DISQUS

Teresa, their moderator, is repeatedly taking hits on her behavior in the thread so while I may have a minority opinion, it definitely isn’t singular if I see people regularly calling for her to be sacked

I've not really been following this story, but I do frequently read the comment threads at Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blog Making Light, which are arguably the best comment threads in all of Blogistan. Anyone saying she should be fired is full of it.

As you might imagine, I've given some thought to this same question.

In my own case, I don't think that it's privilege that alienates me from those folks. (Though unreflective privilege does squick me.) Rather, it's something that occured to me about folks who got undergraduate degrees in business; these are folks who went to college for social class reasons, but couldn't find a single subject at the university that they were interested in.

These folks are apparently only interested in one thing: it's not money, though it often manifests through money. They are interested in primate status games.

While we freak citizens are interested in stuff, whether it's comic books or ballet the quest for enlightenment.

DC never published this comic because it was finished and about to go to press just before Columbine happened.

Don't get rid of the esoteric books. I'm working on a project to construct a Bay Area lending library and reading room for esoteric books. If you need them off your hands sooner rather than later, let me know.

I like the little wink toward this classic experiment in trying to count how many times people pass a ball.

I am given to understand that the western-educated elites of much of the Middle East think about these kinds of questions quite a bit. But they are very, very difficult problems.

The expression “kablahblah” reminds me of an article about training in Jewish mysticism by the Meshugass Center.

Idexa at Black & Blue in SF is expensive, slow, and has a busy calendar. But she was able to accurately put this on my arm.

Hmmnn. You know Iain Banks' Culture novels do a good job of portraying the anarchist implications of super-high technology.

But I do think I buy interstellar trade, even with very limited transportation technologies. I've been picking away at McNeil & McNeil's book The Human Web, and they make the point that trade and information exchange at a global scale dates all the way back to prehistory ... it just was very, very slow.

And history also teaches us that very simple guild secrets can be kept by a very long time, if the guild has a strong interest in their exclusivity. The real threat to the starfaring guild in a world where a spaceship can be grown from cuttings is people snipping off a chunk of starship while the spacers aren't looking.

This has been weighing on my mind, yeah.

Good gods. I remember seeing the police video that circulated last year of a woman being tasered for being uncooperative at a traffic stop.

Are these things just too tempting to leave in cops' hands?

You are familiar with Austin's Zen and the Brain, right?