Posts by Lucy Stewart
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
What, you think London's going to do a wee montage of All the Ways We Have Fucked Up Our Colonies in *their* opening ceremony?
I watched the British version of the opening ceremony, and the commentators did allow themselves some snide commentary on how China totally skipped on portraying the Opium Wars and colonialism in their potted history montage. Funnily enough, they forgot to mention exactly where the finger can be pointed for said events.
-
and a third of their joint salary on the wedding
But if the couple pay for it, how will the bride's family ever express correctly their appreciation for the groom taking their otherwise unproductive daughter off their hands? Now that's tradition.
-
It's a mystery.
Eh, not really. The desire to flaunt wealth, or the appearance thereof, has won out. It's a social standing thing.
That, and the wedding industry (with able support from De Beers) has done a bang-up job of convincing women that a big white wedding is exactly what they want.
-
Oddly, this is what my mother thought I wanted in a wedding. And little girls, to strew the rose petals in my path as I walked down the aisle.
I don't even think that my mother thinks I want that. It just seems to be a convenient excuse to protest the whole wedding concept. The trouble is that it's not a very logical one.
-
I am in the process of a protracted battle to convince my mother that putting off getting married until we have enough money to do it "properly" would be a total waste, namely because I would rather slit my throat than spend half a year's income on one day. I don't know what she thinks I want in a wedding, but meringue-shaped dresses and a tonne of roses are most definitely not involved. Seriously. Ew.
-
Of more pressing concern to the producers and broadcasters is that you'd think an over-excited psychic could land them on the end of one hell of a defamation suit.
Except most psychics are experienced enough at their profession - i.e., manipulating people and cold-reading - to know not to name names. The possibility of a defamation suit has probably occured to them, too.
-
Chipping in somewhat late, I have always thought that Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" should be required reading, because I have never read a more lyrical or eloquent explanation of why skepticism is necessary and how to apply it. By every measure possible, the psychics on Sensing Murder fail. They lie to people, and make money from it. Letting them be presented as informed experts on national TV only encourages the general population to be unsceptical about extraordinary claims, in an age where the constant bombardment of information demands that people be skeptical in order to process it. We have some fuzzy notion that these things shouldn't be touched because they "make people feel better". It's kind of like an abusive partner - we hush up the bad bits because the good bits make up for it.
They so don't. It is possible to have a sense of wonder in the world, and faith in humanity, and compassion, and kindness, without resorting to the supernatural. These things require neither a sixth sense or the semblance of one. The tragedy is that we are allowing chartalans to fill in for real experts - why? Because it's easier? Because it's cheaper? Because it's never the educated or wealthy who have to live with it when these "psychics" (or religions) cause harm?
It's easy to say that lies are harmless or even helpful when you're not the one being lied to.
-
Except in private between consenting adults. Contemplating Bill and Mary getting their freak on gives me entirely the wrong kind of shivers.
You had to go there, didn't you?
-
Craig, I'm going to call bullshit on that one having actually heard the report. The only person "close to to screaming" was Plunket who could not get past his one scripted question and repeated it a dozen times only to get the same, very clear answer. Pathetic technique.
I'd be close to screaming if someone persisted in asking me to deny that X group of people did something when I didn't know who had done it.
-
I think there are two senses of "reference" being used here:
something you refer to for more information when you a learning about a topic, and something you cite in a scholarly work.Yeah, I probably should have said "cite". After all, even the superhuman powers of university lecturers are not sufficient to determine that you read the Wiki article if you didn't put it in the bibliography or footnotes.