More comments I'm reposting from elsewhere:
This in response to a locked post from a friend who has Reasons why they actively dislike being wished a merry Christmas:
To my mind Christmas is either a religious festival that has never been my own, or an onslaught of aggressive consumerism. "Aggressive" in this case meaning it's not about "I want this thing" but about "you must buy lots of stuff, whether you want it or not, some of it for people who don't want it either."
Christmas also means that for about 1/12 of the year, shopping for anything except groceries becomes problematic, because of crowding, annoying music, and too many blinking lights. It's a societal orgy of consumerism that has the effect of making it harder for me to go buy things I actually need or want.
Part of a comment I am leaving![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
oursin, hanging off a post about best-of lists:
"Nonfiction" is in some ways a very weird category, if only for the unexamined assumptions: what about cookbooks? Other how-to and reference works, from bird-watching guides to the Oxford English Dictionary? In practice it seems to be "best nonfiction prose narrative" (thus eliminating guidebooks, photography collections, and lots of other things that are in no way fiction and have been published in book form).
I am, perhaps inevitably, reminded of the classification proposed in Le Guin's Always Coming Home, which ranges from "what happened" to "like what happened" and separates all of that from jokes and lies. A distinction based on plausibility (a person might have gone to Berlin, but not turned into a cat while there) and partly I think on intent. (I think it's time for me to reread that book, which is clearly fiction but not exactly a novel.)
Deliberately removing the context here:
And remember, when virtual strangers ask for a chunk of your time for something that benefits them directly, you're not making it weird by saying "no." Sometimes I want to use lmgtfy, for things where the obvious natural language question will work, like "when did Arizona become a state?" (though these days I usually resist saying anything).
The questions I will google for internet strangers and the most casual of acquaintances are things like, an idle discussion of history in which someone asked "what was that odd group called?" It was easier for me to put "Oneida colony" into a search bar and check that I was remembering correctly than it would have been for someone who had never heard the name "oOneida," or whose only context is the Iroquois Nations, to phrase the query, run it, and read enough to be sure that they had the right utopians. (In that specific case, if the person hadn't been talking about the Oneida Colony, I wouldn't have pursued it further—but taking a few minutes to check my memory was worth it given that I would otherwise have sat there wondering.)
I think a bit of what I'm basing this on is, Do I think this is interesting enough that finding out might make the other person one of today's llucky 10,000? … What counts as "too dry" is of course subjective; for me that's partly surprise value. The answer to "what is the capital of Nebraska?" isn't likely to be very surprising, because you expect the answer to be a city in Nebraska. On the other hand, I was surprised by the tallest wave ever recorded: if I'd had to guess I probably would have said something around 100 feet (30 meters), and I would have been wrong by more than an order of magnitude.
raino was talking about re-reading The Dispossessed and went from there to wondering how many of her ideas are original rather than Le Guin's, and how much or little her beliefs had changed over time:
I think we tend to keep rereading the books that resonate for us that way; I'm not sure how many of my ideas I got from Le Guin, but I know some of the phrasings are hers.
I suspect most of us do some of each of those things. Very broadly, sometimes the reasoning goes something like (a) general principle [arrived at however], (b) possibly surprising new-to-me fact(s), (c) application of that principle to those new facts, sometimes causing me to question some other thing I'd been taught. Some people, presented with evidence of institutional racism and sexism, conclude that there's a lot of work yet to be done if we want to come anywhere close to the equality and justice we'd been led to think had already been achieved. Other people dismiss that evidence because accepting it means accepting that we are living in and in significant ways benefiting from a badly flawed culture, that fairness and equality require active effort, and that the work of fixing it is much larger than we had realized.
I suspect (and this is a wild surmise, no data whatsoever) that both the people who, for example, deal with conflicting axioms by saying "my family/country/church/etc. has mistreated people I care about, and we must protect and support those victims" and the ones who say "it's unfortunate what happened to so-and-so, but no one person's situation is worth destroying the family/church/etc." are likely to describe that conclusion as being true to the principles that they already believed. "Family is so important" can fit either "so I must protect my nephew no matter what" or "so the nephew whose reports would disrupt everything must be ignored or silenced."
james_davis_nicoll snarkily posted "TFW...you realize the Young People [read SF] project missed Pel Torro."
That's OK, so did most of the Old People who Read SF (whether that means our generation, or those in their sixties and seventies).
Now I am wondering about an Old Fans Read Pulp SF project: could someone (probably not you and certainly not me) recruit long-time fans to read and comment on pulp sf, and see how/whether it holds up. Maybe start by picking from the Retro Hugo ballots, and look at the lists people have put together of works eligible for the Retro Hugos. But while that's an amusing momentary image, I doubt [the hypothetical organizer] could recruit volunteers: people who read those stories when young would either want to cherish the memory, or reading in comparison with their memories and "has the Suck Fairy been here?" and those who hadn't likely have other things on their To Be Read lists.
Excerpt from a comment toconuly about food preferences:
Now I'm wondering how much overlap there is between "come on, you're not really allergic" judgmentalism and people who think "don't eat anything your great-grandparents wouldn't have recognized as food" is sensible dietary advice. My great-grandparents were born in the mid-19th century and spent their lives eating kosher in central and Eastern Europe. So they wouldn't have in Europe, and wouldn't have recognized (for example) kappa maki, but I don't know if their reaction would have been "no thanks, that's weird" or "what's it? Just vegetables? OK, that's kosher" and a willingness to try it.
This in response to a locked post from a friend who has Reasons why they actively dislike being wished a merry Christmas:
To my mind Christmas is either a religious festival that has never been my own, or an onslaught of aggressive consumerism. "Aggressive" in this case meaning it's not about "I want this thing" but about "you must buy lots of stuff, whether you want it or not, some of it for people who don't want it either."
Christmas also means that for about 1/12 of the year, shopping for anything except groceries becomes problematic, because of crowding, annoying music, and too many blinking lights. It's a societal orgy of consumerism that has the effect of making it harder for me to go buy things I actually need or want.
Part of a comment I am leaving
oursin, hanging off a post about best-of lists:"Nonfiction" is in some ways a very weird category, if only for the unexamined assumptions: what about cookbooks? Other how-to and reference works, from bird-watching guides to the Oxford English Dictionary? In practice it seems to be "best nonfiction prose narrative" (thus eliminating guidebooks, photography collections, and lots of other things that are in no way fiction and have been published in book form).
I am, perhaps inevitably, reminded of the classification proposed in Le Guin's Always Coming Home, which ranges from "what happened" to "like what happened" and separates all of that from jokes and lies. A distinction based on plausibility (a person might have gone to Berlin, but not turned into a cat while there) and partly I think on intent. (I think it's time for me to reread that book, which is clearly fiction but not exactly a novel.)
Deliberately removing the context here:
And remember, when virtual strangers ask for a chunk of your time for something that benefits them directly, you're not making it weird by saying "no." Sometimes I want to use lmgtfy, for things where the obvious natural language question will work, like "when did Arizona become a state?" (though these days I usually resist saying anything).
The questions I will google for internet strangers and the most casual of acquaintances are things like, an idle discussion of history in which someone asked "what was that odd group called?" It was easier for me to put "Oneida colony" into a search bar and check that I was remembering correctly than it would have been for someone who had never heard the name "oOneida," or whose only context is the Iroquois Nations, to phrase the query, run it, and read enough to be sure that they had the right utopians. (In that specific case, if the person hadn't been talking about the Oneida Colony, I wouldn't have pursued it further—but taking a few minutes to check my memory was worth it given that I would otherwise have sat there wondering.)
I think a bit of what I'm basing this on is, Do I think this is interesting enough that finding out might make the other person one of today's llucky 10,000? … What counts as "too dry" is of course subjective; for me that's partly surprise value. The answer to "what is the capital of Nebraska?" isn't likely to be very surprising, because you expect the answer to be a city in Nebraska. On the other hand, I was surprised by the tallest wave ever recorded: if I'd had to guess I probably would have said something around 100 feet (30 meters), and I would have been wrong by more than an order of magnitude.
raino was talking about re-reading The Dispossessed and went from there to wondering how many of her ideas are original rather than Le Guin's, and how much or little her beliefs had changed over time:I think we tend to keep rereading the books that resonate for us that way; I'm not sure how many of my ideas I got from Le Guin, but I know some of the phrasings are hers.
It's impossible to really find out if I just have arrived at the correct conclusions at a rather young age or if I'm editing my perceptions to fit the original conclusions.
I suspect most of us do some of each of those things. Very broadly, sometimes the reasoning goes something like (a) general principle [arrived at however], (b) possibly surprising new-to-me fact(s), (c) application of that principle to those new facts, sometimes causing me to question some other thing I'd been taught. Some people, presented with evidence of institutional racism and sexism, conclude that there's a lot of work yet to be done if we want to come anywhere close to the equality and justice we'd been led to think had already been achieved. Other people dismiss that evidence because accepting it means accepting that we are living in and in significant ways benefiting from a badly flawed culture, that fairness and equality require active effort, and that the work of fixing it is much larger than we had realized.
I suspect (and this is a wild surmise, no data whatsoever) that both the people who, for example, deal with conflicting axioms by saying "my family/country/church/etc. has mistreated people I care about, and we must protect and support those victims" and the ones who say "it's unfortunate what happened to so-and-so, but no one person's situation is worth destroying the family/church/etc." are likely to describe that conclusion as being true to the principles that they already believed. "Family is so important" can fit either "so I must protect my nephew no matter what" or "so the nephew whose reports would disrupt everything must be ignored or silenced."
james_davis_nicoll snarkily posted "TFW...you realize the Young People [read SF] project missed Pel Torro."That's OK, so did most of the Old People who Read SF (whether that means our generation, or those in their sixties and seventies).
Now I am wondering about an Old Fans Read Pulp SF project: could someone (probably not you and certainly not me) recruit long-time fans to read and comment on pulp sf, and see how/whether it holds up. Maybe start by picking from the Retro Hugo ballots, and look at the lists people have put together of works eligible for the Retro Hugos. But while that's an amusing momentary image, I doubt [the hypothetical organizer] could recruit volunteers: people who read those stories when young would either want to cherish the memory, or reading in comparison with their memories and "has the Suck Fairy been here?" and those who hadn't likely have other things on their To Be Read lists.
Excerpt from a comment to
conuly about food preferences:Now I'm wondering how much overlap there is between "come on, you're not really allergic" judgmentalism and people who think "don't eat anything your great-grandparents wouldn't have recognized as food" is sensible dietary advice. My great-grandparents were born in the mid-19th century and spent their lives eating kosher in central and Eastern Europe. So they wouldn't have in Europe, and wouldn't have recognized (for example) kappa maki, but I don't know if their reaction would have been "no thanks, that's weird" or "what's it? Just vegetables? OK, that's kosher" and a willingness to try it.