So my cat Lydia likes paper right. If I open my mail on my bed, she’s right there, walking on it, listening to it crinkle under her toes, and then laying right down. Even if I leave paper on the floor, on carpet or tile or hardwood, she’s there, curling up, standing on it, happy as can be.
And like many of my fellow fanfiction addicts, I don’t read a lot of print books, but I recently borrowed a novel that sounded a m a z i n g and I wanted to get it back to my coworker on Monday. It was going pretty well Saturday afternoon until
Every time I put this book down, whether open or closed or page up or down, she was there. Happy as can be. And so freaking cute that I didn’t want to move her, which meant I was not going to finish it.
So finally, in protest and so I could actually finish this book, I gave her another one
When Roy Moore, then 34 years old, asked 17-year-old Debbie Wesson
Gibson whether she would date him, Gibson asked her mother what she
would think.
According to The Washington Post’s investigation into Moore’s alleged pursuit of teenage girls, which was published Thursday, Gibson’s mother replied, “I’d say you were the luckiest girl in the world.”
That
attitude of encouraging teenage girls to date older men, rather than
shielding girls from men’s advances, sounded familiar to some people who
read the Post story that has shaken Moore’s bid for the U.S. Senate.
“It’s
not so uncommon that people would necessarily look at it askance,” said
Nicholas Syrett, a University of Kansas professor who recently
published a book on child marriage in America. “The South has a much
longer history of allowing minors to marry, and obviously there’s some
courtship or dating — whatever you want to call it — leading up to
that.”
That courtship of underage girls is especially common in conservative religious communities.
“We
should probably talk about how there is a segment of evangelicalism and
home-school culture where the only thing Roy Moore did wrong was
initiating sexual contact outside of marriage. 14 year old girls
courting adult men isn’t entirely uncommon,” Kathryn Brightbill, who
works for the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, tweeted Friday, prompting a flurry of responses from other people who also had watched teenagers date much older Christian men.
Ashley Easter, who grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist church where
courting was the norm for teenagers, said, “That was the first thing I
thought of with Roy Moore.” In her church community in Lynchburg, Va.,
Easter said, fathers had complete control over whom their daughters were
allowed to date, and she could see how a father might set his teen
daughter up with a much older man.“A woman’s role is to be a
wife, a homemaker and someone who births children. The man’s role is
generally to be established and someone who provides the full income,”
said Easter, who runs the Courage Conference for survivors of church
sexual abuse. “It may take longer for a man to reach stability. While a
woman of 15 or 16, if she’s been trained for a long time looking after
her younger siblings, in their eyes she might be ready for marriage.”
(13 November 2017)
My first thought on reading this was, “Thank God somebody said it.”
Ashley Easter’s first thought when she heard the allegations against Moore was mine, too. Because I grew up with exactly this. I could go home to my mom’s church tomorrow and hear the pastor say exactly what Brightbill says here: that the only thing Roy Moore did wrong was initiating sexual contact outside of marriage.
And this is exactly why he may very well still win the election.
OK, I really am exhausted and running very low on wording spoons right now. But, I still have to make one observation that jumped out at me about this post and the weird assumptions about how things work some people are working from.
“Per Capita Total World GDP” (or whatever the exact phrasing was), which starts picking up after 1500 or so. Where the “world” a lot of people would be thinking of didn’t know whole other continents existed until…around 1500 🤔 Never mind sensibly estimating GDP.
(And of course the usual run of assumptions are still generally not based off much knowledge about social and economic conditions across those “new” areas before ca. 1500. When they started getting plundered for resources.)
Assuming everyone everywhere has always inevitably run with that type of unequal scarcity-based approach to available resources–and inevitably will!–just doesn’t make any sense.
Just one illustration of one of the many many wtf-inducing things about some common economic/social assumptions underpinning whole popular schools of political/economic thought. Not very well expressed, because wording spoons.
But, the “world GDP” graphs kinda stuck out.
It’s not quite halfway through November yet, and I am already so tired of being cold.
You’re
almost there. You can feel the thrill of victory. It vibrates in the
keys under your frantically tapping fingertips.
You’re
sure, you’re sure, you’re
about to convince another blogger that doorknobs
exist!
Tumblr
user the-knob-is-a-lie has
argued hard, across dozens of reblogs, to prove their thesis that
doorknobs are nothing but a sinister myth. But they’ve slipped.
There’s a flaw in their logic. A contradiction. And you’re about
present that flaw to them and prove yourself the victor of this
ideological war, once and for all.
“If,
as you say, twisty things don’t exist at all,” you write,
“then how
did you unscrew your water bottle just now?Huh?
HUH?????”
You
post the reply and take a moment to bask in your genius.
The
trap is sprung. The day is yours. The only thing to be done is sit
back and wait for your opponent to come crawling over and kiss your
feet, to thank you solemnly for making them see reason.
The
response is not what you expected. There is no kissing your feet. No
groveling.
The
victory strikes oddly hollow. You’ve proven something you already
know, that the-knob-is-a-lie is
wrong. You’ve proven it to yourself, and you’ve proven it to the
other people who already know it. You’ve won, and you’ve won
precisely nothing.
Want
this situation to go differently? Want to communicate rather than
alienate? Let’s look at your question again:
“If,
as you say, twisty things don’t exist at all, then how
did you unscrew your water bottle just now?”
The
phrasing implies that you expect your question to come as a shock.
That… might come across as condescending. Consider,
instead, assuming that the question you
are asking is a question the other person has thought of,
and working forward from there.
Firstly,
take a moment to set aside your incredulity and think about possible
answers to your question. How did they
unscrew their water bottle without twisty things? Do they define the
word “unscrew” differently from you? Or “twisty”?
Were they exaggerating a bit when they said twisty things don’t
exist? And will you come across as pedantic when you use that
exaggeration against them?
Assume
there are reasons why a good, earnest, intelligent human would say
things that sound crazy to you. What might those reasons be? If you’re trying too hard to be in the right, it’s harder to make your point. It’s harder to understand where the other person is coming from so you can communicate your points in a way they will understand.
Okay,
now you’re ready to start your question over. Own your subjective
perception of the conversation, and inquire openly about theirs:
“You
said earlier that twisty things don’t exist. My
understanding of
the screw-top lids on water bottles is that they are a kind of
twisty thing. Do
you see them
differently? Or did
you mean ‘twisty
thing’ more specifically than I
interpreted it
when I read your earlier post?”
Now
the conversation can move forward, because you’re talking like you
care what the other person has to say. Like you know that there are
limitations to your own understanding.Your
goal now is not to be right, but to understand where the other person
is coming from so you can communicate your points in a way that they
will understand.
You’ve
set a tone of respect. That doesn’t guarantee you anything, but it
does make it much easier for the-knob-is-a-lie to
admit that they might be wrong, or might have communicated badly.
You’ve
created room for them to say, “Well now that you mention it,
I’m not sure how I reconcile those things. Maybe you’re right.
I’ll think about it,” or, “Oh, yeah, I didn’t really
mean that there are no twisty things at all. I was talking about a
certain kind of twisty thing.”
Remember,
if you’re arguing, then someone else is involved. Even if your
argument seems rock-solid to you, if that person doesn’t see it then
you haven’t proven anything to them. Maybe you just wanted to prove
to yourself how right you are, but if you want them to understand and
believe your point of view, trying to spring traps for them is not an effective strategy. Demonstrating an attempt to understand where
they’re coming from works a lot better.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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