Misc. comments 15

[redbird]

To ginmar, who was talking about the lying "swift boat veterans", Vietnam, and the complexities of trying to be a good soldier in a bad situation.:
I support our troops enough that I don't want you-all dying for no reason, or killing for no reason, or forced to lie to protect a cowardly politician. We should no more send soldiers into useless battles, or for worthless aims, than we should pointlessly waste the lives of firefighters. Or teachers. Or any decent human being.

What bothers me about the "support our troops" stickers is that too often that's read as "support the war." Not "do the best we can for our troops"--which includes decent pay and conditions to the extent possible: we cannot stop Iraq from being a desert, but we can provide decent veterans' hospitals.

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To beetiger, who I met when we were the two Vicki's in Yale Story Reading:

A complete life, and people who know us and love us. That's what we all need.

Indeed. But I'm still trying--and suspect I will be, on and off, forever--to sort out what is part of a complete life, what I still need, and what's superfluous.

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In response to baldanders's comment on why he dislikes spelling rants:

[Spelling is] one of the pattern-matching things the brain does, one that I--and you--are good at. It's not a virtue.

What bothers me are (a) people who say "oh, it doesn't matter" and don't want to get it right, even when offered everything from spelling checker software to human assistance, and (b) people who deliberately do it wrong. Because the flip side of spelling well being a pattern recognition thing is that it's easier to read correctly spelled copy: that's why people like us get paid to fix it.

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cakmpls questioned the term "childfree". I don't think she meant to irritate me, but she did:

I think you've seen too many people who use "childfree" to mean "anti-child." I call myself childfree because I have no children, and want none: "childless" generally implies that the person feels this as a lack.

I don't dislike children as a class (I dislike some children, just as I dislike some adults), and I don't want to make life harder for them. And I feel as though I'm explaining for the 887th time that being a feminist doesn't mean hating men.

After seeing my comment, cakmpls edited to expand/clarify, and I then wrote the following in response to her comment to ddb:

I'm childfree because I don't want (and am not at all sure I could handle) the responsibility to raise a child to adulthood, or the necessity of that much time investment at the beginning. (I deal better with children who are old enough to say what they want, and understand simple answers.)

I don't avoid children. I smile at them, offer parents a hand, talk to or assist children as appropriate (say, when one asks me to return a stray baseball, or says hello in the elevator, and of course if we're guests at the same gathering) and am extremely fond of my adoptive nephew.

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misia asked "If you were going to write a book called 101 Things Everyone Needs to Know , in which you essentially set out to teach people 101 variegated things that you felt needed to be pretty much universal knowledge, what are 5 of the things you would include and why would you include them?"

These are three that came to my mind immediately and weren't on her list of examples:
That it is essential to good health and clear thinking to get enough sleep. Connected to that (but it probably would be one item in the book), how to tell when you're too tired to make important decisions, and when you're too tired to handle knives, fire, cars, and other potentially lethal tools.

The importance of hugs, cuddles, and other forms of touch.

Back-of-the-envelope arithmetic/estimating: not precise calculations, but the ability to look at "okay, 10.3 times 4.2, that'll be a bit over forty" or "hmm, 800,000 Muslims, that's 10 percent of the city's population."

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In a comment thread in roadnotes's journal:

What white people need to understand is what we're doing and have done, and the effects it continues to have. And what straight people need to understand isn't what it's like for me to be attracted to women--straight men are just as likely to be intolerant of or blind to lesbians and bi women as straight women are. What they need to understand is that what matters, legally and on very basic cultural and social levels, isn't about sex: it's about the right to walk the streets without being harassed, to hold down a job I'm qualified for, to be a full citizen.

From another angle: if you need or want to understand what it's like to be black in America, any decent library or bookstore has the information you need. And it's hard enough for black people to have white friends without being expected to do Racism 101 education over and over. I've done enough Feminism 101 for a lifetime or two. I have male friends: men who already get it, either because they were raised right or because they went and found out on their own, rather than expecting me to do the work for them.