The point of giving prompts for open threads is to provide a jumping off point from which a conversation can start, and then range wherever it damn well pleases from there.
And I do confess that my brain has atrophied and I am out of ideas for jumping off points in spite of there being seemingly infinite possibilities.
So, without a prompt, talk.
Talk, damn you, TALK!
(I think said with the cadence of, “Live, damn you, LIVE!” but I can’t remember if that was The Abyss or Young Frankenstein or some other movie. It gets said often enough regardless.)
In The Abyss it was “Fight”.
Is there any hope of social change going any faster than waiting for previous generations to die off?
Is there anything that can be done to prevent memetic contamination of people whose viewpoints haven’t yet ossified?
If we were waiting for previous generations to die, we’d be stuck, feminism-wise, in the equivalent of the 1950s.
I am currently booted into Ubuntu. I have not been booted into Ubuntu since September. There are reasons for both. The one that concerns me presently is that my computer refuses to boot into Windows. AAAAAAAA
(I mean, I like Ubuntu, but I can’t do most of the things with it, and also all my tabs are in Firefox on Windows)
I mean, I like Ubuntu, but I can’t do most of the things with it
Oh? Ubuntu is certainly not for everyone*, and I don’t know what your needs and wants in a computer are, but about the only things I can’t do with Ubuntu are play Age of Empires (which I haven’t been doing that often anyway), fiddle with my music organisation system**, and the issue I’ve been having with playing DVDs that could probably be fixed if I could remember to ask Dad about it.
*Enough of it is unintuitive as to make it unusable if your household does not contain a minimum of one Linux geek. (Said geek need not be you, as long as they are sufficiently willing to help.)
**I’m told that I could do it if I spoke better command-line, but I don’t.
also all my tabs are in Firefox on Windows
Which is why I like Sync so much. You still have to re-open all the tabs manually as far as I can tell, but it knows what they were (though maybe not what order they were in). Plus URL history and bookmarks. (Bit late to sign up for Sync now, though, even if you’ve nothing against it.)
So, the next school district over has gone completely evil: first they declared themselves owners of any creative works employees or students create–even at home, on their own time, with their own materials!–and then they got caught showing health classes an “anti-bullying” video that advocated “ex-gay therapy.”
I’m the nearest my household has to a Linux geek, so.
Whoa, froborr. Good reasons to homeschool in that district!
Froborr, as another local DC person, what school district was it? It wasn’t Montgomery County, right? Because I will be very disappointed if it was.
As for the original question, I think social change can move faster than waiting for previous generations to die off. It requires a combination of social change through grassroots efforts (hearts and minds, person by person) and the younger and/or more open-minded folks gaining increased political power. Not an easy task by any means, but definitely possible. It’s happened before and it can happen again.
Prince Georges, storiteller.
I am back in Windows. Praises to Hermes.
Pour a libation, gods of Hermes’ ilk seem to like that.
I might just. I have vodka, though, not wine, it’s not exactly what I expect he’s used to…and I’d have to figure out how to time it so my folks don’t ask wtf I’m doing…
You know, this is the second time in under a day that I’ve found words falling out my fingers and not had any idea what’s pushing them? Third if we count last comment and this one as separate incidents. Because I had lunch at a sit-down tip-your-server place, and I was thinking about the pastor who wrote on their receipt words to the effect of God only gets 10% why should the server get 18% (and then left 0%) and the atheist who subsequently wrote on their receipt God gets 0% so they could afford to give the server 28%, and I gave my server 30% (which is just about 18% of what I would have paid for food had she not suggested I get the lunch size of my order) and I wrote “30% for Demeter” on the receipt.
Do you sense a theme to these incidents? Because I’m pretty sure I’m still an atheist, but…
A while back, there was a post on Box Turtle Bulletin (I think it was by Rob Tisiani, in which case the post is probably also on his own blog: Waking Up Now), demonstrating conclusively that attitudes in the USA toward gay issues, at least, are progressing at a rate considerably faster than can be explained by “the older generation dying off”. And that’s a good thing (especially for older gay people).
I don’t know to what extent this is or is not true for other social issues.
TRiG.