• “IANAL, but….”
• Anything describing how when you were a kid, [commonly accepted safety requirement] either didn’t exist or wasn’t used, and WE all turned out fine.
• Pretty much any sentence ending in “….and WE all turned out fine.”
• Support of tort-reform measures, unless you are a defense attorney or in some capacity employed by the Chamber of Commerce, PHRMA or the Republican Party, because at least then you’re getting paid for it.
• Any argument suggesting that matters of taste are actually matters of absolute truth. (“How can you not like strawberry ice cream? Strawberry ice cream is yummy!”)
• Statements about “religion” which make clear that you think “religion” is a synonym for “those annoying fundamentalist Christians who I had to deal with in the small town I grew up in”.
• A belief that any sexually explicit material, behavior or conversation is perfectly reasonable to have, display or wave around anywhere, anytime, because The Human Body Is Beautiful And Sex Is Natural. If you apply this standard to behavior that normal people would agree is sexual harassment, punch yourself in the mouth twice.
• Huffily stomping out of a discussion with a promise never to return. Yeah, that ever happens on the Internet.

I’m sure there’s more but your knuckles are probably split and bleeding as it is. We can pick up where we left off tomorrow.

And I absolutely want people who are stupid enough to believe that to keep their kids out of school that day. For every Wingnut, Jr. who doesn’t have the “work hard and do well” message reinforced, and who’s taught that education is a Commie plot, my kids have that much more of an edge. Rock on, wingnuts!

Well, Jonathan Tweet just managed to prove LeGuin right. Robin Laws tries to moderate the dumbth of this post a little, but good grid, I thought the “but girls just don’t naturally WANT to play D&D cuz they’re girls!” thing was something most gamers got out of their system after, oh, losing their virginity or so. I didn’t realize there was a kind of middle-aged Saturn Return on this one.

I already commented on Tweet’s blog, but for the slow or LJ-averse: “they just don’t want to” is a convenient excuse. It means never having to think about whether something about, I don’t know, behavior puts females off gaming; much less stressful to pretend instead that was fixed in our genes for all time hundreds of thousands of years ago, as Early Man strode across the savannah with his spear in a Museum of Natural History-approved manner, hunting for wildebeest. (No doubt these thrifty hunters carved primitive 20-siders from animal bone.)

I’m old enough to remember when gaming-store owners gave me funny looks, instead of helping me find the latest Trail of Cthulhu supplement; when I literally had guys crowd around my gaming table at a con staring at me, not because I had a nice rack or killer boots, but because I was a female DM and such a thing had never before been heard of. I rather like not being the only girl in the room. I just wish clueless dorks would quit fucking that up with their half-assed evo-psych intellectual masturbation.

Frank Micciche writes about how the recession is hitting over-50s, and he’s right; it’s hard to compete for jobs against people half your age who are willing to work for peanuts, it’s difficult to face retirement when your nest egg got flushed to pay for executive ‘retention bonuses’ at AIG. His solution to this? Screw the next generation, of course. That’s what we’re for.

. . . .Restoring Medicare as the primary payer for all seniors would reverse this calculus.

. . .Elimination of all payroll taxes for those over 60 would not only leave more money in their weekly paychecks but also make them cheaper to employ for businesses, which would be spared their share of the payroll tax on these workers.

…On the savings side, policymakers could temporarily quadruple the amount of savings that households headed by individuals 50 or older are allowed to put into retirement savings tax-free.

Huh. And what are we going to do to cover that extra Medicare and those payroll and retirement-savings taxes? It’s as if Micciche thinks that we can just have the Summer of Finance, where if we all hold hands and think love of money at the world, the recession will go away, like, by the power of our minds alone!

Because the alternative is that he knows, but isn’t saying, that the lost tax income and the increased Medicare expenditures have to come from cutting services to and/or raising taxes on existing taxpayers.  Apparently Micciche doesn’t think or care about how that will affect Generation X and own down, since those are the people largely starting, raising and supporting families of their own – and often, their aging parents.

Hey, that’s what everybody else is for, right? Keeping the Boomers happy?

Fuckers.

And damn if the thread doesn’t immediately get clunked on by people who amaze you only by their ability to type with fingers jammed firmly in their ears, going OMFG U CALLED ME AN OPPRESSOR!! and “Racism? That’s so twentieth century, darling” and “But shouldn’t we wait for people of color to come to us before we acknowledge they have a role in SF?”

Oh Internets, just once, I would love you to surprise me.

Then they will recover, and beat you viciously and without mercy. Rhetorically speaking.

It is true that many people who aren’t lawyers to have a clear understanding of certain areas of the law, and are even able to talk about it intelligently. Unfortunately those people are vastly outnumbered by other people, who think that Wikipedia is a real legal resource, or who take one line in a judicial opinion out of context and think that’s what the law is.

It is also true that the law is full of different specialities and lawyers have different levels of competency. I’m not familiar enough with patent law to explain its complexities to you, either at a cocktail party or on the Internet. Likewise, don’t tell me that you fully understand product-liability law in California because you heard about it from your dad, a retired lawyer who used to do criminal cases in Massachusetts.

And for god’s sake don’t present your half-baked legal expertise as legal advice to others.

Total cost of surgery, anesthesia, surgical tubing, collar, medicines that we have to administer over the next three days, etc. etc.: over $800.

“As long as we have him under anesthesia, do you want to go ahead and have his teeth cleaning done?”

Oh sure, why not. What’s another $65 when you’re paying enough money to buy a whole new cat, perhaps one not stupid enough to get into fights with other cats half his age.

I spent another $25 on the way home to buy three big bags of potting soil, and dragged it along with months’ worth of dead leaves in mounds along the bottom edge of the fence. If he wants to sneak out and pick fights with the locals again, he’s damn well going to have to work for it.