5. Lewinsky really wants to make a big pile of money and this is her opening gambit. She'll work all the angles, including Hillary's presidential run. She's trying to frame herself as an expert on public shaming (which she sort-of is at this point), and hopefully monetize that somehow.
Linda Tripp is an expert on how to fuck people over, but society hasn't fallen so far that you get a TED talk for that.
So (3) with a little more agency from Lewinsky than I was giving her credit for.
Anyway, even animals have now by now been exposed to the Atkins/Crossfit/Paleo stuff.
I got roped into watching that TED talk by one of my wife's friends. My initial impression was that Lewinsky talks about being 22 like I would talk about someone being 15 and that yeah, it's not nice to be branded a slut but if you have a thing for aggressively seducing married men that kind of comes with the territory.
1: That's uncharitable. Lewinsky seems to legitimately believe she's got something to contribute to the public, and she's gone about it in the least exploitative way possible.
I can think of a whole lot of other ways for her to leverage her notoriety. Twenty years later, it's hard to see how she can be accused of going for the quick buck.
I don't get why the press is suddenly making it a news item that deer will opportunistically eat small animals. Yeah, and? Has this not been known forever? Some other deer species are quite active predators when the mood takes them.
5: I haven't actually seen the TED talk, but I read the Vanity Fair piece linked by the NYT.
I think there's a sense of proportionality missing from the moralism around Lewinsky's behavior. I was still pretty stupid at 22, and I don't have any problem with her considering that a mitigating factor.
Her conduct was stupid in exactly the way that 22-year-olds are stupid. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton's dalliance with her and others, while much more blameworthy given his age and position, is still about the 50th worst thing he did as president. And, on balance and in the context of presidents of the United States, I think Bill was a great guy.
Personally, my biggest worry about a HRC presidency is "What will Bill do?" Having an ex-president in the White House as the spouse of the current president strikes me as potentially problematic. But, if I think he can just get blowjobs, I feel a bit relieved. Politically, it's safer than having him do diplomacy or something.
7: I had no idea. I mean, I don't find it particularly unbelievable, but I didn't know ruminants ate meat at all. (Pigs, yes, goats, I'd believe anything. But anything in the cow/sheep/deer category, it would never have occurred to me.)
"What will Bill do?"
I have had this elaborate sitcom-type fantasy (which I've mentioned here) about Bill lounging on the couch in the Oval Office eating chips and kibbitzing alternately annoyingly and helpfully as Hillary tries to govern.
8 rephrased:
Sure, Monica was stupid -- but what do you expect from 22-year-olds?
Sure, Clinton was an ass, but what do expect from U.S. Presidents?
and.....
Sure, this comment didn't contribute much, but what do you expect from peep?
8: Her conduct was stupid in exactly the way that 22-year-olds are stupid.
I have to disagree with this. By 22 most people have their act together enough not to try to seduce married men, or at very least to know that this is wrong, wrong, wrong. Being young is a minor mitigating factor, but the big mitigating factor is Bill Clinton's behavior and use of his position to seduce her. The power differential was so large that even if she wasn't an eager participant there still would have been strong forces pushing her to blow the bastard.
I agree about the Clinton presidency, though. Shithead though he was he did the right thing more often than I expect from US presidents.
I personally feel like if Monica Lewinsky can leverage her ill-advised dalliance into some money and a decent later-life career, good for her. She had her whole life ruined because we are a disgusting, misogynist society which gets a lot of titillation out of shaming women (which isn't to say she didn't behave badly, just that the whole thing - being consensual bad behavior - was a private matter). There's nothing wrong with facing life consequences for participating in an affair with your boss, but having your whole life defined by that, being the subject of sexual speculation and dirty jokes across the nation...it's like she's the 1996 version of tumblr-shaming.
The type of person who wants to shame and punish a young woman on the national stage for a common if unappealing personal failing - well, I don't think too much of that type of person. Affairs - disgusting and morally slack as I personally find them - are private matters.
What's more, if tubby, badly-dressed genocidaire Henry Kissinger - for instance! - could be considered a desirable dating partner and can still be considered a respectable member of society, it's ridiculous that Monica Lewinsky has to be a punch line and a cautionary tale. All Monica Lewinsky did was put a lot of stress on an already-strained political marriage - aided and abetted by the man in the case, let's not forget! - while Christ knows how many people would still be alive if Kissinger hadn't meddled in East Timor and Chile and a dozen other places.
I mean, for pete's sake, both Clintons still have important careers and tremendous wealth. If what ML did was so bad, why aren't we all constantly saying that Clinton shouldn't have a career, shouldn't give talks, should just be a sexual punchline, etc? Why aren't we sketched out that HC seems to put up with his philandering? Surely if HC is abetting this terrible, terrible immorality we should be dubious about her*?
*I mean, I'm totally dubious about her, but for other, entirely predictable reasons.
While I completely sympathize with thinking that Lewinsky shouldn't be punished, and shouldn't be a punch line, she is in an odd position where the only reason she's in the public eye at all is the two-decade-old common if unappealing personal failing. That is, what she did when she was twenty-two shouldn't still be having any negative impact on her personal or professional life; once it's the driving force behind her presence on the national stage, though, it's hard to see how it can be totally discounted.
is the two-decade-old common if unappealing personal failing
The American Council of Dry Cleaning would like to remind you that sending items in for cleaning quickly can avoid problems with staining and over-zealous special prosecutors.
14: The power differential was so large that even if she wasn't an eager participant there still would have been strong forces pushing her to blow the bastard.
Bullshit. Unless you are going to argue that he was also trying to get BJs from a bunch of other female interns, no way. The one good thing about the Starr report is that we have an extraordinarily well-documented history of the start of the relationship that makes it clear that she had and exercised plenty of agency about getting involved, in spite of the power differential.
That differential could still have been problematic (e.g., if she had later wanted to break the affair off against his wishes), but let's not rewrite history here.
If we do re-write history, let's make Bill a dinosaur and self-publish the story.
But, if I think he can just get blowjobs, I feel a bit relieved. Politically, it's safer than having him do diplomacy or something.
Blowjobs are diplomacy by other means.
15: I don't want to see Lewinsky suffer, and I hope she's able to do well for herself. Perhaps she can even do some real good with her cyber-bullying activism. And yes, Bill Clinton should be pilloried for taking advantage of her.
Lewinsky should go ahead and throw her own hat in the ring for the 2016 nomination. Just to fuck with everyone.
Besides, she could argue (correctly) that she couldn't possibly do a worse job than Bush II.
Insert horrible Oral vs. Bush joke here.
18: The responsible and mature thing to do when an intern hits on you is to deflect it, not take advantage. She did something stupid, but he did something worse, IMO. She had plenty of agency and she pursued him aggressively, but his role in this wasn't passive. Nobody forced him to ask her to kiss his cock. The fact that she was eager to do so doesn't excuse him at all.
Isn't one of the other Lewinsky things that her "reputation" has made it hard to find regular jobs?
16: Sure, in some minimally sensible world that we don't live in, her behavior wouldn't have had the massive fallout that it did. In this world, she got lemons, and did what you're supposed to do with them.
If we're going to pretend that we live on that sane planet, then surely out of all the people involved in that situation - I'm thinking of Ken Starr, Henry Hyde, Newt Gingrich, Lucianne Goldberg - Lewinsky's behavior didn't stand out at all for its loathsomeness. Neither did Bill's.
Peep in 13 characterizes my view correctly, if a bit uncharitably.
Since with the exception of Unfogged, I only hang around on wholesome web sites, I must have originally seen this NSFW performance because someone linked it here. But it pretty well sums up my feelings on the matter.
16: But the point is, right now that's all she's got. It's not as though she could just be all "hm, I think I'll stop talking about the affair and become a podiatrist", because no one would let her escape the affair. This is pretty clear from the various abortive employment attempts she's made. It doesn't sound like she's from the kind of wealth where if you can't work then you just live on your dividends, either.
Once a woman is a sexual punchline, that's pretty much it for any kind of regular career, it seems to me.
I thought Bill was sleeping with tons of women as governor, and only sort of reined it in as president, and basically what Peep said.
On the link in paragraph 2:
I have two kindergarteners this year (and one will be 6 in just a few weeks),
What?
On Lewinsky, Frowner gets it exactly right in 15.
25, 27: Good point. I guess I'd had a vague impression that she was doing okay (went to the LSE? But I don't know what she's done since then.) And there's nothing wrong with her being in public talking about what she learned from the whole experience, of course.
Also, now that I think about it she's an excellent person to address bullying, precisely because she isn't a blameless victim.
As I'm sure you can figure out from the archives, I was bullied pretty severely as a kid and it has shaped almost every aspect of my adult life - despite time with a really excellent therapist. As a young adult, one of the most difficult things for me to figure out was how to deal with the reality that I was kind of a strange child and developed the ability to understand social norms relatively late. I wasn't a particularly "good" victim - certainly the things that happened to me should not happen to any child, and certainly I was failed by my school system and my family, but I was a little weirdo and I thought my classmates were willfully stupid. As a young adult, I blamed myself a lot for what had happened to me, because I did not have access to a narrative which could encompass both my own flaws and a condemnation of what happened to me - I felt like I either had to have been a wonderful child who was picked on by stupid classmates or else I was just a kid who was too selfish and attention-seeking to learn how to fit in.
I think it's useful to have Monica Lewinsky assert that no matter what she did, she still didn't deserve how she was treated.
30: She did go to LSE, but no business ensued, apparently.
Anyone else having trouble with the link in 26.last?
I'd had the same impression as LB in 30. Has ML really been effectively unemployed for (almost) 20 years now? Crazy.
Apropos of OP.3, yesterday the old Sesame Street animation of "A loaf of bread..." was going around the other place, and I was of course immediately struck by how young the girl is, and being sent to the store with money to buy groceries. In, implicitly, an urban neighborhood.
It is nice to have documentary evidence that we really have gone crazy on this subject. It's so prone to "when I was young" stuff, but no, really, the parents of today's 9-y.o.s were themselves given far more freedom when they were 9 than they are willing* to give their own kids. It's nuts, a little bit like how evangelical Xians over 40 all pretend that they've always found abortion abhorrent. I mean, there's a paper trail.
*and/or able, given social norms
There was a book I saw in the bookstore about Shame that wasf ocused on the value that shame has in certain contexts and the ways that shaming could be good. Specifically it was an argument for the use of shaming by the weak against the powerful.*
An example of this kind of shaming would be the question "Have you no sense of shame?" when addressed to bankers and politicians. I so wish that we could successfully shame John Yoo, but he doesn't seem to have a terribly developed sense of shame.
*There was a chapter called "7 Habits of Highly Effective Shaming".
Oh, and I was also unaware that deer eat meat. Incidentally, last week we had our first ever deer sighting in our immediate neighborhood. Specifically, deer scat in our (tiny, wholly urban, albeit grassy) park, and then that night a few blocks away on a dead end street. The dead end street is directly adjacent to a wooded hillside, so that's less surprising, but you can't get from the woods to our park without passing through an intersection with 2 lanes + left turn lane in every direction (that is, 5 total lanes each way), and no cover anywhere. Crazy.
36: I think it only works if the norms in question are also enforced by the peers of the powerful. That is, in 1955 living a too lavish lifestyle would not only get you the slanteye from hoi polloi, but also whispers at the country club. But when everyone in the country club is fine with infinite luxury, who gives a shit what the proles think?
32.1 is a good point. I do hope this new direction works out for her.
"I thought Bill was sleeping with tons of women as governor, and only sort of reined it in as president, and basically what Peep said. "
I am sure he was sleeping with tons of people as president as well. Most of them were just not friends with Linda Tripp.
Has ML really been effectively unemployed for (almost) 20 years now? Crazy
I am not convinced that she was forever unemployable for that reason. I suspect that she was unemployable for the depression and real toll that the whole episode took on her (mentioned in the NPR story), but that's a slightly different thing. It's not that her reputation preceded her and made her unemployable, it's that the bullying was so destructive that she became unable to work.
35
It's nuts, a little bit like how evangelical Xians over 40 all pretend that they've always found abortion abhorrent. I mean, there's a paper trail.
A 41-year-old Christian has never lived in a world without Roe v. Wade. A 50-year-old or even 60-year-old Christian was alive then but probably wasn't writing too much or too politically active when the decision was made. It's plausible. A 70-year-old, fair enough, but it's not like anyone expects consistency from them anyway.
/editorial
I believe ML tried to work at various jobs but for ex it was obvious to her that her presence was unhelpfully distracting to the nin profit she was working for.
Frowner's point is excellent and excellently stated.
My personal experience with JY led me to conclude years before he burst onto the national stage that he is utterly immune to shame.
Today's freshmena have never lived in a world where a 41 year old Christian lived in a world without Roe v. Wade.
40.2: Really? If he slept with "tons of people" wouldn't it be likely that at least one of them would have spilled by now?
But that's beside the point -- in complete agreement with Frowner on all the substantive points.
45: You mean like Paula Jones or Gennifer Flowers?
(I guess Paula Jones doesn't claim to have slept with him. Substitute Elizabeth Gracen.)
46: I think peep meant "while he was president".
Because there was grass on the infield.
Oh, right. Reading comprehension, I has it. Go Team Peep.
49 is correct.
51: I've never had a team before! I'm pretty sure Charlie Brown is the pitcher.
42 - Except that Roe v Wade has fuck-all to do with the Pro-Life movement, which is a pretty well established historical fact. That's why it's a bizarre pretense that these people held that view all of their lives.
35: There's a Japanese TV show that's been going for 25 years called Hajimete no Otsukai ("First Errand") which secretly films preschool kids as they're sent by themselves to buy groceries (this one is partly subtitled, part 2 here), or occasionally other errands (one four-year-old was sent to take the bullet train to see his father). The youngest child they followed hadn't even turned two. Of course it's a TV show so the children are a couple of years younger than usual, but by six or seven being sent to the shops is perfectly normal.
But the point is, right now that's all she's got. It's not as though she could just be all "hm, I think I'll stop talking about the affair and become a podiatrist", because no one would let her escape the affair.
Actually, I kinda doubt this. I bet that if she had entered a boring field with a ton of credentialism, she could have built a different life. CPA, podiatrist. Name change, so it it isn't the first thing you'd see about her and a boring career and by now people would just be saying 'oh yeah, that was her, but she did diagnosis my orthotics last year, did you pick up asparagus for dinner?'.
I have every sympathy for Lewinsky and identify with her because we kinda look alike and come from the same city. But if she'd been serious about being boring and forgotten, she coulda done it.
One hilarious thing about the second link in 54 is that the camera people catch each other in the shots. They're making no effort whatsoever to stay out of sight of the kid, because it's easy to sneak around a not-even-two year old.
Not everybody can become a podiatrist. Even if she wanted to, she'd have basically had to redo her undergraduate degree plus med school and all of that.
Plus, you have to have a tolerance for feet.
If he slept with "tons of people" wouldn't it be likely that at least one of them would have spilled by now?
I know! I mean, who wouldn't leap at the chance to be publicly slut-shamed 24/7 the way Monica Lewinsky was?
The income levels for people with a tolerance for feet really vary tremendously depending on whether or not they do well enough on standardized testing to go to medical school.
I read and watched the We Are the World thing with mild interest and now find snatches of the song stuck in my head 30 years later. THANKS OBAMA.
And if she had gone to med school, it would have been a good long time that she had dropped out of sight and by now, she could probably live some good portion of her days as a boring professional and only unfortunate anniversary times as the target of abuse.
59.2: Yeah, maybe I'm wrong -- out of all the women that Clinton is rumored to have slept with as governor, Gennifer Flower is the only to admit to having consensual sex with him -- is that correct?
61: Of all Prince's great achievments in music, that may have been his finest moment.
64: Elizabeth Gracen (Miss America '82) and Dolly Browning.
61: Just don't get struck down by a trolley, golly.
A 41-year-old Christian has never lived in a world without Roe v. Wade.
Evangelical Xians praised Roe v. Wade. Evangelical Xians were pro-abortion through the 1970s (and voted overwhelmingly for Carter).
My source on all this, btw, is Fred Clark, the Slacktivist, who is iirc 43, and remembers this history firsthand.
And considering that they now claim it to be the worst sin this side of gay marriage - so evil that you shouldn't make exceptions even for rape and incest - I don't think we need to look to people who were adults at the switch for memory. If the Roman Catholic Church decided today that meat was murder (or that Catholics should keep kosher), I don't think Catholics under the age of 20 would be likely to forget the switch.
Now, there's motivated reasoning and groupthink and all that shit for why they "forget", but there's no reason for anyone else to respect it. It's like a Boston fan booing Johnny Damon after he became a Yankee, and expecting the rest of us to think that he always hated Damon.
Oh, sorry, owned by 53. I scrolled too fast.
One other thing on evangelicals and abortion. A foundational principle of most (all?) evangelical churches is that they are non-hierarchical - they are like-minded believers who have read the Bible, have a personal relationship with Jesus, and come together to worship*. But they're not supposed to be getting doctrine from their ministers, let alone any "higher" authorities.
Now, obviously that's idealized, and I doubt anyone sincerely believes that in its most literal form. But my point is, this isn't something that Falwell and Graham and Robertson could agree on in 1977 and just make it happen. Even if you get the bigwigs on board pretty quickly, there are literally thousands of individual congregations to reach, with all of those ministers, many explicitly independent-minded**. On the one hand, that means you don't have the equivalent of a papal bull to draw attention to itself (Evangelicism has always been at war with Abortion) , but on the other, it means that it takes years for the new "biblical" principle to trickle down to every believer.
*would they use that word? Seems off to me, not sure
**and also explicitly anti-Papist; abortion politics were strongly associated with Catholicism, and thus suspect
But why would they suddenly change and in the process create a violent movement causing massive social harm to the country as a... oh right this is America so the answer is racism.
73 was written before I read 72. Swear to god.
That's ok, since I left out the racism part.
53, 69, et al.: Fair enough, I'm pretty sure I knew that at some point but forgot it. Mea culpa. However, as best I can tell, abortion beliefs matched the current partisan lines by the 1976 election. That's still a long time ago by now.
Based on apo's 66, I'm recommitted to my own team.
Also I thought of 68, but decided it would be funnier if somebody else said it.
67: AAAGGH. Toodle-oo! Toodle-oo!
75 is what was replied every time Lee Atwater tried to apologize to a client for a mistake.
I would be intrigued to know how the TED invite came about. I think her messages are ones a lot of elites want to press right now -- that one (or two or three or four) public mistakes shouldn't have such a big impact on a person's life, and that in the age of the internet it's a lot more likely to, that everyone has some right to a private life, and that the politics of personal destruction (isn't that a Clinton phrase) has victims who aren't public people.
I rely heavily on my mistakes being discounted because I'm not important enough for anyone to care. But folks like Musk, Brinn, Gates (and, worse, their children) can't rely on anonymity. Maybe that's why she was invited? And, folks who care about the Clinton's are cool with it, because they think it's a Clinton message too? And, also, TED has always had an west coast, silicon valley vibe, which is not the Clinton power center.
The origins of the current evangelical right in segregation is definitely, absolutely accurate, but the idea that the evangelical Christian right affirmatively welcomed abortion prior to the mid-1970s is a big exaggeration, in at least two ways and is contrarianism taken too far.
First, the truth is that while abortion just wasn't much of an issue either way until legalization, it was definitely frowned upon. Abortion after quickening (i.e. first trimester) had been a common law crime for centuries. Protestantism had long been officially pro-contraception, but anti-abortion laws banning abortion even prior to quickening were generally supported by Protestants through the 19th Century, as a general anti-promiscuity, punishment of women, and even a "health" measure (though abortion wasn't a huge emotional focus). So, once the abortion debate came to the fore, it wasn't a stretch at all to make abortion an issue as a proxy for general opposition to sexual promiscuity once the legalized abortion debate came to the fore after Roe. Second, politicized evangelical US Christianity as we know it today just didn't exist until the 60s and 70s -- while previous generations of evangelicals certainly would have condemned promiscuity, and as noted above abortion after "quickening" was a common law crime from the middle ages, abortion itself just wasn't a salient political issue. The modern evangelical movement is itself a new social movement that's a product of reaction to the sexual and civil rights revolution and it's misleading to say that because protestantism didn't emphasize natural law theology on abortion that somehow conservative protestants were pro-abortion.
72.1 is a foundational principle of the Southern Baptists, but is I think is completely wrong as a general principle about evangelicals -- what was the Evangelical Synod, to pick one example, if not a hierarchical structure above individual churches? It's right there in the name.
I thought there were actual texts and by-laws from the '70s Baptist conventions and such saying that the mother's mental health is a reasonable justification for abortion.
Churches in the Presbyterian tradition quite often have well-defined hierarchies, just not ones on the episcopalian (that is, bishopric-based) model.
How many synods do you have to have before it isn't a hierarchy?
The sinfulness of abortion (more precisely, which exceptions, pre-quickening, to the basic sinfulness of abortion were acceptable) was up for debate in Protestantism through the 70s (and in Protestantism generally, still is; Protestantism isn't limited to "evangelical" churches). But that was a theological debate caused by the elite movement to legalize abortion, not some reflection of a long-standing pre-existing belief that abortion was fine that mysteriously changed in the 1970s.
83, 85 -- that's just a problem with the semantic slipperyness of the term "evangelical" (which can mean about 10,000 different things, as can a lot of church words). I mean arguably my church is "evangelical" in some sense and I'm a liberal Episcopalian. If you take "evangelical" to mean "white religious conservative Protestants in the largely southern American tradition as opposed to mainline protestants" which is now a common shorthand use of the term, then most of those churches are notionally non-hierarchical. The evangelical synod is now part of the UCC and the Presbyterians just allowed gay marriage.
82: Wasn't acceptance of abortion, like contraception, perfectly compatible with sexual conservativism/hostility to promiscuity so long as it was thought of as family planning for married women?
Episcopalian deer can eat meat on Fridays, even during Lent.
"white religious conservative Protestants in the largely southern American tradition as opposed to mainline protestants"
Maybe we should just go back to defining these people as Fundamentalists. Somehow they re-branded themselves as Evangelical, but that doesn't mean the rest of us should buy into it.
I rely heavily on my mistakes being discounted because I'm not important enough for anyone to care.
That's what I rely on, plus white male privileged.
88 - But that just defines saying "by evangelical I mean Southern Baptist". There's a bunch of politically conservative Protestant denominations that come out of Lutheran and (particularly) Calvinist traditions for which saying "it's up to individual congregations" is just a falsehood. Look at the DeVos empire in Michigan; it's a religiously-flavored branch of the right wing of the Republican Party, just not a Baptist one.
94 -- there are a few, but (a) even most of those denominations have huge congregation-to-congregation variants (b) they're a pretty minor factor in conservative protestantism as a whole these days. I had to look it up, but De Vos belongs to the Christian Reformed Church, which is a more minor branch of a split between Dutch Calvinists; even in that kind of organization, you're going to have a lot of difference between individual churches on doctrinal positions. It's pretty fair to say that if you're using "evangelical" as a synonym for "American protestant right wing" that most of the churches are non-hierarchical (many aren't baptist, either).
Even when there is a hierarchy, aren't the congregations likely to bolt if they don't like a decision or whatever. A bunch of Methodists in my hometown got pissed at something and started their own church. They joined with something called the Bereans and some Baptists.
Wikipedia says a Berean is a type of Presbyterian.
A Presbyterian is a type of hospital.
A hospital is a big building with patients, but that's not important right now.
85 et al: I'm happy to say that "evangelical" isn't a useful term, but I don't see how you can possibly relate Presbyterians to anything that people normally use the term "evangelical" to describe.
Here's a recentish discussion over at Slacktivist. A valuable quote in there from a knowledgable expert on the field: "There is no such thing as evangelicalism and David Bebbington has provided the best possible definition for it."
I appreciate 95.last because it's very much my impression, and not only from Clark. I was perhaps overstating the extent to which each individual congregation is self-contained, but the idea that any individual (or council) can give marching orders that have to be respected by the vast majority of self-described evangelicals is simply wrong.
Bebbington's quadrilateral (the aforementioned "best definition"):
biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible (e.g. all essential spiritual truth is to be found in its pages)crucicentrism, a focus on the atoning work of Christ on the cross
conversionism, the belief that human beings need to be converted
activism, the belief that the gospel needs to be expressed in effort
Here's how the Pew Forum classifies various protestant denominations. Probably of interest just because of the sheer craziness of the number of US protestant denominations. The big one I'd forgotten about were the conservative mostly southern Presbyterians (the "Presbyterian Church in America" -- VERY different from the "Presbyterian Church in the United States of America," in one of the great cases of "God's kingdom needs trademark law") , who are indeed hierarchical-ish and part of the religious right. But it looks like roughly about 20-25%% of what they call "evangelical" churches are part of hierarchical denominations, depending on how you count that.
Then there are some other interesting variations -- the Missouri Synod Lutherans are very conservative theologically, and listed as "evangelical" here, but are also committed to being apolitical and are not part of the "religious right."
102: Good stuff.
I was just going to say that part of the trouble is that the terms are legitimately used to mean different things: "charismatic Christian" can refer to a fairly specific subset of Protestantism, or it can mean any Christian service, even Catholic, with certain worship practices. Even within the gay marriage-friendly PCUSA, there are groups/congregations that meet the test in 101, and might even call themselves "evangelical Christians," but the difference between them and Southern Baptists isn't just political.
42 might be my dumbest comment ever here. (No, it's not, I've said some pretty stupid things here, who hasn't. But it's pretty bad.) I wasn't even trying to make any particular important point, I was just trying to nitpick in a "ha ha, you should feel old" way, but I got the facts wrong in an obvious way and derailed discussion for 50ish comments. Seriously, I'm sorry.
Not to be too self-important, I realize it's not hard to derail discussion around here, but I regret it because I find the taxonomy of evangelicalism much less interesting than OP.3 and the comment I replied to in the first place.
We've seen a lot of those "kids these days aren't allowed to cross the street" comparisons/complaints/whatever lately, and they aren't wrong that it's weird how things have changed, but I guess it bugs me because... so what? Is anyone proposing more walkable development? (Lots of people are, but not for this reason or in this way in particular, I don't think.) And, more importantly, the funding to make it happen? And what's the actual goal we should be aspiring to - a quarter-mile radius or a half-mile or using public transportation freely or getting to the nearest store regardless of distance? Would even self-described "free range parents" go back to the standards of the 1970s, or are even they giving their kids more limits than parents back then did? Given that there were specific rules of thumb in the 1970s for independence of children, are there guidelines today? Or do we just expect people to get it right and shame them for any problem after the fact?
Or is it just the literally ancient "kids these days are going soft" bullshit?
While I'm at it, OP.2 was an interesting history lesson. Hard to imagine something like that today. Wikipedia reminds me that there was one in 2010 for Haiti, but the critics hated it.
crucicentrism, a focus on the atoning work of Christ on the cross
I am not sure what exactly this means in this context and I strongly suspect it's being used in a way that I wouldn't disagree with at all and regardless I am certainly not the expert that David Bebbington is (I don't know who he is but he has an expert-sounding name) and most of his quadrilateral seems very solid but: in my mind one of the hallmarks of most people who would self-describe as evangelical is a belief that the event of prime theological importance is not the crucifixion but the resurrection. And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. (1 Corinthians 15:14) This is in explicit contrast to Catholic doctrine which seems to be more fairly described as crucicentric.
While I'm at it, OP.2 was an interesting history lesson. Hard to imagine something like that today. Wikipedia reminds me that there was one in 2010 for Haiti, but the critics hated it.
I don't think the critics were thrilled by "We Are the World", but it didn't matter.
Maybe we should just go back to defining these people as Fundamentalists.
Just referring to them as "assholes" is easier.
We've seen a lot of those "kids these days aren't allowed to cross the street" comparisons/complaints/whatever lately, and they aren't wrong that it's weird how things have changed, but I guess it bugs me because...
Your walkable development point is a good one -- lots more kids now live in places where there's nowhere for them to walk. But some of us do. When Sally was eight or so, I commented here about wanting to send her to the store, and someone replied that it sounded silly, like sending a parrot to the store to bring back food in its beak (not being a jerk about free-range kids, but thinking of a grocery store as something you'd only access by car).
I think what people talking about free-range kids want is a combination of wanting safety from the police/CPS for letting your kids have a reasonable amount of unattended freedom: that a kid over six or so in no apparent distress in a public place at a reasonable hour shouldn't trigger enforcement, and that the initial stage of enforcement should be a gentle inquiry into whether the kid is okay and can get home. And social support for letting your kids over six or so outdoors unaccompanied at reasonable times of day and under reasonable circumstances.
I'm not sure lack of dense walkable development is a very big part of the cultural shift. I grew up in textbook suburban sprawl, and we kids still walked or biked all over from a young age.
I think even textbook suburban sprawl has, on average, changed some in terms of how big the arterial roads are and how fast the traffic is. But you're right that it's certainly not the whole story.
Yeah certainly in Southern California the 70s heyday of free range parenting (or as I prefer to call it, "ludes in a van") feels like the absolute heyday of suburban sprawl -- it's denser now. I guess there's more traffic. I wonder if the same is true for the country as a whole; not sure how to measure it but I'd guess for the country as a whole sprawl-ification peaked in the late 90s but was alreadly massively sprawlified in the 1970s, certainly in the middle class and up zones where things like wars over free range parenting happen.
Does any of it have to do with how much vandalism and smoking was involved in being a free range child of the 70s? Or was that just me?
We've seen a lot of those "kids these days aren't allowed to cross the street" comparisons/complaints/whatever lately, and they aren't wrong that it's weird how things have changed, but I guess it bugs me because... so what? Is anyone proposing more walkable development? (Lots of people are, but not for this reason or in this way in particular, I don't think.) And, more importantly, the funding to make it happen? And what's the actual goal we should be aspiring to - a quarter-mile radius or a half-mile or using public transportation freely or getting to the nearest store regardless of distance?
And to move further away from the urban/suburban thing, you don't need any "development" at all. In genuinely rural areas (most) kids used to be able to roam freely, now it's (mostly) frowned upon. It's a cultural change, not a change in the built environment.
I think it's less taboo in rural areas. Kids given free roam in the wood/countryside around their house, that sort of thing.
I blame the shift mostly on America's Most Wanted.
I blame the Satanic pre-schools. Those guys just ruined it for everyone.
115: well I haven't done a formal survey or anything, but while my general impression agrees with you that it is less taboo in rural areas, it's still very much more taboo in rural areas than it was a generation ago. Kids are given free roam around their property (which may be 40 acres or whatever)--just like my kids are able to play in my backyard in the city--but kids these days aren't generally permitted to just venture off into the countryside.
It seems wrong to blame them when they didn't even eat a single baby.
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I tend to work/be at my desk until 6:30, so I'll often finish up the work day with a glass in hand. Today is not one of those days, which is good, because I'd totally be blaming the drink for my inability to comprehend this bit of building code. It's about the rules for what glass needs to be tempered, and I've certainly dealt with it before, but today it's completely baffling me.
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Free range teens in the sprawl of Van Nuys boulevard. Remind me again how technological and social progress somehow supposedly improved the world?
I believe he means to comment on how far we have fallen from the glorious days of those cars and moustaches.
Remind me again how technological and social progress somehow supposedly improved the world?
Huh, my snarky remark was whisked into the ether. But it involved dropping a building on you and calling you "broford," T"R"O.
Was the glass in the building's windows tempered?
121. Yesterday's lion photos prompted me to make exactly the opposite remark at the other place. The maid stepping over the lion and 14-year old Melanie getting married off to Tippie's costar were both pretty striking.
Also, gluten tag to the diet those poor kids in 121 must have been eating. One of the photos is clearly captioned Fresh Hot Bread.
Kids are given free roam around their property (which may be 40 acres or whatever)--just like my kids are able to play in my backyard in the city--but kids these days aren't generally permitted to just venture off into the countryside.
And more to the crux of the point, kids wandering around the countryside are more likely to get the cops called on them. UNLESS, the adult who spots the kids actually knows the kids and/or the parents, which is the key distinguishing factor that is vastly not likely in rural areas.
Rare vintage Bob McManus photo.
Twenty years later, the teens on Van Nuys Blvd didn't look like that anymore. We looked substantially more geeky.
120: What's the window condition, JRoth? I assume you're in 2406?
131: not nearly as good as In the Love for Moods.
129: I laughed on the train looking at that photo. People must think I'm equally crazy.
Seconding 128 for the patch of the Olympic Peninsula I know something about, plus the teens themselves were reluctant - being driven everywhere was high status.
Plaints of sex offenders more effective than plaints of large nonhuman predators.
129: may I get out of the van now, sir?
"Remind me again how technological and social progress somehow supposedly improved the world?"
...he simultaneously asked several dozen people scattered around the world, using the high powered computer connected to a vast information network containing almost all of the world's knowledge and accessible almost instantaneously over a wireless transmitter contained within it. I mean, it was probably just the one he carries in his pocket but depending on the situation it might have been the larger, even more powerful that he carries around in a bag.
136: I sometimes go to the basement to address the old black box in terse amber glyphs, just out of sentiment. The Dwarf Lord occasionally has to go to a windowless room near the top of a tower, past the guards and giant fans, into a locked cage... to poke the power-button.
To bring two parts of OP together- I blame the deer ticks.
You rang? (Is Maynard remembered?) 129: I told ya, I have always looked like Farber Gimli between jobs. I like a beard.
136:
Differently put, as displaced mediators, blogs access key features of communicative capitalism: the intensification of mediality in reflexive networks (communicating about communicating), the emergence of "whatever beings" (beings who belong but not to anything in particular), and the circulation of affect (as networks generate and amplify spectacular effects). This access not only draws out the challenges to political organization under current conditions but also highlights the imperative for actually undertaking such organizing rather than presuming it will simply emerge: the very practices of media we enjoy, the practices that connect us to others and ostensibly end our alienation, appropriate and reassemble our longings into new forms of exploitation and control....Jodi Dean, Blog Theory
Thirdly, I didn't cruise. The buddy and I used to go in his old station wagon and drive drive way out in the country in the evenings. Without drink or drugs. He eventually married the exchange student that took his cherry and lives in Rouen or something.
128: You think? In rural areas around here I'd bet for "someone would threaten them with a gun" way above calling cops.
140: Wow, even if the kids are on a public right-of-way?
What I'd really expect in not-Forks would be maybe getting the sheriff there to Protect the Children, and definitely a year or forever of side-eye and thank-you-no to the mother at all school, town, road maintenance, garden day, and quilt bee meetings, which would be possibly very damaging as that's how everything happens.
Huh. Haven't though of him in decades.
I think he felt trapped in the UMC family business, that had him working from age 12. 4 siblings:oldest 1st born brother responsible eventually took over; older brother wastrel; older sister no idea; younger sister went to Hollywood in a craft, set design or something.
They were above me in class, and I remember being shocked by his Mom's black eyes: took me a decade to realize plastic surgery.
He liked me because I was bright, but utterly undemanding and non-competitive. We used to listen to baseball on the radio out under the empty stars. I was a bit at least homosocial.
I thought he was a fool to fall for and marry the first and only girl to chase and fuck him. He thought he was all grown up. We parted unamicably.
A few years after that, having completely lost touch with the family I had seen every day, heard somehow about a terrible delivery and hitchhiked thirty miles to give blood to the oldest's wife.
I got stories. They ain't worth anything.
141: No, I've only heard about it in trespassing contexts and more often a threat to get a gun, I guess. But I've heard zero stories about police being called for rural kids adventuring from any of the local rural families I know.
I know that depictions of Bob are forbidden by scripture but am I the only one who has sometimes wondered what he looks like?
144: This ain't secret, and isn't hard.
I look like Dusty Hill (ZZ Top), but sorta stepped on. Full white beard to the chest, and in public very dark glasses and a faded gimme cap. Usually blue jeans, grey t-shirt, sandals, denim jacket. Pot belly grows and shrinks with the seasons. Hairy arms and calves, but a fine blondish fur.
Underneath that, I don't even know what I look like.
But not hard to pick out from a crowd these days.
Before anyone clicks this link, it's important to remember that hate is an evil feeling that leads people to do bad things and we should all strive to exercise love and compassion for our fellow living things. But, you know, everything in moderation right?
On OP.3, this letter from school is very amusing.
What's the window condition, JRoth? I assume you're in 2406?
Just a couple big, storefront-like openings. And yes, 2406. Part of what's baffling me is the table that says everything over 9 SF needs to be tempered, but also that (away from doors and showers) only glazing over 9 SF with all these other requirements needs to be tempered.
I'm inclined to ignore the table, but I also don't want to get sued if somebody smashes through a piece of glass and dies.
The guy I knew who went through one lived. Possibly there's a rule covering the windows of college bars.
Are you looking at Table 2406.2 here, JRoth? If so, agreed, that's terribly written. The whole part. (I assume that that Web page corresponds to a part of the Ohio building code, but who knows.) I can't find the heading of 2405, some sections have specific "Exceptions" as separate paragraphs but plenty of them have exceptions right in the text, it uses "shall" and not "must," it only tells you where to find documents incorporated by reference once, references to Table 2406.2 appear both before and after it, the table has two rows and one row has exactly the same thing in every cell... the table looks insane. Most of it is tautological: if you actually look up what Category I and Category II mean, they're partially based on size. The table is little more than a requirement that you can't put a piece of glass bigger than 9 square feet in a 9-foot hole. Ya think? But then there's the box for panels smaller than 9 feet regulated by item 7 of 2406.4: "No requirement." But 2406.4 is titled "Hazardous locations." They have no requirement for the hazardous locations, specifically? What they probably actually mean is that the requirement is elsewhere, but what they wrote is ridiculous.
To answer your question, I'd say, yes, ignore the table, because it looks redundant with everything else the rest of that section and 16 CFR 1201. If you're complying with those, you're probably good. Disclaimer: I'm obviously not a lawyer or any kind of expert, I'm just trying to read that and figure out what the regulator was thinking, but I can't imagine anyone winning a lawsuit by citing that piece of regulation.
It's given me a new respect for my office. We've put out some bad documents, but I can't remember anything this bad.
(I'm supposed to be working hard, now, but I can't right this minute, and this is a lot like work.)