! I love it. *becca runs off giggling*
ambook,
Welcome aboard! Sounds like you’ll make an interesting addition to the gang.
lol, you cannot just say that and expect us not to ask you to spill the beans here.
Work is stalled for a bit, so going back to the previous sci-fi/fantasy thread, one of my old favourites is the Dragon Knight series by Gordon R. Dickson. I also enjoyed The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams.
I read Wizard’s First Rule and didn’t care for it. It struck me as derivative of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series* except that Goodkind isn’t as good a writer as Jordan. I think “leave no cliche unused” must have been Goodkind’s motto when writing this book. The major departure from the cliche-fest is Goodkind’s insertion of his political philosophy. This is almost comically ham-handed because the bad guys are Commies complete with a Peoples’ Palace. I actually laughed out loud at the “trial” of the farmer by the evil queen (whose name isn’t Queen Mao but should have been).
The long excursion into S&M is simply juvenile and serves almost no purpose. The hero, Richard, is being tortured but is saved by that hoary cliche the Deus ex Machina.
I found the behaviors and actions of characters to be irrational and flat out stupid. Richard’s brother makes a long winded speech about how fire is evil. I imagine if someone made an unusual and completely random speech about fire being evil I would remember this. Later someone mentions how the main villain fears fire and is banning it from his cities. Somehow Richard fails to make any connection between these two incidents. Goodkind tries to be clever by dropping these incidents as clues to what’s going to happen later. The problem is these clues are so blatant they aren’t clever at all. It’s absurd the characters in the story fail to notice them.
I finished Wizard’s First Rule, I didn’t read Wizard’s Second Rule or whatever the next book is called.
*I gave up on WoT around book 5 when I realized I really didn’t care what happened to the characters.
Oh? At a certain celebrated and prestigious New York pulblic high school that shall remain nameless but is well known for its employment of a certain celebrated memoirist and as the alma mater of J*hn Kw*k and his fellow alumni which include advisors to Presidents and editors of Scientific American?
Do tell!
333
Maybe its just because I haven’t read enough yet. I am an avid reader but I still haven’t read as much as you guys have. Sadly, Wheel of Time is not one I have read yet, so I cannot make the comparison or connection. Again. It’s been pointed out that I’m reading shallowly as well. I certainly appreciate the point of view, I am forever learning here. Should have figured they weren’t mentioned for a reason, at the time I just couldn’t see why that was.
ambook:
Cool! I photograph bugs a lot, ambush bugs are awesome, and so are treehoppers. I’d be lost without the very nifty what’s that bug.
Your posts have been interesting and thoughtful, I’ve enjoyed reading them.
ROTFL. Oh, that is just too effin’ priceless! I think you just might deserve a camera… ;D
Well, yes, I COULD tell stories, but actually they’re better in person and they’re not actually my stories, since I didn’t actually go there. And while it no doubt was a great high school, I haven’t noticed that the people I know who went there spend remotely as much time reveling in their years there as Kw*k seemed to. Really, life moves on, at least for the actual semi-normal ones among us.
I must admit that I did enjoy the books of the celebrated memoirist, though.
@Caine – do you post on bugguide.net? I did for a while, and it’s a great site. I do deserve a camera, so thanks for reminding me. Mine got sand or something in the lens apparatus and you have to hit it to get the lens cover to open. Amazing what great pictures you can take with broken cheapo cameras…
National Geographic Channel, High Definition: ”
Evolutions: Walking Whales” is on now. Pakicetus, Phil Gingrich…
Celebrated. Prestigious.
ambook:
No, I’ll check it out though! I have had a few photos and questions on whatsthatbug.com, the last one was a bee fly, I think. I’ve been chasing the elusive hummingbird clearwing moth the last couple of years. Amazing looking things.
That’s the truth. I have a Nikon D80 with assorted lenses these days, but I started with a little Nikon Coolpix L1. I swear, that thing is indestructible. I’ve dropped it snow drifts, had it out in hail, and I would have sworn I killed it when I dropped it out of my studio window. I gave it to my husband to take apart, he applied some good torque to the frozen lens and it started working again. I can still get great shots with it.
‘good torque’ is my favorite phrase of the day
Caine, The Dragon Knight series? I enjoyed The Dragon and the George quite a lot, but there’s one huge clunker in the opening scene. Our hero wakes up in a cave, in the body of a dragon, and immediately knows that he’s eight or nine feet high. How? There’s no scale in a cave, so he’d assume that he was his usual height.
What you need is a Leica M7 rangefinder. I think I know how to get one….
Census office work is dull, but easy! Also, they’re paying me, which is nice. :)
After reading through most of the Thread, I think I’m the only person who is still reading The Wheel of Time. It’s completely understandable why others have quit, but I can’t. I MUST know what happens at the end. Waiting for the new author to finish the last three books is so very frustrating, but not nearly as frustrating as never getting them would be.
Walton,
Brown v. Board of Education ended legal segregation in 1954 not 1967. The Civil Rights Act which officially outlawed the disenfranchisement of African-Americans, segregated schools, and Jim Crow laws was passed by the democratically elected legislature in 1964. BTW, most SCOTUS decisions that have expanded the rights of the people are from an unusually liberal period during the Court’s history and should not be taken as reliably representative of the courts vis a vis individual rights. What SCOTUS has done for most of its existence is reliably support property rights and corporate rights. These two things do not necessarily translate into greater civil liberties for the general public.
monado:
In case you didn’t know, yes, there are a whole series of books about Jim Eckert and the rest.
As for The Dragon and the George flaw, I can’t answer that. I don’t remember now how the cave was described, whether there was much detail or not. Personally, I’m not good at estimating heights, distances, etc. Other people are very good at it. Basically though, I tend to let a fair amount of stuff slide when it’s fantasy.
Feynmaniac, Chimerical Toad:
Hahahaha, memoooories…
@Sven – no, the best phrase should have been “he applied/ some good torque.”
I think Sven has it with ‘good torque’, because that could be slipped into sentences more easily, I think.
Here is one for all the greybeards amongst the hoard.
Have You Ever Danced?
An old prospector shuffled into the town of El Indio , Texas leading an old tired mule. The old man headed straight for the only saloon in town, to clear his parched throat. He walked up to the saloon and tied his old mule to the hitch rail. As he stood there, brushing some of the dust from his face and clothes, a young gunslinger stepped out of the saloon with a gun in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.
The young gunslinger looked at the old man and laughed, saying, “Hey old man, have you ever danced?” The old man looked up at the gunslinger and said, “No, I never did dance… never really wanted to.”
A crowd had gathered as the gunslinger grinned and said, “Well, you old fool, you’re gonna’ dance now,” and started shooting at the old man’s feet. The old prospector, not wanting to get a toe blown off, started hopping around like a flea on a hot skillet. Everybody was laughing, fit to be tied.
When his last bullet had been fired, the young gunslinger, still laughing, holstered his gun and turned around to go back into the saloon. The old man turned to his pack mule, pulled out a double-barreled shotgun, and cocked both hammers. The loud clicks carried clearly through the desert air.
The crowd stopped laughing immediately. The young gunslinger heard the sounds too, and he turned around very slowly. The silence was almost deafening. The crowd watched as the young gunman stared at the old timer and the large gaping holes of those twin barrels.
The barrels of the shotgun never wavered in the old man’s hands, as he quietly said, “Son, have you ever licked a mule’s ass?”
The gunslinger swallowed hard and s aid, “No sir….. but… I’ve always wanted to.”
There are a few lessons for us all here:
Never be arrogant.
Don’t waste ammunition.
Whiskey makes you think you’re smarter than you are.
Always, always make sure you know who has the power.
Don’t mess with old men, they didn’t get old by being stupid.
bullofthewoods:
Rule Nineteen is: “Remember Never to Forget Rule One“.
Rule One is “Do not act incautiously when confronting a little bald wrinkly smiling man”.
sorry to disappoint, but around here, you’re DEFINITELY one of the cool kids; you even have your own groupies, FFS (who are still waiting for those sexy brain scans, btw)
Wouldn’t you know it? Religion is political after all.
While walking down the street one day a US senator is tragically hit by a truck and dies.
His soul arrives in heaven and is met by St. Peter at the entrance.
“Welcome to heaven,” says St. Peter. “Before you settle in, it seems there is a problem. We seldom see a high official around these parts, you see, so we’re not sure what to do with you.”
“No problem, just let me in,” says the man.
“Well, I’d like to, but I have orders from higher up. What we’ll do
is have you spend one day in hell and one in heaven. Then you
can choose where to spend eternity.”
“Really, I’ve made up my mind. I want to be in heaven,” says the
senator.
“I’m sorry, but we have our rules.”
And with that, St . Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes
down, down, down to hell. The doors open and he finds himself
in the middle of a green golf course. In the distance is a clubhouse
and standing in front of it are all his friends and other politicians
who had worked with him.
Everyone is very happy and in evening dress. They run to greet him, shake his hand, and reminisce about the good times they had while getting rich at the expense of the people.
They play a friendly game of golf and then dine on lobster, caviar
and champagne.
Also present is the devil, who really is a very friendly guy who
has a good time dancing and telling jokes. They are having such a
good time that before he realizes it, it is time to go.
Everyone gives him a hearty farewell and waves while the elevator
rises…
The elevator goes up, up, up and the door re
opens on heaven where St. Peter is waiting for him.
“Now it’s time to visit heaven.”
So, 24 hours pass with the senator joining a group of contented souls moving from cloud to cloud, playing the harp and singing. They have a good time and, before he realizes it, the 24 hours have gone by and St. Peter returns.
“Well, then, you’ve spent a day in hell and another in heaven. Now
choose your eternity.”
The senator reflects for a minute, then he answers: “Well, I would
never have said it before, I mean heaven has been delightful, but
I think I would be better off in hell.”
So St. Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down ,
down to hell.
Now the doors of the elevator open and he’s in the middle of a
barren land covered with waste and garbage.
He sees all his friends, dressed in rags, picking up the trash and
putting it in black bags as more trash falls from above.
The devil comes over to him and puts his arm around his shoulder.
“I don’t understand,” stammers the senator. “Yesterday I was here
and there was a golf course and clubhouse, and we ate lobster and caviar, drank champagne, and danced and had a great time. Now there’s just a wasteland full of garbage and my friends look miserable. What happened?”
The devil looks at him, smiles and says, “Yesterday we were campaigning.. .
Today you voted.”
David M. Bullshit! You are a seriously cool dude.As a layperson with no formal higher education, I stand in awe of your intellect and command of languages, I mean damn! In what world are you not cool?
Report: China To Overtake U.S. As World’s Biggest Asshole By 2020
And here is one for all you math lovin’ types.
Cajun math ???
A Cajun man wants a job, but the foreman won’t hire him until he passes a little math test.
Here is your first question, the foreman said. ‘Without using numbers, represent the number 9.’
‘Without numbers?’ The Cajun says, ‘Dat is easy.’ And proceeds to draw three trees.
‘What’s this?’ the boss asks
‘Ave you got no brain? Tree and tree and tree make nine,’ says the Cajun.
‘Fair enough,’ says the boss. ‘Here’s your second question. Use the same rules, but this time the number is 99.’
The Cajun stares into space for a while, then picks up the picture that he has just drawn and makes a smudge on each tree. ‘Ere you go.’
The boss scratches his head and says, ‘How on earth do you get that to represent 99?’
‘Each of DA trees is dirty now. So, it’s dirty tree, and dirty tree, and dirty tree. Dat is 99.’
The boss is getting worried that he’s going to actually have to hire this Cajun, so he says, ‘All right, last question. Same rules again, but represent the number 100.’
The Cajun stares into space some more, then he picks up the picture again and makes a little mark at the base of each tree and says, ‘Ere you go. One hundred.’
The boss looks at the attempt. ‘You must be nuts if you think that represents a hundred!’
The Cajun leans forward and points to the marks at the base of each tree and says, ‘A little dog come along and poop by each tree.. So now you got dirty tree and a turd, dirty tree and a turd, and dirty tree and a turd, which make one hundred.’
The Cajun is the new supervisor
Jesus and St Peter go out for a round of golf. Jesus tees off first.
It’s a huge slice that sails over the fence on to the freeway, bounces off a truck windshield, back over the fence and on to the clubhouse roof. It rolls down the drainpipe and gets picked up by a frog. A bird swoops down and picks up the frog and as it’s flying over the first green the frog coughs up the ball and it lands in the hole.
Peter turns to Jesus and says: “Are we going to play golf or are you just gonna fuck around all day?”
:-)
Jokes?!
This bodes ill.
You thought kitties wuz bad…
Viel Geschrei und venig Wolle, said the farmer; he sheared his pig.
Don’t be silly.
It’s Kw*k-level assholery.
(Look, Ma! No diaereses!)
Jokes now, is it? An up-to-the-minute one going around the UK:
Diplomatic note to Iceland:
No, no, no! We said we wanted full repayment of the collapsed banks’ debts to UK investors in cash!
so… when Iceland says “I fart in your general direction”, they really mean it, huh?
*wenig
I’ve heard that Cajun joke about an Irishman. David (or John Wells) will be able to tell us if it’s phonologically believable.
Congrats, PL! Money = good.
@ 329,
Could you define “gifted” in this context ? Is that like “touched” ?
Which is it?
To be honest, I found the whole S&M theme in those books quite well done and rather, ahem, erotic.
But how can they do that?!
Uganda is a sovereign nation!
MPs have diplomatic immunity!
Who are we to impose our values on others and demand they answer to out morals?!
Monado @343,
Not really comparable, but for some reason it brought to mind the “Warlock of Gramarye” series (begins with The Warlock in Spite of Himself), by Christopher Stasheff, which I enjoyed more.
One day, a cat dies of natural causes and goes to heaven, where he meets the Lord.
The Lord says to the cat, “You lived a good life, and if there is any way I can make your stay in heaven more comfortable, please let me know.”
The cat thinks for a moment and says, “Lord, all my life I have lived with a poor family and had to sleep on a hard wooden floor.”
The Lord stops the cat and says, “Say no more,” and a wonderful, fluffy pillow appears.
A few days later, six mice are killed in a tragic farming accident, and all of them go to heaven. Again, the Lord is there to greet them with the same offer.
The mice answer, “All our lives we have been chased. We have had to run from cats, dogs, and even women with brooms. Running,
running, running; we’re tired of running. Do you think we could have roller skates so that we don’t have to run anymore?”
The Lord says, “Say no more” and fits each mouse with beautiful new roller skates.
About a week later, the Lord stops by to see the cat and finds him snoozing on the pillow.
The Lord gently wakes the cat and asks him, “How are things since you got here?”
The cat stretches and yawns, then replies, “It is wonderful here. Better than I could have ever expected. And those ‘Meals On Wheels’ you’ve been sending by are the best!”
I’ve got the Wheel of Time series at home, but my interest petered out at about book 6 and at this point I feel like I’d have to start reading them from book 1 to remember what the heck is going on.
Got a B&N nook a few months ago and I’m honestly not sure if I’ll ever buy a paper book again. I love the fact that B&N sells a replacement battery for the nook, along with the tools to replace it yourself when needed. That was the main incentive for my choice of the nook over the Kindle, and a big kick in the pants to Apple, Amazon, and every other company that thinks you should have to pay $60-$100 to replace a battery.
I do kind of drool at the iPad’s touch screen, although I’ve come to hate Apple after a bad experience with my iPod.
(sigh)
I kinda miss the old days, when trolls, godbots, creobots and suchlike could be reliably be expected to infest any given thread.
…
…
…
OK, that was a stupid thing to write.
One more joke:
Famous violinist dies and goes directly to hell. There he is interviewed by a desk-devil, and he is instructed to take his violin and go down to the concerthall on level 3.
He enters the hall and a symphony-orchestra is rehearsing. The sound is heavenly. It’s by far the best orchestra he’s ever heard, and that’s saying something.
There is one free seat in the orchestra – he goes up to the orchestra and is invited to sit. He is overwhelmed when he sees the other musicians. There’s his old teacher, on his left is one of his most revered colleagues who died just a year ago. He is surrounded by music history’s finest musicians. Even Haydn and Mozart are in the orchestra!!! He turns to to his old teacher with tears in his eyes and exclaims: I can’t believe this is hell – to me it’s pure heaven!.
‘Don’t be mistaken ‘ the old teacher answers. ‘The music is by Hindemith and the conductor is Karajan’
I make no claims for originality …
[Ed. I should hope not!]
Jokes, eh?
A man is enjoying a few rounds at the bar, laughing and joking with his friends. He’s a bit buzzed, and before he knows it, time has gotten completely past him. He looks up at the clock, “Oh, dammit. It’s 10.30, my wife is gonna kill me if she knows I’ve been drinking all night!”
He waves goodbye to his friends, gets out of his seat, turns, and falls flat on his face as he gets up. He tries to stand again, but his legs just won’t let him, and he falls once more. He’s determined, though, and he crawls over to the door, opens it up and steps through. BAM! Straight on his face.
“Must be drunker than I thought.” He mumbles to himself, and starts to crawl back to his home. Luckily it’s only about a block there. Dizzy and out of it, he gets to the front door, opens it up, figures he’d be okay, stands, and falls flat on his face.
He does, however, manage to crawl up the stairs, into the bedroom, and into his bed without waking up his wife.
The next morning, he wakes up and sees his wife standing above him with anger in her eyes. “Hey, baby. What’s wrong?”
“You were out all night drinking, weren’t you?” The man was stunned, and he tried to deny it, but his wife stopped him, “The bar called. You left your wheelchair there again.”
Well, if you want a bit of drama, John, how about this?
Cat ownership should be banned. All cats should be neutered and the species allowed to fade out of existence (as much as is possible given the tens of millions of ferals around the world).
Cats might once have served a purposed in keeping rodents out of grain silos in ancient Egypt but now all they do is slaughter wildlife. Each year, uncountable millions of native birds, reptiles and mammals – many of them endangered – are killed by cats both domestic and feral.
Cats are not a benign luxury for our species; they are just another way in which we’re destroying the planet.
Jokes? Hell, I can shut that one down:
And it is even funnier when I tell it when I’m at a forest fire.
And last night, (((Wife))) walked up to me with a damp cloth in her hand and asked, while holding it out to me, “Does this smell like chloroform to you?” And yes, I sniffed without even thinking about it.
Luckily she has ho access to chloroform.
Yet.
@Billy:
Oh… that was bad… but funny.
ambulocetacean, not bad.
Hm. Not a bad idea, the “War on Cats”.
Apart from your stated benefits, it should increase the GDP by providing employment to bureaucrats, law enforcement officers, lawyers and judges, prison officers and so forth.
The public purse could be enriched by seizing the assets of cat-traders.
The price of kitties would go through the roof, crime syndicates and bikies would get in on the act, the rich and powerful would get status out of cat-ownership…
Makes a lot of sense.
My cats are indoor only, but you have to exterminate dogs too then.
In the year or two my roomate lived here I cleaned about 40 bird carcases out of my yard. My neighbors say they killed more.
They were freaking chihuahas. Imagine what your dobermans are doing.
John,
Well, I haven’t thought that far ahead vis-a-vis criminal justice ramifications. But if there’s one thing the electorate always wants it’s law and order.
I’m not big on incarceration, so I would rather see first-time cat-related offences punished by about 600 or 800 hours of community service work shooting feral cats out in the bush.
If you think you’re a good shot you can pay your debt by turning in, say, 600 or 800 feral cat scalps rather than tramping around doing nothing for hours. Rabbit, fox and dog scalps would also be acceptable, and with big ferals like pigs, goats, camels and buffalo, one scalp could be worth, say, 10 or 20 cat scalps.
That would sort out the environment in no time flat. Then we could start on the Indian mynah birds.
Ol’Greg,
“Dogs do it too” is not an argument :)
I’m not arguing. I think you’re being an ignorant ass and I’m not in the mood to deal with people either.
Kill them all.
End animal domestication altoghether.
Hell… kill all animals.
I don’t give a fuck right now.
Around here the neighborhood kids do it for you anyway. Found a slaughtered cat with its ass blown up on my walk.
So take my fucking cats away. They’re the only thing I can relate to right now, but take em.
Kill em.
Fuck you.
A social worker, a lawyer, and a priest find themselves together outside of the room of a patient at a children’s hospital when the fire alarm goes off. The social worker springs into action, urging the others to help. “Come one, guys! We have to get the children out of here!” The lawyer looks at him and says “Fuck the children!” After a moment, the priest says, “Normally, I would agree with the lawyer. But I don’t think we’ll have time before the building burns down.”
Ol’Greg, I’m sorry you’re feeling upset.
Sorry. I’m sorry too.
I’m just sad and logged on and *boom* that’s what I gotta see. Another nice unemotional argument for killing things and taking what little comfort is in my lonely sad life.
So do it, argue for it. But make a good argument for HURTING me too. Tell me why I deserve it.
Can you do that?
Do you have a rational argument for that?
You know I may be turning into more of an accommodationist. More and more I just see that people aren’t so much humanists in that they don’t care about what people go through.
I do care when some one is questioning their religion. It causes pain. I understand that. Whether we mean to or not we just go around hurting each other and it seems there’s nothing that will ever stop or even soften that.
A part of me would like to have this discussion but a part of me knows I don’t feel well enough to and I’m already on the verge of not coming back here.
Yes. I owe you an apology. I’m sorry.
I’m not capable of entering or even reading any discussions of what does and doesn’t deserve to die right now.
I’ll go.
Really, I’m sorry for my emotional drama. I’d love to pretend I don’t have these days, but I do. I’ll go to work, no one will know… and it’ll be fine.
Anyway, I do apologize ambulocetacean. You’ll probably always think of me as crazy and irrational now :/
That’s life I guess.
I refuse to allow myself to be dragged into another cat discussion. However, I think calling for the neutering of cat owners is a bit harsh – or maybe I did not read that post very closely. :^}
More book ideas instead. Moving away from fiction, I have enjoyed Mark Kurlansky’s books, Cod, Salt, The Big Oyster, Basque History of the World. The first two are especially informative and entertaining. The Big Oyster is an examination of the oyster trade in New York City and how that affected its history and the development of trade. Not the equal of the first two books, but still worth reading. The are all good airplane books, i.e., they keep your attention, but can be put down without losing the thread.
I just finished rereading Thomas’ Victorian Underworld and Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and dropped those off at the Oxfam bookstore across the street. Actually dropped off 17 books and only got 5. I do not know what is wrong with me lately. (smile) Finished Carpe Jugelum last night and finished rereading Feet of Clay over the weekend. However, those will not be going back to Oxfam as I found them there in hardback. Hardbacks are mine, mine, all mine! (Overtones of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor with thunder accompaniment.)
Any other suggestions for good non-fiction? Personally, I do not want current political works, read enough of those on my own. However, I am sure they would be of interest to many here.
—
[20/3/2015 – Reuters]
And, in breaking news, yet another illegal cat-breeding farm has been found in remote country.
Lawmen raided the cat-breeding farm last week, euthanising the illegal felines valued at $8.5M near a remote village in [elided], and at least three smaller farms plantations in remote [elided] were also raided.
The farms were found by policemen from the Regional Anti-Illegal Feline Task Group in a three-day operation, based on a tip-off by a disgruntled conspirator in exchange for a reduced sentence.
The police’s deputy regional director for administration Chief Superintendent Canis Major said at least 2,500 breeding pairs and 8,800 kittens were euthanased.
No breeders were collared, but with the raid, Major said a large chunk of a supposed large haul of supply of the illicit trade was denied from the market.
The operating troops that included the Counter Feline Task Group and police forces, who without sleep began to head to the mountainous town on foot to reach the farms on Saturday midnight, reached the farms five hours after dawn, Major said.
“We are losing the battle”, Major said, “the profits breeders make enable them to hire the poor and indigent, for whom the risk of a jail term is dwarfed by the low risk of detection and the opportunity to make big bucks.”
It’s a cruel business — the principals sell the pelts for $2.50 each, and the cats subsist in appalling conditions, fed not just on roadkill but, indeed, any animal they can shoot or trap, and genetic defects and ill-health due to inbreeding and poor sanitation are rife.
“It’s devastating the local ecosystem, but they don’t care about that, so long as the profit is there.”, added Major.”
Ugh, that’s horrible John Morales. Where is the demand for animals raised like that anyway? I don’t even understand… it seems like they wouldn’t be healthy enough to buy.
Ol’Greg,
Please don’t take it so hard and personally. My “argument”, such as it is, is entirely theoretical anyway. Nobody will ever ban cats.
I do care about people and I certainly don’t want to hurt you or your cats. Don’t leave here on my account. I’d much rather leave and have you stay. I don’t have much to contribute anyway.
The only cats I was talking about killing were feral cats, of which there are millions in Australia, killing millions of equally adorable native critters like quolls, quokkas and possums. I care about that not because I hate cats (I don’t), but because I love native animals.
But, yes, let’s not you and I have this argument. Again, I didn’t mean to upset you and I’m sorry that I have. :(
I guess the only reason I brought up dogs is that people tend to justify killing the animals they hate when really I’m not joking about domestication being the problem.
If we exterminated all domestic animals, stopped depending on farm raised meat and fish, and trapped and killed as many invasive human-spread species (like Eurasian tree sparrows) then that might do some good.
Ol’Greg, Eek!
I was composing my previous before I saw just how upset you were. I was riffing with Ambulocetan (via an allegory related to the “war on drugs”).
I apologise unreservedly for aggravating your distress.
FWIW, I too am a dog- and cat-person, though I advocate (and practice) responsible ownership (which includes desexing my pets).
I’m also in (general) agreement with Peter Singer regarding animal rights.
katiebour @ 368 – what happened to you iPod? we’ve got 4 of them in my family (5 if you count my old, dead Clasic – which, I swear, one of these days I’ll get a new battery for so I can have it as a backup) and haven’t had any problems for several years past warranty. I (almost literally) live on my iPod – use it mostly for audiobooks, though.
And yes, I do understand that exterminating feral cats is necessary. I didn’t know they didn’t already do that there? All stray animals around here are rounded up and put down.
I know Hawaii has a problem with feral cats too, but no one compares to Rhodesia, where I’m told at the end of the tourist season they just put food out with rat poison and for a while it rains dying carnivores.
Any carnivore, sadly :(:(
It’s all right John, don’t tiptoe around me. I just woke up majorly on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I’m a big girl, I know when I’m being out of line.
Actually I just went back and read pelts in that story, so they were raising them for fur then?
Yikes. Because we really need fur coats *eyeroll*
Yeah, in truth if we stopped domesticating animals we’d just hunt whatever ones were still around to extinction anyway.
Man… people suck.
Ol’Greg, No worries about the upset. I know what black days are like (well, I know what mine are like; I don’t know what yours are like). I promise not to think of you as crazy and irrational if you promise not to think of me as a cat-hating asshole. :)
BTW, I think John M’s piece was a spot of original fiction. The cat-squad cop being called Canis Major and all.
You no doubt have a point about dogs, but in Australia at least cats are a bigger problem. I don’t own any pets BTW, so I don’t have a quadruped in this fight. :)
Yeah, I made it all up, based on a typical report of a raid on a marijuana farm.
Ol’Greg, I’m not trying to tip-toe, I’m genuinely sorry.
I wish I’d read your comments after #379, which is when I started composing.
I think this is an episode I should learn from.
Ugh. I never pick up on jokes. I know you’re not an asshole ambulocetacean, I usually enjoy your posts.
Oh well… to work then. You have a good day.
You have a good one too. :)
John Morales, why are your cops not cracking down on kitten huffing?
Hmm, need to do some work myself. Will check later for book suggestions.
@365
I think a reasonable case can be made for “if there is something worthy of being called god, it’s identical to and in no way separate from the natural universe – no separate spirit involved.” The version where god is the natural universe AND somehow also a transcendent separate being is called panentheism. Unless you somehow manage not to believe in either the physical universe OR a magic spirit, I think the words atheist and pantheist really mean the same thing. Using the pantheist label gives me a way to read religious writing (which I do out of a general interest in literature and the humanities) and put it in a context that is makes sense to me.
I celebrate Jewish holidays most of the time. Just like you might give presents around the winter solstice without actually believing in a magic spirit. (A whole lot of observant Jews are atheists, by the way – it’s common, out of the closet, and largely uncontroversial – not much like being an atheist Catholic.) I view religious writings with the same degree of reverence that I view Shakespeare, the Stoic philosophers, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. I wouldn’t stand on them either – I only stand on the Left Behind series.
With respect to my son, by gifted, I meant really intelligent, which is the conventional meaning of the word in the education world. The problem is that if a kid is really intelligent, they figure out ways to get around their severe difficulty reading and so school systems often deny them special services. The work-arounds that a kid comes up with often take so much energy and time that they can’t do the level of work that they could if their reading problem were officially addressed via special teaching and/or assistive technology.
Sorry, Ambulocetacean, now I’m kinda upset and embarrassed and feel bad, so I’m gonna go beddy-byes.
(I’ll check it out in the morning).
John, You did nothing wrong. None of us did. It was all just one great big misunderstanding. :(
Okay, Ray Comfort again makes himself look completely ignorant and stupid regarding atheism… are we sure this guy isn’t a Poe?
John! I’m glad I logged back in (it’s one of the few sites I can play on at work).
Have a good night. I’m sorry for the drama. I was just having a really really bad morning, and I already have an almost autistic ability to not-get-jokes.
@ambook:
I know how this is. I was a ‘gifted’ student in school, but I have dyscalculia. I cannot do numbers in my head easily – I’m usually off by factors of ten (I forget to carry when I do math in my head.) I always need to use a calculator – or I have to do the math in a way that I break apart everything into tens and fives.
It never really bothered me at all, and I always found ways to get around my inability to perform simple math in my head, so I always got good grades, but like you said, it takes a lot of effort and time to have to do these workarounds.
Hmmm… I don’t want to prolong a painful conversation today, but sometime in the future, when emotions are a bit less frayed, can we have a chat about this idea that indigenous species (outside of a handful of very isolated habitats, is any species truly indigenous, if you look far enough back in history) are automatcially more valuable than introduced species? Or that, more to the point, the environment-as-it-would-be-if-there-were-no-humans is invariably (if necessarily hypothetically) preferable to the human-inhabited world.
Of course humans (and their works, including domesticated animals) affect the environment. And of course those effects are sometimes deleterious (see also anthropogenic global climate change), which is a problem that requires attention and management… but why should we assume that human-caused change is philosophically evil, independent of impact assessment? And why shouldn’t we include the value to humans of human-caused change in the ledger book when we decide what counts as deleterious?
Are we people really less important than “nature”?
Becca@393- I bought my iPod and used it for about a year with no problems. The battery life then proceeded to get shorter and shorter, and I was looking into sending it in to get serviced when Apple came out with a software update. That software update bricked my iPod and essentially made it so that I couldn’t turn it on. The charging dock attached to my computer would not give it enough power to complete the update.
Supposedly if I plugged it into a wall charger, it would finish updating. So I bought the $20 wall charger, plugged it in, and nothing. I looked online and there were tons of other people with the same problem, saying “I tried the wall charger but it’s not fixing it.” I then thought that perhaps a charger with a bigger kick, so to speak, might work, so I then bought a $20 car charger, took it out to the car in the lot outside Walmart, plugged it in, and voila, it updated. I then repackaged the car charger, took it back inside, and got a refund on it.
But with the battery life at basically zilch, me looking at an $80-100 “service fee” to send it in and have them put in a new battery, and software and hardware glitches like those mentioned above, I decided that I was done with Apple.
I also have friends with iPods and iPhones who have similar horror stories.
My LG Chocolate 3 holds as many or more songs than my old iPod, cost me $30 with a 2-year plan, is a cell in addition to an MP3 player, and getting the battery replaced on it doesn’t involve paying practically the cost of a new one.
Did I mention that iTunes software bugged and bogged up my PC to the point where I had to uninstall it, simply so that it would stop telling me to update it constantly?
@Bill Dauphin:
I don’t think humans are less important than nature, but we do have a responsibility to preserve it. We have a bigger chance to impact the world than other creatures, and it’s because of this impact that we have to protect nature.
Bill, discuss it then! It’s an interesting point.
I’m feeling better already, some breakfast helped. Now I feel almost obliged to stick around and not-act-crazy.
*shakes head*
Yeah, it’s just been an emotional week over here. I’m pretty sure though that the counter argument is that we do have a responsibility to try and keep ecosystems from being destroyed simply by the fact that we have to some extent set ourselves up as the animals that control the world, whether other animals like that or not.
@ambook – it’s not just the gifted ones that get denied services. My son has neurological damage due to anoxia at birth. By medical diagnosis, he has a TBI: traumatic brain injury. By the state, however, he’s just fine: TBI requires a percussion according to state definition. Due to his disabilities, he’s got an IQ of about 93 – all the neurologic tests say he’s potentially much brighter, and not to pay attention to IQ tests because they can’t adequately test him due to his disabilities. The schools took that IQ number, however, and said that he’s performing “beyond tested abilities” (he’s got a great vocabulary) and therefore he doesn’t get services. They’ve qualified him as “special needs” however, so they can get the extra money from the state… he just doesn’t qualify for services.
who, me, bitter? not much… (ha).
We got him out of that school district into one that did give him the services he needs, until the last 2 years when school funding cutbacks took away the one thing he really did need (more time). By this point he was in high school, and he opted to stay in the school district with his friends rather than be pulled out for home schooling.
He’ll start community college in the fall, and with a lower work load I think should do just fine – if we can get him through the rest of this term.
Playing Devil’s Advocate…
Why? How does it follow that if we have the capacity to change things, this gives us the responsibility to ensure things do not change? That doesn’t even make sense. Not to mention you’re ignoring the is/ought…whence comes the ought?
Bill @407:
Profound question. It has been answered expertly (and IMHO beautifully) in a book entitled The Diversity of Life, by E.O. Wilson. Much of this book can be viewed in Google Books, and I recommend a look.
[I carried this book to grad school interviews for luck…never trotted it out, but its weight in my backpack was always reassuring. I haven’t given up all superstitions I guess*]
*My pre-PCR ritual appeasement of the Thermocycler Idol is no less elaborate than Easter Mass in the Vatican.
@Paul:
Not saying we stop change, but while changing, try to do so responsibly – clearcutting forty acres of trees without replanting is irresponsible. Dumping toxic waste into the lakes and rivers is irresponsible. Overhunting animals is irresponsible.
And we have to preserve nature cause… well… it lets us kinda live? Plants are food and provide oxygen. Clean water keeps us hydrated and alive. Clean air lets us breathe without the black lung. Animals provide us with food and can help correct ecosystem imbalances.
Yeah, the more I think about it the more I think that it’s hard to separate issues with global warming and industrial pollution, and issues with introducing species and disrupting ecosystems.
Then again, does it make sense to create more species that are essentially dependent on us in another way?
We already, for instance, have people who pollinate flowers by hand because bees are scarce.
At what point does the world become our garden, and then at what point can we ensure we understand it enough to keep it from taking us out too?
If that’s what you were trying to say, you’re completely ignoring Bill’s question. I’ll quote the relevant part:
The latter view is not wholly uncommon, though…in many facets of life, people make the unspoken assumption that “natural” is better than “human-engineered/synthetic/planned/etc”. Obviously we need to not do things which kill vital facets of the ecosystem that we depend on, but to go back to the initial example why prefer indigenous species to introduced species?
I’ve always had a problem with abstraction. I’m one of those concrete solutions and actionable items types.
But I think there are two arguments at play that aren’t related directly.
There’s the argument as to whether ANY human involvement is bad and I guess that gets into what is “natural” anyway.
I mean, and I suck at philosophy and am obviously irrational at times, but I do recall there being a pretty ancient division with physical and technical.
I also remember this coming down pretty hard on women too.
The second then is what actions SHOULD be taken by humans for what ends. This is hard because while some consequences are obvious (dump toxic waste in to lake and watch things die) others are subtle (exterminate malaria causing mosquitos and the pesticides kill other things unintentionally).
Huff Poo:
How Scientific is Modern Medicine Really?
The article is written by Dana Ullman – expert in homeopathic medicine.
I have only scanned the article, but so far it seems to be shaping up as projection writ large:
I have plenty of issues with the way Big Pharma is run. But his article seems to be a bait-n-switch strawman justification for tearing down the edifice of scientific medicine and replacing it with proven crap.
No better than ‘Teach the Controversy’, really.
Oh I mean in our minds there is historically a sense of complete division between the human world and everything else.
Then that human = unnatural. Whether that means better or worse than natural depends on the people you’re asking.
I don’t know that there is such a distinction, myself. But humans can not exist without impacting the environment. Of that I am sure. That impact will have consequences because everything does. But to me preserving, for instance, a species on the brink of extinction is no less invasive than driving a species there.
Now the moral (there’s that damned word again) question as to which is the BETTER action is separate perhaps?
Bill D., here‘s an editing challenge for you–can you do better than my stab?
no time for the meatier issue right now, but I’ll second AE’s recommendation of Wilson. Great, great writing.
What else kills birds?
And don’t forget cars
quoted from the website page
What Kills Birds
Bird mortality seems to be quite a complex problem as many human activities affect bird mortality in many ways.
Kevin (@409) and Ol’ Greg (@410):
First, Ol’ Greg, I’m glad you’re feeling better. IMHO, you had nothing to apologize for: We all have rough days emotionally (my own weekend was pretty stressful on the family front); companionship (human or otherwise) is a blissful refuge in those times, and threats to that refuge, however hypothetical, are legitimately traumatic.
Regarding the relationship between people and nature, my concern is that simply by portaying it as a relationship between people and nature, we’re implicitly accepting a sort of dualism that I don’t think is valid. We humans are unique in the magnitude of our impact (whether deliberate or not) on the environment, but the language of these conversations almost always positions us as separate from the environment (aka “nature”), and far too often (though I’m not laying this opinion at the feet of you two personally), as morally inferior to “nature.”
Of course we have a duty of stewardship — I don’t mean to question that for a second — but on what basis? And to what end? The usual predicate assumption of these conversations is that the proper goal is to, as much as possible, stop all human-caused environmental change and, wherever possible, put the environment back the way it was before humans fucked it up. This, I think, is based on two propositions whose validity I question: First, that humans¹ are philosophically separate and distinct from the rest of nature; second, that there exists some state of nature — particularly some distribution of life forms, presumably dating to before humans developed the technological capability to affect the environment on a large scale — that is correct and should be preserved and/or reconstructed. (And before you reject that second proposition as a strawman nobody really believes, consider how it’s implied in the common language of this discussion… words like “preserve” and “protect” and phrases like “keep ecosystem from being destroyed,” which implicitly assert that all change is bad, and should be prevented or reversed.)
I think a bunch of godless evolutionists, if anyone, should reject these propositions, but they’re very deeply embedded in our culture. Theists believe that “mankind” is a special creation of God, divinely granted dominion over nature. The implication of that is that whatever environmental change we make is automatically good, because it is our God-given right to make it. We humanists reject all that God crap, and the divine imprimatur that comes with it… but the sense of humans as special and apart from nature is deeply welded into our cultural heritage; that dualism is difficult to escape, no matter how hard we try.
But if we give up our divine warrant without giving up our sense of our own apartness, we suddenly become not good stewards but invasive pests. Without God’s sanction, all deltas from the state of nature look like deficits, and we end up feeling like (even if we wouldn’t articulate it this way) all anthropogenic change is inherently destructive. Personally, I think that nontheistic-dualistic position is just as mistaken as theistic dualism.2
Then, too, the presumption there is any such thing as a static state of nature to preserve and protect in the first place is an illusion. Nature appears mostly static to people because (volcanoes and earthquakes notwithstanding) global-scale change in geology (e.g., tectonics) happens so slowly that it’s literally invisible; the same is true for evolutionary change in global biology. Anthropogenic changes, OTOH, mostly occur on a human time scale, almost by definition. In fact, the history of all of nature (including, I’m bold to assert, humans) is constant change. Human-caused environmental change looks different than other environmental, but is it really? Certainly it’s practically different, because our capability to cause change is vastly greater than any living organism3… but aside from a practical assessment of impact, does environmental change have a fundamental different moral value merely because it’s caused by humans? Personally, I don’t think so: I think we’re just another part of nature, and human-caused environmental change is just another piece of the larger picture of natural change over time.
So how do I square that with my original agreement that we have a duty of stewardship? Well, it’s because I think the duty we have is fundamentally to ourselves: On a global scale, we should avoid, wherever possible, destroying the habitats of existing species, causing extinctions not otherwise in process, etc., because the diversity of life, and of the physical world, is ultimately good for us… but not, IMHO, because tigers or elephants or coral somehow have a fundamental moral claim on a beneficial environment that supercedes our own. I see the place of species self-interest within the larger environment as analogous to the place of individual self-interest within larger societies: If we have sufficient wisdom, and think on an appropriately long timeframe, we will see that our own best interests are ultimately best served by what’s best for the larger environment (whether physical or societal)… but that doesn’t mean that, on the micro level, we won’t sometimes make self-serving choices with perfect justification.
So, to get back to the question that started me down this line of thought, even conceding that pets and other domesticated animals represent a significant impact on the status quo ante of the natural world, it’s legitimate to weigh their benefit to people, and to decide that said benefit is worth the impact.
Oy! I didn’t mean to subject y’all to the equivalent of a freshman philosophy term paper (and probably a bad one at that, since I never actually studied philosophy). These are thoughts that always bounce around in my head when I listen to conversations around animal rights and environmental conservationism. I absolutely do want to exercise good environmental stewardship, and I abhor cruelty to nonhuman animals… but I often feel like a certain species self-loathing creeps into these arguments, and they end up (probably unconsciously, in most cases) suggesting that everything else about nature is fundamentally more valuable than people. And I struggle with that.
¹ I’d rather say people, because I would be willing to include among people members of other species, if they were similar to us in all the things that define people, such as use of language and tools, the formation of abstract concepts and recording and transmission of same across generations, making of art for its own sake, etc., etc., etc. I don’t mean to be speciesist… but among life currently extant on the Earth, humans are the only species capable of changing the environment on the scale we’re talking about, and (as far as we know) the only species that bothers to worry about how they’re changing the environment.
2 Note that I realize this is different from (albeit metaphorically similar to) the mind-body split the term dualism often refers to; I trust y’all to follow me nevertheless.
3 This has not necessarily always been the case. If you want to talk about destruction of ecosystems, give a thought to the oxygenation of the early atmosphere!
JeffreyD:
You’ve probably read all these, but here are some I’ve enjoyed:
The Body Emblazoned, Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture by Jonathan Sawday
Garlic and Sapphires, The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, by Ruth Reichl
A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
The True History of Chocolate by Sophie Coe and Michael Coe
Where The Wild Things Were by William Stolzenburg
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
The Wild Trees by Richard Preston
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
Stiff by Mary Roach
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss
Crackpot, The Obsessions of John Waters by John Waters
Night by Elie Wiesel
Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson
The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire by Matt Taibbi
A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations by Cintra Wilson
The History of Hell by Alice K. Turner
Confessions of A Failed Southern Lady by Florence King
Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures by Bill Schutt
Dead Reckoning: The New Science of Catching Killers by Michael Baden and Marion Roach
Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley by David Browne
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of A B Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell
The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
MrFire (@418):
I’m pretty sure you’re missing at least one set of scare quotes in there somewhere! ;^)
Paul, AE, Kevin, and Ol’ Greg (@various):
I see while I was laboring over my phoney-baloney term paper, y’all were having a cogent (and succinct) conversation about the question I tossed out. <ShamedBlush>
First, thanks for the E.O. Wilson rec. I’ll check tonight to see if it’s available on audiobook: I have a cross-country trip coming up in a few weeks, and such a book would be a welcome traveling companion.
Next, I think we’re mostly in “violent agreement” on the core point: Fouling our own nest is bad… but that’s because living in a fouled nest is bad, and not because the nest has more inherent right to be clean than we do to live.
I don’t really think many here actually take the position that “nature” is morally superior to people… but I do think there’s a real tendency for conversations in this area to drift that way, owing to the sheer cultural mass (and consequent conversational gravitational pull) of our historical veneration of nature and (often anthropomorphic) love of animals. It’s something I feel continually compelled to push back against, however Sisyphusian that might be.
Pygmy Loris, I’m still reading WoT, too; not only to see how it all ends, but to see just how the heck all those subplots can be tied up, even in three more books.
David M., in these hyar parts, you are one of the cool kids. You’re just gonna have to learn to deal with it! :)
I expect this to get it’s own thread soon. A ten year old girl in Mexico City was raped by her step father and made pregnant. The rapist has been arrested and the girl is in custody. The debate if she will carry to term is beginning.
Here we go again.
Yes.
Precisely because humans are capable of moral consideration. Another species, or a non-biological natural process which kills billions of animals, cannot comprehend the scale of the violence or any question of right and wrong.
When humans kill, directly or by destroying others’ habitat, we know what we’re doing; we know we are taking the lives of other sentient animals, who own their own lives, and who prefer life to death.
Good non-fiction:
–Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (which Caine already mentioned)
–Who Wrote the Bible? – Richard Elliott Friedman
A good history of the first few book of the Bible came to be and why it’s so frickin’ contradictory and incoherent. Mostly it’s a result of different powers writing texts to their own needs and ending with a lousy copy-and-paste job (creationism really hasn’t changed much in 2000+ years).
–The Ancestor’s Tale – Richard Dawkins
Nice overview of the tree of life.
– Surely, You’re Joking Mr. Feynman! – Richard Feynman
There’s a reason I got my pseudonym from this guy!
– The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory – Brian Greene
Jordan never intended to wrap up all the subplots. And I doubt he gave Sanderson details of the ones he didn’t intend to wrap up himself.
Of course, you can only be interested in Epilectic Tree theories trying to figure out who killed Asmodean for so many years before you just stop caring about certain subplots.
You can count me in the ranks of people still reading WoT, if having The Gathering Storm on my shelf for 3 months without reading it (although intending to!) counts. When my wife read it first and said they didn’t wrap up the Tower of Genji subplot in that book, I sort of lost the immediate motivation to read it. I’m still irritated that TOR and Sanderson decided to end with a trilogy, when Jordan was adamant that there would only be one book (A Memory of Light). I suppose you couldn’t expect them to be ok with only selling 1 book instead of 3 when the original author couldn’t exercise his clout anymore, but it grates.
Holy crap, I’m agreeing with Fox News :O
Of course, it’s them talking to an Arizona senator who’s talking out of his ass about ‘oh no, it’s not going to give police a reason to racially profile’ when the immigration bill allows police to stop people they’ve got suspicions of being illegal immigrants (read: anyone who looks Hispanic.)
Bad bill, blow-hard senator, rather attractive news reporter. I totally agree with her.
Anyone willing to assist me with a recipe. I’m gonna make red beans and rice, but I think I need a sauce for it. I was thinking about making a rous (sp?) and putting some chicken stock in it with some Cajun spices, adding that to the rice and beans with some cut up Andouille.
Any thoughts?
Janine:
*Sigh. This should not even be a question. No 10 year old should be forced to birth. Ever. When people ask me just what it is I have against religion (and most people), I point to cases like this, which highlight just how fucked up people can be.
Or, how about: fouling the nest is bad because it is such an aethsetically pleasing and interesting nest.
Yes! Thank you for reminding me, MrFire. A few days ago I got impatient waiting for MIT to make a non-streaming version of the video, which I thought they implied they were going to do but I may have been mistaken about.
So I ripped the audio. Here it is, for anyone who wants it, in a format that can be downloaded and saved offline. (36MB .ogg file, and a player for anyone who can’t play the file format.)
^aesthetically, godammit.
great non-fiction: anything by David Quammen (Song of the Dodo especially) or John McPhee.
@AE:
I prefer “fouling our nest is bad because we can’t quite move to other nests yet and it’s the only nest we’ve got.”
I think you mean a roux?
Even more subjective than Bill’s phrasing. The nest matters to us because we are codependent. Our outcomes are better on average when the nest is clean. Otherwise, do people who do not particularly find the nest aesthetically pleasing moral to tear it apart and try to replace it with something more to their liking?
Caine (@423):
Great list. JeffreyD may have read all those, but I have not read most of them. Imma make a copy of this list for future reference. Some comments:
I’ve not read Stiff (nor Spook, her take on research into the afterlife), but I highly recomment Roach’s book on human sexuality research, Bonk. (Note, however, that if I’d been her editor, the title would’ve been Boink.)
I loves me some Bryson! Also of interest to this crowd might be A Walk in the Woods (about hiking the Appalachian Trail… in the traditional sense, I mean, not the recent euphemism!) and In a Sunburned Country (about Australia). Neither is explicitly a science book, but both have a fair amount of sciency content, owing to the landscapes he’s traveling through.
Heh! You’re just trying to start trouble by listing this one, aren’t you? ;^)
Another of my favorite authors! This is actually his second book about the OED, the first being The Professor and the Madman, about the relationship between Professor James Murray, OED editor, and an American who became one of the most important individual contributors to the work despite being (unbeknownst to Murray, for most of their working relationship) incarcerated in an asylum for the criminally insane after having committed murder in London.
Winchester also has several books based on geology, which was his field of study at Oxford: The Map that Changed the World (about William Smith), Krakatoa (about — duh! — the Krakatoa eruption), and A Crack in the Edge of the World (about the San Francisco earthquake), and I recommend them all. I found his most recent — The Man Who Loved China (about Joseph Needham) — less compelling than the others, but I have such trust in Winchester as an author that I lay that off to my own inattentive reading (listneing, actually), and plan to give it another chance. In googling Winchester to make sure I was getting the titles right, I discovered that he has a book about a walking tour of Korea that I hadn’t known about: O, the joy of learning there’s a previously unknown work by a favorite author. In addition, there’s a new book due out this fall, called Atlantic: A Biography of the Ocean.
Both Bryson and Winchester read their own audiobooks (though, sadly, Bryson reads only the abridged versions of Walk in the Woods and Short History), and both are really wonderful readers: If you have any tolerance at all for audiobooks, give ’em a listen!
@439
…aesthetically pleasing
moralget to tear it apart…@blf:
THANK YOU! I have heard the word so many times, but never figured out how to spell it. The last letter I would ever have thought of to be on the end of that word would be an ‘x’
Clearly, I’m having a productive day.
Sven: Nice recommendations. I have an entire road trip planned around Annals of the Former World as a post-tenure reward should I not die of a fucking aneurysm before that day comes.
Bill:
I’m neutral on the Bonk/Boink issue. I think both work. (How’s that for slithering out of the question?) Stiff is a delightful read, even though the subject is corpse disposal. Jan Bondenson’s Buried Alive is also about corpses, specifically about the history of the fear of being buried alive, and all the different ways that was dealt with along with the prevalent theories of the time. I’ll tell ya, when I got to the bit involving red hot pokers…I puckered! ;P
Me? Would I do that? *looks around, starts whistling*
That sounds interesting, it goes on my B&N list.
One of my favourites I didn’t list, because you can only get it used these days, is Listening in the Dark: The Acoustic Orientation of Bats and Men by Donald R. Griffin. A friend of mine is Griffin’s daughter, which is how I came to know about the book. Griffin was a professor of zoology at Harvard, and pioneered this research.
I found the book fascinating, especially as we have a large population of Myotis lucifugus where we are, I often get them in the house and need to rescue them from overly interested felines.
Speak for yourself.
Ah, thanks , Bill, that one slipped by me.
*ahegm*
FUCK YOU; CAINE! KW*K YOU SIDEWAYS WITH A LEICA RANGEFINDER!
And here I thought you were one of the good guys.
::composes self:: ::straighten hair::
There’s a reason category 5 is called “Prescriptivist Poppycock”.
Go; read; and sin no more.
Seriously? I went out of my way to be polite when you spewed tripe about how we should respect nature because it’s beautiful, yet when I try to give a neutrally reasoned position to support what you are interested in that’s the response? Fuck off.
AE (@433, as corrected @435):
Yes, the loveliness of the nest is one reason fouling it would be unwise… but, as Paul (@439) points out, not the only one, and not sufficient to ensure that those whose aesthetic is different from yours and mine will join us in stewardship.
sgbm (@427):
I agree with this as far as it goes: Responsibility scales with both capability and consciousness. Thus, we have greater moral responsibility for the choices we make both because we are capable of great impact and because we have moral awareness of the impact we’re capable of.
But I don’t believe that changes the fundamental moral worth of the things we’re choosing between: A tiger or a lion will eat a human because it’s good for the tiger or lion to do so; a human will eat a cow or a pig (at least, this human will) because it’s good for the human to do so. Because we can, it behooves us to think carefully about the manner in which we eat (and raise and kill) the cow or pig, and the environmental impact of doing so… and because we’re both capable of and responsible for that moral consideration, we may make different choices than the wild predator… but none of that means the cow or pig has inherently more right to not be eaten than humans do.
Ahh, but because we do anthropomorphize animals, it’s perhaps less emotional to look at an example related to nonliving “nature”: I have heard people quite seriously argue that we should never colonize the Moon, nor ever even visit Mars, because to do so would involve “despoiling their pristine environments”… even presuming there’s no life on either world! It’s that sort of extreme corner, into which conversations about environmental conservation and/or animal rights often drift, that makes me a little bit crazy: The idea that a lifeless rock has inherent moral rights that superceded the needs (or even wants, for that matter) of people, and that the present state of said lifeless rock is somehow sacrosanct, despite the fact that it’s really nothing more than a single freeze-frame in the nearly endless motion picture of history.
I have a xupply of Xx for xale. Big oneX, xmall onex, inxane onex, and even plain onex. An X for every need and budget. Give your frexh hot Xx whilxt xuppliex laxt.
Remember, you can rotate your favourite X and get a +, or flip it and get an X, or even bend it about a bit as in ϗ and א. A verxatile and uxeful letter for all needx!
@blf:
Haha, yes yes. I like our lovable letter X – but I still need help with my dinner.
I missed them due to a ‘senior moment’ ;)
(Even though I’m barely 30).
A pleasure, but sorry about the streaming thing, I forgot about that.
Personally, I wish they’d had more time to talk – Chomsky had only around 15 minutes or so, at the end, which was a shame. I’m new to his material, so I don’t know yet how it compares to his other speeches. He was eloquent, but clearly had a lot more to say.
And Roy was quite magnificent, even if she spent most of her speaking time reading excerpts from her new book.
The overall feel I got, though, was more ‘Democracy Lost’ than ‘Democracy’s Endgame’ though (as in, I initially thought they were implying an inherent instability in our understanding of ‘democracy’) – are you interested in sharing any of your thoughts on this?
There’s a worker at JPL who thinks he can hand out religious DVD’s on the job. JPL demoted him for that practice. Apparently he is suing.
Caine, Fleur du mal at #423 – Thank you, dear lady. I have to admit I have read most of those, but you did provide some wonderful looking leads. The books by the critics look interesting and I don’t think I would have found them on my own, same with Kitchen Confidential. Feel free to drop more as the mood strikes you. :^} Oh, and I love Florence King (a dirty little secret, tell no one!) Her book, Southern Ladies and Gentlemen is still superb. It describes the south in which I grew up.
Feynmaniac, Chimerical Toad at #428, The Elegant Universe is new to me, and is now on the list nestled gently below Caine’s offerings. Comfy?
Sven DiMilo at #436 – Will look for David Quammen, Song of the Dodo first.
Bill Dauphin, OM at #440 – Bonk is new to me, also on the list. Not strong on geology so putting those on the list as well.
Thanks to all. Apologies if I missed any suggestions.
To return to the fiction front, while at Oxfam bookstore today I picked up a book called City Infernal by Edward Lee. The book is about the city which is hell. I seldom care for Goth Splatter Punk Horror fiction, but the artwork caught my eye and I bought it on a whim. Started to leaf through it about 5, looked up and realized it was 7. Not sure I can actually say I like it, rather like a glass bottom boat tour of a sewer, but it is interesting. Will let you know what I think when done. Anyway, well worth the dollar I paid for it today.
Looked at the other subthreads running here, but nothing caught and held my interest. That and I don’t want to end up in another fight tonight. (smile)
Sili, The Unknown Virgin:
No, no, I am a flower of evil. I did enjoy Truss’s book, however, a grammar nazi I’m not. I don’t know enough grammar to be one. ;p Not to say I don’t have my peeves, I do, such as people who can’t use the shift key.
JeffreyD:
:D Florence King is an absolute treasure. Ruth Reichl’s book is a very interesting insider look. I hesitate to sound kw*kish here, but I never would have known about it except for a friend, who happens to know her. Oh, there’s a bonus too – recipes! Kitchen Confidential is kind of *the* tell all book when it comes to food, restaurants and cooks. It’s marvelously descriptive.
Non-fiction about a favourite subject of mine: sleep:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Counting-Sheep-Science-Pleasures-Dreams/dp/0006551726
And I hope to get some tonight (sleep that is) so I can dodge this oncoming cold
So here are my favorite non-fiction books
All of Alain de Botton’s books – The Consolations of Philosophy and Status Anxiety are terrific.
Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful
Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale – I read this one every year during the week that I go to Boy Scout camp with my son, sort of like an antidote…)
Andre Comte-Sponville’s The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality
Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft
Wilson & Holldobler’s Journey to the Ants
Bill Bryson’s Short History, especially nice as an ipod book on tape (I have the unabridged version – quite good) and The Mother Tongue
Steven Pinker – The Language Instinct or The Blank Slate
Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal
anything by Jared Diamond
I’m leaving off the history of spinning and weaving that I’m enjoying, or the British Museum’s definitive book on indigo cultivation and dyeing – these might be for more a niche market…
ambook, I don’t think you should leave those books off because the pharyngulistas have very wide interests, including knitting and all things knitting related.
Rancor understood…I have only been procrastinating part time, and fired that off half-assed.
My original point should have been explained, because it was somewhat tangential. People don’t generally support conservation efforts because a cost/benefit analysis has been presented and the utility of some conservation goal is clear. They support conservation efforts because they find the red-cockaded woodpecker to be enchanting, or like living near pristine lakeside habitats, or don’t care for the smell/look of industrialization as they watch the sun set over the mountains at night.
You could make the argument:
I agree that there are some rational people who do not find the nest aesthetically pleasing, but would be swayed by this argument. However, my experience with conservation biology tells me that there are many more irrational people who will glaze over when you explain exactly how and why we are codependent, but would swoon at an image of an alpine meadow blooming with lupine, columbine, and maybe half a dozen species of Penstemon.
The fucking irony is that the easiest conservation targets are often those that provide the least benefit for cost of preservation. Look at Yellowstone. We couldn’t do anything with that land even if we wanted to*. On the other hand, preserving littoral habitat in the Gulf of Mexico would have demonstrable long-term economic benefits for those who live there. Try convincing the citizens of New Orleans or Galveston or Mobile of that. The short term profits gained by shortening shipping routes, oh and what was the other…drilling oil, are far too present in the minds of people who depend on these short term solutions to the next paycheck**. It appears that this last point is also somewhat tangential. Maybe I should get some work done.
Anyway, Paul, I graciously absorb your “Fuck off” with the realization that I probably had it coming.
*Unless I guess the geologists get creative.
**Understandably so.
Milhous: “So we’ve learned that war isn’t an answer.”
Bart: “Except to America’s problems!”
The End.
* * *
The Cajun joke is very instructive…!
* * *
Nonfiction recommendation:
Bruce Gilley: China’s Democratic Future. How it will happen and where it will lead, Columbia University 2004.
Very optimistic, but it makes the fairly compelling arguments that everyone basically knows the scenario presented in it is the only way to avoid a revolution that would turn the Yellow River red… and that nobody wants that.
* * *
Me too! Me too! :-D :-D :-D
Power really does come out of gun barrels.
I see. :-) Where I come from, “cool” refers more to pretty strictly defined features of appearance and behavior.
As I’ve mentioned before, my brain has never been scanned; as I’ve also mentioned before, your groupies are still waiting for the X-rays of your head. Don’t forget to get them this summer. :-)
Erm… the Bulgarian in comment 310? Four years of Russian in school (ending 10 years ago) will do that to you. In other words, I cheated.
Bookmarked!
I expect every word to come true.
Seconded!
~:-| Don’t know that one. Must be regional (…like most of the rest of the German language).
Evidently.
Almost; some Irish accents, or so I’ve read, do pronounce th as [d] and [t]. Of course, thirty would get the [t] and thus still be distinct from dirty.
I don’t get it. I don’t know Hindemith, but wasn’t Herbert von Karajan a very famous conductor indeed?
B-)
In Australia and on islands, yes. In the Americas, perhaps. Elsewhere… :-/
Heh. I was taught proper sniffing procedures! You’re supposed to stay away and waft the smell toward your nose with your hand. :-)
…Scuse me?
No country with that name has existed for decades! :-) Northern Rhodesia is Zambia, and Southern Rhodesia is Zimbabwe!
It’s a pity when they’re gone.
Simple, no?
:-) :-) :-)
ROTFL!
Bringing it to the brink of extinction was invasive.
In degree, yes! Think “Sixth Mass Extinction”. You’re misundreshtmatin’ us drastically.
That one’s about “the ends of the world as we know them”.
Reminds me of a special issue of some geology journal… about the Rheic Ocean from opening (Cambrian) to closure (Carboniferous)! So much detail! ^_^ It even went over my head! ^_^
I trust you’re speaking from experience? :-)
Caine, Fleur du mal #456 – “I hesitate to sound kw*kish here, but I never would have known about it except for a friend, who happens to know her.”
Hey, I can out kw*k you here. Former spouse was for many years the assistant to the editor who helped Florence King publish her first book, the aforementioned Southern Ladies and Gentlemen. Former spouse did not even go to a famous high school!
Hmmm… just searched audible.com for E.O. Wilson. It turns out that The Diversity of Life is not available (at least through audible) as an audiobook, but The Future of Life is (narrated by Ed Begley, Jr., no less). Any recommendation?
ambook:
*perk*
Don’t hold out on us!
Hmmm, after having a look at all the stacks of books scattered about, here’s more non-fiction:
The Book of Tea, by Okakura Kakuzo [My copy is from 1906, but I understand the book is still being published]
Cruelty: Human Evil and The Human Brain, by Kathleen Taylor
Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics From the Black Death to Avian Flu, by Philip Alcabes
The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
God The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist, by Victor Stenger
The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark, by Carl Sagan
Your Inner Fish, by Neil Shubin
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Papermaking: The History and Technique of An Ancient Craft, by Dard Hunter
Moral Minds: The Nature of Right and Wrong, by Marc D. Hauser
Books I haven’t read yet, but have been ordered:
The Racist Mind, by Raphael S. Ezekiel
Tomorrow’s Table, by Pamela C. Ronald
Missionary Position, by Christopher Hitchens
Roasting in Hell’s Kitchen, by Gordon Ramsay
The Accidental Mind, by David J. Linden
JeffreyD:
Ooooooh. ;D I realized, typing out the 2nd list, I have another one. I had no idea I could be so kw*kish – a friend and I got into a discussion of Taleb’s Black Swan, and it turns out she knows him, and interviewed him several times. Said he loves the sound of his own voice and seldom shuts up.
Dust@421,
So people who live in glass houses particularly shouldn’t throw stones at cat owners!
Humptulip, Howe to Kille Insects.
David M: Welll, yes Karajan was indeed a very famous conductor. Also very feared, and in some cases quite uninspired IMHO (ducking and running from Karajan-fans) Hindemiths music is dry, uncharming and very … well I personally think it’s boring, but since I didn’t make the joke, I don’t know the exact reason why his music is played in hell. The combination of Karajan and Hindemith would prove a mightily boring evening, I should think. It is a very orchestra/classical music insider joke maybe?
I just spent my cold-infested evening in the company of The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland AND Hindemiths contemporary Korngolds amazing score. Well entertained, I was.
Very famous, yes. And ego incarnate. His performances – as I understand it – was more Karajan than, say, Beethoven, Mozart, Bruckner &c.
Also he overpriced working with the Berliner Philharmoniker to the point that noöne else could record with them. Which again benefited his wallet.
Someone will be able to correct me here, but I think he at least tried to integrate women into the BP, so he does have at least that going for him. Of course, they bumped the flautist again the minute Karajan stepped down.
Sexism is apparently still very entrenched in the BP. Likely because they’re one of the few selfgovering orchestras around. So it tends to become an oldboys’ club. I vaguely recall reading about someone doing a blinded study, where applicants got to do their performance behind a screen. Not surprisingly, women suddenly did as well as men. Disgusting, really.
OK,
Elizabeth Wayland Barber – Women’s Work: The First 10,000 Years – spinning & weaving from 35,000 BCE until around the time of the Roman Empire
Jenny Balfour-Paul – Indigo – the definitive book on indigo cultivation and use around the world. Interesting and has really great pictures.
David:
Yes. This is one area I definitely have experience in. :D
Mooney’s got a big head.
Getting back to the fantasy books, I’ll put in a recommend for The Child Thief by Brom. It’s a dark and nicely twisted take on Peter Pan, partially set in New York.
Disclaimer: If you don’t care for cussing, gory bits or sometimes unpleasant subjects, not the book for you.
Do I get banned for provoking an outbreak of Kw*king?
Bah. Stupid blockquote.
Mooney’s got a big head.
David, on the other hand, is humble to the point of being irritating:
As if you have not demonstrated a breadth of knowledge of several different languages in the past. Silly boy.
Sili – you may be mixing The Berliner and the Wiener Philharmoniker in that last bit about the women in the orchestra. Though the rest of your description of Karajan is pretty spot on, I think. ;-)
ambook, shhhhhhhhhh. If we’re very quiet, our Squidly Overlord may not hear us…
A book I am currently reading (from the local library – a wonderful institution in the UK):
“Darwin’s Lost World – the hidden history of
animal life”
by Martin Brasier, Professor of Palaeobiology at Oxford Uni.
Published by Oxford University Press, 2009
ISBN 978-0-19-954897-2.
From the dust cover:
“He argues that the Cambrian explosion was real – a genuine and profound change affecting the whole Earth system. … It might only have taken the appearance of one or a handful of predators to change the world. The Cambrian explosion was a watershed: once life acquired teeth, the Earth was never the same again.”
I’ve only just started it. Is there anyone more qualifed than me who has read it and cares to comment?
David M, maybe?
Lt. Dan Choi and friends do it again.
If not now, when? If not us, who?
This is the point where I feel bad: I don’t think Autumn Sandeen looks all that womanly. But she has more balls than I have, have had or ever will have.
Thanks, Trine. I’m working from memory which … well, it’s not particularly Davidian in scope.
Looking forward to Copenhagen!
On a different subject – Port!
There is a great tradition of port-drinking in England. Portugal is reputed to be our oldest ally and most of the great Port producers were found by the British (Dow, Cockburn, Taylor, Croft immediately come to mind). I doubt if the tradition exists in more than a handful of homes of passing the port round the remaining gentlemen at table once the ladies have retired. The story is, however, well recorded in fiction.
It would appear there is something in port which is specific to aiding digestion. I suspect it is not just the alcohol (although I have no evidence).
Anecdotally, my wife suffers badly with her digestion and port seems to work well for her. (She is allergic to the alium family, as I have noted before – onions, garlic, leeks all result in severe stomach and intestinal pain but recovery is definitely aided by port.)
Does anyone know whether there is any (non-anecdotal) evidence about the efficacy of port and whether it is unique to that particular beverage?
I do wish I could come. :-(
=====
I have been particularly afflicted by SIWOTI syndrome today, and have spent much of the day arguing on Pharyngula instead of revising. This is probably a bad thing. Maybe I should ask to be banned for the next month, so that I actually do enough work for my exams. (Though I might die of political-argument withdrawal syndrome.)
ambook, thanks! Women’s Work looks like an interlibrary loaner to me; if I like it, it looks afordable at Amazon. I notice that she’s also the author the The Mummys of Urumchi, which I very much enjoyed.
Indigo looks to be priced out of my budget, though, even used.
Walton:
Nah, you don’t have to do that, just keep reminding us and we will yell at you to stop arguing and study. And eat. And sleep.
Doesn’t work. I’ve tried banning, myself, and I end up circumventing my own ban in fits of stalking. Very ugly.
You could install nanny-software on your computer, block Pharyngula and get a friend to put in the password so you can’t switch off the programme, yourself.
I believe there are also programmes out there that allows you ration your ‘play time’ online for people with poor impulse control (like me …).
Bugger.
“I’ve tried banning myself,” – only one comma.
Nah. You’re still learning. Is most of your work being done on the computer? It’s so easy to get addicted isn’t it!?
I find it really is helpful to get away from the machine for a while, but obviously if you have to work on it anyway…
Oh and thanks for your support earlier. I’ve been having a really stressful and emotional week. Sorry if it’s resulted in less than ideal reactions in general.
Usually when I find myself arguing online with people it’s a sign that my mind is overwhelmed wit h whatever else and staging a mini-rebilion. Give it the break it wants, but try not to tire it either :P
I tried Poeing my way to a ban one time (here et seq.) but people just got amused and then annoyed.
Book classics:
Carl Sagan: The Demon-Haunted World. Science as a Candle in the Dark
Richard Dawkins: Unweaving the Rainbow. Science, Something Else I Can’t Look Up Right Now, and the Appetite for Wonder
The latter, interestingly, doesn’t mention religion at all as far as I remember (haven’t read it in way too many years). It’s sort of a sequel to The Selfish Gene, explaining how wonderful, how utterly fascinating the world as revealed by science is, and trounces woo, mysticism, obscurantism; it explains how and why the rainbow became more, not less, beautiful when Newton unwove it. With plenty of detours: unweaving all the way to atomism – chapter headlines like “barcodes in the cells” (inheritance is digital, DNA is digital) and “barcodes in the stars” (Newton’s unwoven rainbow, emission and absorption spectra, reveals the chemical composition of the stars and their velocity relative to us).
“Lichens to dye for”
– Headline of… I thínk Scientific American, about 10 years ago.
The first women were allowed to join the Vienna Philharmonics a few years ago. I didn’t know about the experiment, though.
*poke*
:-)
…and the list of bannable offenses is here.
Haven’t read it. The idea has been suggested before and is fairly plausible, however. I’m only not sure how well it can be tested so far…
No idea about port.
Books.
Richard Rutt’s A history of Hand Knitting is good – well, it tails off a bit at the end but the first four fifths are worth reading.
For patchwork nuts – The Quilts of Gee’s Bend (various authors, publisher is Tinwood, Atlanta, GA) and Jinny Beyer’s Designing Tessellations are both brilliant. And both expensive but that’s what libraries are for, innit?
OK, more books (can I be arrested for Bibliophilia)?
These are some of the ones I have with me, scanned and on the computer. A bit of a weird mix, but I like all of them. These are only a few of the ones with me and exclusive of pure military history books on my topics of interest, about a thousand scanned books right now on the hard drive and backed up to an external drive.
The Complete Book of Cheese – Robert C. Brown
The Archaeology of People – A. Whittle
Medieval Households – David Herlihy
Excrement in the Late Middle Ages, Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics – Susan S. Morrison
Demanding the Impossible, History of Anarchism – Peter Marshall
Food in Medieval England, Diet and Nutrition – Editors Woolgar, Serjeantson, & Waldron
The Prehistory of Food – Gosden & Hather
Forbidden Words – Allan Burridge
A History of Limb Amputation – John Kirkup
Surviving The Swastika, Scientific Research in Nazi Germany – Kristie Macrakis
Gunshot Injuries – Sir Thomas Longmore
War in Human Civilization – Azar Gat
My spouse was supposed to arrive Thursday from the US. Looks like that is off. So, and fitting my mood, the finale from Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz
Just don’t do it within 100 yards of a school and I think you’re safe.
You do not wanna click this. No. Seriously. Certainly not if you’re at work.
“Just don’t do it within 100 yards of a school and I think you’re safe.”
Damn, how about in the states of Mississippi or Texas? I think there are pockets in Texas where reading might still be against the law. Get pulled over by a cop – “Son, your eyes look kinda red, you been reading? What’s that in the back? Is that a B&N bag?!?”
Bill Dauphin, way up there: can we have a chat about this idea that indigenous species are automatcially more valuable than introduced species?
Misses the point. The point is that, usually, the introduced species exist elsewhere (e.g. where they got introduced from) and the indigenous species are unique to the place under discussion. The other usual point is that we don’t know enough about any part of any system to start throwing parts away or subbing imports for homegrowns.
Which is pretty much the point of restoration and preservation in general: We don’t know what the fuck we’re doing, so maybe we should do it with as little incidental take/collateral damage as possible.
Or that, more to the point, the environment-as-it-would-be-if-there-were-no-humans is invariably (if necessarily hypothetically) preferable to the human-inhabited world.
(shrug) When I hear people saying that, maybe I’ll ask. Well, no,to be honest I have heard it squeaked maybe twice from the Way-Out-There pews, but both times it was in favor of making some bit of land off-limits to humans because it’d be good to see what might happen without us there.
(outside of a handful of very isolated habitats, is any species truly indigenous, if you look far enough back in history)
This question always sounds a lot like “When Does Life Begin?” to me. Look back far enough, you don’t have “indigenous” oceans or continents. So what? Every preservation project I’ve ever dealt with has had some specific reference for that: pre-Columbian, pre-colonial, like that.
I can vouch for this. It’s not against the law per se but if they see a book they might taze you and seize it. It’s easy to get around though. Just wrap your books in the a scan of the front of a Bible and you should be cool. :P
Seriously? A whole book about… *ahem* Ewwwww.
I used to annoy New Agers, hippies, or anyone else who used the naturalistic fallacy by claiming the point in which we lost our way was not when we invented organised religion (as opposed to spirituality), or stopped growing our own food, or whatever.
No, I would argue—in all seriousness and with will-someone-please-think-of-the-children conviction—that we fell from nature’s grace when we invented predation and stopped being autotrophs. I’d explain that we needed to genetically modify ourselves to contain chloroplasts and photosynthesize. The best part is that the slogans practically wrote themselves: “End Consumerism Now!” and “Stop Life on Life violence!”
It sure shut up some dreadhead blathering on about how drugs can never hurt you as long as you, like, stay natural and avoid the chemicals, man.
That sounds like an awesome book.