I really like this post and think about this sort of thing a lot. For our particular situation, I do wonder what things will be like for Mara as a teen if she is interested in men. She got through all of 2011 without playing out the little script she has for interacting with men who scare her so she can feel like she's getting the upper hand, but I don't fool myself into thinking that means she's fully resolved whatever kind of abuse she experienced before she could talk about it and I do expect it to come up again when she is old enough to have to deal with male peers' sexuality, regardless of her own interests.
This is not merely a comic trope in entertainment, but a thing people actually say; joking references to shotguns are common in discussions of the parents meeting teen boyfriends.
AFAICT it's basically a comic trope in entertainment that reflects a fear but not reality. Dads do want to make sure that no one is treating their daughter like shit and worry about them and want to seem superprotective, but being actually dead serious about a never ever have sex ever rule? No. Or, more precisely, there are people like that but those people are independently crazy.
No-one (who's sane) means the "nobody will touch my little girl" stuff literally. It is a game, played in wry recognition of the competing and often absurdly contradictory (but still often hard to avoid) incentives and priorities involved in mating and socialization.
I like 4 even better than my 3. This shit, it is not serious.
I did think of the Stop Looking at My Mom from a few years back, which seems like a different spin on it with some overlap in the patriarchy department.
I think that it's a version of the idea that the father gets to screen suitors, with a taste of "if he's afraid of my shotgun he's a pussy and not good enough".
Also the thing that "other men's daughters might be fun to mess around with, but mine aren't that kind". The more macho and predatory a guy is, the more he wants to screw every other man's daughter and the more protective he is of his own. Norman Mailer played this game, and the Mafia.
And then, envy and Freudian weirdness.
Damnation; I should have known better than to try to make links on a touchscreen. Bedtime for me, so others will have to amuse alameida.
what is the deal with the society-wide contention that fathers of baby girls/girls generally can and should insist that their little girl is never going to have sex, ever
I don't think this is a society-wide contention. I've never met anyone in real life who contended this, though rumor has it they're out there somewhere.
A more intense version of the line "if you have a boy, you only have one penis to worry about".
(Kind of heteronormative there, but we're in mainstream-cultural-trope territory).
Parody display. Fathers are powerless and know it. If they retained patriarchal power, they wouldn't have to talk about it all the time.
I wonder how the experience of being-protected-by-being-forbidden differs for daughters. Booth Tarkington begins a chapter in one of the Penrod books with a disquisition on the difference, for boys,* between "your mother won't let you" and "my father won't let me." Is there a similar sexism among girls?
* Penrod's investigations into the second sex are limited, even including his brief dalliance with the enchanting newcomer Fanchon. I probably recall too much about Penrod, really.
Nobody has read Tarkington since 1940. Would you like to be our native informant regarding Tarkington?
Boy, we respect you and your people without condescension. But don't call me bwana.
I'm with 3, 4, and being seen to be cleaning a large handgun when the boy arrived to pick up my daughter in her early high school years.
sort of on topic, a friend just told this story about her 4 1/2 year old daughter:
So this morning after a vicious nightmare [daughter] asked me if I have nightmares. I said I did have one where I couldn't protect her and it made me really upset. She asked what I was trying to protect her from and I said a person who was making her uncomfortable and unhappy.
She said "...oh. I don't know anyone like that... How about seagulls? Can you protect me from seagulls? They really freak me out."
I brought up this exact issue a few years ago, and everybody pooh-poohed my contention that it was a dangerous and probably harmful way for fathers to behave around their daughters. I was right then, and I'm still right today, so there!
But yeah, I just don't get it, man. If you're saying this about your daughter, you're not just making a claim about the perfidy of teenage (or older) boys & men, and you're not just infantilizing teenage (or older) girls & women. You're actively claiming that (het) sex can be neither positive nor mutually beneficial. Which is just weird. This all goes to my contention that heterosexual masculinity should be defined not so much in terms of a sexual preference for women as in terms of an overwhelming fear of/obsession with homosexual desire.
Here's another Dad story. My drinking buddy's brother is a military lifer who now does contract work overseas. His last job was in Mali. He's not at the top mercenary level, he did things like go out in 115 degree weather to do building maintenance. Cannot compete with Oudemia/Alameida 's guys.
Anyway, his wife is the daughter of a former commanding officer. They got along and he got to know the family including the daughter. One summer the officer, who lived in Texas, needed to have his house reroofed in 100 degree heat (Note the "heat" theme). So the guy drove hundreds of miles down to Texas and worked several days in the hot sun for nothing.
At the end of which time, the officer said, quote, "What's my daughter have between her legs that made you drive down here".
And they lived happily ever after.
I got to experience an odd instantiation of this during Clinton/Lewinsky, when this older asswipe I worked with felt that I would be moved by his eloquent, "Imagine it was your daughter!" outrage. I literally did not know how to respond, although things like "means she had gotten a pretty damn good internship" ran through my mind. In truth I would be concerned*, but my attitude would probably be almost completely determined by her attitude (if she chose to tell me anything) and my read on how coercive it might have been (power imbalance .. sure, can't argue that, but also 22, 23 whatever it was--Bob Somerby can give you his outrage on the 21-year old intern label, which reflected another variation on the general trope).
*But mostly along the lines of, "Everything big different now O daughter of mine."
When guys come over to date my daughter, I'm going to tell them, "I want you to go out and have a very good time with my daughter. I want you to enjoy yourself and have her home on time. If you abuse her in any way, I'm going to kill your mother and father, cut your back open, pull out your spine, and leave you in a wheelchair so you can think about what you did for the rest of your life. Now, go out and have a good time!"
If Monica Lewinsky was my daughter, I would poke Linda Tripp in the snoot.
"Poked us in snoot," say victims.
That's OK, most guys just leave her hanging on the tree.
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When I type a "P" into the little Google search thingy in Firefox, 3 of the top 10 results are for pizzerias. It's like they know me.
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My young niece does have to deal with really jerky boys all the time, though. I guess I'll say that it's asymmetrical, too. There aren't equal proportions of predators and prey in the teenage M and F groups, or equal risk. And one reason for fear is that desires seem to be totally blind as far as settling on the right person is concerned.
"Children, behave!" That's what they say when we're together. And "watch how you play" -- they don't understand, but now we're runnin' just as fast as we can, holdin' onto one another's hand, tryin' to get away, into the night, and then you put your arms around me and we tumble to the ground and then we say "I think we're alone now, there doesn't seem to be any patriarchy around."
22: Yep, her and Ken Starr would be likely to be much higher on my list. (And Starr was for Lewinsky's actual father.)
23: It's an underappreciated masterpiece, that's for sure.
I mean, if that makes any sense for a book that's been more or less continuously in print since my grandfather was a teenager.
"Get Thee To a Nunnery" sounds like the name of a Belle & Sebastian song.
29, 30: You don't want to know how much of it I can quote from memory.
I should read that and Right Ho, Jeeves! back-to-back and try to figure out which one is better.
"Very good," I said coldly. "In that case, tinkerty tonk." And I meant it to sting.
Anything with Jeeves is superior to anything without Jeeves, the canonical Gospels excepted.*
* Perhaps I have stumbled upon the next Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
Okay, at some point I will try my hand at writing the Gospels in the style of P.G. Wodehouse, but it is already late, and I think I would be up till 2 a.m. trying to do even a half-assed job.
34: seconded, with passion. flippanter, do you read the mapp and lucia books?
"Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the earth."
"Very good, Lord."
36: Never heard of them, but I've read some of Dornford Yates' Berry Pleydell novels.
e.f. benson. oh flip, what joys await you! I am jealous you get to read them for the first time. start with lucia. he is second only to wodehouse and similar in many ways. we used to read them aloud to my grandmother and we would all be weeping with laughter.
If you're saying this about your daughter, you're not just making a claim about the perfidy of teenage (or older) boys & men, and you're not just infantilizing teenage (or older) girls & women. You're actively claiming that (het) sex can be neither positive nor mutually beneficial. Which is just weird.
This. It doesn't matter that it's jocular and not literally intended, this is still the core concept, making it a weird thing to be standard even as a joke.
Speaking of the OP, the anti-clerical Renaissance pornographic works of Pietro Aretino are full of naughty, naughty nuns.
Shut up. A girl gave them to me.
No, not that one.
Yes, a different one.
She moved back to Europe and got married, thanks.
are you sure it was a different one or are you just saying that to make us happy?
It doesn't matter that it's jocular and not literally intended, this is still the core concept, making it a weird thing to be standard even as a joke.
True, but it's totally consistent with the similarly widespread trope that sex is something that men enjoy and women don't.
Quite sure. If #1 had gotten married, I would have faked my own spectacular death and become an drunken, itinerant occult detective in the Antipodes under my backup identity, "Alphabet Philemon Solozzo" behaved with the utmost dignity and self-composure, as an example to all, a sort of paragon of dignity and maturity.
My dad never said anything when it became obvious I was having premarital sex, but he never really talked to me again. We have benign conversations about work, since the dog died. It's weird, and makes me realize how creepy and Freudian my father's feelings for me were.
45: naturally you would have; no one doubts your calm dignity.
46: right, the idea is "I'm the only man in her life." and also, as has been noted, everyone is an old-school, imaginary andrea dworkin all-het-sex-is-rape feminist, apparently. which is a little odd.
I tried some Dornford Yates after it was mentioned here, and recommend Maria Thompson Daviess to anyone who likes that sort of thing. Different annoying aristocratic social structure and, I thought, more interesting main characters.
Oh, I guess the difference is my dad never blamed the guy. He just figured I was a slut like my mom.
41: Natilo's analysis assumes an involved, specific and non-disprovable chain of perfidious assumptions in its target. An excellent way to miss what is actually going on in humour is to work through all its logical implications and then end by declaring "So there! Stop laughing!" Virtually nobody who jokes "don't touch my daughter" is carefully forcing the jape through a series of specific hoops to the logical conclusion that all het sex is evil; that is a silly thing to say, masquerading as a clever thing to say.
What offends about the "don't touch my daughter" joke is that it's laughing (so as not to be crying) about a set of absurdities arising from sex relations that it assumes to be in some sense asymmetrical. The real underlying question is: can that set of absurdities be replaced by non-absurdities, and can anyone who isn't earnestly working toward this goal instead of joking around therefore just be assumed to be a dick? Or if not, can we at least joke about some different sets of absurdities? Or if not, can we be earnest about the degree of difficulty of replacing the existent absurdities with different ones or with non-absurdity?
All of those are valid questions. What's not a valid question is "why are you being all 'weird' and joking about the fundamental absurdities in your culture"? It is not weird for people to joke about the fundamental absurdities in their culture.
47: None dare call it emotionally-crippled repression.
50: That is just very sad.
How many possible positions are there about young women's sexuality? There's just two: she's a victim, or she's a slut. I'd rather be thought the latter, frankly.
51: I do think it endorses by implication the unequal sexual relations that are the foundation of the joke.
53: that's an ugly dichotomy. bleh. obviously you prefer to have agency, but it's sad if "slut" is the only category in which you can.
OT: sumatriptan is the shizzle. I barely have a headache and I woke up in agony. I do feel kind of stupid, though. and still a few words went missing this morning.
54: At the very least it takes them for granted, which one can read as endorsement, or indifference, or resignation (which in turn can be read as a form of endorsement). On the other hand, unless one's Revolution is about to break over the horizon on Tuesday, joking about the way things currently are can still be funny. Or lame, but inoffensive.
56: Sufficiently Alpha females can vault the dichotomy handily, but it's little comfort to those who aren't born with the genes, the money or the functional family background.
I am driving next to a convertible (Chrysler Sebring) with the top down and a large white coffin in the front seat. Creepy old guy with a hoodie driving. What the hell? Is this the angel of death?
60: You could speculate about the story, or you could preserve your sanity and say: "Hey. Performance art." Either method is understandable.
How big is the coffin? A full-sized one wouldn't fit between the seat and the glove box even without the top.
Maybe it would. I guess I don't know how far back the seats go.
This Thinking Allowed episode (December 7. 2011) is good on this topic.
LA is even cooler than I thought, man.
Is this the angel of death?
First, check whether you are in a Neil Gaiman novel.
Maybe the coffin car is a sign that Halford should stop commenting while driving.
naw, then the driver would be a woman and she'd be all hot and goth.
I have seen precisely one hot goth chick in all my years on God's green earth, but she was of the rare platinum blonde sub-species, hence worth a round dozen of the usual.
70: Sounds like your ZIP code must have been very Goth-poor. The current "alt" aesthetic is basically a mash-up of punk chick, rockabilly chick (a.k.a. post-punk chick), and goth chick; the goth chicks contributed pretty much all the fetishy stuff, and were fashion plates par excellence in a much higher ratio than goth dudes.
60: Sounds like someone is testing the carpool lane rules.
I don't know, castock. in my experience girls who turn to goth often have bad skin which doesn't go well with pasty foundation and black lipstick. looking basically like tank girl is a different thing.
73: Well, I sort of go by the rule of thumb that 90% of any fashion trend will be subpar. Laydeez who struggle with skin and self-image issues are just as likely to manifest as fake-tanned club girls wearing a pound of pancake makeup. Such are effectively the norm here (though I blind myself to it by only going to niche clubs).
73 was always sort of true of a fairly high proportion of the goth types who went to the same clubs I did when younger. Also, I don't think I ever met a goth-looking bloke who wasn't a bit funny looking, though. Since I haven't stepped into that sort of club since 1992 I might be completely wrong on the current situation.
My teenage goth-type ex-girlfriend is a facebook friend, so I can sneakily link to:
http://a2.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/22740_241824532459_523992459_3139758_4291536_n.jpg
It's hard to believe all 3 people in that photo were, iirc, 17 when it was taken.
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So in my blog's referrer logs today I see some hits from 321gaychat.com. Not really sure how to interpret this.
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Friends of mine were over-insistent on the "We don't mind you having sex, but we'd like to know when you start doing stuff so we can kind of adjust" line. So the first time their daughter got it on she was ringing home every half hour and practically liveblogging it, until they said, "TMI, see you tomorrow."
I have the creepy-sad threadkilling problem that my mom put me on birth control before I was anywhere near having sex, and in retrospect one can't help but think she was worried that, etc.
but we could give her the benefit of the doubt and say before you're having sex is just the right time to go onto birth control! being on the pill makes it harder to convince your partner to use a condom though, I feel. you could just not tell them and have it as back-up.
76: awwwww! lurve!
my family let my boyfriend stay at my house all the time when I was 17, but he was nominally sleeping downstairs in the guest room. I'm not sure how I feel about this. if I'm ok with my kid having sex, it's hard to see why I want to make her life difficult by having to have sex in cars and freezing cold parks and things all the time. but then I just think...my family had boundary issues.
That's not me in 76, btw. It's another two friends from the time.
I was 17 when I had girlfriends stay over. I don't remember my parents treating my sister any differently, although she had it slightly easier as I fought/negotiated the rules earlier, as the oldest.
17 year old me, back left:
http://www.mcgrattan.org/hahhah.jpg
Linked here before.
oh man, I must have missed it before. fabulous.
now I sort of want to post a pic of me at 17 for everyone's amusement but I don't know where to host it. i know, I can pick an earlier age, at which I am unrecognizable. goddammit there are ants biting me in my bed and it's all my fault because I had toast with jam and tea in bed. fucking tropics.
Are people still awake? Are we still on Denver time?
John, I know why al's awake, it's daytime(ish) in Narnia. Why are you awake?
I am awake because I'm awake. I don't exactly have a sleep disorder but I sleep from 5 and 8 hours a night somewhere between 9 pm and 8 am so I get up as early as 4 am.
Well you'll have to make do with al and any Brits who are around for a bit. I know al has your best interests at heart.
I'm sorry I missed the discussion because I wanted to represent the sexist Puritan point of view. I worry more about my cute young niece than I think I would about a nephew the same age in the same school. In some other more ideal culture than the actual one this might not be true. The atmosphere there isn't really such that the "when two people love each other much" sex talk is quite right. From everything I've seen, the "Boys are morons and beasts and they'll do you harm if you're not careful" sex talk is more appropriate. From the way her girl friends talk a lot of them are somewhat of that opinion, though they carry it off in a sort of saucy way. It's not a terribly tough place, mostly lower middle class, but seeming tough is the rule.
Al's probably working. I'm not in harmony with the Unfoggetariat temporally speaking.
work-time's over and I'm too sick to work anyway. what's for breakfast, john?
I keep remembering to use this in a blog post, but apparently prime minister Stanley Baldwin was described as feeling "as if a daughter had lost her virginity" after abandoning the gold standard in 1931.
Which struck me as an interesting formulation - after all, going off gold was inevitable, not really in his power to prevent by then, and actually a good thing that resulted in everyone being happier than they would otherwise have been. Further, trying to cling on longer would only have fucked all concerned up much more.
In a sense he was quite right, but of course that wasn't the sense he meant it in.
Directly on topic, I think this is one of those cases where 99% or higher of people who say it don't mean it in the slightest, and just trot it out as an unthinking cliché that's on the telly. Which is of course a great reason to say things that are interesting, valid, or funny! rather than just burbling away!
two days ago I did 3 things in one day: saw my neurologist; went to a noon AA meeting; and had coffee after with some newcomers/returnees. as a result the following day I collapsed and slept from 1 in the afternoon to 7:30 and then 10 at night to some mish-mash of 7 and 8 in the morning. I had an interesting dream about driving around in a pick-up truck outside hilton head with my brother and stephen colbert, who was hilarious. this morning I woke up with a migraine so terrible I almost started crying when I let the microwave timer go off. new medicine worked after second dose. worked great! so I had enough energy to go to the other doctor! but now I'm wrecked again. how long is it going to take me to get over this. I got shit to DO people.
Well I just calculated the time zones. Singapore is in THE WRONG TIME ZONE. And right now, the 10:44 pm-2:44 am includes only teofilo and whichever New Zealanders we have. The Aleutians and Pago Pago have zones almost to themselves.
YMMV. Nominal (political) and geographical time zones differ by as much as 3 hours.
95: I don't know; as a parent of young kids you hear a lot that girls are easier when they're young but more difficult when they get to their teens. why? not because they're borrowing your car and going drunk driving more than boys; if anything they do so less. it's because you must guard their precious virginity at all times.
97 to 96 obviously. Guard my virginity!
Uteruses too.
Maybe it's because boys feel more obliged to be predatory and girls feel more obliged to be nice. Maybe it's from back on the veldt. Not very many of the boys in my niece's HS are really tough, but they all have to pretend to be.
And also, utureses, not just maidenheads.
89. The long version is, many but not all boys are morons and beasts and is hard to spot the ones who aren't without some experience in the matter. I've never had children and my own experiences are too long ago to be relevant, but from what I've seen of the teenage children of my contemporaries, the ones who are happiest are the ones who are sexually active without taking it to excess, and they seem to have achieved this by having parents who manage a difficult balancing act of being involved and supportive in their lives without taking an extreme position of either "thou shalt not" or laissez-faire.
I think it works if the parents demand as much maturity from the young person as they can manage in all parts of their lives, and on that basis, include them as fr as possible in adult decision making. Where that's the case (and I stress that I can only speak from observation), it seems that by the time the young person is directly confronting their sexuality they're both more used to thinking in grown up ways about stuff generally than otherwise, and sufficiently used to being open with their parents that they see them as part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
Of course, a lot of your people don't have supportive or even functional home backgrounds like that, and that's where you get the moronic, evil boys and the victim girls. I don't know what you do about that: "Get out as quickly as you can/ And don't have any kids yourself" is the traditional answer.
sex is a thing that boys can take from girls on this model. they're always trying to get it, and you've got to stop them somehow. as it happens teen boys are always trying to wheedle you into having sex with them by some means or another IME, but if there's a problem it's on the "no means no" side. i.e. the boys need to act differently, not the girls, or their dads. I think the idea of "enthusiastic consent" is good but only halfway there. "consent?" shouldn't that be "enthusiastic participation?"
I've spent a fair amount of time talking Buck out of making variants of that joke; whether or not it's badly meant, I think it's a lousy thing for the daughter in question to have to listen to ("Hey, if you ever have sex, you're going to be doing something your father hates and fears for you.") Kids are in a rotten position for picking apart the bits of that kind of joke that really aren't supposed to be taken seriously.
Chris sounds dead on in 100 -- that's basically the model I'm hoping to achieve with my two.
after all, going off gold was inevitable, not really in his power to prevent by then
Somebody should have told Churchill in 1924 that you can't restore virginity.
97: surely you're reliable enough to attest that I have a sweet rental deal.
in general the other problem is that a very small percentage of the boys can be predatory but nonetheless hurt a lot of people if they just do it serially to dozens of girls. it's really hard to know which one of your friends is fine in other ways but psycho along one axis. well, he's usually kind of jerky to other guys too, but not always.
105: there's a river in cyprus where aphrodite used to bathe yearly to restore her virginity. I went swimming in it and re-lost my virginity the same day.
The problem is that we're not the people you have to convince, Al. It's the boys and girls in my niece's class. I think that there are places where the local culture is different. But it's not just local; the international pop culture pushes a version of that.
Then you get to slut-shaming. If there is an affectionate girl with no problems who just gives it away in that world, her life might be made a living hell.
The older sister of the niece I'm talking about pushed back hard and successfully, but what she did was become flamboyantly gothish/punkish, change HS three times, drop out, and become a lesbian. (She also is plumpish and had to push back against that). She's legendary in that school. But it shouldn't be that hard.
I think it only works if you're a goddess. Oh shit, you are, I forgot.
A very small percentage of the boys can be predatory but nonetheless hurt a lot of people if they just do it serially to dozens of girls. .
Of all the nice men get paired off while the predatory guys do the serial predation, the stats of the dating scene get muddled. Ten different women grumbling about guys might all be grumbling about the same guy.
fucking slut-shaming, argh. either it's a good thing that girls have sex with you, or not, but not both, you assholes.
104. I'm aiming for that sort of model too. But so far my son (11) has decided he wants to be gay because girls are too noisy, and my elder daughter (8) is disgusted at the idea of grownups kissing (each other - the kissing of children is permitted) and says she will never have sex. But she does want children. It seems complicated.
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What gift did you bring, Tebow?
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either it's a good thing that girls have sex with you, or not, but not both, you assholes.
Close, but not quite. It's a good thing that girls have sex with you; it's a bad thing that they have sex with anybody else.
Wonders of science: sex no longer necessary for reproduction.
Or more elegantly: "not both, you assholes" should be "not both you assholes".
no, because it's the guy who fucks the girl who can really get the slut-shaming started about how easy she put out.
112. Given their respective ages, I'd say those are pretty cool positions. They may change in time.
he wants to be gay because girls are too noisy
Somebody clearly hasn't been to a gay bar yet.
maybe he'll go to a fancy gay bar with old-fashioned cocktails where they make their own bitters.
like neb neb's gay counterpart goes to.
Apo, is it time I took him to a gay bar?
The problem is that we're not the people you have to convince, Al. It's the boys and girls in my niece's class.
I really think a lot of that kind of crazy comes from the adults around, not solely from the kids. If the parents and teachers weren't supporting the slut-shaming, there wouldn't be as much of it.
On a vaguely connected point, Sally reads a fair amount of trashy fiction aimed at middle-school girls (along with a fair amount of other stuff), and it basically all takes as an assumption that the social structure of a middle/high school is going to be Mean Girls -- a clique of popular girls and boys who are broadly recognized by the other students as an elite, and who torture and exclude the unpopular kids. She asked me if that's real anyplace, because it's got nothing to do with the social world she sees in her school (not that everyone's always nice to everyone, but there's not a ruling clique or the kind of social malice that's part of the fictional norm.)
I had to tell her that I had no real idea, because I'd never seen that sort of social structure operating myself, but I couldn't swear it was real someplace.
I wonder how much teachers either contribute to this or could fight against it. one always hears horror stories from the first girl in the class to develop boobs; surely the teacher could do something there?
124: we had that at my private girls school, with a counterpart crew of popular boys at the boys school. oddly it kind of fell apart after 11th grade, with the wacky, artistic types suddenly becoming socially ok.
it basically all takes as an assumption that the social structure of a middle/high school is going to be Mean Girls -- a clique of popular girls and boys who are broadly recognized by the other students as an elite
while she was in 5th grade my brother and sister in law watched my lesbian-to-be niece with this in mind. She was sort of an elite wannabe on the fringe of that group, and they watched the elite trash a different wannabe, who finally left the school. They believed that my niece would probably be their next target, since she'd shown vulnerability by trying to be accepted. But the year came to an end and they all went to different schools the next year.
I think that the structure of the schools makes things worse, and some of the teachers too.
Do you think that was kind of supported/maintained by the adults running the school? I'm theorizing on fictional data here, but I started wondering if the elite clique thing was really a function of being in a school where sports and cheerleading were important -- that there was an objective status hierarchy from having adult-granted elite positions, and then that got leveraged into social control. But I don't have any firsthand basis for that, and it doesn't sound as if it would work in an all-girls school.
82: ttaM, are you sure you're not actually Chris Needham?
124/6. Again, I think it helps to have some hot-housed maturity to hand. Crude primate rank sorting is probably wired into our mid-brains, but most of us get over it because it's not functional enough in complex human societies. It might be functional enough in a gaggle of thirteen year olds, but IME - and this I can dredge up from 47 years ago - if you have a critical mass of kids who respond to the wannabe alpha monkeys by sighing wearily and suggesting that they grow the fuck up, they do, because otherwise they're shown to be acting like little kids.
I think that the mean girls thing comes from having a mix of classes. The worst maybe be the parvenu rich kids with striving parents.
132 is very true. And the best ones at keeping them in line are, sadly, the "old money".
Sally's school is fairly economically mixed. But city schools are different -- the kids' families aren't necessarily in contact outside the school, so while it's clear who has more money than who, the families aren't participants in a class hierarchy within a social group. I'm having trouble saying that last bit coherently -- I mean, in a suburban or rural school, the parents are in some kind of social contact with each other as rich or poor even if their kids aren't in school together.
re: 129
I had to google that, but no. Needham looks less, erm, 'alpha' metal bloke than I was. There isn't any non-dickish way to say that, but I was in a (shit, obviously, in retrospect) band that had gigs and good looking girls came to see us play. No mullet, no plooks.
I've not seen the program, though.
There was no mean girls type culture in my school that I was aware of, no jock culture, either. There were some cliques of rich kids that emerged as we got towards the end of secondary school, but they were arseholes and had no social power over the rest of us. They had a half-hearted go at bullying me for having long hair, but it ended when I dragged one of them over a desk and headbutted him in history class.*
* story told before. Anecdote redux.
as it happens teen boys are always trying to wheedle you into having sex with them by some means or another IME
You've also got the neurotic boys who are simultaneously freaked out by sex/romantic emotions and desperately wanting to get laid. Then one of their best friends gets a crush on them and decides that the reason you're not responding as expected is she's not being clear enough that she wants you and/or you're too shy, so she decides to push. All sorts of fun emotional trauma for everyone ensues.
On the other hand no jock culture in my school beyond the fact that being athletic and hot was a social plus, but less than being perceived as smart. And the girl known for happily fucking tons of guys was viewed by guys with awe and admiration.
Judging from what I hear from others, there were definitely far worse places for a nerdy guy to go to school.
re: 129
Actually, I suppose there was a Needham phase, aged about 14 when we had our first band. Including dire school gigs.
I can imagine that being a drag but have never been on that side of the annoying problem. I have to say I never even have thought about it, so, there you go. learning something new every day at unfogged.
140 to 137. 138: yeah, sounds not bad. I had the weird experience of being "alternative" suddenly becoming cool, so that girls who wouldn't speak to me in 11th grade were greeting my like a lost sister at the start of senior year; I was mystified. then later in the year I was shunned by almost everyone, popular on not, for "ruining my photography teacher's life." still not feeling super-forgiving on that one, have to say, though I know some people have grown to regret it.
The metal/alternative kids at my school were all fairly middlingly popular, the school really wasn't that cliquey and most of us were neither amazingly nerdy or really self-confident. There was a phase just after school where suddenly the posh kids wanted to be our friends, though, as the 'summer of love' was hitting and suddenly they wanted to drugs. And the only people who knew how/where to get drugs, were the metal heads.
This is why among the first people I knew who went to Ibiza, listened to the early Balearic stuff that was coming out, went to warehouse parties, etc were greasy looking blokes with long-hair.
Rock on, ttaM. [Makes secret devil sign.]
I present to you the massive country hit Cleaning This Gun...Come on In, Boy which deals with many of the themes in the OP.
I would want a daughter to have sex with guys that genuinely like and respect her as a person and who she genuinely likes, and to have it when and only when she really wants to. Per Emerson above, teen sex doesn't always go that way. I wouldn't be too happy if things went differently but my control would be limited.
I've not seen the program, though.
Oh, you should. It's great. And the follow-up programme made a few years back eases any sense of mocking the afflicted, as he seems to have turned out pretty well.
I would want a daughter to have sex with guys that genuinely like and respect her as a person and who she genuinely likes, and to have it when and only when she really wants to.
the best way to ensure this is not to threaten to kill people (not that you would) but to treat your daughters with love and respect. girls that get treated shitty by their dad go find boyfriends who treat them shitty. that's why one of the things in my life I'm most proud of is somehow having the sense to marry my wonderful husband. I always knew he would be a great father, and he is. he's so devoted and kind and reliable. it strengthens my trust in my daughters' ability to make the right choices later.
When Steven Seagal hosted SNL many, many, many years ago, there was a Seagalized skit about this:
"What's that you're reading, Mr. Seagal?" [I think the late Chris Farley played the boyfriend.]
"It's called Silent Killing, Billy. It's very informative."
146: totally agree, and one selfish reason why I would want to see my daughter choosing guys who treat her well is that it would reflect well on our parenting.
I also wouldn't explain men/boys generally to a daughter as 'morons/animals/out of control' because I can't see how that perspective on the opposite sex would help a woman make good choices or be anything but weird and confusing.
I've joked about testing boys, but don't think I ever made the joke that's the subject of the OP. My daughter probably remembers it differently.
I did warn her that kids can be mean, and that she might spare a thought for her reputation. She probably remembers this differently as well.
The idea that this stuff would primarily emanate from parents and teachers is totally alien from my experience, in HS and now. On the spectrum of when a kid stops paying attention to input from adults, what to think of particular classmates -- especially those not well known to the parents -- probably comes a lot earlier than most other topics.
Has anyone linked Burnistoun All ma mad uncles yet?
Have you tried driving around with a coffin in the front seat? That might scare boys.
as a parent of young kids you hear a lot that girls are easier when they're young but more difficult when they get to their teens. why? not because they're borrowing your car and going drunk driving more than boys; if anything they do so less. it's because you must guard their precious virginity at all times.
I've thought this trope had more to do with stereotypes about the emotional volitility of teenage girls (and stereotypes about the energy/activity levels of young boys). Not so much about the precious honeypot.
also I think you have to have a lot of honest discussions about how if anything you're doing doesn't feel OK the other person has to stop, no matter what point things have gotten to. not just one time "the talk" but multiple talks pivoting off real-life examples that come up (as they naturally will.)
152: I think it's pretty explicitly about how you have to worry that she might get pregnant, while boys can't.
Heh at 150.
Burnistoun is consistently the best sketch show on British TV, imho.
The microphone is a fantastic touch.
152 -- This exactly.
146 -- I'm not keen to take that much responsibility for the shitty boyfriends my daughter has chosen.
ttaM, are you sure you're not actually Chris Needham?
I'm getting more a Robbie Nevil vibe. (Metaliosity aside, obvs.)
155 -- Al, there's plenty of things worse than pregnancy.
159: The number of late teen boys at my school killed in car accidents was very high and much higher than for the girls.
157: well, naturally not. and it's not as though it's true in every case. but I had a some fucked up addict boyfriends who veered between emotionless, opaque hostility and avid sexual desire that they almost seemed to feel annoyed by, like there was something wrong with me in eliciting it in them, and I'm preeeeetty sure where I got the idea that that was OK.
152: Yeah, that has always been my take as well.
159: sure, getting raped, for example. and then getting pregnant.
Ditto on 152. My sister was horrific as a teenager in ways that code very strongly as female. You wouldn't really have judged my parents (and particularly my mother) if there'd been a homicide. I'm pretty sure that sort of temporary borderline personality thing is what people have in mind.
...in ways that code very strongly as female.
Does that mean being extremely sullen and argumentative with her mother? Or that she stabbed people with a pink knife?
"Hello Kitty ... Goodbye, Mommy!" [O Fortuna plays.]
re: 165
The former, but it was pretty bad. Although if she'd had access to a floral chib, she might have used it. I can't go into all the gory details, but I do remember her slapping my mum once, and my mum quietly leaving the room. A tap running. Returning with a large glass of water. And pouring it over my sister's head.
I also remember her jumping on me and pulling a chunk of hair out.* But generally it was just histrionics, and vicious insults designed to zero-in on my parents weak-spots in the nastiest way.
* we fought as kids, but this was past the point where i) she was far too old for the behaviour to be acceptable, and ii) I was big enough that it wasn't advisable, either.
When her time comes, my daughter can have all the sex she wants. I'm reserving my shotgun for anyone who tries to teach her to drive a car.
168: that's straight fucked-up. I wouldn't regard that as typical teen girl behavior at all. sneaking out at night to get wasted with boys, that's more like it.
168 - oh, the vicious insult approach. Suffering that one currently from my devil child. She's been practising for years, there was a bit of a lull, but turning 13 ramped up the evil.
Having 13 and 15 year old daughters means I have been reading this thread making incoherent noises of agreement but nothing useful to add. No boy- or girlfriends on the horizon yet. The 13 year old told us last week that she thought her opinions were more important than her friendships - I hope this means she will be as uncompromising when she starts having romantic relationships.
119: he wants to be gay because girls are too noisy
Somebody clearly hasn't been to a gay bar yet.
I don't hang out in gay bars as often as I should, but I always thought the stereotype was that too many gay bars have groups of straight women coming in to dance and/or get wasted, who are shrieking hysterically and generally acting as a sort of blanket cock block.
but needless to say ain't nobody sassed my mom at all, since it was a throwing down the stairs-worthy error. not by her, of course.
Maybe it means she wants to work on a tabloid.
going to bed now but I never responded to thorn in 2; I didn't know mara had been abused, exactly. sorry if I missed it earlier but I just wanted to say I'm really, really sorry, and I think that her inability to remember it later will be a blessing, even if it still affects her. although I have one memory from between when I was one and two, so anything's possible. but generally people don' remember much at all that happened before they were 4, even though of course the environment they grow up in has a lot to do with their character development. getting her so early, I'm sure you can love her back to a safe place.
172: there's good music at the end up! and it's open till 8am! and they had hot boys dancing in cages sometimes! cut a sister some slack.
too many gay bars have groups of straight women coming in to dance and/or get wasted, who are shrieking hysterically
This kind of happens in straight bars too. There are some near my office which are frequented by hen parties, which are about as welcome as CS grenades.
96: as a parent of young kids you hear a lot that girls are easier when they're young but more difficult when they get to their teens. why? not because they're borrowing your car and going drunk driving more than boys; if anything they do so less. it's because you must guard their precious virginity at all times.
I don't think this is the right interpretation, at least not right half the time. Between what AB has always said about her teenagerhood, and what parents of girls of varying ages have told me, the reason girls get (ostensibly) harder is that they become emotional and confrontational and impossible to talk to. Teenage boys aren't exactly a treat, but they are more likely to be sullen and silent than to scream "You don't understand me I hate you at the dinner table."
I have no real sense of how much these generalizations are fact-based, and how much those facts are culture-driven, but the point is that I don't think the worry about teen girls is all, or even primarily, about protecting their virginity.
Sometimes they were dancing in the cages. Sometimes they just paced back and forth with a haunted look in their eyes, a look that showed they were focusing on something only they could see, a past where they were free. Sometimes, they looked at you as if you had the power to release them or at least the ability to explain why some men are trapped and others can leave.
124: She asked me if that's real anyplace, because it's got nothing to do with the social world she sees in her school
The only place I've heard of exactly that model is in medium-sized suburban schools. Any relatively large HS (>1800 students or so) is just going to be way too big to have a ruling clique. Very small schools (
My ex had the experience of going to a mid-sized suburban HS, where she was persecuted as a "lesbian" to the point of developing an eating disorder (with some help from Mom of course) and an aptitude for serial monogamy that is really weird to contemplate now that she's settled down.
If you're really worried about "predatory" teenage boys, wouldn't the best solution just be more cougars?
124: She asked me if that's real anyplace, because it's got nothing to do with the social world she sees in her school
The only place I've heard of exactly that model is in medium-sized suburban schools. Any relatively large HS (1800 students or more) is just going to be way too big to have a ruling clique. Very small schools (400 or less), especially if their Jr. High feeder schools are also small, mean that everyone knows each other too well for the absolute worst kind of bullying to go on. City schools, aside from usually being pretty big, don't have as much emphasis on HS as the be-all, end-all of teen social life, and rural schools, in addition to often being small, wind up having cliques that are much more friendly and mutually supportive. This is all drawing from my exp. and that of various friends here in the Midwest so, you know, if you don't live in flyover country with the hogs and the corn and Stephen Bloom, mileage may vary considerably.
My ex had the experience of going to a mid-sized suburban HS, where she was persecuted as a "lesbian" to the point of developing an eating disorder and an aptitude for serial monogamy that is really weird to contemplate now that she's settled down.
If you're really worried about "predatory" teenage boys, wouldn't the best solution just be more cougars?
[re-posting as I stupidly had less than and greater than signs in the first draft and they ate a bunch of text, just like the crocodiles they are said to resemble.]
I may be being too hard on her mother, I don't know. Certainly some of the eating disorder ideology responsibility could be laid at her feet, but it was probably the mean girls that were the sufficient condition.
176: I don't and won't talk online about what few details I know. I wouldn't be surprised if she remembers some of whatever happened thanks to her hypervigilance. I do believe she had clearish memories of her dad, who was out of her life by the time she was 15 months old, and any abuse probably postdates that. It was just scary and sad to see how she responded to male yelling, like once being triggered when we were at a football-watching party and immediately going into her soothing/disarming routine with the stranger whose cheering scared her after a moment of pure panic. She's doing really well, of course, but I think part of her progress on that front is due to not having adult men or teen boys in the home so that she could let her guard down and relax.
174 - she is interested in journalism .... wonder if I need to worry ....
The statement came about because she was disgusted at the idea that some people might be a lot more racist in their minds than they let on, because they have learnt that such opinions do not go down well in their social circle. Racists AND cowards!
I'm a protective father. It is in my nature. I avoided the "sex=bad" meme entirely. Instead, I told the boys seeing my girls "You hurt her, I kill you." I said it with conviction, and not because I'm a good actor. I meant it.
I figured that covered all the bases, and I avoided implying that sex was bad.
If/when my daughters get engaged I'll say the same thing to their fiances.
Teenage boys aren't exactly a treat, but they are more likely to be sullen and silent than to scream "You don't understand me I hate you["] at the dinner table."
My brother and I were, and, honestly, continue to be, exceptionally sullen, moody sons of bitches, but we did more than our share of shouting and throwing stuff.
124: She asked me if that's real anyplace, because it's got nothing to do with the social world she sees in her school
The only place I've heard of exactly that model is in medium-sized suburban schools.
My HS (suburban, ~1,200 students) fit this model reasonably well. Not as extreme as it's usually described in YA novels, but the basic structure was there. I think a big part of it was having adults around who were obsessed with sports.
At the end of the year awards ceremony my senior year, the principal droned on and on for about 15 minutes before presenting the Athlete of the Year award (what an honor, how great the recipient was & etc.). Then, more or less as an afterthought "Oh, and BTW our valedictorian is X".
(Later I heard that a bunch of the teachers sent him a letter complaining about how inappropriate it was. Good for them.)
187: Well, I did say likely.
As I say, the cultural elements of that stereotype/cliche are impossible to unpack. It seems entirely likely that the median girl undergoing adolescence is having a biologically different experience than the median boy (different timing, different mix of hormones), but how society impacts how that's acted out, and then how society tells us to view the acting out, are just layers upon layers.
A lot of it seems to depend on father-son and mother-daughter relations, for various and obvious reasons. My sense of things is that uptight/domineering fathers are reasonably likely to have fraught relations with their sons, while practically any mothering style can end up in difficulties with daughters. My sister had big issues with our mom, who was stern but loving (and with whom I never had the least problem), while AB had moderate issues with her mom, who wasn't stern in the least, and also loving.
51: Yes, that's a better way of putting it. I seem to be using the word "weird" to mean not "incomprehensible" but "incorrect by proper moral standards."
My HS (suburban, ~1,200 students) fit this model reasonably well. Not as extreme as it's usually described in YA novels, but the basic structure was there. I think a big part of it was having adults around who were obsessed with sports.
This is me, too. I was quite surprised to learn that this wasn't universal, since I think it's also a fairly universal theme in pop culture.
Where I was, there were enough geeky weirdos around that I had plenty of company, and we were, for all practical purposes, beyond the social reach of the elite kids.
And yeah, I think Natilo nails it in 182. My HS GF's HS had a significant streak of it, and they were very proud of their football program. But it was also ~1600 kids, and it's not like they all cared about what Johnny Football thought of them.
It probably helped that it was a fairly uniformly UMC school, such that they were all too entitled to let the popular kids keep them down. OTOH, my HS was much more egalitarian (her school probably ranged from 80-99% income; mine more like 40-95, maybe even 90), which meant that no one cared about any theoretical elite, because they were a tiny minority (and many of them were just dorky honors students, like me). It was sort of funny seeing occasional athletes (esp. transfers) who clearly thought that they were going to be Johnny Football Prom King, lording it over the masses, only to discover that the masses couldn't care less. The smart football players were the ones who partied with the metal kids.
My entire high school would fit on two school buses. The students, not the building.
186: I am not a protective father, but I hope you've talked to your daughters about how they would want you to respond if they were ever dealing with intimate violence. I think it's particularly disempowering for women (since I haven't known men this has happened to) whose disclosures to a trusted man about sexual assault leads immediately to violence against the perpetrator. If you're really worried about their daugthers, I hope you'll respect their agency and ability to make decisions about their own lives.
I'm anti-vigilantism anyway, but this is one that hits close to home. Oh, and parents of teens should probably talk to them about how to deal with a friend or girlfriend or boyfriend's disclosure of sexual assault or abuse. When the reaction is bad, it can do a lot of damage to a lot of people.
124
She asked me if that's real anyplace, because it's got nothing to do with the social world she sees in her school
I'd bet that that Mean Girls thing is based in reality, but it's a always a huge simplification just because of how hard it is for fiction to be as complicated as reality. For example, the average high school has 750 kids. (Data is out of date, but this is rigorous enough for comments.) And then teachers and other staff and family members are also relevant. No TV show has ever had that many named characters in four seasons. (Probably...)
So in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, say, there was one "popular" clique, four girls always walking around together, and IIRC there was one change in it during the entire high school part of the show - Cordelia getting kicked out of it for falling in with the Scoobies. In real life you'd have multiple popular cliques and/or a much bigger, looser popular tier. And in real life it would change much more often. Also, most deliberate bullying isn't aimed at the poor unfashionable nerd, it's aimed at the people just outside that clique. The poor unfashionable nerds just have to deal with more subtle, maybe even unintentional ostracization.
But like most people here, that's mostly not my own experience I'm talking about, so maybe I'm completely wrong.
Over Christmas my family watched Dazed and Confused. I had never seen it before, but my sister had and recommended it highly. I was aghast at some parts at the hazing and downright brutality in it and how it was supported by the adults. My sister accepted it as a harmless fact of life and said I shouldn't worry about it so much. It occurred to me later on that, as a good-looking athletic girl from a relatively wealthy family, she was more likely to be one of the bullies than not.
I didn't pay an enormous amount of attention to the cliques in my high school, as the one I belonged to was sort of a default (roughly, kids who would otherwise have sat by themselves in the cafeteria)*, and implied a certain disconnection from social pressure, positive or negative. There were definitely jocks, and smart types, and arty stoners, but I'm not sure they were terribly tightly defined, and there weren't a lot of fights, for instance. It was also a relatively large (1800+) public school full of high-achiever types, which almost certainly tamped things down.
* This clique still exists, as I learned when the son of a friend started attending my alma mater, only now they have a name for themselves: the "lasers", because they don't want to self-describe as "losers".
(roughly, kids who would otherwise have sat by themselves in the cafeteria)
Unless your district paid too much for a huge lunch room, the number of kids who can sit by themselves in the cafeteria should be limited by space.
197 continued: on the other hand, I did eventually (and to my great surprise) find myself spending time with a highly specific, oddly well-defined group: the Republicans. There were about ten of them, maybe, and they all had rich parents. We ended up with weird areas of overlapping interest, as they had started (and funded) an alternative school paper in response to the (really quite good-hearted) mushy do-gooderism of the regular, sponsored school paper, and it gave me an outlet for 1. puerile jokes and 2. semi-inept graphic design. Later, we made the headmaster resign. Odd, odd, odd.
198: well, right, so they end up bunched together, and eventually somebody suggests playing Hearts for money, and next thing you know you're breaking into vacant classrooms in disused wings for mammoth Car Wars sessions and wearing a satin Strategic Games Club letterman jacket.
My school didn't let you letter in anything stupider than band.
195: Thorn, my comments were made in private to the boys. I didn't say that to the girls, because then they might be hesitant to tell me about any problems or concerns they had. My girls know that I am sympathetically supportive of them. I'm a good listener. I don't stifle them, I empower them, but I also have their backs.
My eldest did her undergrad study abroad in Kenya right during their latest revolution. She's currently attending grad school at Columbia, studying International Relations, which is a BIG DEAL for us. She may become our first female president, unless someone beats her to it, but first she wants to go fix Somalia.
I did all kinds of pointless stuff (musical, one act, speech contests, student government, school paper, yearbook, raising money for poor people, academic do-das, etc.) and never got a letter.
I was in the queer/RPG/activist/theater nerd clique, but only on sufferance. It would be nice to imagine that everyone was really mean, even in that most despised of social groupings, but really it was that I was pretty awful -- violent, paranoid, neurotic, cold and unfeeling -- so I can see why people were not too crazy about having me hanging around.
But then I got into anarchism and everything was horrible there too, socially, but at least it was different from HS, and a lot of the ostracizing was over my head.
A lot of my obsession with loyalty and betrayal probably comes out of these experiences.
201: oh, neither did mine. This was a one-off that somebody's older brother had made, that I ended up with.
You could letter in band and debate and even got a letter (with a little lamp of knowledge on it!) for honor roll. I can still picture the (one) kid who actually went and bought himself the jacket onto which to sew his honor roll letter.
(The debate letter had a little gavel on it!)
I lettered in Debate (Lincoln-Douglas) and Quiz Bowl. And our team got first place (by a ridiculously huge margin) in the Strib's annual current events contest. Beat that, nerds!
and a lot of the ostracizing was over my head
Is it an unusual head in terms of size or shape?
I'm going to get a letter jacket for my 25th reunion.
We didn't even have debate, just speech contests. I gave a detailed, well-researched presentation on nuclear reactors. If someone would have had the "It's not Nucular" talk with me before the contest, I might have done well.
209: I do have an unusually large and knobby head. Thick, Neanderthalic brow ridge, corresponding huge bone ridge in the back, high forehead, big ears, etc.
Mostly though it was just along the lines of "Hey, we're done with the meeting, let's go to the dive bar down the block! Oh, sorry Natilo, see you next week."
I think we had debate. I always wanted to do it, but could never figure out how to sign up. (It probably involved going to some kind of "activity fair" or "club sign up day" or similar.)
I originally joined debate because you got to miss school and go on lots of overnight trips where you'd stay in college dorms. I'd sneak out and get shitfaced at cheezy dining club parties, etc.
I'm going to get a letter jacket for my 25th reunion.
Is that like getting an MA from Oxbridge?
216: No, I just mean I'll go down to the shop that sells letter jackets, buy one, put my letter on it (and probably the little Debate & Quiz Bowl tabs) and wear it to the reunion. Ironically.
If someone would have had the "It's not Nucular" talk with me before the contest, I might have done well.
I have no idea why they let George W Bush advise that club.
"Hey, we're done with the meeting, let's go to the dive bar down the block! Oh, sorry Natilo, see you next week."
This rings a college bell for me. Some of it was (I think) simply down to me not drinking (why invite a teetotaler to a college drinking party?), and I don't think it was malicious, but it was a bit off-putting to realize that my ostensible friends were getting together without so much as mentioning it to me.
OTOH, I was also alarmed to realize that my name came up when I wasn't around. I was pretty deep in my own head, I guess. Which is funny, because I was gregarious.
218: The debate judge's comment was, "I don't care how Dan Rather says it...." And my dad watched CBS news, so the judge was probably correct about the source, directly or indirectly.
OTOH, I was also alarmed to realize that my name came up when I wasn't around.
I'm always surprised to learn that people have discussed me when I'm not there, and that they have opinions about me at all, really. In related news, I don't have any knowledge of the social hierarchy at my high school.
220: "The debate judge's comment was 'I don't care how Nosflow says it...', and my dad hung out on Unfogged, so the judge was probably correct about the source, directly or indirectly."
--Moby's kid in 20 or 30 years
My kid should probably try to get out of high school well before 20 years from now.
I wanted to post on this Marcotte thread but you need to get a ticket and I didn't really care enough to build a post on my own blog, so I'm recycling the comment here.
I've always loved that Nik Cohn story. As a kid up north in the 90s I never really believed dance music had a history in the States. I mean, Pearl Jam? Please. I knew about the northern soul tradition and got plenty of Motown at home but there was a historical black hole from about 1977.
..
Beyond tales of my own ignorance, the UK has never had the "err, dirty rhythm music, teh horror" thing. I suspect this says more about the cultural differences than either side would want to let on.
Of course, it would take a few more years for him to bitch about it on the internet. I see what you mean.
223: No, see, that would be your kid relating this anecdote on some medium that we can't even begin to imagine -- holograms that you can only see if you're dosed with synthetic pufferfish venom or something.
Lettering in band always seemed kind of like cheating, since you could join the marching band as a freshman and earn the letter by the end of football season that year. I nerded out instead and got my first letter in programming contests.
Beyond tales of my own ignorance, the UK has never had the "err, dirty rhythm music, teh horror" thing.
Well there was the whole Mods/Rockers thing.
226: I'm thinking Geocities will come back.
Well there was the whole Mods/Rockers thing.
True, but the people who quaked in their boots about that had no idea what either tribe listened to and couldn't have cared less.
I thought some of the resistance to Caribbean immigration in Britain's cities took the form of hatred of reggae/ska music. Maybe this was just an assumption.
But later the skinheads took to ska and started beating up Pakistanis instead. Comity!
Ttam can tell you more, but it took the form of love of reggae and ska music, just with violent hatred and loathing of black people, left-wing activists, gays, anyone getting in the way, etc.
"very well I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes" is so much more a British sentiment than an American one.
When I was there, I remember SWP having a Reggae Against the Nazis concert of some sort. I never saw any Nazis around, but I didn't look before so I can't vouch for the effectiveness of reggae at reducing the scope or incidence of Nazism. Both reggae and Nazism are effective at reducing the incidence and scope of me being nearby.
Yeah, what Alex said in 233. One of the big contradictions of UK street culture from at least the 60s has been the co-existence of a deep love for, and vast knowledge of, black US and Jamaican music with an antipathy to actual-in-the-UK black people within one and the same subcultures. The skinhead scene being just one manifestation of that.
re: 236
The big Rock Against Racism movement of the late 70s was, notoriously, sparked by Eric fucking Clapton. And Bowie, for that matter, although he (unlike Clapton) hasn't continued to profess the same views.
I think I would have gone to see either of them.
Tripp, leaving aside your masculine bravado (and yes, I'm sure you can beat me up), I wonder a few things: Don't you think getting hurt (though not necessarily hurt) is part of growing up, part of becoming a fully realized and mature adult? Also, don't you think these young men share with your daughter(s) what you've said to them, the threats you've made? Actually, don't you want at least one of these young men eventually to have a stronger connection with your daughter(s) than you do? And wouldn't such a connection require that young man to share with your daughter(s) what you've said to him? And upon sharing what you've said, don't you worry that your daughter(s) will feel, if not embarrassed by what you've said, like your having said such a thing suggested to her partner that you didn't trust her to take care of herself, to sort the wheat from the chaff man-wise? And finally, don't you worry that you're tacitly telling these young men that violence is a reasonable thing to have in a man's toolkit, and given that, that you might, at some level, be making your daughter(s) less rather than more safe?
Well, a British Rock For Bigotry concert could line up Bowie, Morrissey, Ian Curtis, Clapton...and that's before you break out the misogynists and homophobes.
Clapton and Bowie, or the Anti-racism gigs? (full disclosure: I did all of them).
Elvis Costello wrote Night Rally (Armed Forces) for Rock Against Racism.
Also, I misread Emerson's 89 as including the phrase "sexy Puritan", which made me think, "Finally, the right woman for Flippanter!"
In 1992, I confused Van Morrison and Morrissey. I'd never heard of the Smiths. This caused all kinds of laughter among various British people present. I didn't even have google to figure out what I did wrong.
and that's before you break out the misogynists and homophobes.
You've got to do that, you need Shaun Ryder, homophobe by appointment.
Homophobe by appointment to HM the Queen?
No, by appointment in the pub with any journalist who wants a really crass homophobic quote on the cheap.
Also, HM the Queen is right. Her/His Majesty was a style invented for the Holy Roman Emperor and pinched by Henry VIII. HRH The Prince of Wales and other princes/princesses of the blood are the only ones with "Royal" in their titles.
I think Tripp is blustering, but 240 is mostly absurd:don't you worry that you're tacitly telling these young men that violence is a reasonable thing to have in a man's toolkit
Because there's no other social source they might already have possibly learned this from, right? Come on. Come. On.
What's Prince Philip?
A senile old racist git. Or do you mean how do you address him?
|| Dead common, as they's have said on that old BBC comedy.
|>
His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth, Baron Greenwich, Royal Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Knight of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, Grand Master and First and Principal Knight Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Member of the Order of Merit, Companion of the Order of Australia, Extra Companion of the Queen's Service Order, Royal Chief of the Order of Logohu, Canadian Forces Decoration, Lord of Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council, Privy Councillor of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada, Personal Aide-de-Camp to Her Majesty. (Copied and pasted from wikipedia). Also, Lord High Admiral of the United Kingdom.
253: There's telling as in informing someone of new information and telling as in endorsing.
Phil should have raised an army and tried to make the Greek title stick.
Invading Denmark really seems too much, but given Greek history since WWI, he may have been in improvement.
Knight of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle
Huh?! I would have guessed that was Eeyore.
Phil actively renounced his Greek and Danish titles and claims at some point, probably having to do with being commissioned in the Royal Navy. Perhapes counterintuitively, he seems to have been an extremely capable officer, unlike his father in law, who was apparently barely competent.
238: And there I go learning something.
Baron Greenwich
This sounds as if he should have to go around festooned with clocks, octants, and telescopes.
Tripp's spiel is a good way of sorting those who either don't take him at all seriously or are pretty sure they'd could take the fool from those who will stop dating his daughter.
||
Random tweet: "Today has been declared National Sound Engineer Day. 12-1-12 (one two, one, one two)"
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The Garters and the Thistles need to fight out which is actually the most noble Order.
264: Right. I'm suggesting that he should have been raising an army before WWII ended. Perhaps hiding up in he hills with the resistance and building up polis cred.
Oh, I thought they were differentiating themselves from other, sleazier, orders of the Garter or Thistle.
He couldn't have got a discharge from the British Navy in wartime.
272: He could have planned ahead. By 1939, it wasn't that hard to figure out that Greek governments were really unstable and that he might have an opportunity if he waited.
I've been looking at this and I had not realized Greece had a king until 1974.
256: $431.25 is the going rate for nipple-twisting? How did they settle on that number?
I was just looking through monarchical styles and discovered, to my surprise since I've studied the place to some small extent, that Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy.
Couldn't they also have claimed Hanover? There would have been all kinds of nitpicky little technical problems with that, but might makes right.
I think just Schleswig-Holstein and parts of Denmark that managed to stay Denmark.
The Hanover part would have to come by marriage.
All of Saxony and Denmark, then.
Wait, Bowie was racist? I thought all the Thin White Duke stuff got retracted, apologised-for, and chalked up to glib theatrics and too much cocaine years ago.
I'm only going back to his grandparents. I don't know about before.
Royal Chief of the Order of Logohu
How does one join? (I'm imagining it as an order of copy editors devoted to the Elder Gods.)
282: I checked wikipedia, because I find I'd also prefer Bowie not to have been racist, and it looks like the whole thing was a couple of Thin White Duke "Yay, Hitler!" comments. Which, tacky, horrible, don't do that, but not really a history of racism.
Everybody gets three pro-Hitler comments before it becomes a trend.
Observation: The Danish royal family is better looking that the British one.
Re 282
Yeah, as far as I know with Bowie it was a couple of coke addled comments in an interview and one photo, all since repudiated. Clapton on the other hand says that Enoch Powell was basically right, to this day.
Observation: The Danish royal family is better looking that the British one.
Counter-observation: This is not objectively difficult.
Okay, fine then. I wonder what service Bill Clinton rendered Papua New Guinea to have been made an Honorary Grand Commander of the Order of Logohu.
Funny who you feel affectionate about. As I've said a bunch of times, I'm not a big music fan, and I generally don't get involved in caring much about celebrities. But I find I would be sad if I had to think that Bowie was an importantly bad person. Which is ridiculous.
I wonder what service Bill Clinton rendered Papua New Guinea to have been made an Honorary Grand Commander of the Order of Logohu.
I expect the Prime Minister of PNG could be made a Kentucky Colonel or something if she/he let it be known it would give him/her a buzz.
A friend of mine avidly follows the Scandinavian prinsesser.
289: When you are working with so many of the same genes, it can't be too easy.
No, Bowie isn't an importantly bad person, he spent twenty years shitfaced and lost the plot occasionally. John Lennon said equally awful things when he was in a bad mood and god forbid we should hold them against him.
Everybody gets three pro-Hitler comments before it becomes a trend.
That should come as a relief to this gal.
Eric Clapton:
Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight? If so, please put up your hands. Wogs I mean, I'm looking at you. Where are you? I'm sorry but some fucking wog...Arab grabbed my wife's bum, you know? Surely got to be said, yeah this is what all the fucking foreigners and wogs over here are like, just disgusting, that's just the truth, yeah. So where are you? Well wherever you all are, I think you should all just leave. Not just leave the hall, leave our country. You fucking (indecipherable). I don't want you here, in the room or in my country. Listen to me, man! I think we should vote for Enoch Powell. Enoch's our man. I think Enoch's right, I think we should send them all back. Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white. I used to be into dope, now I'm into racism. It's much heavier, man. Fucking wogs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs. Britain is becoming overcrowded and Enoch will stop it and send them all back. The black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans and fucking (indecipherable) don't belong here, we don't want them here. This is England, this is a white country, we don't want any black wogs and coons living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man. We are a white country. I don't want fucking wogs living next to me with their standards. This is Great Britain, a white country, what is happening to us, for fuck's sake? We need to vote for Enoch Powell, he's a great man, speaking truth. Vote for Enoch, he's our man, he's on our side, he'll look after us. I want all of you here to vote for Enoch, support him, he's on our side. Enoch for Prime Minister! Throw the wogs out! Keep Britain white!
One of the Habsburgs had 16 ancestors in the generation in which he would have had 64 with no interbreeding.
Bowie claims to have no memory at all of really long periods, up to and including the recording of entire albums. He also, iirc, had a Crowley period.
Oh, Eric Clapton can be a terrible person all he likes -- I always get him mixed up with Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins anyway.
299: That's got to be entertaining. "Huh, that song's kind of catchy. When'd I record that?"
Funny who you feel affectionate about.
I had a period of several year in the mid nineties when I had an odd affection for Tom Cruise and was casually hoping that he wasn't actually as crazy as everybody said that he was.
Turned out that I was wrong on that one.
To the OP, 137 basically describes me, if you omit both the sex and the trauma. I remember looking at my friends relationships in HS and deciding, more or less explicitly, that trying to have sex was a poor decision from a cost/benefits perspective.
Which, in retrospect, doesn't seem like a bad decision, but perhaps a little bit odd.
299: Yeah, I think Low is just completely gone for him.
Teraz, we all have the occasional slip of the tongue.
Bowie claims to have no memory at all of really long periods, up to and including the recording of entire albums.
I'm told that he says this in private, as well, so that it's not just a pose to dodge questions, Bowie's apparently bizarrely humble in a kind of "holy shit, someone took over my body for a few years and did that? Who'd a thunk it?" kind of way. I'm also told that Clapton (who was super drunk when he made that comment, but still) is just kind of a generally unhappy guy who's got an ego but hard on himself and personally very decent to those around him. Probably still a racist, though.
296: Aw come on. She's merely guilty of being interesting - which, granted, is anathema for someone in her position. But still ...
Also, I was considering leaving Unfogged permanently after comment 60, seemed like a good way to go out. Couldn't do it. Damn you addiction and need for procrastination.
307: I was certainly wondering where you went.
For my son and his musical friends Clapton is the international standard for what you don't want to be (yuppy division). They associate him with Starbucks and fern bars. This as based on his most recent 2 or 3 decades, but they won't listen to the early stuff either.
297: Wow, I wasn't aware of this. Was the protagonist from The Wall based on Clapton? ("Who let all this riff-raff into the room?")
Clapton ... is just kind of a generally unhappy guy who's got an ego but hard on himself and personally very decent to those around him. Probably still a racist, though.
This is the consensus. He's sober these days though, and he could walk it back, but he doesn't.
My girl Hedy Lamarr did have dinner with Hitler and Mussolini. Two books about her! Inventress of frequency-hopping!
309 -- yeah, I'm not a Clapton fan at all, don't like his playing style and god damn "Tears From Heaven" but at this point I'd say he's underrated. I like the Delaney & Bonnie album he's on a lot.
A lot of people I do rate, rate Clapton. Oddly enough he has a lot of African American friends. Completely inconsistent.
297: Ugly as the original rant was, I think his recent comments are actually more damning. The rant might have been chalked up to id-boiling-over drunkenness if he'd just left it alone. But his subsequent Powell-wasn't-a-racist schtick is the kind of carefully-crafted deceptiveness that only dedicated crypto-racists bother with.
312. I'd rather have dinner with Hedy Lamarr than anybody else whose name has come up on this thread. Really interesting person. (And not hot at all, honest)
My guess is it's probably more old guy leave-me-alone ism than actually deeply considered hardcore racism. But I don't want to defend the guy and there's no defending his comments.
Also, in news of interest primarily to me, we're now on Day 3 of the internet thinking I'm an Indian woman. I guess I shouldn't have clicked on the sites, but literally every ad I'm getting right now says something like "This Lohri -- Ready, Steady, Glow!" Still no idea what's going on.
I guess I shouldn't have clicked on the sites
Oh, the volumes left unsaid here.
Wow, while reading up on Rock Against Racism and Bowie's Thin White Duke persona, I discovered Metapedia, which appears to be where the Neo-Nazis go to play Let's Pretend.
My guess is it's probably more old guy leave-me-alone ism than actually deeply considered hardcore racism.
I am always impressed with how many ways there are to mitigate overt racism. Did you know that Ron Paul is not really a racist? That's only his signature on a racist rant - it's not something he really believes.
So, what's the deal with Ian Curtis' racism? I hadn't heard about it, and a casual wikiing is unenlightening.
Yeah, I'm not defending the guy. He's not really a political figure though, just a crotchety old ex-drunk rock star who's had a weird life, so I'm inclined to cut him a little more slack in a "that's just grandpa" kind of way. Maybe wrongly.
"This Lohri -- Ready, Steady, Glow!"
Without looking it up, my guess is that it's a skin lightener.
Clapton's racism is of a specific kind which I think may be specifically British - he doesn't hate people of colour per se. He wishes them every success as long as they aren't living in England, interfering with his Tolkienesque fantasies of the Shire. No sense of history, no awareness of exploitation, but able to convince himself that Powell, and himself, aren't racists, because everybody would get on fine as long as different cultures stayed at arms length from each other.
I think this derives from the self-justification for formal empires. It's quite widespread over here.
Clapton's racism is of a specific kind
I have said here before that I sometimes think that we should have 30 words for racism, just like the apocryphal eskimos and their snow.
But I will also say that when I have tried this theory out on black friends, they're not impressed. They seem to think it's all pretty much the same thing.
racism is of a specific kind which I think may be specifically British
I'd say this is also the predominant native (anglo) Californian strain of racism, as distinct from the classic Southern US or Northern US variants, though those are also found here. The focus is not at all on the defects of people of color per se, just their intrusion on the lost peaceful utopia. My guess is that it crops up in places with strong senses of a lost, but better, past and heavy immigration pressures.
Yet again we see the narcissism of small differences.
Further to 326, you can see this particular strain of racist argument put into book length form by old frenemy/laughingstock of the liberal blogosphere Victor David Hanson here.
They seem to think it's all pretty much the same thing.
If you're black and not interested in engaging with it, I guess it is. Depends whether you think it's worth trying to argue the individual out of their ideas. You can smack any type of racist upside the head the same way, but if you think there's a glimmer of hope somewhere in there, you have to try to understand what they pass off as ideas.
327 is correct. When I was young and on a mission, I would have cared much more about this sort of shit. Now I'm old and (re)tired, I'm on team fuck the lot of them.
321: Not so much racism per se, as just being a reactionary/young-fogey arsehole. He insisted that his wife vote Conservative, ffs.
For my son and his musical friends Clapton is the international standard for what you don't want to be (yuppy division). They associate him with Starbucks and fern bars.
- this is of course very true, although the other day I walked into the lobby of the Grosvenor House Hotel and found it playing the Stone Roses.
If you're black and not interested in engaging with it, I guess it is.
Teo in 327 catches the point, I think.
They seem to think it's all pretty much the same thing.
Because white people have Neanderthal genes and they evolved in an envirnoment where nuanced forms of discrimination were needed?
336. Come on, constructing a typology of racists and trying to knock sense into their tiny minds is a luxury available to activists and white people. If you're affected by racism day in, day out every time you leave home, you don't care why somebody justifies looking funny at you to themselves.
Deliberately misinterpreting an otherwise clear comment to make a stupid joke is sort of a hobby of mine.
I tried cycling and tennis, but they didn't take.
329: It's rarely worthwhile to engage racists about their "ideas." The varying rationales, schemae and justifications are typically just masks to obscure much simpler and more inchoate impulses. If someone shows signs of being able to get past that impulse, the key is to focus on that rather than mucking about with the niceties of the ideology.
I do think a detailed typology of the tactics used for masking, obfuscating or justifying racism -- and of the telltales that make these tactics distinguishable from whatever economic or social or religious or humanitarian critique they try to masquerade as -- would be a useful thing. Not for dealing with the racists, but for keeping otherwise uninformed parties from being taken in by them. Islamophobia has capitalized on a lot of practical naivete about these kinds of tactics, for instance.
326: It's a pretty common theme in many justifications for racism that the racist declares they don't hate anyone, just as long as everybody keeps to their proper place. With immigrants, it's "if they'd only stay in their own countries;" with former slaves or conquered populaces it's "they stick to their own and we stick to our own and everybody's happy." Again, usual excuses masking a standard pattern of hostility: the Other that one genuinely didn't have a problem with could not be construed as an "intruder" at odds with a lost, peaceful utopia. But so long as they can keep interaction with the Other to small, selective doses that they control, they can keep the mask in place.
253: um, okay. Also, what LB said. But mostly, um, okay.
It's a pretty common theme in many justifications for racism that the racist declares they don't hate anyone, just as long as everybody keeps to their proper place
So clearly, a white English boy should never be allowed to meddle with Delta blues.
Sexual mores are one aspect that makes me really glad I was raised by Scandinavians (not in Scandinavia, alas, so I missed out on the free healthcare and other socialist utopia perks). Despite having weirdly religious (for Scandinavians) parents, I totally missed the puritan craziness that characterizes the US view of sex. Even though I've grown up in this country, I was sheltered enough from pop culture that I still have lots of WTF moments when I realize how most Americans approach sex and sexuality. For me, it's kind of a "if it's safe and you'd enjoy it, why not?" sort of attitude. There's also a more pervasive sense of sexual naturalness and at the same time less freaking out and oversexualization of everything, so being naked and hanging around with members of the opposite sex in say, a sauna or lake, could be sexual but it didn't have to be.
I think what's really important is for women to view sex from the perspective of their own pleasure and safety. This sounds super obvious, but I think in the US women are taught to be sexy (or chaste), but never to think about their own pleasure or their own experiences as sexual beings, like being sexy is for men, and for women pleasure comes from being desired. The whole, "will he respect you in the morning" thing falls into this: why the fuck shouldn't he care if YOU respect HIM in the morning? (And what does it say that a guy doesn't respect you because you slept with him? doesn't reflect well on him, now, does it?) Like, women are supposed to focus all our energy on how people will judge us rather than on, say, judging ourselves, or not giving a fuck.
But I will also say that when I have tried this theory out on black friends, they're not impressed.
Wait, which kinds of black friends?
344 sounds good to me. Might be hard to put into practice for non-Scandinavian parents, though.
Clapton's racism is of a specific kind which I think may be specifically British - he doesn't hate people of colour per se. He wishes them every success as long as they aren't living in England, interfering with his Tolkienesque fantasies of the Shire.
This reminds me of a standard line about the difference between northern racism and southern racism in the US. In the south, blacks can get as close to whites as they like, as long as they don't get to big. In the north, they can get as big as they like, as long as they don't too close.
I find this sort of generalization quite useful not in arguing against racists, but in predicting what will set them off. My grandfather, for instance, fit the pattern of a southern racist. (Although he was actually born in the north and lived most of his life in northern Virginia.)
Except maybe Alexandria, but even then probably not when your grandfather was un-old.
Northern Virginia is the south.
Only in a literal sense.
Bah! The Mississippi Delta: Subjectively Yankee?
I admit that NoVa isn't the Delta, by any stretch, but it's still the South.
I resolve to treat my daughters' boyfriends with every bit as much civility as I would extend to any other crass, boring, arrogant spotty little jumped-up twat who might happen to enter my house. In order to send the right message to my girls about their sexuality, I will make a point of continuing the death threats long after the relationship has ended.
I've gotten only far enough in the thread to endorse 3 and 4, but fucking seriously. Dear people who see pictures of my daughters,* could you please refrain from telling me how much trouble I'm going to be in in a few years? They're eight years old, okay? Kthxbye.
*There's one in the flickr pool. Yes, I know they're cute and likely to be very attractive young women. But they're children!
I grew up in northern Virginia (just a few blocks from my grandfather) and it definitely is more the South than similar DC suburbs on the Maryland side of the river. Also, reactionaries like Grandfather had plenty of company. (Again, even more company than he would have had in similar bedroom communities on the other side of the Potomac.)
Still, I never felt like I was in The South the way I did living in Auburn or Lubbock.
Bah! The Mississippi Delta: Subjectively Yankee?
You find blue counties all across the South where the population is majority African American. The Mississippi Delta is part of this "Black Belt". Fairfax and Loudon Counties are less than 10% African-American, and still went for Obama. That's subjectively Yankee.
That's two counties, not Northern Virginia. Also, it was only 40 years ago when voting R was objectively Yankee. How many of those guys are left?
What 358 said. Also, Buncombe and Jackson counties, North Carolina. McDowell County, WV. Less than 15% African American, went for Obama. Subjectively Yankee?
[I get the point, but the red state/blue state voting thing isn't everything.]
This is geography, not a self-esteem course for mobile Yankees and other malcontents.
344.2: the Lost Chord.
Useful test for the Shire-ists: how do they feel about people of non-Anglo descent who are playing the game full up? I think I've known a few honest cultural bigots, who didn't care what you looked like as long as your behavior would have pleased their grandparents, but it seems unusual. Also, not obviously a less harmful form of bigotry.
353:Dear people who see pictures of my daughters,* could you please refrain from telling me how much trouble I'm going to be in in a few years? They're eight years old, okay? Kthxbye.
Hey, when people above said that the "Girls are more trouble when they're teenagers" was about emotional instability rather than the need to police them sexually, it sounded off to me, but I couldn't think of a basis for argument. But this is right -- people say that all the goddam time: compliment a little girl's attractiveness by telling her parents that they're going to be in trouble when she grows up. And that's clearly about sexual issues, not about emotional conflict, because being pretty doesn't have anything to do with being more or less emotionally difficult.
362: Erm, my father, although mostly a good guy, is an anti-immigrationist (of a mild, humane sort -- he votes as far left as possible, and when any actual unpleasant policy is specified, he's on the right side of it) of roughly this kind. Doesn't care what color you are so long as you're drinking Bloodies to cure the hangover, and you know not to wear diamonds until evening. (We have no family connection to old-money WASP, but he sort of would have liked to have.)
You're right that it's still not good, but it's a thing.
how do they feel about people of non-Anglo descent who are playing the game full up?
Amused and patronising.
It's an idle compliment. Not intended to be a serious prediction.
I think I've known a few honest cultural bigots...not obviously a less harmful form of bigotry.
IMO it seems far preferable to Sheareresque style thoughts that the darkies are literally inferior humans.
The Shire reminds me of a comment I heard recently by my advisor: "Minnesotans, totally multicultural until a black person shows up." I pointed out that is a general attitude of Scandinavians in the Old Countries as well. In Scandinavia, there's definitely a "let's help the Nigerians...in Nigeria" sort of attitude, and all patting each other on the back for being UN overachievers falls by the wayside with the significant discomfort of seeing people who weren't blond as children walking down the sidewalk.
On "is cultural racism/xenophobia any better than the other kind," I was just thinking about this during the annual cringe-inducing Christmas dinner conversation with an elderly Finnish minister who visits every year. He was going on about how Somalis were ruining Finland, what with their polygamy and laziness and low-quality work. Sensing discomfort, he emphasized that Nigerians, on the other hand, were high quality workers and he had no problem with them. I was trying to grapple with to what extent, if any, the remarks on Nigerians mitigated those on Somalis, and while I guess it points to not automatically hating black people, I'm not really sure it's better.
. And that's clearly about sexual issues, not about emotional conflict, because being pretty doesn't have anything to do with being more or less emotionally difficult.
Yeah but even there no one (sane) is really saying the trouble is that the daughter will someday be having sex and the daughter must be stopped from having sex at all costs. It's more like "the life of a pretty young girl is madness, and you're gonna have to deal with it" which, as has been discussed many times on this blog, is in fact true.
I was trying to grapple with to what extent, if any, the remarks on Nigerians mitigated those on Somalis, and while I guess it points to not automatically hating black people, I'm not really sure it's better.
My money's on, he looked around and saw people not reacting well, and pulled out a defensive coda about Nigerians in the same way someone else might pull out "some of my best friends are black."
Also, for more context, this minister is conservative in the elderly-male sort of way, but votes center-left and thinks the true Finns are fascists. He's also cosmopolitan in an educated European sort of way (speaks about 6-7 languages, has lived in different parts of the continent). I would say his views are extremely run of the mill across Scandinavia, though younger people might be slightly more subtle about it.
I am pretty deeply pro-multicultural but tbh I really do think that Ranchera music sucks and would like to hear less of it, particularly from my neighbors after 8pm.
IMO it seems far preferable to Sheareresque style thoughts that the darkies are literally inferior humans.
I agree, but I bet it leads to as much if not more friction and microaggression in daily life.
But maybe I just don't know the good Ranchera music.
Also, Buncombe and Jackson counties, North Carolina. McDowell County, WV. Less than 15% African American, went for Obama. Subjectively Yankee?
I don't know anything about Jackson County, NC, but Buncombe is Boulder East (i.e. Hippieville), and therefore objectively Yankee. McDowell County West Virginia (along with Logan and Mingo) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the UMWA; different rules apply there.
The point is, NoVa is no more the South than Dade County, FL.
Now I'm worried that that was affirmatively racist. Not meant that way at all; it's not like I have a leg to stand on in the hair metal vs. ranchera music contest.
Is Ranchera different than Norteño?
Is Norteño the one that has to have the accordians and the German oompa bassline? I've never been able to get into that stuff.
368: "Minnesotans, totally multicultural until a black person shows up."
That sounds like something my adviser would say, but I don't think it's the same person.
Anyhow, that's more of an out-state reaction. Or at least deep suburbs. Not that there aren't racists in the city, but I've very rarely been in groups where that level of visceral uncomfortability is displayed. Plus, we're WAY less racist than 'Sconnies.
Is Ranchera different than Norteño?
It's Ranchero, but my understanding is that they're basically the same. There may be a subtle difference I'm unaware of.
Is Norteño the one that has to have the accordians and the German oompa bassline?
Yes.
I used to be very hopeful that norteño music would completely die out as the current generations of Mexican immigrants age and their children find the oompa oompas completely embarrassing. Then those neighbors moved and now I kind of like hearing it once in awhile.
380, what would it be replaced by if it dies off? Horrible rap music, almost certainly.
It's Ranchero
Why do you say that? I've always heard Ranchera, wikipedia seems to agree, and if you were making the genders in Spanish agree it would be be musica ranchera, right (my Spanish is almost nonexistent so I'm happy to be told that's not right)?
I think that to the extent that a society is really pluralist you can't hope for much more than tolerance, non-violence, etc. Not a big group hug. Because genuinely different cultures do things in seriously different ways, which can always lead to disagreements about substantial issues.
Minnesota used to have big ethnic differences, and the reason they've disappeared is homogenization. The Serbs and the Finns and the Germans and the Norwegians and the Irish and the Anglos aren't much different any more, besides also now being intermarried.
Huh, I've always just assumed it was masculine to match "norteño," but you appear to be right. There also does indeed appear to be a subtle difference between the two, although there's a lot of overlap.
In NM, at least, all those types of music generally get lumped under the term "mariachi."
Huh, I've always just assumed it was masculine to match "norteño," but you appear to be right. There also does indeed appear to be a subtle difference between the two, although there's a lot of overlap.
Indigenous informants are always wrong, wrong, wrong!
I was trying to grapple with to what extent, if any, the remarks on Nigerians mitigated those on Somalis, and while I guess it points to not automatically hating black people, I'm not really sure it's better.
Look, if we can't hate on specific nationalities, then we're no better than the blasted Tibetans.
Not to beat a dead horse, but McDowell County really is a special case. The electorate skews almost comically Democratic -- almost 10,000 votes cast in the 2008 Democratic primary, versus barely 200 for the GOP -- and yet Obama barely managed to squeak out a win in the general. Basically, 3,000 votes swung from Hillary to McCain, and another 3,000 stayed home rather than vote for the Black man.
386: This stuff's all as foreign to me as it is to you.
Texans call it Conjunto. I like older recordings of this stuff a lot. Conjunto Bernal and older recordings of Flaco Jimenez are good. Arhoolie has rereleased tons of this stuff, I keep meaning to put up a mix. Old cumbia is nice also.
For new Norteno, Nortec Collective is pretty interesting, not traditional. There's really interesting cumbia-flavored new music as well.
Here, at least, Mariachi tends to get reserved exclusively for the 100% traditional bands in full uniform and with exclusively acoustic instruments. Perhaps relevant to this discussion, having a Mariachi band (in that limited, old fashioned sense) is very traditional at formal events (weddings, very fancy parties) involving Southern California WASPS.
Hey, when people above said that the "Girls are more trouble when they're teenagers" was about emotional instability rather than the need to police them sexually, it sounded off to me
I'd argue that different phrasings of this general concept are actually pointing to different concerns. Both AB and the mother of Iris' best friend are pro-sex for teenage girls, but they've both expressed fears about our daughters' teen years, entirely focused on the screaming and the hating and the door slamming.
I don't deny at all that there's creepy/patriarchal BS around OMG DAUGHTERS HAVE SEX, but that doesn't mean that's the only thing people can worry about.
Here, at least, Mariachi tends to get reserved exclusively for the 100% traditional bands in full uniform and with exclusively acoustic instruments
Yeah, in NM these are the bands that tend to play the other styles too. It's mostly done as kitsch, especially in settings like mediocre Mexican restaurants. All these styles developed well after NM was severed from Mexican popular culture and are very different from NM Hispanic folk music.
NOVA really isnt in Virginia.
ROVAns keep saying this, but they still take our taxes.
The point is, NoVa is no more the South than Dade County, FL.
But it once - and not that long ago - was quite Southern, whereas Dade really never was (it was Seminole, then it was northern speculators, then it was Jewish, then it was Cuban, now it's whatever it is; but there were never enough crackers to matter - pockets here and there, but you can have pockets of a given group anywhere).
There are Spanish-language radio stations that play authentic versions of the other styles (and more), but they cater mostly to recent immigrants and that's still a fairly small niche.
JRoth is right. The reminders are all around. Names of schools. Names of streets. The People's Republic of Arlington is think about renaming Jefferson Davis Highway. Many people are not happy about that idea.
Anyway, I'm not a Virginian at heart. I just live here.
Norteno includes polka, I just checked, so I'm on their side. (Also most Nordic metal genres, apparently -- they even write waltzes.)
John Rawls' last book covered the failures in 'Shirism', I guess.
Little Lucretia is being taught to salsa by her Colombian nanny. The sight of her furiously attempting to shake her non-existent hips has already caused me to have to leave the room in fits of giggles.
Babies dancing in diapers is a genre. There's a better one yet, but it has a stupid 20-second ad.
Teaching little tiny kids to dance can only be a good thing. Did NOT happen in my family.
That's racist and sexist Dsquared. We are talking about Mexicans, not Columbians (they all look alike to you British imperialists, I suppose), and how dare you imply that your daughter lacks hips or laugh at her because she fails to have the fake "hips" you've seen in your salsa-dancing porn magazines and imagine all women have.
It's rarely worthwhile to engage racists human beings about their "ideas." (At least for the purpose of convincing them otherwise.) The varying rationales, schemae and justifications are typically just masks to obscure much simpler and more inchoate impulses. If someone shows signs of being able to get past that impulse, the key is to focus on that rather than mucking about with the niceties of the ideology.
FTFY.
Not hungry for a taco, yet, but interested in searching the internet for good examples of son jarocho.
Racist.
(Just at random, in case I missed something.)
Thanks, teo. I'll take it from here.
At a restaurant in the Bronx last weekend, Tweety and I saw the most hilariously terrible mariachi band ever. They were all youngish, probably in their 20s, except for the trumpet player, who was probably in his 50s and looked like Sharukh Kahn.
But meanwhile, some southern California fusion.
Speaking of southern California fusion, anyone else think that Los Lobos are genius and one of the great American bands? Here's a cumbia , their more traditional side.
I really should like Los Lobos more but I've always known them mostly as a critical favorite so they feel a little bit like taking my medicine. I prefer Ozomatli for similar, more recent, fusiony sounds.
So we actually are going to talk about the 30 flavors of racism? Okay, but you have to have actual words for them all.
The people who are okay with foreigners as long as they stay in their own country? Placists.
The ones who are okay with people from other cultures, unless it involves hugging? Embracists.
The people who resent illegal aliens from other planets? Spacists.
"I would say his views are extremely run of the mill across Scandinavia, though younger people might be slightly more subtle about it."
I would say you don't know what you're talking about. WTF is Scandinavia?
416: I was over-exposed to La Bamba as a teen.
I am willing to entertain arguments that our Lord wants Tim Tebow to cover the spread.
People who venerate Trajan's Column are Dacists.
It's funny somewhere.*
* Bucharest.
421 -- 13.5 points is a lot to give up w/the NE defense, esp given that Denver's defense is merely mediocre. I'd take the bet with anyone willing to go for it.
People who hate Asian desserts=tastists.
Bucharest?
A whole dollar? No wonder they roam.
417: So we actually are going to talk about the 30 flavors of racism?
Is that what this thread is about? I couldn't figure it out for the life of me.
People that won't watch Sopranos episodes by no-name directors: Chasists.
PS: Norteño is awesome, you philistines.
People who pester ophthalmologists with questions about corrective eye surgery: Lasists.
People who like NASCAR... nevermind.
240: Tripp, leaving aside your masculine bravado (and yes, I'm sure you can beat me up), I wonder a few things: Don't you think getting hurt (though not necessarily hurt) is part of growing up, part of becoming a fully realized and mature adult? Also, don't you think these young men share with your daughter(s) what you've said to them, the threats you've made? Actually, don't you want at least one of these young men eventually to have a stronger connection with your daughter(s) than you do? And wouldn't such a connection require that young man to share with your daughter(s) what you've said to him? And upon sharing what you've said, don't you worry that your daughter(s) will feel, if not embarrassed by what you've said, like your having said such a thing suggested to her partner that you didn't trust her to take care of herself, to sort the wheat from the chaff man-wise? And finally, don't you worry that you're tacitly telling these young men that violence is a reasonable thing to have in a man's toolkit, and given that, that you might, at some level, be making your daughter(s) less rather than more safe?
Wow. For a moment I forgot how quickly the feminists would flock to some percieved red meat.
Meow. Heheh.
Seriously, you people have buttons, big, fat, pushable buttons. You might consider working on that.
Boilling things down, or, stating things in the currently fashoinable way, at the end of the day, usually the group has more power than the individiual. If one joins one's efforts with others, one does not necessarily lose power, and one may actually increase one's power. I extend my group's power to my offspring. They extend their group's power to me. Win/Win.
I suspect you may already know this, or at least you should know this. That is why your questions suprised me. Are you really that ignorant of human evolution and the point of why we are here, now, doing this thing? Are you really that clueless? If so, I must say that you disappoint me. Are you baiting me? You may take this opportunity to respond "yes" and save face.
Are people who won't eat trout bassists?
Having been one, I am comfortable relegating teenaged boys to the bin of chaff, wholesale, right next to the husks.
Hey, I saw Ozomatli at Warped Tour during high school, on the advice of my mother. They were great. When I returned from the show excited about them and CD in-hand, my mom proudly told me, "I heard about them on NPR!"
Only mildly chagrin-inducing, and I continue to like them and make references to their songs (which pretty much no one gets).
431: sually the group has more power than the individiual. If one joins one's efforts with others, one does not necessarily lose power, and one may actually increase one's power. I extend my group's power to my offspring
Wait, what? What the hell does that have to do with the topic under discussion? It's clear that you have some facile ev psych explanation for patriarchy, but it seems like a particularly weak or obscure one, 'cause I don't think I've seen anyone make it before.
Nothing you've written seems to bear directly on the OP, or the arguments offered in favor of it. How does this tie in with anxieties about female sexuality? Or socialization of girls and boys? I mean, it would appear to be obvious to even the most casual reader that we're talking about something that is entirely social. Britta gave a very good example of just how this is so. If it's a biological imperative to threaten your daughter's boyfriends, why don't they do it in Scandinavia?
434: I saw them in the Staples Center parking lot in 2000, right before the cops came in to bust heads. I think I first heard of them in a radical bookstore basement.
If it's a biological imperative to threaten your daughter's boyfriends, why don't they do it in Scandinavia?
Everybody is looking at naked people on lakes in the summer and trying to remember what the sun looked like in the winter.
435: Lutefisk, probably. Or maybe because they have better furniture?
436: I was at that show/cop riot. Even managed to get the attention of a few news cameras as a representative of the Direct Action Network, which was a little weird, because I think I was wearing an aloha shirt at the time.
I saw them give an amazing free show at the Santa Monica Pier and wound up interviewing them for, of all places, Miami New Times. For a while I was a big Ozo evangelist. Then their second album was kind of meh and they became, instead of the millennial hip-hop-cumbia Aufhebung I was hoping for, a jam band.
I don't even know if the thread is still about this because I didn't notice it until it was 400+ comments, but I just had internal thread convergence so:
1) I think loud bachelorette parties in bars are a thing that occasionally happens but also something that has been inflated to some kind of fictional status to preserve that old gay misogyny that was worst a few decades ago but still thrives in some environments. Other than a space intended for public sex/pickups* I am bummed out by the idea of gay bars that aren't welcoming to women, partly because
2) I never experienced the YA fiction clique dynamics at all that I can remember--I think because I settled in early with a nominal male best friend (a beard of sorts), the first of many female besties, and a bunch of weirdos who were all, as I may have said here before, sexually amorphous enough that one did not set off anyone's alarms by never once asking out a laydee and hanging out constantly with the weird girl one was probably not doing anything with. So anyway for me, cliché though it may be, the gay guy + best girlfriend dyad is something of a sacrament and if it means occasionally, within the occasionally that I'm at gay bars, there are some drunk women in plastic tiaras with penis-shaped novelties, I'll deal.
*I did almost once take a lesbian friend from out of town to The Cock but in the end I think we decided it was a funny idea that actually wouldn't be much fun.
439.2: So what you're saying is, Ozomatli ya se fue?
I've visited Vegas only once, but the bachelorette parties were thick on the ground, so to speak.
Without reading ANY of the comments, I thought I'd add this regarding the OP. I have a client who wanted to trademark or copyright the phrase "n*b*dy w*ll *ver meas*ure up to my d*ddy", for use on t-shirts and such. Thought it was a million dollar idea. I told him that copyright protection wouldn't work and trademark protection would only work I the "slogan" became something more than decorative in t-shirts, so if he wanted to own that phrase he should organize a business and put the phrase on other baby products. A month later he told me to organize a business called "All D*ddy's G*rl". I have to do what my client wants, but I would hate to be this guy's daughter.
thick on the ground, so to speak
They went barefoot without shaving their feet?
For a moment I forgot how quickly the feminists would flock to some percieved red meat. [...] Seriously, you people have buttons, big, fat, pushable buttons. You might consider working on that.
I'm totally confused. How does this relate to my humorlessness?
Oh and I missed the discussion of ranchero too (for some reason masc sounds right to me as well...perhaps it's being used as a noun rather than an adjective? Like saying "cowboy music"?)
I love that stuff. I used to have some of the Arhoolie stuff like Lydia Mendoza--"la reina de la musica Tejana", wanted to learn "Mal Hombre" on the guitar. Such good stuff. Not to speak of Lola Beltran but that's maybe a whole other genre, like countrypolitan but for Rancher@. And besides, the thread is dead.
They went barefoot without shaving their feet?
Do parties even have feet?
Hey, Tripp? That was an interesting perspective on the importance of family versus individual, framed in a big smelly turd of unnecessary rudeness.
perhaps it's being used as a noun rather than an adjective
That's how I've always heard it used.
Either me gusta norteño or (less common) me gusta música norteña.
And I'm glad to hear Smearcase shares my (mis?)perception.
451: I've never heard anyone call it ranchero/a, but that's clearly just a blindspot in my experience. The only ones I can think of that go feminine without an associated noun are all feminine already (and all refer in their noun forms to dances): bachata, salsa, cumbia.
444: arrgh, nooooooo!
344: this is right and I sometimes wish we didn't live in asia so we could wander around naked in a non-sexual way when it's hot, the way my hippie parents god intended. but I feel we are guests here, so it is only right to adhere to local mores. my husband feels that our 10-year-old has reached the point at which she needs to wear a t-shirt as well as underwear inside. (dude, it's hot here. the children taking off all their clothes when they come home is perfectly sensible.)
353: this is what gives the lie to the "it's all about tantrums" line. "you're going to be in big trouble in a few years!" no one says that meaning: she's going to slam the door and say "you don't understand!" they mean: people are going to want to fuck her and you'll have to ward them off somehow. also, IME teenage boys are just as bad about walking off in a huff and slamming doors and moping etc. as girls are. and they're 1000 times likelier to steal your car and drive off in a huff.
Tantrum's just the tip of the emotional iceberg.
I wish you all the luck in the world helping your daughters navigate their late teens.
What I'd like to know is whether, if one of Tripp's daughters had happened one day to bring home a girlfriend, would she have been subject to the same threat? I'm guessing not.
But then there's probably some back on the veldt explanation of that about how homosexual offspring won't benefit one's family by providing further offspring and so don't deserve the protection of the group.
More seriously, one of the suitors will become part of your 'group' one day, and you'll see more of your daughter if her partner feels like one of the family, and I'm not sure that making his first impression of you be "christ, this bloke's mental" is going to help with that.
Mine are 14 and 12, they're fairly easygoing so far. Fingers crossed and all.
My older one has had a couple "boyfriends" in the manner of 14 year olds, holding hands in the hallways, going to the mall, etc. Never really occurred to me to threaten anyone. Occasionally dropping off lattes to my wife in uniform on the way to work probably helps (my kids go to the same jr. high she teaches at).
455 - late teens? Are you telling me this will get harder? *sob* Although tbh, a lot of my own erm, emotional times that I remember were in my later teens, so I guess I should be prepared.
Maybe they'll turn out gay. Much easier than dealing with those nasty teenage boys. Except for my perfect son of course. No girl will ever be good enough for him!
yeah, dropping things off at school in uniform; I think you're golden there, gswift. did you see I apologized for telling you to fuck off the other day? I did.
456.3: Recollect the thread started out by noting how commonplace this sentiment is. Tripp's claim that the sentiment is serious in a literal sense is the only thing that sounds mental (and also kinda sorta like bullshit). Having the father of a girlfriend give you this talk is not plausibly extraordinary, nor the kind of thing that someone would likely go running to the girlfriend about claiming "he threatened me!!!!" (Unless you wish to be seen as a milquetoast.)
Scandinavian exemption on this, apparently, though I suspect this is by dint of Scandinavians being disinclined to talk about feelings of any sort at any time. (/racist)
Totally in line with the ickiness of 'my daughter will never X, Y, Z' (ew!), while also appreciating Emerson's representation of the sexist, Puritan point of view. And didn't John have a lewd and lascivious female Mayflower ancestor who was harassed and harangued by Cotton Mather, or something like that? I'm sure he knows of what he speaks.
gay kids have it easy: sleepovers are allowed!
But then there's probably some back on the veldt explanation of that about how homosexual offspring won't benefit one's family by providing further offspring and so don't deserve the protection of the group.
Come on, I think it's a bit early to be making the jump to "Tripp hates fags" from what he's written. IF the same warning wasn't given to a girl being brought home I'm pretty sure it would be because the death threat is directed at specific behaviors by boys towards girls that in all honesty you're probably not as likely to see from another girl.
and flippanter is descended from that very same moralizing cotton mather! well, probably.
463: Also true. (It takes more extensive familiarity with lesbians to realize that's actually a myth, but that's a whole other can of worms.)
did you see I apologized for telling you to fuck off the other day? I did.
Wait, I got told to fuck off? Heh, maybe I had it coming.
It takes more extensive familiarity with lesbians to realize that's actually a myth
I bet a high school girl is a hell of a lot less likely to get date raped by a another girl.
467: Meh... lesbian relationships are probably not less abusive than the average straight relationship, by some accounts. But it's a taboo subject on account of the choice homophobic attack vector being "teh gheys totally want to rape you," so pretty hard to have a rational conversation about at this point in time.
Oh, I didn't mean to accuse him of that, sorry Tripp if that's how it sounded. I was just making up bollocks about how the gay offspring aren't furthering the bloodline.
It's early in the morning here, never my best time.
Specific behaviours? Like getting them pregnant? I'm not sure what else is necessarily specific only to boys.
I'm not entirely sure what 460 means - that such a conversation might well happen but not be meant seriously? As for complaining about being threatened, I'm more inclined to think that any young man receiving such a talk would just be amused by an old man's posturing. I cannot see how out would reflect well on the would-be threatener.
467: seconded.
it was in the thread about whether presidential pseudonym girl should try to find out whether her friend and former teacher had slept with her other 10th grade friend and thus fucked up her life, or just let it drop. you said that the statute of limitations of being an asshole whom people should shun had run out, so even if the guy in question had slept with his student, who cares. because I am prejudiced against asshole teachers who sleep with their students I told you to fuck off. I would hope that if someone were friends with my HS photography teacher found out what a dick he was to me they would no longer wish to be his friend because he's a fucking pervert asshole who thinks 13-year-olds are hot. then I regretted having told you to fuck off and I apologized. because you were actually being hilarious in that thread, even though I disagreed with you.
you said that the statute of limitations of being an asshole whom people should shun had run out, so even if the guy in question had slept with his student, who cares.
I apologize if I gave that impression. I think it's certainly possible it happened. I just think she should have ignored it because the only allegation she knew of was 15 years after the fact by someone with an axe to grind. It just seems crazy to me to have a questionable secondhand account override decades of experience and observations of both her and everyone she knows.
469.4: Of course. I've been told "You hurt her, I kill you" and understood the expression to be non-literal, given that the person in question was unlikely to actually as a matter of fact try to come after me and murder me. Likewise I have heard people in a fight say "You wanna fuckin' die?" without anybody expecting anybody else to literally attempt murder. Hyperbole happens. People employ figures of speech. I don't really think this is news to anyone.
What you're meant to understand by this expression is that the old man in question will take a very dim view of your attempting to harm his daughter, and will go out of his way to make your life more difficult if you fail to heed the warning. Whether one laughs this off depends of course on the person and the delivery rather than the expression itself.
Now, everybody: hands up if you would prefer your parent not to warn people off from harming you. This is part of what I found objectionable in 253: how many people would really truly want their father to say, "Well, getting hurt is just part of growing up, y'all go ahead and do your thing"? I don't think Tripp is being the sole purveyor of bullshit on this.
yeah, I guess I've just known a lot of men who were really stand-up, decent guys whom I trusted, who then turned out to be predatory assholes just along this one axis, as though it didn't relate to the rest of their personality. so that you could know someone for a long time and see him being a decent fellow for years and still not know that he was capable of some pretty fucked-up shit under certain limited circumstances.
474: Granted. Nevertheless the overwhelming norm is not for people to talk about killing and actually literally mean it. (People bullshitting about meaning it: slightly more common. People actually meaning or doing it: even American murder rate stats tilt toward "no.")
473: I think there is a lot of room between "you better treat her right now, you hear?" and threatening to kill people, however metaphorically intended. what if something happened that you didn't like and are upset about but you are worried your dad will genuinely become violent if he hears it, and you don't think it warrants that/don't want there to be trouble with the law/are afraid someone will get really hurt etc. how are you supposed to be able to confide in your dad when medium-grade transgressions take place if everything has already been put in the "I'll kill you" box?
There is absolutely no way I would have wanted either of my parents warning people not to hurt me. And I imagine that my girls would find it mortifying.
But that's a long way from saying I think it's fine if they get hurt. Although, at some point, it probably will happen. And I don't believe for an instant that warning someone not to hurt my kid is going to prevent it from happening.
476: I think there is a lot of room between "you better treat her right now, you hear?" and threatening to kill people, however metaphorically intended.
If one insists on interpreting all statements literally, maybe. But this really only makes sense if one already has pre-existing reason to interpret such statements literally (e.g. a demonstrably violent parent). As we all know, some people have such cause; many people do not.
473: Having my parents warn people off from hurting me? Rather than talking to me directly about protecting myself? I'll take the latter.
Also, I was warned away from a girlfriend by her father two separate times. The first was in high school, and it scared the shit out of me. The father was quite literally telling me that if he found out that his daughter was with me again he would beat the shit out of me. I broke up with his daughter and told her why. He then grounded her for a very long time. The second time was in college. The father told me, Jew that I am, to stay away from his lovely WASP daughter. Or else. Because it was obvious that he couldn't hurt me, I laughed the threat off. I also immediately told his daughter what had happened, she told me that he had guns in the house, and so we left together and went to a hotel. The next night we went out to dinner with her mom but not her dad. The morning after that, we drove back to school. The daughter, even after we broke up years later, didn't speak to her father. She married another Jew, though a real doctor, so that's a happy ending, I guess.
478.2: I don't believe for an instant that warning someone not to hurt my kid is going to prevent it from happening.
What do you not believe, exactly? That you're capable of giving any specific person pause, ever? Or that doing this will keep harm coming to them generally speaking? The latter is perfectly reasonable and sane, the former would strike me as quite unrealistic of most parents given sufficient motivation.
I never had any Dads do the 'I'll kill you' speech, but I'm pretty sure I'd have found it hilarious. Given the general class-patterns of my teenage dating -- nice middle class girls, mostly -- it'd have been doubly hilarious.
When I was 16 or 17 I did square up to one girl's Dad. He flung me out of the house, and I wasn't welcome back for a couple of days. However, he was out of order -- he gave the strong impression he was about to raise his hands to her* -- and it didn't affect our relationship. If anything, we got on better afterwards as we'd established some boundaries. Viz, 'I really will square up to you old man' on my part, and 'And I'm not going to be scared by that, you skinny dwarf' on his. He did genuinely seem to like me, fwiw.
* later on he denied it, and I had apparently 'gotten the wrong end of the stick'. But ...
I'll bet $50 Tripp didn't say this and is bullshitting us or possibly himself. Or, if he did, he did so in a way that was obviously a joke. If not, of course it's a dick move. Not OK to go around threatening anyone and not exactly likely to be good for opening up the lines of communication, and yes there is a middle ground between no concern and death threats. I persist in thinking this is mostly a TV trope but there are nut jobs out there.
480.1: Why would it be either/or? Why not have both?
Because it was obvious that he couldn't hurt me, I laughed the threat off.
Well, having seen pictures of you now, you were obviously nothing to fuck with. I've had some similar experiences of the "warning conversation" being motivated by racism and also disregarded it, although I was a hundred pounds soaking wet at the time. Like I said, a lot depends on the specifics.
What 478 said, also. I can imagine circumstances in which one might want to (or actually) cause harm to someone who hurts one's child.
Actually telling someone that you'll do this, on the basis of nothing more than their desire to date/socialise with your child: i) a dick move, ii) not going to actually make much difference most of the time, iii) mortifying for your child.
Clarifying a couple of points in 480: two separate girlfriends and their fathers. And in the second case, the girlfriend wasn't really worried that her father was going to shoot me. But she was terribly upset about what had happened, suspected that her father was likely even more humiliated than that by my cavalier reaction, and worried that humiliated people sometimes act irrationally and do crazy things. So we went to a hotel! I think that was the first times I ever stayed in a hotel with a girlfriend. It was actually really fun, albeit weird and emotional. Which pretty much describes the good parts of college.
I don't really believe 480, either. In college? I guess the world is a strange place.
Why not have both?
Because I wouldn't have wanted my parents threatening people, even if such threats were intended as lighthearted banter.
What don't you believe, Halford? That a fucked up Louisville banker living a mansion called "Bird in Bush" didn't want his precious daughter dating a Jew? Or that he tried to warn me off? Either way, it's true, I'm afraid.
485: iii) mortifying for your child.
By report of virtually every parent of a teenaged child I have ever know, you can "mortify your child" by being in the same room. Not that I think you should go out of your way to do so, but I can understand if that isn't exactly a high priority in Tripp's thinking.
488: YMMV. There are perhaps advantages to not having a parent be timid and humorless, on the flip side.
476: contrapunctally, since what we are talking about here are date-rape or similar situations, I have a passing familiarity with how the courts system deals with them and am 100% sure that I would never advise one of my daughters to go within a country mile of that fucked-up process. And so I've basically decided that any such cases in my family will have the alternative of a "country justice" system administered by me, with a more enlightened policy than the UK courts with regard to treatment of witnesses and "character" evidence, but a somewhat less enlightened sentencing policy (since I'm not really set up to administer community service orders or custodial sentences, it's the pub car park I'm afraid).
It's the classic situation in which there's nothing but false moves; your example is real of being "worried that your dad will become violent if he hears it", but there's also "worried that your dad will tell the police if he hears it" and that kind of shades into "worried that your dad will basically do fuck-all if he hears it".
It's a bit weird to threaten people up front though. You don't usually greet people at the door of your hosue with a warning not to steal the spoons. I would tend to reserves the threats of violence for young men who I simply didn't like and wanted to fuck off.
487: sure, mr. "coffin in the chrysler sebring."
493: Aha! Clearly the coffin contained an unfortunate (ex-)suitor of the driver's teenage daughter.
The story doesn't seem remotely consistent with my experience of middle class US mores anywhere in roughly the same period, especially for college kids and especially especially with the overt anti semitism thrown in. Doesn't mean it didn't happen of course, and I could be totally naive. The behavior just seems so insanely out of line.
re: 492.1
Indeed. In our university social circle in Glasgow we discovered a guy was a creepy fuck of the date-rape/groping type. He'd tried it on with one of the other guys in that circle's sister. Ian broke his jaw, beat the fuck out of him, and no-one ever spoke to him again on pain of another doing. I still think Ian handled it the right way.
Threatening people in advance is still odd, though.
496: I think you've expressed real surprise in the past at tales of overt antisemitism. Maybe you just missed out on the fun.
495: Um indeed, my friend. Um in-deed.
496: Yeah, most stories of actual as-it's-happening racism sound crazily out of line. Unfortunately it doesn't make them implausible. I can completely believe 480 on those grounds.
496 to 490. The coffin was totally real! 492 is totally self delusional bs, though.
498 -- I guess. There's probably a real regional difference here, and I'm also a bit naturally naive.
it will surprise none of you to know that I favor vigilante justice in these situations and fully support putting the beat-down on that date-rapist guy in your social circle. please, beat him up extra for me, OK? I just find it odd to threaten to kill the guy before he does anything problematic.
halford: I'm surprised that you're surprised! people are racist and anti-semitic and shit. in real life.
492 is totally self delusional bs, though
are you calling me out, caveboy?
492 really is just fake lame tough guy ism though. If, God forbid, someone date rapes a teenage daughter, the reality is that it's a horrible tragedy for everyone and 50 yr old man parking lot heroics are (a) not fucking likely (b) not likely, if tried, to succeed, and(c) not doing anyone a lick of good.
In college?
Ha, my introduction to my future father in law was after I'd taken out my wife maybe three or four times. We went to her house for dinner and he asked right at the dinner table "what are your intentions concerning my daughter", I shit you not. I was kind of incredulous and said something about not really having any intentions at this point beyond having a good time dating her. He also said something right before we got married about coming after me if I ever hit her and added that he might not win after I gave him a look that must have conveyed my thoughts at the time. Also in that speech was how I'd "done something to his little girl" and how it was going to take a while to forgive me (I'd knocked her up).
fight! fight! fight!
my money's on dsquared, sorry halford. I got mad love for you, but I don't think santa monica has prepared you for this welsh motherfucker, crossfit or no. anyone want the other end of the bet?
490 - one of the great joys of being the parent of a teenager is embarrassing them. Whether in public or just casually at home (how to make a 13 year old blush - make a joke about visiting a prostitute to while away an evening in Southampton, or comment on how putting a condom on a cucumber sounds intimidating and what's wrong with the traditional banana?), it's always entertaining. But really, the point is to make them groan, "oh god, my bloody parents" and their friends laugh because theirs are, like, worse, not to make their friends think you're an actual arse.
505, ha, my parents didn't meet C until after we'd decided to get married, and my mum was asking him about his prospects and so on, and completely failing to keep a straight face.
As long as there's no bouncer or knife involved, I should be OK. I don't think even in the UK the financial industry is the real deal, not that I am either. I would stay away from Ttam though. Anyhow the point is that the sad reality is that 95% of anything any guy says about fighting is always bluster and bullshit (maybe I'll grant a Scotland exception).
502, yeah, I know but the manner seemed surprising. I'll chalk it up to naive.
492 really is just fake lame tough guy ism though
It really isn't. As with the four minute mile and outperforming the S&P 500, it's really a mistake to assume that just because you can't conceive of yourself doing something, that it's impossible.
As long as there's no bouncer or knife involved
stop making all these stipulations, Stig-of-the-Dump. do you want to fight or don't you?
If you circulate a video of you actually successfully taking on a younger dude in a serious fight, I'll believe you. I mean, you can encrypt it or something if you'd like. Until then I'm calling out straight up Internet mittyism.
I would stay away from Ttam though.
That's an illusion created by internet bluster [and stories from 20 years ago, pre-academia/getting-fat/leaving-Falkirk]. Several of the people here have met me in the flesh. I don't think any of them would have come away with the impression I'm actually 'hard'.
I'm calling out straight up Internet mittyism
I'm being accused of "mittyism" by a paleodieter? hilarious.
Rob, I don't fight, because as a rule, nobody does anything to me or my family that would warrant it. And I don't play rugby any more. But I have no idea why you think it's Mittyish to say that I would if I had to. Thousands of people, many of them my age or older and many in worse physical condition than me, have fights every day. And I would still have lots of friends, and I would still have access to more or less any weapon I wanted except firearms.
I think that living with all those guns is making you yanks go soft. You even wear hard hats to play rugby.
they have pills for that now, you know, ttam.
man, my business partner and I were waiting for my acupuncture appointment today so we went briefly to a vintage store nearby where we're going to source some stuff (but not revealing our status as dealers at the moment.) one of the things the guy had was a regulation narnian police baton from the 60s, wood and with the loop like a cartoon irish cop. I'm going back for it.
So, what you're saying is that you don't actually fight. And while mores and law enforcement may be different, I'm pretty sure that even in England organizing a posse of old Jeremy Clarkson lookalikes to blackjack some perceived teen boundary crosser in a parking lot is a good way to get either forcilbly beaten up by youths or, more likely, picked up by the cops and forcibly and permanently expelled from the comfortable world of finance, so I'm sticking with not fucking likely. But I will happily believe video evidence to the contrary.
How many more comments until Halford goads dsquared into getting on plane to LA and beating the shit out of him? What's the over/under, alameida?
More seriously, Halford, you're having quite a few failures of imagination tonight. Is it really that impossible to imagine that dsquared would do what he says he'd do? I guess I don't have a hard time picturing it. But then again, I've been threatened in the parlor of a house called "Bird in Bush".
Yeah, it's pretty much impossible because he's bullshitting all of you, or more likely himself.
I mean, unless he's delusional enough to take the Internet persona into real life, but since he's gainfully employed and apparently has friends and a family, I'm giving him the credit of assuming that he's not actually delusional.
Buncombe and Jackson counties, North Carolina.
The three NC mountain counties that went for Obama--Buncombe, Jackson, and Watauga--are dominated by UNC-Asheville, Western Carolina University, and Appalachian State University, respectively.
Well, Asheville is a fairly sizable city so "dominated" is overstating the case but, as noted above, it's Hippie&Artistville.
anyone want the other end of the bet?
Not in a thousand years.
I'm pretty sure that even in England organizing a posse of old Jeremy Clarkson lookalikes to blackjack some perceived teen boundary crosser in a parking lot is a good way to get either forcilbly beaten up by youths or, more likely, picked up by the cops and forcibly and permanently expelled from the comfortable world of finance
well, you're pretty sure of something that isn't true then. Particularly about the "comfortable world of finance stuff"; financially I could quit this job tomorrow if I wanted to.
So you and your current way of life comfortably survive arrest and imprisonment? Some brief looking around suggests 5-10 years in GB for what would be aggravated assault in the states. Dont know about civil penalties, or tort penalties but if there are any you've self-confessed as a deep pocket. Color me super unconvinced that you're going to roll the dice there, banker. And that's putting aside the most likely scenario, which is you getting your ass kicked. I mean if I wanted to be super uncharitable I could see you maybe taking on a scrawny 13 year old whose parents you could intimidate, but I didn't figure you for that low a grade of fake macho asshole.
Can I stipulate no knife fighting at the next UKUnfogged? Or at least take it outside...
to borrow from the patron saint of fat old guys bullshitting, "it was not great trolling, it was merely perfect trolling".
I'd think carefully about what you're saying, Halford. Owls are silent flyers -- you'll never know what hit you.
Is this a for-real argument that two actual grown men are having on the Internet? Or have I finally lost the ability to understand irony?
It's like Schrodinger's cat - no one knows what's real until the owls come out.
I suppose, as I look at that sentence, it's not much like Schrodinger's cat.
all gats are grey in the dark
480: "though a real doctor"
So you're just an ABD or something?
So you and your current way of life comfortably survive arrest and imprisonment? Some brief looking around suggests 5-10 years in GB for what would be aggravated assault in the states.
Since he's mentioned weapons and associates, you can bump that up a bit, Halford. It's close to four years just for carrying a weapon with intent to commit violence - you don't even have to use it. Idiots generally underestimate how severe the sentences are for violent offences in England, and this would be close to the top of the severity list even if (as is likely) he failed to actually do any damage to his victim.
I am also amused by his apparent assumption that you could set these things up in advance - "yes, let me check my Outlook calendar, Mr Davies, I think I have a window on Friday at 10.30 pm round the back of the Royal Oak if that works for you and the Clarksonettes?" - and that the proposed victim would be stupid enough to a) turn up b) alone c) and unarmed.
And that's putting aside the most likely scenario, which is you getting your ass kicked
also not true; I suppose if my daughter was assaulted by a teenage rugby player or physical freak maybe, but your average teenage kid is really quite scrawny.
This seems very odd to me; I'm genuinely surprised that seemingly nobody else thinks this way. But yes, if the alternatives were a) letting a date-rapist get away with attacking my family, or b) putting one of my daughters through the nightmare of the police/courts system, then yes, I would probably end up thinking I'd have to take the risk of doing something that might have very nasty consequences for me.
Since you have apparently worked out precisely the level of felony involved, I think you might have a more vivid picture of this than me, but I don't think it's particularly uncommon for normal middle class burghers like me to look after things ourselves, even in leafy North London.
re: 532.1
FWIW, I have a fair bit of experience (qua hometown, etc) with people with a long history of interpersonal violence. You'd be surprised how few of them ever saw the inside of a jail cell. In fact, the only person I knew who spent time inside for violence stabbed a stranger 24 times, although I did know a few others who were prosecuted but either got acquitted or had non-custodial sentences. I gather the weapons laws are much more tightly enforced than they once were, but there's an awful lot of people having brawls and not getting jailed.
I am also amused by his apparent assumption that you could set these things up in advance - "yes, let me check my Outlook calendar, Mr Davies, I think I have a window on Friday at 10.30 pm round the back of the Royal Oak if that works for you and the Clarksonettes?" - and that the proposed victim would be stupid enough to a) turn up b) alone c) and unarmed.
I am amused by your assumption that I have put any detailed planning at all into something that will almost certainly never happen. I don't have this sort of rich internal fantasy life, just a general disposition to give that sort of answer to that sort of question. Just-in-time and adapted to specific circumstances is the way to do vigilantism.
496: The story doesn't seem remotely consistent with my experience of middle class US mores anywhere
It strikes me as quite possible in the South, the rural West, in military families, etc.
This is a truism, but: tolerance for violence varies from group to group. The educated American middle class is at the intolerant end where you say "Violence never solves anything" etc. Stereotypically, Jews and Chinese also avoid violence if possible, though in the US they learned different. (Jewish boxers and gangsters, Bruce Lee in Seattle, etc. Actually, there were professionally violent gangster and military families in traditional China, but they were pariahs when not needed as goons).
On the other hand, the Southern gentry was proud of its capacity for violence. Likewise plenty of Southern hillbillies. Likewise cowboy types. Another group that fought a lot was the Irish. Likewise blacks and hispanics.
Hilzoy's crazy uncle Jan Myrdal registered the Swedish middle class on the violent side. In NYC with Gunner and Alma he joined a 1950s street gang specialized in fisticuffs. His school counselor said "People of your class don't engage in such activities". Jan said "In Sweden we do". Don't know if it' true, but that's Jan's story.
Dsq mentioned guns. They say that there are a lot fewer street fights and bar fights in the US since guns came to be widely carried. That's somewhat my experience. Things escalate too fast. There seems to be be a ritual level of violence with fists that is sometimes but not often lethal, and then the murderous thing you have in the US.
Back in the day, even when Northern Ireland was at its worst, the island-wide Irish intentional homicide rate was not high. The non-political fighting seemed to blow off steam relatively harmlessly. The highest rate in Europe is the unemotional Finns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Hate to miss these things.
In fact, the only person I knew who spent time inside for violence stabbed a stranger 24 times
Jesus.
That's so incompetent.
The highest rate in Europe is the unemotional Finns
as a reader of Henning Mankell, I contend that the Swedish intentional homicide rate would be much higher if people really took a close look at those "suicides".
Only incompetent if he was intending to kill him.
I didn't agree with 504, and so consequently don't agree with 539 either.
(what's really curious is that, having met neither of us, RH is prepared to absolutely rule out of the question as being completely obvious bullshit for me, actions that he regards as being completely plausible and even potentially in character for ttaM. I'm hoping this isn't just a fraGlesgae thing and is more related to ttaM having told more stories about his past than me).
DSquared is basically saying that the Swedes are like the Finns, but smarter. Could some Finn shoot him please?
Finland's murder rate is half the American rate, which is pretty respectable. But the highest rates are third world and ex-Communist. The US leads the developed world and quite a bit of the developing world.
In fact, the only person I knew who spent time inside for violence stabbed a stranger 24 times
Jesus.
That's so incompetent.
The great-grandfather of blogger Scott Martens was shot nine times by Makhno's anarchist bandits and took three days to die. Old-fashioned pre-Colt pistols were not efficient.
Making Light linked an odd webcomic a while back based on Scandinavian/Nordic stereotypes (that is, the characters are personifications of the different countries). Sweden's a tightass, Norway is all crunchy-granola relaxed, Denmark's an alcoholic, and Finland is a mute, sullen, knife-wielding maniac.
re: 540
It was a frenzied rage-stabbing thing. Lots of superficial cuts, and a couple of deep stabs. The guy didn't die, although I think he spent a lot of time in hospital.
re: 541
Particularly since I'm not actual fraeGlasgae [although I've lived there]. Nor hard. The very idea would have made my school-mates scoff with derision.
I personally find dsquared's violent fantasies irrational and a little bit scarey. In America at least, there is too large a chance that daughter will end up in court testifying in an assault case.
In the situations he is describing, and I have encountered them, there are a lot of reasons to remember that this is what friends are for. Don't know, can't recognize, no motive. And the bonding!
I have a firm policy of believing anything anyone says about themselves on the Internet, because it's more fun that way.
For clarity, though, because I can follow the reasoning, the stereotype Halford's working from is more likely to be class than race. At least in the US, someone from a working-class background talking about violence is likelier to have at least some direct experience of it. A guy with an upper middle class job who grew up middle class (UK sense) is likely to have never encountered violence personally and to be bullshitting and trying to sound tough if he brings it up.
Sorry, I said race when I meant 'regional background'.
ex-Communist
I maintain that this isn't a fair comparison. There's no way that anyone, even an educated Swede, can get away with killing a neighbour and making it look like suicide in Stasiland. The bastards know all the tricks.
541. dsquared is a Welsh former rugby player. These guys pull people's ears off and call it a game. ttaM is, by his own account, an indie kid raised by hippies. Halford should RTFA.
I have lots of Scandinavian jokes. True about the Finns:
In Finland and Sweden the have special English-language schools for women who want to go to the US to work as secretaries. Scandinavian secretaries were a measurable demographic not long ago, don't know about now. There was a Finnish secretary werking in my office.
At that time we had one unit which was famous for disfunctionality and feuds. They called in a conciliator or whatever they call them, who started off with a psychological test. VEery person in the lab except for one was in the 90th-percentile+ for introversion.
When she heard this the Finnish secretary mentioned having lunch with this crew one day. Everyone sat there reading their book after finishing, and not one word was spoken. Her summary was "I thought I was back in Finland".
The silent, solitary madman is the American stereotype of Swedes (that and the dumb Swede). That's also the Swede's stereotype of Finns.
Now they're going to kill me too.
A guy with an upper middle class job who grew up middle class (UK sense) is likely to have never encountered violence personally
? I don't think this is true. I think you'd have to be really quite upper middle class (basically to not have gone to football matches[1]) for this to be true.
[1] both in the sense of class shorthand, and the obvious.
550: Sorry, I said race when I meant 'regional background'.
#17: Racists who explain away things as slips of the tongue.
552: Yeah, I think the class lines around violence are just different in the US. Putting the policy of total unquestioning belief of everything I read to one side, an American guy with dsquared's reported biography, including playing rugby or American football, I'd still be surprised by any actual experience of real violence, and would tend to write off talking about it as posturing. (Also an age bracket thing -- a man in his sixties or older talking about his youth, I'd believe violent stories. But a middle class man mid-forties or younger, I'd be skeptical.)
554: Sorry, I meant a US guy. The UK sense in brackets after middle class was intended to indicate that I meant "middle class = affluent" not "middle class = usually employed".
Basically I think that Dsq is saying what Jan Myrdal was saying, that in Britain the middle class isn't so nonviolent.
Even in the US, a friend of mine got beat up once by four huge guys from U of Chicago Law School out hippie-bashing.
a man in his sixties or older talking about his youth
hmmm...
This is just so stupid, a daddy rushing out to avenge his daughter, and so fucking many good reasons to have an unrelated meeting of a reasonably distant acquaintance meet him outside a bar.
Rapist might have friends who should know you have friends.
And you don't send messages or teach lessons to rapists, and this isn't a case where you need to get a deterring reputation. God knows this shouldn't be a frequent occurrence.
This usually shouldn't be paid for to a stranger*, though gifts and favors to friends are always welcome.
*Crazy druggy bikers are safer than cool pros.
in Britain the middle class isn't so nonviolent
It varies regionally, but North Wales wasn't/isn't all that much less so than Scotland. One of the teachers at my secondary school used to be quite well known for knocking people out in pubs, which I suspect wouldn't be tolerated in America.
Yes, to 552.last. Raised by hippies on benefits on what was, at the time, a rough (by UK median standards) council estate. So saw quite a lot of violence, was on receiving end of a bit of it, but was never any good at it. It didn't confer much on me except a very good sense of when it's going to kick off, and a reasonable eye for who might be dangerous.
re: 556
Rugby really can be a violent sport. It's not much like American football, I don't think. I have a guy in my Frenchy kickboxing class who is a hulking ex-rugby player. He's given up rugby and taken up martial arts because he feels he's not really up to the violence anymore. I can take him quite handily in a kickboxing match, but I have no illusions. He'd snap me in half without drawing breath if it got 'real'.
Can I stipulate no knife fighting at the next UKUnfogged? Or at least take it outside...
Glassing only.
"Scary and irrational" for bob presumably means "the imaginary pile of bloody skulls is not high enough"
This is just so stupid, a daddy rushing out to avenge his daughter, and so fucking many good reasons to have an unrelated meeting of a reasonably distant acquaintance meet him outside a bar.
good point Bob, this is exactly the sort of thing one would have to take into account at the planning stage.
four huge guys from U of Chicago Law School out hippie-bashing.
Heh. I was thinking of invoking a 'really evil bastards' exception -- that doesn't actually sound terribly implausible to me. That is, I'd believe a 'we used to go out and beat people up' story from a middle class guy, and I've known at least one guy with stories like that. I posted about him -- knew him in the Peace Corps, and he mentioned having switched to smoking pot from drinking when he decided he was beating people up too much. But I'd expect that exception to be much more about very controlled circumstances where there was no risk at all to the person: "Me and my buddies/football team/fraternity used to beat up hippies/faggots." Not getting into fights, but preying on isolated and unprotected people.
And of course I'm stereotyping too -- I could be wrong about any individual.
One of the teachers at my secondary school used to be quite well known for knocking people out in pubs
Yeah, we had a teacher who was also a thug (and a rugby union player to county level) who occasionally showed up to take games lessons - basically, to coach football - with fresh wounds on his face and weak excuses.
And I don't know if the Islanders understand that in America you can't reasonably expect to put someone in the hospital and have it stop there. Imprudent, ya know?
Lincoln set us free, but you know how it goes, we are all made (possibly) equal over here.
Across the puddle, the toughness of street brawlers looks a little silly.
Rugby really can be a violent sport. It's not much like American football
I think it's because American football as a sport is so, so much more violent than rugby, that it basically doesn't exist at the level that I played rugby at. "Someone who used to play American Football" would be an ex-athlete, who had played in an organised team with a coach, probably in high school or university. "Someone who used to play rugby" is more like me - I've never been particularly athletic, but I'm big and so there was always a place for me in the fourth or fifth XV at the sort of local amateur club that exists in rugby but not gridiron (I think Alex H plays rugby league at the moment).
Also, because of the padding, presumably American football games don't break up into fistfights. And the helmets would make biting logistically difficult.
There's one famous Oxford or Cambridge don quite eminent in his field who was famous for beating people up. Boxing was an elite hobby at one time in Britain, as I remember.
The same man's father was locally famous for getting drunk and being too lazy to put the light out, so he took out the bulb with a shotgun. Which sounds like the kind of thing that happens in Alameida's stories.
See, on the internet, I believe everything. In person, from an American guy, bob's implicit threat of homicidal violence there would crack me up.
I think Alex H plays rugby league at the moment
I don't, and I would wish to disclaim any alleged toughness...
My son played rugby for a year and loved it. As a continuous action sport it's more fun to watch than American football, and it's less frustrating than games like baseball and soccer where you have the stupid 1-0 games.
I'd say we've had a pretty serious cultural change, middle-middle and up, in the last generation. You wouldn't write the Gregory Peck Charlton Heston fight scene from The Big Country into a movie now -- it's not what modern people would expect of Peck.
I was struck by the extent of it 35 years ago or so: my then girlfriend had a sister, who, along with her husband, had graduated from the same HS I went to, but 10 years earlier. The husband described nearly daily fistfights as the highlight of his HS years. I'm not saying there was never a fight when I was in HS, but I never saw one, and wouldn't be surprised if there weren't but 2 or 3 a year, max.
572: he's being modest. wasn't there that time you thumped a bloke for tampering with that ATM?
re: 568
Yeah, I know a few people who continue to play rugby at that sort of level. The guy at our kickboxing class used to, I think, play at a bit higher level than that. He's massive, and fairly athletic for a really big guy, but now that he's in his mid-30s he's getting a bit sick of the sort of fourth XV matches that he plays in now. He was talking about playing against some ex pros recently, and being a bit tired of the dirty play.
[O]ne of the great joys of being the parent of a teenager is embarrassing them.
Would someone please tell the Flip-Pater that I'm no longer a teenager?
Yeah, my father's seventy-three, and I've told stories about his late-teens/twenties social life involving actively working at not getting into fights by hanging around with a large group of big athletic guys who were also all uninterested in getting into fights. Not getting into fights was something you had to actively plan for, though -- the default expectation would be that violence would break out somehow. The class background is comfortably employed at all times, US middle-middle class, but not quite what you'd call middle class in the UK.
fairly athletic for a really big guy
I don't watch sports much, but occasionally I'll flip past rugby, and man, those guys are amazing. The size of rhinoceroses and running like gazelles. American football players don't have the same esthetic effect -- probably all the padding rather than a difference in athleticism: it makes them look like "football players" not people, so it's less astonishing.
You know why? Drugs. Bob Dylan and the Beatles got the kids hooked, and they became sissies. The James Dean, Elvis, Marlon Brando generation did the fighting.
The Stone affected the look, but they were sissies too. Iggie Pop, not very big but I can see him fighting, and his Ashetons.
You know why? Drugs.
Nah, it was abolishing the draft did it.
Apparently the Beatles were a bit thuggish in their Hamburg era, but their marketers packaged them as cute.
571:Oh god, it wasn't a threat, and it was very long ago, but in 1970s my crowd was remarkable for our politeness and caution. Whatever bluster there was, and there wasn't much, was very subtle. ttaM and DD's rugby strutting, well, I don't remember much chest bumping. Imprudent,
And is this a class difference or regional difference?
You don't believe it? Maybe you could ask alameida, sho slummed my world.
I was a fucking tweaker, for god's sakes.
Iggie Pop, not very big but I can see him fighting
Well, there's a whole record (Metallic KO) that's basically "Iggy and the Stooges show up to gig even more wasted than usual, fuck up, and get into a brawl with members of the audience".
And come to think of it, the only time I saw him play, he did manage to get into an eyeballing, spitting confrontation with a security guard.
583
Troll away. I have a distinct recollection of you doing some bragging of your own a while ago.
re: 585
I saw Anthrax get into a physical fight with the bouncers at the Glasgow Barrowlands. Band 1, bouncers 0.
One of the bouncers grabbed a would be stage diver and dropped him head first onto a metal barrier. Bass player took of his bass, jumped into the pit and attacked the bouncer. Mayhem ensued.
I think there's a lot to 580, although I'm not sure what's cart and what's horse.
There's one famous Oxford or Cambridge don quite eminent in his field who was famous for beating people up.
But then one day he met his match.
Thinking back on it, there was a backstage brawl at a concert I went to in 1977, but it was evident at the audience at the time. Brits were involved.
It isn't drugs, it's empire: when you're exporting state violence on a significant scale, it's going to get somewhat quieter at home (except in the designated "rough" areas you need to cultivate, to draw your raw talent and expertise from). Brit Empire starts to wind down after WW2; American Empire begins to ramp up. Hence the UK becomes more generally violent in that timespace, after a (sort of a) lull of some decades; the US, the opposite.
I still think that anthrax is an overrated and that the anthrax biowarfare program is just a wasteful boondoggle.
The great-grandfather of blogger Scott Martens was shot nine times by Makhno's anarchist bandits and took three days to die. Old-fashioned pre-Colt pistols were not efficient.
Not sure it's the pistols: look at 50 Cent, who has the same number of holes in him and is even more alive than great-grandpa Martens. Human bodies are funny things. You can get shot and stabbed multiple times and be fine, or you can fall over and hit your head on a piece of furniture and die there and then.
580:God, the Beats were bullshit. Exactly what I'm talking about. Bukowski.
Catch some Burroughs. He was real, and his tone was what I remember from my youth.
You can get shot and stabbed multiple times and be fine....
That sounds like a challenge.
That sounds like a challenge
IT'S ON, BABY.
Isn't the Ra-Ra-Rasputin story now debunked, like lemmings? Its only source was one of his murderers.
My favourite bit was that when Rasp's (poisoned/stabbed/shot/strangled/beaten/drowned/frozen) body was dragged from the icy river, they found marks that suggested he'd been clawing his way out from under the ice. How exactly did they find these marks?
Not sure it's the pistols: look at 50 Cent, who has the same number of holes in him and is even more alive than great-grandpa Martens.
My understanding, which I'll readily admit is minimal, is that in olden days you were more likely to die from gunshot wounds, but it might take some time. Basically because the bullets were not shot as fast/powerfully, they were more likely to tear things up on their way through/into the body. Whereas bullets shot with modern guns are more likely to go clean through. As long as they don't hit anything crucial, there's less chance of complications. Gswift is presumably the local authority on this sort of thing though.
598: marks like, frex, torn fingernails?
597: Thanks for ruining my day with nuance. That was my favorite murder story.
The US didn't feel very 'rising Empire' in the mid-70s. That's why we needed John Wayne Ronald Reagan.
Not Ayer. Not this guy either. It was an eminent early 20th century British mathematician or scientist.
Bah mere torn fingernails is much too humdrum for the best version of the story: I read it as long dragging claw marks on the underside of the ice, as the rushing torrent bore his furious undead corpus towards the sea.
593 - wonder if that's this bloke's story? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9011652/Oxford-University-lecturer-held-over-death-of-a-science-professor.html
re: 606
No-one talks about Don Fightclub?
Opening paragraph:
"The body of Prof Steve Rawlings, 50, a married astrophysicist, was found at the Oxfordshire home of Dr Devinder Sivia, 49, a mathematics lecturer, late on Wednesday night. "
Spot the incongruous word in that lead.
599: I think a lot of that might be to do with poorer medical care, in particular lack of antibiotics, lack of anaesthetics, and lack of understanding of the necessity of debridement.
Basically because the bullets were not shot as fast/powerfully, they were more likely to tear things up on their way through/into the body.
In this case it really might have been partly due to the guns being used. If you're getting shot with a handgun around Russia pre WWII there's a good chance it was with a Nagant revolver. .30 cal 100 grain bullet at 1000 feet per second. The 1911's Americans used are a bit slower at around 800 feet per second but they're launching a 230 grain .45 cal bullet.
To clarify, my comments were meant to apply to mid-late 1800s guns.
And, yes, I'm sure standard of medical care had a lot to do with death rates as well. But in the context I vaguely remember reading this info, the implication is that you'd be more likely to die from an old gun/bullet in the present day too.
the implication is that you'd be more likely to die from an old gun/bullet in the present day too.
Maybe if the comparison is an old softer lead round vs. a full metal jacket. But that's not going to be the case with a modern hollowpoint.
As I remember, the anarchist gun was archaic even in its time. This was in the Ukraine, which was even more backward than the rest of Russia.
it would act more like a hollow-point.
40 Vikings brutally murdered even though they never did no one no harm.
612: sounds plausible, especially if you look at rifles. Something like a Martini-Henry (as seen in "Zulu") fired an absolutely terrifying bullet more than half an inch across. It didn't fire it as fast as a modern NATO rifle, but it had 50% more energy on impact, and because it wasn't copper-jacketed it would be less likely to go straight through and more likely to deform and dump most of that energy into the target.
Anecdotally, people get up and keep running after being shot with a NATO round. A Martini-Henry dismembers.
Something like a Martini-Henry (as seen in "Zulu") fired an absolutely terrifying bullet more than half an inch across.
IIRC the case the bullet is .45 cal and the case is .5 something but yeah, very similar ballistics to the 45-70's that were being used in the U.S. 400 and 500 grain .45 cal lead bullets at something like 1400 fps. Dropped a lot of bison over here.
533: That was and is our family policy. And I have much less to lose now if I get caught than I did back then.
Anyone messes with my 62 year old baby sister will have to deal with ME!
Whereas bullets shot with modern guns are more likely to go clean through.
Yes and no. The modern full metal round is less likely to be deformed, but more likely to tumble on impact, which ends up having the same energy-transfering, organ-shredding effect.
I doubt the era of the Barrett .50 BMG sniper rifle has to bow to the power of firearms past.
619: good point. I was thinking it was .577, but you're right, that's the case diameter; the bullet is .45. 400 grains at 1,450 fps according to wiki.
622: depends on the barrel length, range, and other factors, but yes.
Were the original elephant guns -- e.g., the .577 and .600 Nitro Express -- really the diameters advertised or were those just marketing hyperbole?
You had to stretch them a bit first.
Also, this has to be the manliest discussion we have had in eons.
608: Astrophysicists are easily scared off by parental threats, so they rarely marry.
To divert from all the icky gun talk - I don't think I'm going to have to think about Kid A having sex for a while yet. She just reblogged this on her tumblr: Going on tumblr at stupid hours in the morning. Updating twitter as if you're famous. Lusting over men nearly double your age. Ending texts with the Voldemort laugh. Playing air guitar alone. Never wanting to get changed out of your pyjamas. Crying over fictional relationships that aren't actually specified in the stories. Drawing scars on your forehead whilst waving a carved twig around. Trying to deduce things but failing badly. Using 'fandoms', 'flails', 'reblog' and 'canon' in everyday context. Being grammatically correct. Saying 'Forever Alone' as a normal term. Wearing obscure fandom t-shirts. Eating chocolate and regretting nothing. Getting incredibly happy with two notes and new followers. And all the time we do this, we look for fucks and we find none. This is us.
Were the original elephant guns -- e.g., the .577 and .600 Nitro Express -- really the diameters advertised or were those just marketing hyperbole?
AFAICT the .577 is to be taken literally. I think I have a picture of one somewhere on Flickr.
628: I was thinking "Who commits murder on a Wednesday?"
A prof with a heavy Tue-Thu course load and weekend plans?
AFAICT the .577 is to be taken literally.
Especially if you're an elephant.
627:Essentialist and sexist.
It isn't drugs, it's empire: when you're exporting state violence on a significant scale, it's going to get somewhat quieter at home (except in the designated "rough" areas you need to cultivate, to draw your raw talent and expertise from).
Is there a source, an article or book, that makes this argument in this way? Serious question. Thanks.
Threadlink: the Vikings to which Emerson refers in 617 were discovered under one of the quads of the 606 suspect's college. STOP HIM BEFORE HE KILLS AGAIN (in about 3018 AD or something)
634: I would not like to meet the woman who packs a .577 Nitro Express pistol.
What I'd like to know is whether, if one of Tripp's daughters had happened one day to bring home a girlfriend, would she have been subject to the same threat? I'm guessing not.
But then there's probably some back on the veldt explanation of that about how homosexual offspring won't benefit one's family by providing further offspring and so don't deserve the protection of the group.
More seriously, one of the suitors will become part of your 'group' one day, and you'll see more of your daughter if her partner feels like one of the family, and I'm not sure that making his first impression of you be "christ, this bloke's mental" is going to help with that.
I apologize for my previous rudeness, but I think the assumption about who I am based on one line I use on suitors is pretty rude, too.
I'm gender-neutral and neutral regarding sexual orientation. Family is family. At times I choose to pro-actively provoke a tiny bit of fear in outsiders, and I do that for a reason. Call it 'respect' instead of fear if that makes your pre-frontal cortex feel more comfortable about it.
As a parent, I want to encourage 'curiosity' and 'bravery' in my children. These emotions are innate in all of us, and they stem from the base emotion of foraging. Fear inhibits that emotion. People are more inclined to forage if they have a secure base to come back to. I want to give my offspring that base.
In the meantime, when they are out in the world, they will encounter other people, who may or may not hurt them. When I can, I pre-emptively like to install a little fear in the other people (by "posturing," not "blustering") to blunt some of their more aggressive urges. In addition to that, by modeling this behavior, I teach my own kids how to effectively deal with problems as well.
This approach is not loony, and it works very well. Suitors "get it," and plenty of them have temporarily joined our family group over the years. In addition, every one of my kids is pursuing his/her dreams out in the big scary world. Details upon request.
629: That's a familiar rant.
635: I think it'd be difficult to argue. Britain in 1900: ruled a quarter of the world, homicide rate 9.6 per million. Britain in 1965: no empire worth speaking of, homicide rate 6.8 per million. Then the rate rose again, even though there weren't really any more colonies to get rid of.
Also, Britain in the days of the empire may have been exporting violence, but it wasn't exporting the violent: the key thing to remember about the empire is that it involved very small numbers of British troops. As a method of getting the violent out of Britain, it wasn't very effective.
Photo here. It isn't actually that impressive from that angle -- you can't really appreciate the barrel diameter.
The wielder of the weapon explained that, because of the bolt action, you would have exactly one chance to stop a charging elephant, and that it would have to be a head shot between the eyes where the bullet could penetrate the skull. A heart-lung shot would not stop the beast before it trampled you. Upon hearing this, I asked why he had five spare rounds in his bandolier. He further explained that shooting an elephant was illegal, so the remaining rounds were to eliminate the witnesses.
617: Wow, Aethelred didn't mess around. Maybe his nickname ought to be King Aethelred So-How-You-Like-Me-Now.
As a method of getting the violent out of Britain, it wasn't very effective.
Not nearly as good as association football.
Von Wafer: not sure if I've ever read an authentic modern historical argument discussing (or challenging) it in so many words. It's implicit -- and fairly often explicit -- in the rationale given at the time (by politicians, commentators, novelists) for the expansion of imperialism as a deliberate flag-waving project in the UK in the second half of the 19th century especially (and of course Lenin in his famous essay on Imperialism co-opts the argument). Kipling isn't a bad place to start: Soldiers Three in particular.
Transferring it to the US is pure guesswork on my part, though I do think it's highly relevant. However the empires are quite dissimilar in key ways; US "neocolonialism" for example is much less concerned with actual transplantation of significant numbers of Americans, landspace being rather less of an issue.
There is -- not unrelated -- stuff written about the upsurge of drug addiction etc when troops return from largescale involuntary mobilisation (WW2; Vietnam). This is the flipside of the same argument. However I don't have any the titles or links to hand -- haven't read it up for many years.
There is -- not unrelated -- stuff written about the upsurge of drug addiction etc when troops return from largescale involuntary mobilisation (WW2; Vietnam). This is the flipside of the same argument.
Whoa there. No it's not, unless you're arguing that drug addiction is a violent crime.
A better example might be Chatham. IIRC when he was asked whether raising the Black Watch was a good idea - after all, these were Highlanders, like the ones who had recently rebelled in the '45, and taking several hundred and training them in modern warfare might be considered to be sowing dragon's teeth - he replied that he wasn't worried - "after they are raised they will be sent to North America, and I do not anticipate many of them will return".
Foraging is an emotion?
Yeah, one of the basic emotions we share with other mammals. "Affective Neuroscience," as one citation.
IIRC, the four base emotions are fear, rage, foraging, and wanting to be part of the group, or something like that. These emotions interact with each other, enhancing or inhibiting each other. All of these come from the more primitive parts of our brain. They are innate, and they provide our motivations for doing what we do. Our pre-frontal cortex then rationalizes our behaviors and supplies a pseudo-rational explanation.
This knowledge provides a pretty powerful insight into human psychology. Seriously.l
Some neuroscientists suggest that our dream state may actually be what our consciousness was like before we had the pre-frontal cortex to provide a rational layer to our thinking. They do know that the part of the brain where long term memories are made is very active during the dream state, so they think maybe dreaming is the primitive processing of our daily experiences so that they may be put properly into long term memory. I highly recommend "Affective Neuroscience." It is expensive, but it has a TON of good data in it.
Also, Britain in the days of the empire may have been exporting violence, but it wasn't exporting the violent: the key thing to remember about the empire is that it involved very small numbers of British troops. As a method of getting the violent out of Britain, it wasn't very effective.
Presumably convict transportation was fairly effective.
Some neuroscientists suggest that our dream state may actually be what our consciousness was like before we had the pre-frontal cortex to provide a rational layer to our thinking.
Whoa, there's a crazy thing to think about.
I would think this information would be very helpful to someone in the legal profession. In some ways I think our entire legal system is the codification of all the nuances that arise because of the interactions of our base emotions and how those manifest in our behaviors.
647: I've heard foraging called "seeking".
My recollection of the list of basic affects is Seeking, Care, Lust, Joy, Care, Loss, Rage. I don't remember the source.
Joy and Loss are more often called Play and Panic respectively, according to Google.
I think you'd have to measure overall fightiness, rather than murder rate alone, ajay. And I'm prepared to counter-posit that the quiet decade and a half immediately after WW2 in the UK were as much about post-war exhaustion as anything. (The post-war surge in addiction to speed and so on notswithstanding.)
"Exporting violence" isn't quite the same as "exporting the violent": if it were the latter, yes, you'd expect to see the changes more or less overnight, as the troops came come and went out on the razz. What I'm getting at is more about long-term inculcated assumptions about absence of a future. Colonialism gave an opportunity for a significant tranche of people to escape (or maybe as much to the point, to imagine escaping) suffocating lack of opportunity in their hometown, and go push other people around in places with amazing weather and landscapes. It offered a better structure of physical excitement than street-brawls: and one which actually included good career futures. The Leninist argument is that the homeland working class in an empire will tend to become -- for variety of reasons -- stakeholders in the imperial status quo. Hence (presumably) less likely to take up arms to topple it.
647. Dude, you're going to angry up some blood a whole lot talking like that. Try hitting the "wanting to be part of the group" chord harder.
Also, disgust is missing. Also also, these insights do not help in distinguishing mice from meerkats, or to distinguishing normal behavior in Tokyo form normal behavior in Mogadishu.
the upsurge of drug addiction etc when troops return from largescale involuntary mobilisation (WW2; Vietnam).
Evidently there was less of that than is popularly imagined.
I fear that I am being trolled, but I'll ask anyway - WTF is foraging as an emotion? When would I experience it, what would provoke it, and what would I feel inclined to do under its influence? I have an image in mind of someone pouncing out of the bushes and yelling something at me that inspires a frenzy of berry-picking.
Affective Neuroscience by Panksepp, I believe...
656: The desire to find out what's there. Curiosity. What makes wrapped presents more exciting (and not opening them more painful) then presents where you know what's in them.
Evidently giving it the name "foraging" is an attempt to link the affect to a common adaptive behavior. In other words, the idea is that when you experience curiosity/seeking, you've gone into "forager mode".
So, curiosity. That's good, I know what curiosity is. And now it's satisfied.
Oh, I hadn't seen 659. Not just curiosity, but curiosity on the veldt.
I think you'd have to measure overall fightiness, rather than murder rate alone, ajay.
Homicide rate's generally seen as quite a good proxy, though, isn't it? Given changes in reporting standards, definitions etc?
And I'm prepared to counter-posit that the quiet decade and a half immediately after WW2 in the UK were as much about post-war exhaustion as anything
People who were four years old in 1945 were still, by 1960, too knackered from the effort of beating Hitler to go out and stab someone? I'm not buying it.
Plus, so much else was happening over the period in question that I am really sceptical you could prove the thesis in 653.2 one way or the other.
Affective Neuroscience , and
Getting on the right path.
"this is flipside of the same argument": yes, I could hardly have picked a less clear way to make the point I wanted to make, I think.
I'm not really talking about "crime" though, I'm talking about violence as an unavoidable social manifestation of high-density population without good outlets in regard to excitement or other possibilities. War -- and soldiering overseas generally -- offer both these, with other benefits (like a pension, which football hooligans don't get): so presumably ameliorate both the actual; density of population, and the density of unrelieved frustration.
By "flipside" I suppose I meant that a group of people who really liked the high-intensity excitement of war (including some relevant drugs) or had found reliably numbing means to cope (via other kinds of drug) were now returning in large-ish numbers right back into the communities under most pressure.
How could rounding up a significant fraction of a society's young males and shipping them elsewhere not reduce the murder rate?
666: Then it's just as well I never actually tried to read the book.
665: Put up a huge bunch of "Rosie the Murderer" posters.
665: an imperial army isn't a significant fraction of a society's young males; it might make them more likely to commit murder when they came back; it might increase the incidence of other phenomena (such as inadequate childrearing) which in turn would act to increase the murder rate.
One of the interesting secondary effects of empire in the British case is that -- partly with the intention of shoring it up as it began to come to pieces -- large-scale state-run social programmes, in education and universal healthcare especially, were instituted. These actually outlived the empire by several decades: they too, had a significant ameliorative effect -- though by the 70s, things were beginning to fray, and violence began to rise.
Trying to remember who defined an empire as a territory at peace, with endless war all round its edges.
I doubt the equation between fightiness and military capacity. Not completely unrelated, but some fighty peoples are not militarily very good, and some non-fighty peoples (Japanese) were pretty militaristic.
Anyway, I'm off to fight a man in a pub car park. He cannot see the links I am making between this thing and that other thing, and needs teaching a lesson.
What are the chances that I can get both Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil to blurb my new book? Probably not very good.
I'll blurb it.
"Von Wafer manages to make the history of [insert topic] come alive for modern readers in a way that no one has before."
--- a random guy on the internet.
669: If the removal is of an insignificant number, those other effects you mention would have to be really strong.
I don't think Ttam's move would be violence either, but since he's trained in a martial art and isn't given to being a blowhard about fights (btw this is a defining characteristic of those who do them) if he'd said he was going to do something I'd be both (a) more likely to believe him and (b) more likely to believe he'd succeed.
Do none of you know the "banker/financial services guy who talks tough but is basically a bullshit artist" stereotype. It's a thing, especially among traders. NB -- not actually tough. Come to think of it, some of the folks I met who embodied this stereotype were ex rugby players.
Anyhow, I'm sticking with 504.
The human brain has layers. Psychology has tried a 'top down' approach to understanding emotion, and has defined the 'affects,' and I am surprised to find that fear is not on the list.
From a bottoms up approach, mammals begin with the four basics. Because study on human brains has been limited, we know a lot more about the neuroscience of the basic emotions through animal studies than we do any of higher ones. Non-invasive brain scans are helping with this, but we have a LONG way to go before we fully understand the higher level emotions.
The human mind is the synthesis of all these parts, and many parts may actually inhibit each other. While it is true we are no longer on the veldt, we still have the effects of that in our base emotions, and our base emotions still influence much of our behavior. I don't think it is good to ignore such a basic part of our brain.
off to fight a man in a pub car park
of course, as a central Londoner, the nearest pub with a car park is probably miles away, thinking about it. People just don't understand metonymy these days and hitting them doesn't help.
652:Joy and Loss are more often called Play and Panic
joyance and "lack"?
(struggling this morning through Theory about Mishima versus Genet)
666: Paanksep is essential reading, but I wouldn't pay the $180-new cost of his book.
675: those aren't meant to all be true at once; they're just suggestions.
Trying to remember who defined an empire as a territory at peace, with endless war all round its edges.
It's not a very good description. I don't think you could distinguish on those grounds between an empire and, well, a country.
679:Ugh. s/b "jouissance" Embarrassed
How could a winner take all Halford-Dsquared grudge match be financed? Who lives where? TV rights? Viral media? We need a promoter.
680: to call people stupid or uninformed or whatever?
I'm sorta on vacation right now.
685: Rest up, then. I'm sure your talents will be needed again.
A lot of countries are at peace under some empire's hegemony.
In 1871 Napoleon III left power and France lost its imperial status, which Germany claimed.
Per wiki: in 1877 Parliament declared Queen Victoria Empress of India in order to make sure that she would be equal in rank to her own daughter, who was married to the German Emperor. Before that the imperial status of the British crown was uncertain; George III declined the title.
684: Screw a promoter. We need owls.
I think I would find it much funnier to set the grudge match venue for a pub in the West End, then watch Halford get stopped at the door for wearing trainers and a hooded top, while I happily strolled in for an evening's drinking, watching him splutter "But but ... this isn't proper fighting!!!"
Also, who will play the role of Dsquared's innocent daughter? His actual daughter is too young. One of my nieces is in drama and is the right age, but she's a lesbian.
688: Speaking of owls, I hear some arctic owls (or something like that) are having an eruption, and are appearing far south, into the US. There was an explosion of lemmings, which the owls eat like candy, and the owl population erupted.
They are impressive birds, and not afraid of humans, so please treat them as honored guests to our country, and not illegal immigrants.
691: A snowy owl that drew birdwatchers from throughout Ohio was found dead on the same day its photo was on the cover of The Dispatch
I think it's safe to say Halford should hand the TV rights.
My 15 year old is the right age, and half Welsh, and has the right name iirr from Remembrance Day. She can play the
wronged maiden!
They don't have to be in the same place though, they could act it out on unfogged, like postal chess.
They don't have to be in the same place though, they could act it out on unfogged, like postal chess.
Or Cheddar Gorge.
If the goddamn birders had each brought a mouse, a rat, a vole, or a cute little bunny, that owl would be alive today. I suppose that would be against their code of ethics.
One of my nieces is in drama and is the right age, but she's a lesbian.
this is quite a good idea - you could get a dram-school dropout to act in an incrementally more and more offensive way to Emerson's niece, and then I could sort of watch and calibrate at precisely what point along the continuum one would have to a) say something b) make a death threat c) start planning vigilante justice d) declare war and so on.
It's not exactly what one would call wholesome entertainment. But potentially cheaper than an evening on the cocktails.
Wait, why are we casting the daughter? Technically I am a creepy divorced middle aged dude but I didn't see the part where I signed on for teen daughter date rape.
Actually I'm pretty sure that Dsquared could take me although I might be able to give it a go. Back in my brief and not very successful teen fighting career, I mostly got by by seeming crazy and having people back down, but I'm not even a little intimidating.
No drama without a maiden in distress, Halford. Your decision to be the dragon is your own.
I had always thought that Emerson might be a pseudonym for the WWE promoter "Vince" McMahon, and this suddenly unveiled deep practical knowledge certainly supports the hypothesis.
699: Who would drop out of something as awesome-sounding as dram-school?
689: Halford considers fighting work. He'd wear a suit and tie.
It sounds better than most online degrees.
Halford and Dsquared might have to take on personae. This would be Dsquared. Guaranteed Welsh.
691: Wow! Someone ought to put up a thread or something.
we know a lot more about the neuroscience of the basic emotions through animal studies than we do any of higher ones.
Oh excellent. Can neuroscience explain which mammals are predisposed to live in groups and which are solitary, and so distinguish meerkats from mice? I think the answer is no.
The very rudimentary knowledge we have about emotion is insufficient for sweeping claims about animals with a capacity for learning, much less those with culture. Even on the internet.
May I audition for the role of the father? I mean, I played a part in getting this thing rolling.
705: My niece* did very, very well with a U. Phoenix accounting degree. However, this was probably because she already knew the stuff from keeping books for her sociopathic, tax-evading, creative-accounting father. It was like she was laundering money, i.e., she was getting formal credit for knowledge she already had.
A distillery is opening down the road from here. No idea if it will be a craft distillery or a rotgut distillery. Corn can be found here.
* No, not the damsel in distress niece.
The Leninist argument is that the homeland working class in an empire will tend to become -- for variety of reasons -- stakeholders in the imperial status quo.
Stalin byl geroiom!
The world of fight promotion is like a gigantic money funnel to litigators, there is no industry with more constant legal fights. WWE and UFC solve this through controlling everything and treating the fighters as slave labor. Actually come to think of it I litigated the aftermath of one of the most famous bar fights in recent US history, perhaps a dedicated stalker can figure out which one. I realize that doesn't make me tough.
Well, Dsquared is set. But with two damsels and two dads, all we'd need is another bounder. Then we could have a championship round.
709: The answer is not "No," the answer is "Not yet." We do know a lot more than the rudiments, and we are in the process of gaining full knowledge.
I prefer not to wait for the time when we have complete knowledge of the subject. My actions are motivated by the emotions and knowledge that I have at any given time. If I can get someone to do what I want by giving them a certain look, I do it. It is silly to not use those tools.
lw gets it completely right.
If I had brought an actual computer with me I would no doubt spend a productive day patiently yelling about folk misunderstanding of neuroscience. Or get fed up and leave the thread.
If I can get someone to do what I want by giving them a certain look, I do it.
So, how did you learn what kind of look worked? Pop-neuroscience about foraging, or interacting with people?
Asked on NLP speed seduction forums.
||
Hey, if any UKers are still hanging around (no shivs, please), my wife and I just found out that we'll be spending a little over a week in Norwich (two nights) and London (six) this coming May. We'll probably also take a day trip to either Oxford or Cambridge, as we're both (to a rough approximation) academics.
I know I'm mostly a lurker, but if anyone's interested in meeting up then, please email me at the address below. We'd love to connect.
|>
In the last 10 years I've become much more accepting of ev psych and the the neuroscience of behavior. It seems to me that something will eventually be found out. But it seems to me that right now we're more or less at the level of the enumeration of the components.
My image for this kind of thing is the coagulation chart. The coagulation of blood is pretty well understood, but it's pretty complicated. The elements were gradually discovered over a considerable period, converging finally on a description of the complete system after the discovery and replacement of a series of partial systems. (Factor Six turned out not to be a factor at all, but they didn't renumber the others.)
My guess is that behavioral neurology is much, much more complicated than coagulation. And that right now, people are still discovering the components.
Also, neuroscientists often seem to start with conventionally-American pidgin folk descriptions of everything about human behavior except the one thing they're studying.
I litigated the aftermath of one of the most famous bar fights in recent US history
I think your path is clear -- get D-squared to punch you in the face and then sue him.
720: Damn, that's badly written.
I agree that animal models are the way to think about this, and that this is a very interesting field. Darwin's book about facial expressions is fantastic, and the people who study facial expressions in humans have a lot to say; Ekman and Tompkins are the two I've read.
Are there any behaviorally interesting knockout mice? I do not know the answer.
and the people who study facial expressions in humans have a lot to say
Suggesting maybe they haven't learned facial expressions very well.
This has also led me to muse on the last time I saw two middle aged professionals try to hit each other, over, believe it or not, a card game. One of the more pathetic things I've ever seen, lame stumbling, badly throw punches and then collapse and shame, and these guys had both grown up as athletes in fight-heavy towns, though perhaps not in the forge of iron men that is upper middle class Wales.
726: Sad indeed. You should come to Calgary, here we all have wire-fighting teams and move with deadly but beautiful grace.
711.2: WHAT KIND OF CORN?! WHEAT? BARLEY? MAIZE???
ALL KINDS OF CORN EXCEPT GODDAMN AMARANTH, BUT NOT A LOT OF BARLEY AND RYE.
IF YOU'RE USING ALL CAPS YOU SHOULD BE "OPINIONATED" JOHN EMERSON. OTHERWISE IT'S UNCOUTH.
Who is 728, 730 and why does s/he have so many stuffed animals?
I'M BEING GODDAMN TRANSGRESSIVE, OK?
731: Me. Real animals or plants would perish under my care, but stuffed animals do just fine. Also, they have sentimental value to some interested parties.
And they just kind of accumulate, like barnacles or dust bunnies.
Though I've never tried to construct a barnacle-and-dust-bunny tableau.
Actually, MN is pretty good for barley and rye too, though the Dakotas are better.
[T]he forge of iron men that is upper middle class Wales.
This reminds me of the stories another refugee from Western Massachusetts used to tell my colleagues about the depressed, crime-ridden post-industrial city where I grew up. He may have convinced some of them that I still carried a knife.
I had always thought that Emerson might be a pseudonym for the WWE promoter "Vince" McMahon, and this suddenly unveiled deep practical knowledge certainly supports the hypothesis.
"Th-th-th-th-that's John Emerson's music! Could he be returning to face D-Generation X at Wrestlemania?!?!"
713: Rick Santorum did wrestling litigation work back in the day.
I thought this would be beating a dead-horse thread, but luckily we moved back to inter-Nordic racism, so I feel like I can bring this up. For David something at comment 400-something who accused me of not knowing anything about Scandinavia, technically, Scandinavia is Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Finland and Iceland are part of the Nordic states, but technically not Scandinavian, but colloquially they are. Of course, Finns aren't Indo-European, which is something that Swedes especially like to remind people of in hushed tones behind closed doors. I'm not sure how using the colloquial, less accurate, meaning of Scandinavia means I can't know that Scandinavians aren't too psyched about Bulgarians or Somalis moving to their countries in significant numbers, but if you don't want to take personal experience, there's plenty of sociological data on attitudes towards immigration that supports this.
With suicide, according "Suicide in Scandinavia" which didn't include Finland (and was written in the 70s), Denmark and Sweden have high suicide rates because they're neurotic perfectionists, but Norwegians are too stubborn and vindictive to kill themselves (which sounds about right).
Also, Von Wafer, I completely believe you. My first serious boyfriend was Jewish, and it put my grandparents in a huge bind, in particular because Scandinavians (especially Norwegians) define themselves as Not Anti-Semitic, Unlike The Germans, however considering there are about 20 Jews in Norway total, they're still exotic "Orientals" and not really marriage material, at least for Norwegians of that generation. My grandparents dealt with it by being passive-aggressively polite in front of my bf, and then, as the relationship went on, increasingly disapproving to me in private. My father's mother told my boyfriend she thought the holocaust was terrible, and then asked how much of his family had died. She also asked him if he spoke "Jewish" at home. (Considering my grandmother has been to a bar mitzvah and has interacted with other Jewish people in a less offensive way, I have to assume her "cluelessness" was part intentional.) My mother's mother helpfully pointed out my boyfriend that "interracial" marriage was common in Germany around the turn of the 20th century. In private, my grandparents would make comments like, "well, it's nice to date all sorts of people, but of course you're not going to get *married*" or, in a moment of rare candor, "If you have to date a Jew, couldn't you have least found a blond one?" My mother's mother told everyone my boyfriend was from the Middle East, which led my aunt to call me in confusion, since she had heard from my mother he was from Philadelphia. Oddly enough, my boyfriend didn't pick up on any of this, the anti-Semitism was too subtle and slipped under the radar. He found them a bit reserved, but very polite, and had no idea why I was so mortified every time we saw them. Of course, my grandparents are European and grew up during the apex of 20th century anti-Semitism, so that's a bit different from the average American, I suppose.
Then the rate rose again
Like I said upthread, they abolished conscription. If you lock up all 18-21 British males in barracks in Germany, it's bound to reduce the rate of violence in Britain.
"If you have to date a Jew, couldn't you have least found a blond one?"
Well that was always sort of my dream but there aren't too many of them!
Speaking of speaking Jewish at home, when I was four or five years old in small-town Oklahoma, I came home and told my parents "I'm starting to talk like a Christian." They were very much with the WTF, and finally got me to explain: I had started to get an Okie accent and my teacher or classmate or someone had said "you're starting to sound like one of us" and my automatic assumption was this meant a Christian.
742: however considering there are about 20 Jews in Norway total, they're still exotic "Orientals" and not really marriage material,
So, a friend of mine, who'd lived for a couple of years in the Euro-American Colony in the Levant, said that there had been a big problem in the 80s and 90s with young Swedish women (of Xtian descent) coming to work on a kibbutz for a year and winding up marrying Jewish men, who were then no good for anything (in the eyes of their compatriots). Ever hear anything about that?
523: financially I could quit this job tomorrow if I wanted to
533: normal middle class burghers like me
If you have fuck-you money, you're neither normal nor middle-class*
*Yes, yes, except in the sense of silly British "class" where it's all about the connotations of what shoes you wear. That's not proper class.
Your priest's comments would not have been run of the mill in Sweden. I have Norwegian relations, but don't feel I could say, certainly not with your confidence, what sort of sentiments towards immigrants are rare or "run of the mill" there. I do know that when it comes to immigration and ethnic minorities the Nordic countries doesn't have much at all in common, completely different historical experiences, different attitutudes, different numbers, hence my comment wtf is Scandinavia.
"Of course, Finns aren't Indo-European, which is something that Swedes especially like to remind people of in hushed tones behind closed doors. "
No, they don't.
"With suicide, according "Suicide in Scandinavia" which didn't include Finland (and was written in the 70s), Denmark and Sweden have high suicide rates because they're neurotic perfectionists
As far as I know, suicide rates have never been unusually high in the Nordics. I know they were'nt when the Eisenhower campaign invented that factoid, and that they aren't now.
"but Norwegians are too stubborn and vindictive to kill themselves (which sounds about right).".
That sounds like v serious sociology. I don't even recognize those stereotypes.
Scandinavian suicide rates are on a par with the US. Finland is quite a bit higher. Korea, Japan, and Communist or ex-Communist countries are the worst. Plus Guyana and Sri Lanka. Haiti is the lowest because it's unnecessary there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
I have no UMC professional in this fight, but over 200 comments later I'm still giggling over "Stig-of-the-dump".
know they were'nt when the Eisenhower campaign invented that factoid,
What? Is that a different Eisenhower?
747: I don't even recognize those stereotypes.
In Soviet Sweden, stereotypes recognize YOU!
Sorry, it was the Eisenhauer campaign.
I thought the high suicide rates in Sweden thing went back to Émile Durkheim, but I admit I've never read it and don't know what countries he covered.
This account makes Eisenhower come across less bad than what I've read before.
http://homepage.mac.com/jrc/contrib/sweden_suicide.html
David, if you're an American and read as such, Scandinavians aren't going to open up with their xenophobic comments, and will probably say lots of non-xenophobic stuff instead. You have to be considered "one of us" to get the subtle-xenophobia. Even though I was born and raised in the US, I somehow missed all the things that make someone American, so I'm not even read as Scandinavian-American, but rather just as Scandinavian (I'm actually Norwegian and Swedish, with a Finnish step-father), and thus get lots of less than savory comments by people who in all other contexts know better, or wouldn't be caught dead making such a statement to outsiders. (I also have stories I could tell you about German and Austrian anti-semitism which come from people on the anti-racist left who are totally anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist and would never in a million years say anything less than 100% positive about Jews in general daily life.) Also, it's very subtle and done a lot in code, so if you're expecting something more straightforward you'd probably miss it.
But...despite some cultural, historical and political differences (which aren't in the scheme of things that great, there's probably bigger differences between Massachusetts and Florida), the chilly multiculturalism that exists pretty much across all of Scandinavia isn't exactly unknown (of course, as a general trend, it doesn't describe every person), I'm not sure why you're so invested in arguing that Scandinavians aren't at all xenophobic.
Pretty sure that DTUC is a Swedish swede, not an American swedophile.
The sociological study "suicide in Scandinavia" was conducted in 1965, so the statistics are out of date, but the point was to explain disparities *between* different Scandinavian countries, rather than to explain why such countries would have a high suicide rate in general (i.e., why in Norway's suicide rate consistently lower than Sweden or Denmark's.)
I looked at "Suicide in Scandinavia: an epidemiological analysis" by Lisbet Kolmos in the suicide issue from 1987 in the journal "Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica," (behind a paywall, but here's the abstract):
"Suicide rates in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden for the past few years are presented. Despite the fact that the Nordic countries, both historically and at present, have many features in common, differences between the countries in the frequency of suicide are pronounced. These differences and the reliability of Nordic suicide statistics are discussed."
It's also out of date, but pretty much corroborates the findings in the 1965 study, though it notes the suicide rate in Norway increased in the 1970s. It also, interestingly enough, makes a point of noting that the Finns aren't Indo-European, unlike the other Scandinavians. Oh, but I guess that's never mentioned, right?
Ok David, I'm sorry if I assumed you were American. Look, maybe there is something about me that makes people say racist things to me. But, it's pretty common. Like, I'll walk into a bar in the US, and I'll get approached by a tourist from Norway/Sweden/Denmark will approach me to complain about immigration in their respective country. This has happened, like, more times than I can count. Maybe only racist people travel to the US? Again, maybe it's the people I know, but I've heard snotty comments from Swedes about Finns not being IE. I've also heard less than positive things from Finns who've lived in Sweden, enough to make me feel like it's not just the people I meet. You obviously know more about Sweden than I do, and it is true that there is probably less xenophobia in Sweden than in Norway or Denmark or Finland. What I'm maybe reacting overly strongly to is the attitude of "oh, we're not racist" or "we don't have racism here," which is just not the case, and I don't trust anyone who claims there is no racism in their country to be an accurate judge of mild racism. I agree, Scandinavians are less racist than many other Europeans, but more racist then you think you are.
I don't know what being 'Indo-European' means in this context. It sounds like it's being used as if it's some sort of ethnic identity, rather than a language family. Which seems somewhat mistaken.
I haven't really said much of anything about how xenophobic Scandinavians are or aren't, have I?. Whenever there's people, there's xenophobia. I'm just annoyed by you making one ignorant remark after the other.
746: tbh this has always been a bit of an attitudinal difference between me and my contemporaries from Oxford to the civil service to the City. Because I've always known that if it came down to it, I could go back to Granny's farm (and that's probably true at a deeper psychological level even during the ten years that I spent totally denying it), for me, "fuck you money" has basically been whatever I had in my pocket. It's not exactly "nornal" I guess, but people like me from big rural families are not completely uncommon either, and we're not proleterians and we're not capitaalists either. As it happens I now have politely-walk-away money on my own account, but my brother doesn't and he's just like me.
Fwiw, I have a friend whose family farm in Donegal, and he has much the same attitude. He has no interest in farming, doesn't like his family much, and lives in London, but he knows if it really does all go tits up, he has a place to go and an income, forever.
Is this some relic of (even more than the US) state subsidized farming? Bc in the US "having a family farm" most very definitely does not mean "having a place to go and an income forever."
Board up the windows and lay out the mantrap, Halford. You thought you were messing with the middle class, but you just fucked with a gentleman farmer.
Seems only appropriate, given Halford's known antipathy to agriculture.
D2d has just irrevocably become Reuben Starkadder in my head, knowing that he can always go back to Cold Comfort Farm and scranlet the turnips if necessary.
re: 764
Oh I don't think my friend's family are earning a huge amount of cash. But he can be pretty sure that as long as people need food/cattle/whatever-the-fuck-they-farm-in-Donegal he's at least got something, and while it may be just subsisting, at least it's not subsisting in a service job in which people abuse him to his face.
My family are proles unto the nth generation so no fucker owns anything.* But I can sort of understand the attitude: 'This is mine, and no matter what the fuck happens, I can at least eat.'
* literally. One person in my entire extended family owns the house they live in.
The sheep will always be there, and of the sheep fail, the coal mine, and if the coal mine fails, there's the eisteddfod.
/Taffy sterotype
From 768 and 769 it sounds like the distinction here has to with a greater comfort with literal subsistence farming Knifecrimeside, whereas in America even "family farming" has historically primarily meant cash crops.
re: 771
Honestly, I wouldn't know. I'm only going by what one friend says, and he's not really explained in detail what he has in mind. Just that if he had to, he could go back and farm.
My wife's family, though, literally do subsist. They don't have a farm, just a 'garden' which is only maybe half a football field in size. But they grow most of their own veg, raise chickens and sometimes a pig, and that sort of thing lets them live on a very low cash income.
in which people abuse him to his face.
My career goal, which I have largely achieved, is to have people only abuse me behind my back.
literally. One person in my entire extended family owns the house they live in.
Heh. It isn't quite the same, but I realized that with the death of my step-grandmother, widowing my grandfather, that there are no married adults in my extended family. A reasonable proportion of long term relationships, but not a legal marriage to be seen.
Oh I'm taking on agriculture and finance? This is getting better every minute.
In reality, I actually own a small share of a small family farm, inherited from my great great grandfather and jointly owned by a bunch of family members. It generates a few hundred dollars of income a year to me (from rent, there's a tenant), is a gigantic PITA at tax time, and is held onto by my family for 100% sentimental reasons.* The tenant doesn't live there; he has his own farm, but can only make a (until recently, there's apparently been a boom) tenuous living by renting out a bunch of other people's land and farming that as well. Definitely not a lifestyle where you'd go "hey, who cares if I lose my job and go to jail for a while for some old man flailing with a baton at a pimply 15 year old, because I've always got that permanent sweet rural lifestyle to go back to."
I guess the greater comfort with pure subsistence farming could explain a difference, but how many farmers in the US come anywhere close to growing for subsistence? And how many in Britain have at any time in the recent past? Maybe someone knows.
*You may ask yourself, what sentimental value is there in owning land that no one would have the remotest idea what to do with and rents out to a tenant? And you'd be right.
how many farmers in the US come anywhere close to growing for subsistence?
Vanishingly few, I would think, but I don't know of any actual data on this. There probably is some somewhere.
774. My five siblings and I are batting 2 for 8 in marriages now, and the two surviving marriages are dysfunctional but stable.
I'd guess vanishingly few in the UK, either. Which, after all, has a lot of good agricultural land and has been heavily industrialised/mechanised for a couple of centuries.
But, psychologically, I'd bet that 'fuck it, I can go back to the farm if all else fails' isn't driven purely by thoughts of cash.
I'm pretty sure that there a a moderate number of medium-sized to small farmers who are self-sufficient in vegetables, meat, and maybe firewood. But they still need a cash crop.
Don't they usually call that cash crop "Off-farm employment"?
Don't they usually call that cash crop "Off-farm employment" cannabis?
A lot of truck driving. My friend who went from farming to over the road trucking says it's like a big vacation driving around.
Right, my understanding is pretty much everyone who is a small to medium sized farmer also has at least one family member who has a non-farm job and is bringing in some nonfarm income.
Depends on what you mean by medium. I have cousins with a few hundred acres and not all have spouses working.
I've never been to an Scandinavian country and wouldn't presume any firsthand knowledge of what things are like there, but the pen I am presently using comes from S-w/edi/h Mus!!ms for P@ac@ & Justice. When I met with them a year or so ago they were certainly under the impression there was a plenty of real-live racism in Sweden.
I've quite liked all the Scandinavian countries that I've visited.
It looks like the Census of Agriculture includes actual subsistence farming under its category of "limited resource farms" (which may include some other farms too but excludes those for which the operator reports either off-farm income or being retired), which in 2007 accounted for 308,837 farms or 14% of all the farms in the US. The average acreage is the lowest of all the categories, as you might expect.
Jonathan's undefined sense of tension and anticipation was exacerbated by the depression Switzerland always brought upon him. He considered the placement of the magnificent Alps in this soulless country to be one of nature's more malevolent caprices. As he wandered around the hotel aimlessly, he came upon a group of lower-class Eiger Birds playing the fondue-kirsch-kiss game and giggling stupidly. He turned back toward his room with disgust. No one really likes Switzerland, except those who prefer cleanliness to life, he thought. And anyone who would live in Switzerland would live in Scandinavia. And anyone who would live in Scandinavia would eat lutefisk. And anyone who would eat lutefisk would...
-- The Eiger Sanction
Said average acreage being 137 acres, with the median being more like 50.
Half of all farms are less than 100 acres and only 16% are over 500 acres, so a few hundred acres is a fair-sized farm. I suppose hobby farms skew the stats.
The US belt is different because it never had white-people run sustenance farming. It was cash crop (beef on the hoof or grain) from the start or nearly so.
"When I met with them a year or so ago they were certainly under the impression there was a plenty of real-live racism in Sweden."
Fuck yes.
The US belt is different because it has to stretch so far.
Buck's parents used to be like ttaM's inlaws; not really subsistence farming, but substistence gardening. Chickens, a half acre of vegetables, a lot of canning. They got older and couldn't keep it up, but when he was a kid and teen, that was a big part of what they ate.
795: In that era, he would probably have held up his trews with braces.
In that era, he would probably have held up his domestic agricultural industry with punitive import tariffs?
Yeah, at LB. They do loads of canning, still. Her dad picks up cash which pays for larger purchases or maintenance on the house from little building jobs he occasionally gets, and they have small state pensions which pay the utility bills. But much of what they eat is what they grow. It's not a life I'd want to have, as it's hard labour intensive work.
674: "Von Wafer manages to make the history of [insert topic] come alive for modern readers in a way that no one has before."
"For people think the Sand Creek Massacre had nothing to with anti-semitism?"
794: My dad's parents were like this too. One of results being that my dad and his brothers all took up small-time hunting at a very young age. It is rather disconcerting to see photos of a 7- or 8-year-old boy with a gun and a couple of squirrels slung over his shoulder.
775: You may ask yourself, what sentimental value is there in owning land that no one would have the remotest idea what to do with and rents out to a tenant? And you'd be right.
Oh, I don't know. It's called "sentimental" value for a reason: keep it in the family. There are memories, a heritage of sorts.
I ask myself this repeatedly with respect to my mom's house up on the lake: I'm told by many undoubtedly wise persons that the obvious thing to do is take out a loan against it, fix up what needs to be fixed, and sell sell sell. But. The family would be shocked. I would probably cry.
Granted, the only value to that property is how wonderfully pretty and happy it is: it is not a farm in any way. Still, I can always retreat there if things go bad somehow (I'd have to generate an income, but still, it's there, and that's important).
Oh, geeminy Christmas, now I gotta contend with all theses European types with all their the-sun-rises-earlier-over-Europe and their further-along-the-path nomenclature and their we've-already covered-this-ground-my-boy poppycock? Don't y'all understand that the tallest-man or the woman-with-the-most-money sets the standard for the discussion? I mean if you are so great then at least be beautiful or be the richest, for goodness sake.
Get with the program, World! GET. WITH. THE. PROGRAM! The past is history. The future is NOW. Be there or be square!
786: Me too, at least in the trivial sense.
There are memories, a heritage of sorts.
Not really in this particular case. No one in the family has actually lived on or farmed the farm since about 1925 and there is not even an old farmhouse or anything to go back to. It's mostly just inertia and the fact that it's divided up among a bunch of relatives, some of whom are very elderly and none of whom wishes to piss off the others.
One assumes 804 is trolling, but one can't tell for certain.
806: Right. Well, as long as it's not an actual burden, what the hell. (It seems pretty difficult to make changes when half a dozen people are involved in co-ownership, and everyone has *issues* of some kind.)
805 is even more a troll. Nobody has elderly relatives who don't want to piss each other off.
David,
I'm not sure what we disagree on. My claim is that there's pervasive racism in the Nordic countries, even among people who aren't or don't necessarily come off as overtly racist, and you seem to agree. Is it the Finnish stuff? I also claim there's significant cultural unity between the Nordic countries. This...seems like an odd thing to take issue with. I'm not sure how this would be resolved, so I guess we can have differing opinions on this, and you can feel free to call me ignorant. Is it the tongue-in-cheek summary of the stuff on suicide? I agree, the whole "national personality-type" stuff is a crock of shit, so I see how you might think me stupid if you take what I wrote at face value, which you have no reason not to. In terms of the actual statistics, I don't imagine that you'd disagree that Norway had a lower suicide rate than Sweden or Denmark?
Finally, on Indo-European, of course it's stupid to extrapolate from languages to racial groups, and clearly no one would ever do that. That's why no one has ever claimed the Aryan Indo-European language family mapped one-to-one racial or ethnic categories, nor do people ever take the name of a language and apply it to the people who speak it. Nor, of course, do people ever project cultural and racial distinctions onto linguistic ones and then invade and/or discriminate against their neighbors because of it. But anyways, David will probably call me ignorant, but AFAIK it's generally claimed, even among the radically culturally disparate countries that merely happen to be geographically next to each other and are referred to by ignorant outsiders as Scandinavia that the Finns are ethnically and linguistically separate from other Scandinavian peoples.
804: someone left the model airplane glue out again.
Anyway, if my family had a house by a lake, I'd want to keep it unless it was a shitty lake or something.
LB, upthread: I don't watch sports much, but occasionally I'll flip past rugby, and man, those guys are amazing. The size of rhinoceroses and running like gazelles. American football players don't have the same esthetic effect -- probably all the padding rather than a difference in athleticism: it makes them look like "football players" not people, so it's less astonishing.
NO IT'S NOT. NFL players are twice as rhinoceros-like and three times as fast and springbok-esque. you just need to learn to love football more. you'll watch some guy do something balletic, and then you;ll notice the ref comes up to his waist, or an "idiocracy"-limit-approaching series of manly digitized metal plates will clang around with stats on them and you'll say, hang on, that fucker weighs 318 pounds?! and then you'll get to eat a nacho. I'm telling you, it's the greatest.
In 1908 a ruling by Judge W. A. Cant declared the Finns to be white people. Swedes, however, are often solitary madmen (e.g., Gaear Grimsrud in the movie "Fargo"). As Knut Hamsun recognized, Norwegians and Danes are Swedes. That about covers it.
NFL players are [...] three times as fast and springbok-esque
I don't believe you. They just run a couple of yards and smash into each other. It's not aesthetically pleasing at all.
Start clock, run for 5 seconds, smash each other looking roughly like cyborgs, stagger away, stop clock. Regroup. Consult. Start clock again.
815: You're watching the wrong Hulks. Can't say I spend much time watching but some of the running is indeed amazing. Al has it right too, a good tube of glue helps, IMX.
Oooh! The double-click prevention thingy is working again. Great! Thanks.
803: Yeah. Having a "base" can be very important. It can be very important indeed. I'd love to se that place someday.
You're watching the wrong Hulks
That's possible. The truth is I don't think I've watched more than 15 minutes of a game for decades. I just don't get it; that's okay, though.
They just run a couple of yards and smash into each other.
Some do. Others run further, and can be quite impressively athletic. It's a complicated, highly bureaucratic game with lots of specialization and arbitrary rules, which is probably why I like it more than most other sports and also why you probably wouldn't like it even if you watched more of it.
I'm not bad-mouthing the American hulks -- it's just that all the padding spoils the proportions. Rugby players you can actually see what they're built like.
807: I suppose 804 was trolling, in the sense of trying to make a base-emotional connection. Sometimes t is really important to make a fundamental emotional connection - a connection which transcends continents or languages or cultural upbringing. Sometimes it is really nice to connect on a fundamental level. Sometimes, sharing a common humanity matters a great deal.
It's a complicated, highly bureaucratic game
Actually, I rather like the DMV.
Rugby players you can actually see what they're built like.
Nice thighs.
It's really tough to do the conversions on third down and long form with the deadlines running down and the quarterback calling an audit at the signature line.
It's not aesthetically pleasing at all.
824: Well, I wasn't going to say nothing...
820: I just tend to favor individual sports over team sports. Something like tennis has a lot of rules in its way, though I wouldn't call it bureaucratic (unless you get into the seeding mechanisms, I guess, maybe).
Anyway, I like individual sports, mostly. Basketball can be pretty cool, though, as can soccer. I'm not likely to tune in to watch with enthusiasm, but I can be game for a house party for an occasion -- which I just find dreadfully boring for football. I don't see what is possibly interesting there. Oh well.
The helmets make them look like toddler smearcase.
Simpson's dismount was crappy, Apo. 7.5 at best.
826 is amazing, but why are they calling it a barrel role? It's a front aerial.
Football is by far the most complicated and cerebral of the three main US sports. I like it but understand it much well than I do the other two -- being able to seriously analyze and assess the plays on both offense and defense requires a pretty serious level of knowledge.
I like watching big-wave surfing.
It looks like the Census of Agriculture includes actual subsistence farming under its category of "limited resource farms" (which may include some other farms too but excludes those for which the operator reports either off-farm income or being retired), which in 2007 accounted for 308,837 farms or 14% of all the farms in the US. The average acreage is the lowest of all the categories, as you might expect.
But even for poor, struggling farmers, and even with the cost of modern fertilizers and so forth, I'd imagine it still pays better to grow and sell a few cash crops than to try to grow most of the calories you need yourself. According to the Family Farm Report 2010, only about a third of limited-resource farms are occupational as opposed to retirement or "residential/lifestyle." I wouldn't be surprised to learn there were in fact zero subsistence farmers in the US compelled to be so by economic circumstances - that is, leaving out communes, survivalists, etc.
761: I'm just annoyed by you making one ignorant remark after the other.
New to the internet, eh? Well, you'll learn soon enough.
According to the Family Farm Report 2010, only about a third of limited-resource farms are occupational as opposed to retirement or "residential/lifestyle."
That report doesn't try to break them out as a separate category from the others, though, while the Census of Agriculture table I linked above does. The Report mentions the Census definition but explicitly refuses to discuss it along with the other definitions, I guess because they didn't consider it rigorous enough or something. In any case, the Census definition results in a higher number of them than the other definitions, even though it explicitly excludes retirement and residential/lifestyle farms from the category. The Report's probably right that this is not a meaningful category, but I do think it sets a maximum for the number of true subsistence farms.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn there were in fact zero subsistence farmers in the US compelled to be so by economic circumstances - that is, leaving out communes, survivalists, etc.
This is probably true, but who's talking about compelled by economic circumstances? My interpretation of that "I can always go back to the farm" stuff was that it's a deliberate decision by someone who would in fact have other economic options but would choose not to exercise them for whatever reason.
Appalachian State University
Boone! God, I love Boone. Asheville rocks, too, I hear. Like Shallotsville, but with more hippies.
Asheville seemed pretty cool the one time I was there, but I was about 12 at the time and I don't remember much about it.
841: You should wander through Boone sometime. It's on the Blue Ridge Parkway (well, right off it), and it's surrounded by Christmas Tree farms, which is kind of surreal. (I'm probably using the word "surreal" incorrectly.)
Hearing that a downtown building is being bought and renovated by cultists of the I AM constellation, relocating here because we're one of 5 "Golden Cities," I had to look where the others are. Not really cities, apparently, but Vortices.
http://www.ashtarcommandcrew.net/profiles/blogs/united-states-golden-cities
Ashevliie is in. Not sure about Boone. Bluffton is in. Albuquerque. Apparently there's one in Scotland.
Boone looks to be pretty close to Asheville, so it's probably covered too.
There's one in AK too, teo. Just in case.
There is? I don't see it on that list.
It's the sister city of the one in GA/SC/NC.
Ah, so it is. It's too bad they don't specify its size and location the way they do the other ones, but if it's roughly equivalent in size to the others and includes parts of the Yukon too it probably doesn't extend this far west. Oh well.
And here's a news story about them buying a local landmark.
I just saw a job listing in Asheville.
850: I've noticed some recent job postings in your field in my agency. I presume you've seen them (they don't seem to be up anymore, so I guess the application periods have ended), but if not that would be something to look out for.
Yeah, I've seen a few recently and especially last year. I almost applied for one but for various reasons, including 31 KSAs where you needed to rank yourself and describe why you chose that rank + not enough time to go through them before the closing date kept me away. I am apparently going to get kicked off USA jobs soon for not having logged in, and they've stopped sending me daily updates, so I should get that going again.
On the other hand, I'd really like to get something that involves more technical/digital work than most of those postings appear to have advertised. But work is work and I do like paper/old stuff - I just think it's limiting in the long term to do only that.
I almost applied for one but for various reasons, including 31 KSAs where you needed to rank yourself and describe why you chose that rank + not enough time to go through them before the closing date kept me away.
Yeah, the federal hiring process remains pretty impenetrably byzantine, although I've heard they've been trying to streamline it. I'm going to have to go through that wringer when this internship ends, hopefully just as a quasi-formality to turn it into a real job.
In that era, he would probably have held up his domestic agricultural industry with punitive import tariffs?
flip, you amuse me greatly. I am stuck in bed with nothing to do, so I genuinely appreciate your contributions to my entertainment. please endeavour to stay up later so that you can cheer me further. your job may suffer, but isn't your job all about suffering anyway?
additionally, I am prepared to sponsor the halford/dsquared match, and I wish you all to know that I am a distant cousin of that one boxing announcer guy who says "let's get ready to rrrrrrruuuuuummmble!!!!," so perhaps he can be induced to participate. I think that neither should be on home turf, so the solution is to have the fight in a parking lot in bangkok. this has the additional advantage that provided no one dies we will be able to bribe ourselves out of trouble, and perhaps even then. I happen to have a friend who owns land including parking, though it's a little near the PM's house for my taste cop-wise, but I'm sure we can work something out.
853: does everyone have to get the security clearance or is that only for certain jobs? I've gotten interviewed by the feds about two different friends as part of their garnering security clearance, but both were going to work as embassy staff or state department something. I can't think what they're called, the non-appointed bureaucrats/diplomats...foreign service? APHASIA STRIKES AGAIN.
The advantage of coming from beautiful Wild Wales, rather than some anonymous stretch of red dirt somewhere, is that you can convert most of the family farm into a thriving campsite, climbers' accomodation and tourism business.
The great thing about 854.2 is that when you're writing a musical based on the event, you can carry over the lyrics from "One Night in Bangkok" with only a few minor alterations:
[THE AMERICAN] [THE WELSHMAN]
Get Thai'd! Look you! You're talking to a tourist
Whose every move's among the purest
I get aim my kicks above the waistline, sunshine boyo
[COMPANY]
One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble
Not much between despair and ecstasy
One night in Bangkok and the tough guys tumble [rumble?]
Can't be too careful with your company
I can feel the devil walking next to me
[THE AMERICAN]
Siam's gonna be the witness
To the ultimate test of cerebral crucial fitness
This grips me more than would a
Muddy old river or reclining Buddha
Etc. etc.
856. This may be still true in Wild Wales, but friends of mine have a nice cottage suitable for walkers and climbers in the remoter stretches of the Peak District and for the last couple of years they haven't been able to let the thing at all at any season. Their agent has no idea what's happening to the market. Presumably something to do with the economy, but you'd think people would want self catering in Derbyshire if they can't afford Las Alpujarras any more.
857: When my son was 13 or so and I ended up listening to a fair amount of commercial radio, "One Night in Bangkok" was a real blessing. That was the Tears for Fears Duran Duran era and I listened to a lot of crap.
actually I rather like duran duran.
And you get terrible migrains. Coincidence? I think not.
I do like this cover of the Tears for Fears song "Mad World". Very different in feel to the original.
844: Boone looks to be pretty close to Asheville, so it's probably covered too.
Nope, per site, Asheville is on the edge and it is centered near Augusta, Georgia. You can sort of see that on the map of the five circle on the left-hand margin here. The "I Am America" map (showing a post-change America with a lot of "how long can you tread water" areas) is one of a number of such visions of America. A number of them helpfully shown on a thread at here on davidicke.com*.
*"Exposing the dreamworld we believe to be real", so maybe more appropriate to alameida's new thread.
862: Definitely a favorite and mentioned here before. Here's its original non-Darko video with charming children tricks for extra poignancy.
Those are five very rustic cities, and most of them look pretty white too.
864: That's a nice clip. Hadn't seen it before.
855: Everyone has to get a background check of some kind, but there are different levels and only certain jobs need the full security clearance with interviews etc.
Roses are red
And ready for plucking
You're sixteen
And ready for high school.
My father, today, looking at Sally waiting for her heat at a swim meet: "You're in for a lot of trouble." Not talking about any tendency to emotional volatility.
Not unless she had it concealed under her swim cap.
I never wore a swim cap after my first time trying one on. It felt like trying to pull my own hair out. Later, somebody said the new kind (not rubber) were better, but by that time I realized I was so slow that it didn't matter.
I never stabbed anybody, but once I almost was very cross with my coach for making a typo (she said) and getting me into the 400m butterfly. I'd never swam butterfly in a meet and I had very good reasons for this. I sucked at it. Still, she encouraged me and told me I should go for it. I got my hopes up. I knew I was going to lose, but I got my hopes up about finishing. Fuckers disqualified me before I got 50m into it. Why even bother to disqualify somebody 1/2 a link behind on the first link?
I think "You're in for a lot of trouble with that one" to be expressing a different sentiment than the general "Boys are more difficult when they're young; girls are more difficult when they're teens". The former is usually explicitly said w/r/t attractiveness.
Sally's deeply mediocre at this point as well -- on a very very serious team, but not in the faster half of the team. She's having fun, and it's great exercise, but we're not banking on scholarship money.
Still, I'm incredibly impressed by anyone who can get across the pool doing butterfly. I can't do three strokes without starting to drown.
I was worse the mediocre. I have a pile of ribbons, but that's because there were often more ribbon-winning places than swimmers. In breast stroke, I could stay close but still finish last 80% of the time. In crawl I was worse. I was 28 and swimming laps when I finally figured out how to kick.
Even worse "than".
This was a team without an access to an indoor pool. We played mostly duels with other teams that had no access to an indoor pool. Those were fun at times. Sometimes we went to invitationals at bigger towns with 50m pools, automatic timing equipment, and hundreds of swimmers. I didn't like those. Too much standing around between events and too much losing by 15 seconds.
875.1 describes my swimming career.
Good lord, Sally is already swimming butterfly? Kids these days.
I did swim with a guy who had to be rescued during a butterfly race. We trained short course, and the meet was at a not very well designed long course pool (so lots of waves), and about 15 meters from the finish he caught all the back waves from every one else finishing and took in only water on two successive "breaths".
Same meet, another guy not thinking through the long course/short course thing got on the the starting block at the wrong end of the pool for the 50 m. A big summer AAU meet where our coach was not even there.
Do they still have cards at meets? I remember you got called for the event and you had to get your card from a board. If you didn't get it, then you got scratched. Then, you had to fold the card so that it would make a chomping mouth. Then you had to give the card to somebody with a stopwatch and they'd bitch because the card was soggy and folded. Then they'd write your time on the card or something.
No cards, but they do write down what heats/lanes they're in in Sharpie on their arms.
We didn't even have a Sharpie. The ballpoint hurt.
882: The Manson family was in lane 10.
I have no idea. Maybe the numbers got moved around or maybe I was drunk.
churchofproblemsolved
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I think Dr dodogods is a very special person with a lot of integrity and truth to his Spirit work. I would call on him again anytime I needed help with love affairs. His spells and plans brought me and my soon to be new wife together, and for that I will always be grateful. Thank you,dodogodssolution@yahoo.com pst by /james morgan
that has to be the weirdest spam I ever saw.
i was so lucky to meet this spell caster
My name is miss deborah collins from houston,texas.i never believed in love spells or magic untill i met this spell caster once when i went to africa in june last year on a business summit i ment a man called dr koko is powerful he could help you cast a spells to bring back my love s gone misbehaving lover looking for some one to love you bring back lost money and magic money spell or spell for a good job i m now happy & a living testimony cos the man i had wanted to marry left me 3 weeks before our wedding and my life was upside down cos our relationship has been on for 2 year i really loved him, but his mother was against me and he had no good paying job so when i met this spell caster, i told him what happened and explained the situation of things to him at first i was undecided,skeptical and doubtful, but i just gave it a try and in 6 days when i returned to texas my boyfriend (is now my husband ) he called me by himself and came to me apologizing that everything had been settled with his mom and family and he got a new job interview so we should get married i didn't believe it cos the spell caster only asked for my name and my boyfriends name and all i wanted him to do well we are happily married now and we are expecting our little kid and my husband also got a new job and our lives became much better in case anyone needs the spell caster for some help email address dr kokotemple@gmail com
his spell is so fast
This was even faster than I could dream of, dr.koko( dr,kokotemple@gmail.com). Thank you for taking time to listen to me and answering all my emails. I feel emotional strong again. My confidence is back and I see my future clearly. I am forever grateful for your help for re-uniting me with my old lover.
Miss Helen Andersen, Seattle, United States
I'm 98% sure those are spam, but given that this is Unfogged there's a 2% chance it's a weird joke I don't get, instead.
Yes I got my lover back through Dr. Abu. My wife left me six months ago. The longer she's gone, the more I see what a jerk I was. At first, I blamed her for leaving. I told her she was 'wrong'. In fact, I slapped Scripture on her, trying to guilt-induce her any way I could. My anger only pushed her farther away. I can't believe the way I acted. My wife gave me chance after chance, and I ignored her. I contacted Dr. Abu and within a few minutes of speaking with him, I realized that Dr. Abu was the one person whom I could completely trust. Within 48 hours, My wife is back in my life. I can't thank him enough and I will use Dr. Abu again for further work in the future. You can contact him on Ominighospelltemple@gamil.com
My name is velvet foster I am from Florida my Testimony goes to Love spiritual temple, Me and my ex breakup 2 months ago and he told me that he don't love me any more and went to be with another Girl's was still in love with him and need her back I try to get him back but all my effort was in vain until I reach out to the internet for help and I saw a testimony of a spell caster, I decided to give it a try and I contacted him and tell him my problem. He cast a love spell for me and guarantee me of three days that my ex will come back to me and to my greatest surprise my ex come back to me and beg for forgiveness and promise never to live me again, I am so happy my ex is back to me again, thank you ultimate Priest suzu Paul for reuniting me and my ex back together again. If you need him to help you contact them today and all will be well with you..email him now at homeofhelpingsolution@yahoo.com
velvet foster
thanks
These are great. We need more comments from the spellcaster community, it could really change things up around here. I mean, which spells work and which do not? "Dr. Dodogods," whatever else you have to offer, you have an excellent pseud.
The "Dodogods" are extinct.
897: Yep, and they were delicious.
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Perhaps the most bizarre spam or troll ever on this site.
My Name is susan i will love to share my testimony to all the people in the forum cos i never thought i will have my girlfriend back and she means so much to me..The girl i want to get marry to left me 4 weeks to our wedding for another man..,When i called her she never picked my calls,She deleted me on her facebook and she changed her facebook status from married to Single...when i went to her to her place of work she told her boss she never want to see me..I lost my job as a result of this cos i cant get myself anymore,my life was upside down and everything did not go smooth with my life...I tried all i could do to have her back to all did not work out until i met a Man when i Travel to Africa to execute some business have been developing some years back..I told him my problem and all have passed through in getting her back and how i lost my job...he told me he gonna help me...i don't believe that in the first place.but he swore he will help me out and he told me the reason why my girlfriend left me and also told me some hidden secrets.i was amazed when i heard that from him..he said he will cast a spell for me and i will see the results in the next couple of days..then i travel back to Us the following day and i called him when i got home and he said he's busy casting those spells and he has bought all the materials needed for the spells,he said am gonna see positive results in the next 2 days that is Thursday...My girlfriend called me at exactly 12:35pm on Thursday and apologies for all she had done ..she said,she never knew what she's doing and her sudden behavior was not intentional and she promised not to do that again.it was like am dreaming when i heard that from her and when we ended the call,i called the man and told him my wife called and he said i haven't seen anything yet... he said i will also get my job back in 3 days time..and when its Sunday,they called me at my place of work that i should resume working on Monday and they gonna compensate me for the time limit have spent at home without working..My life is back into shape,i have my girlfriend back and we are happily married now with kids and i have my job back too.This man is really powerful..if we have up to 20 people like him in the world,the world would have been a better place..he has also helped many of my friends to solve many problems and they are all happy now..Am posting this to the forum for anybody that is interested in meeting the man for help.you can mail him to Drsmartspellhome@gmail. I cant give out his number cos he told me he don't want to be disturbed by many people across the world..he said his email is okay and he' will replied to any emails asap..hope he helped u out too..good luck:Drsmartspellhome@gmail. com.Once Again His Email Address Is: Drsmartspellhome@gmail. com
A really odd thing that this spam only shows up in a few threads. Why these?
That's not the susan I was hope for.
Oh, sue and not u! Unbreak my heart!
Where is Dr. Dodogods when you need him?
i have been trying to get pregnant for many years but it doesn't seems to work , i and my huby has done all the test and
the doctor steel could not get the reason why am not getting pregnant , until i was researching online how to get
pregnant fast and natural ,it was then i was so many comments and testimonies of different women and families from
different parts of the world testifying how ashra has help them with the powerful witch craft destroyer powder and
protection powder, that destroys any form of witch craft and making the impossible possible .then i decided to contact
ashra and ask for much about the substance and the powder , i did request for it and it was sent to me via delivery agency
and within 3days the powder and substance was delivered to me , with the instruction for various situation and how to use
it , i did follow the instruction and before i had intercourse with my huby i blew the powder into the air and around my
house that very night , some few months later i fell ill and went to do test and my doctor confirmed it that i am pregnant
, i really appreciate ashra for the good work and joy you brought into my family, just like i saw other peoples comment
and i was encourage so am also putting mine out so that it will encourage some one other there crying , you can contact
ashra and request for your own witch craft destroyer powder and wonder powder okay on email : ashraspelltemple@gmail.com
Unfogged gets the best comment spam.
I'm hoping they can get this one to 1000.
Darn. I was all set to see what ANDREW had to say. We'll never get to 1K this way. (Yeah, it is spam and deleting it is a good thing. But these are so odd. Maybe scrub the email addresses to defeat its purpose?)
