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Mar. 6th, 2013 02:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* There are now 1 million Syrian refugees and rising. This is causing huge strain on the neighboring countries several of whom were stretched thin before the refugees poured in. We are looking at a disaster in slow motion, shock waves spreading out further by the day. 141 Syrians were killed by their government today.
* Look, I hate to agree with that creepy racist douchebag Rand Paul on anything, but I too believe that using drones to assassinate citizens is clearly unconstitutional. However, I also agree with Mr. Brennan that the CIA should not be using drones at all, let alone in the unaccountable way they are now. If we are going to use drones, which is a separate debate we need to have as a country, the military should be the ones operating the drones with full transparency. I strongly believe that the CIA should not be used as a military arm at all. They are meant to be an intelligence agency and should be simply that. In the real world, we need an intelligence arm, love it or hate it. We need people who's specific job is to keep track of upcoming world events so we don't get blind sided by them. I have serious problems with some of the things the CIA has done in the past such as toppling democratically elected governments and installing corrupt dictators instead. I weep for the Congo still and over a wide variety of violent assholery the CIA has done in our name. I would much rather we not engage in assassination and destabilization. I do not even vaguely trust the CIA, but I recognize it is a necessary evil. I do think it needs to be reigned the fuck in and redirected back toward intelligence gathering. I honestly don't know if Mr. Brennan will do that, but there is reason to think that him being nominated for CIA head is a signal that maybe president is thinking of transitioning the drones over to the military where there will be more public oversight and therefore more opportunity for investigation and debate as to when, how, and if we use them. I don't live in a perfect world, so I'm not holding my breath for a return to reason, but I am actually cautiously optimistic about this choice of CIA Head for the reasons stated above. What we are doing right now is both morally wrong and strategically foolish and dangerous. It needs to fucking stop. I'm in favour of nearly anything that moves us towards stopping.
* As is generally the case when a wild animal mauls a human, I am of course sorry for the woman and her family, but I am more sorry for the lion who was killed as a result. My feeling is, being in an enclosure with lions is an at own risk activity for the human and the lion was just being a lion. It is unfair to get angry at animals for following instincts.
* A thing I wrote right as I started to get really sick, but didn't post here. It's about the diversity of medieval cultures and societies as compared to the narrowness of depictions in our fantasy writing.:
I think people often miss how much time and space is involved. I consider the Middle Ages proper to run roughly from 900-1500. (The period between the fall of the west roman empire and 900 (early middle ages) is really different and complicated, and I think English speakers tend to ignore what went before that point even though a lot of it is important. So even with the more conservative beginning and end dates. You have approximately three lengths of the time the US has been a country. It’s a huge stretch of time. Then you look at how wildly different Scandinavian or Irish history is from every one else’s in the period, or the dramatically different conditions in England vs. the Italian city states, or the countries that make up Spain vs. the states that make up the HRE. Flanders may be geographically close to and periodically conquered by France, but the history and conditions are very different. And then there’s the East Roman Empire and the various states of eastern Europe, which are important and part of the political world these countries exist in, as do the areas crusaders periodically held, and various Muslim states of the Middle East and north Africa.
The laws, customs, and conditions vary widely even if you are looking at five years, let alone if you look at a six hundred or nine hundred year stretch.
But you can break it down further: Aquitaine vs Normandy vs. Brittany. Northumberland vs. East Anglia. Or you can break it down even further: Florence vs Venice where there was a huge difference in laws resulting in increasingly more freedom for women and folks with strong homosexual interests in Florence at the same time Venice legalizes the murder of wives and starts wholesale mutilating and burning their homosexuals. Then there’s various conditions for various minorities, class distinctions that are literally written into laws. There’s also the serf vs. free born distinctions. There are differing laws of inheritance that can work to increase or decrease equality depending on how they are written.
The “Middle Ages” are not monolithic. A writer inventing their own world to write in can chose the level of equality or inequality and justify a huge complicated variety of choices from real world culture and still be reasonably “historically” accurate. Pretending the real world variety doesn’t exist puts limits on what a person writes about that don’t have to exist. My standard for historical novels is much higher as they are meant to happen in a specific place and time. (Do not start me on the “Pillars of the Earth. My feeling is, if your story would literally make no sense to people in the time and place where it’s meant to happen, it’s a badly researched story. EX: we see a couple get married in the first scene by exchanging vows and consummating, and then the rest of the plot hinges on the child conceived being illegitimate. O.o The nonsense goes on from there). The thing is that world building in a fantasy novel opens up world of choices. Why should all semi-medieval fantasy novels be based in a cookie cutter culture based on Victorian and Hollywood ideas of what the Middle Ages were like instead of basing it on real cultures that could make the texture of the story so much more realistic.
* Postcards from the Republican war on Reality: (Warning: Ableist Language) "Bikes cause global warming because you exhale CO2, GOPer says:" http://americablog.com/2013/03/gop-rep-says-cyclists-pollute-by-breathing-air-so-tax-them.html
* "Christian college fires woman for not getting abortion:" http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/03/06/christian-college-fires-woman-for-not-getting-abortion/
* Today was bad, as in the pain kept waking me up. This is a chronic pain thing, not a me losing my other ear drum thing, though the stress of the infection on my body is likely a factor in the pain being right up towards the top of the scale instead of merely unbearable. (My top setting is so much pain I literally can't roll over. This is the setting below that where I can technically move but not very well). Normally, I'd take the really good meds and spend the next five or six hours lying still. Unfortunately, they only gave me half the antibiotics Sunday and I had to go out to get more in a few hours, which means driving, which knocks out anything stronger than tylenol and my non-narcotic arthritis meds.
(I have a large array of drug allergies which mean the only pain meds I can have are Tylenol, literal two types of arthritis meds out of all the drugs on the market, and narcotics. I never drive on narcotics. For the record, all my narcotics are prescription and I hate taking them a I have an atypical reaction that makes them unpleasant. It could be worse, as half my mother's side of the family would have violent complete break with reality psychosis, agitation, and a tendency toward violence in response to narcotics. Instead I got the milder negative reaction that is physically a little unpleasant and comes with restlessness. Give me a Vicodin and my instinct is to clean the house. I do not get the euphoria most people get so for me it's not attractive for recreation. Clearly, this is much better than needing six orderlies to hold me down so they can get the restraints on). Anyway, I'm a pretty safe person to hand a bottle of percocets or oxycontin to, as I will resist using them unless I absolutely have to.
I've been in pain since 1986, so I have a collection of pharmacological pain reducing strategies I can use. Are they as good as a muscle relaxant or pain meds? No, but they help, so I spent a couple of hours doing that, working on getting it together enough to dress. My trip to the library and the pharmacy was not pleasant and used nearly all the spoons, but I managed.
$80.00 for antibiotics on top of the same on Sunday because Medicare doesn't like to cover the big guns. I'm already off one of my lung meds as $250.00 a month out of $610.00 Social Security allotment on top of things like rent and electricity is simply untenable in the long term. I've got another on hold because while 67.00 a month is more reasonable, I just spent $160.00 on antibiotics this month already. Losing my poor person extra medical help is turning out to be long term tragic. There's another program that could solve it, but I'm not allowed to sign up until October because of the bullshit way Medicare enrollment works. Sigh.
* Karjack and pjack were in my dream last night. They were visiting when the Oz Incident occurred. In the dream, Karjack introduced me to a woman they were trying to help. She had a vaguely eastern European accent and was trying to find the peices of the "Amythest devise" so she could go ome. I had the final piece in my pocket along with the usual array of random stuff. The resulting instrument was a beautiful steampunky metal and crystal moving sculpture thing which cased this huge crystal explosion over the South end of town (in which I live). I caused Oz to overlay patches of my town. I got swept up in it, was missing three days, and returned to chaos all Beardsley'd. What is Beardsley'd? It was like he'd redrawn me only with gorgeous functional art deco wings. I didn't mind as the boy was altogether nicer than the one I currently inhabit both aesthetically and functionally. Alas, the chaos was not particularly pleasant and I had to hurt some people. The pain woke me up. then I dreamed of a spy vs. spy vampire war with intricate politics and rules, but again, the pain woke me up. Rinse and repeat. Sigh.
* The cats have been taking my illness seriously. They've been doing guard shifts, like they would for one of them. They've been coming for pettins, but not being intrusive, hanging close, but not being demanding. Hector's still waking me periodically to see if I'm dead or not, but he means well and has otherwise dialed his mental illness related behaviors way down for which I am appreciative. I just don't have the energy for one of his bad patches just now. They are generally dialing down the aggression as a group and cooperating on mesting spots, which is really sweet. Poor LM had an unfortunate adventure tonight. After Squirrel left she trotted out of his room for a check in pet and I did covered she had a huge amount of some unknown sticky substance all over one side. (It wasn't any of the obvious ones and I wasn't willing to taste it for identification purposes and no way was she letting me sniff her up close which was my only option given the current state of my nose. When Squirrel got home we gave her first ever bath which she considered a major betrayal. Poor sweetie. Her life is so hard.
This entry was originally posted at http://gwydion.dreamwidth.org/288502.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
* Look, I hate to agree with that creepy racist douchebag Rand Paul on anything, but I too believe that using drones to assassinate citizens is clearly unconstitutional. However, I also agree with Mr. Brennan that the CIA should not be using drones at all, let alone in the unaccountable way they are now. If we are going to use drones, which is a separate debate we need to have as a country, the military should be the ones operating the drones with full transparency. I strongly believe that the CIA should not be used as a military arm at all. They are meant to be an intelligence agency and should be simply that. In the real world, we need an intelligence arm, love it or hate it. We need people who's specific job is to keep track of upcoming world events so we don't get blind sided by them. I have serious problems with some of the things the CIA has done in the past such as toppling democratically elected governments and installing corrupt dictators instead. I weep for the Congo still and over a wide variety of violent assholery the CIA has done in our name. I would much rather we not engage in assassination and destabilization. I do not even vaguely trust the CIA, but I recognize it is a necessary evil. I do think it needs to be reigned the fuck in and redirected back toward intelligence gathering. I honestly don't know if Mr. Brennan will do that, but there is reason to think that him being nominated for CIA head is a signal that maybe president is thinking of transitioning the drones over to the military where there will be more public oversight and therefore more opportunity for investigation and debate as to when, how, and if we use them. I don't live in a perfect world, so I'm not holding my breath for a return to reason, but I am actually cautiously optimistic about this choice of CIA Head for the reasons stated above. What we are doing right now is both morally wrong and strategically foolish and dangerous. It needs to fucking stop. I'm in favour of nearly anything that moves us towards stopping.
* As is generally the case when a wild animal mauls a human, I am of course sorry for the woman and her family, but I am more sorry for the lion who was killed as a result. My feeling is, being in an enclosure with lions is an at own risk activity for the human and the lion was just being a lion. It is unfair to get angry at animals for following instincts.
* A thing I wrote right as I started to get really sick, but didn't post here. It's about the diversity of medieval cultures and societies as compared to the narrowness of depictions in our fantasy writing.:
I think people often miss how much time and space is involved. I consider the Middle Ages proper to run roughly from 900-1500. (The period between the fall of the west roman empire and 900 (early middle ages) is really different and complicated, and I think English speakers tend to ignore what went before that point even though a lot of it is important. So even with the more conservative beginning and end dates. You have approximately three lengths of the time the US has been a country. It’s a huge stretch of time. Then you look at how wildly different Scandinavian or Irish history is from every one else’s in the period, or the dramatically different conditions in England vs. the Italian city states, or the countries that make up Spain vs. the states that make up the HRE. Flanders may be geographically close to and periodically conquered by France, but the history and conditions are very different. And then there’s the East Roman Empire and the various states of eastern Europe, which are important and part of the political world these countries exist in, as do the areas crusaders periodically held, and various Muslim states of the Middle East and north Africa.
The laws, customs, and conditions vary widely even if you are looking at five years, let alone if you look at a six hundred or nine hundred year stretch.
But you can break it down further: Aquitaine vs Normandy vs. Brittany. Northumberland vs. East Anglia. Or you can break it down even further: Florence vs Venice where there was a huge difference in laws resulting in increasingly more freedom for women and folks with strong homosexual interests in Florence at the same time Venice legalizes the murder of wives and starts wholesale mutilating and burning their homosexuals. Then there’s various conditions for various minorities, class distinctions that are literally written into laws. There’s also the serf vs. free born distinctions. There are differing laws of inheritance that can work to increase or decrease equality depending on how they are written.
The “Middle Ages” are not monolithic. A writer inventing their own world to write in can chose the level of equality or inequality and justify a huge complicated variety of choices from real world culture and still be reasonably “historically” accurate. Pretending the real world variety doesn’t exist puts limits on what a person writes about that don’t have to exist. My standard for historical novels is much higher as they are meant to happen in a specific place and time. (Do not start me on the “Pillars of the Earth. My feeling is, if your story would literally make no sense to people in the time and place where it’s meant to happen, it’s a badly researched story. EX: we see a couple get married in the first scene by exchanging vows and consummating, and then the rest of the plot hinges on the child conceived being illegitimate. O.o The nonsense goes on from there). The thing is that world building in a fantasy novel opens up world of choices. Why should all semi-medieval fantasy novels be based in a cookie cutter culture based on Victorian and Hollywood ideas of what the Middle Ages were like instead of basing it on real cultures that could make the texture of the story so much more realistic.
* Postcards from the Republican war on Reality: (Warning: Ableist Language) "Bikes cause global warming because you exhale CO2, GOPer says:" http://americablog.com/2013/03/gop-rep-says-cyclists-pollute-by-breathing-air-so-tax-them.html
* "Christian college fires woman for not getting abortion:" http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/03/06/christian-college-fires-woman-for-not-getting-abortion/
* Today was bad, as in the pain kept waking me up. This is a chronic pain thing, not a me losing my other ear drum thing, though the stress of the infection on my body is likely a factor in the pain being right up towards the top of the scale instead of merely unbearable. (My top setting is so much pain I literally can't roll over. This is the setting below that where I can technically move but not very well). Normally, I'd take the really good meds and spend the next five or six hours lying still. Unfortunately, they only gave me half the antibiotics Sunday and I had to go out to get more in a few hours, which means driving, which knocks out anything stronger than tylenol and my non-narcotic arthritis meds.
(I have a large array of drug allergies which mean the only pain meds I can have are Tylenol, literal two types of arthritis meds out of all the drugs on the market, and narcotics. I never drive on narcotics. For the record, all my narcotics are prescription and I hate taking them a I have an atypical reaction that makes them unpleasant. It could be worse, as half my mother's side of the family would have violent complete break with reality psychosis, agitation, and a tendency toward violence in response to narcotics. Instead I got the milder negative reaction that is physically a little unpleasant and comes with restlessness. Give me a Vicodin and my instinct is to clean the house. I do not get the euphoria most people get so for me it's not attractive for recreation. Clearly, this is much better than needing six orderlies to hold me down so they can get the restraints on). Anyway, I'm a pretty safe person to hand a bottle of percocets or oxycontin to, as I will resist using them unless I absolutely have to.
I've been in pain since 1986, so I have a collection of pharmacological pain reducing strategies I can use. Are they as good as a muscle relaxant or pain meds? No, but they help, so I spent a couple of hours doing that, working on getting it together enough to dress. My trip to the library and the pharmacy was not pleasant and used nearly all the spoons, but I managed.
$80.00 for antibiotics on top of the same on Sunday because Medicare doesn't like to cover the big guns. I'm already off one of my lung meds as $250.00 a month out of $610.00 Social Security allotment on top of things like rent and electricity is simply untenable in the long term. I've got another on hold because while 67.00 a month is more reasonable, I just spent $160.00 on antibiotics this month already. Losing my poor person extra medical help is turning out to be long term tragic. There's another program that could solve it, but I'm not allowed to sign up until October because of the bullshit way Medicare enrollment works. Sigh.
* Karjack and pjack were in my dream last night. They were visiting when the Oz Incident occurred. In the dream, Karjack introduced me to a woman they were trying to help. She had a vaguely eastern European accent and was trying to find the peices of the "Amythest devise" so she could go ome. I had the final piece in my pocket along with the usual array of random stuff. The resulting instrument was a beautiful steampunky metal and crystal moving sculpture thing which cased this huge crystal explosion over the South end of town (in which I live). I caused Oz to overlay patches of my town. I got swept up in it, was missing three days, and returned to chaos all Beardsley'd. What is Beardsley'd? It was like he'd redrawn me only with gorgeous functional art deco wings. I didn't mind as the boy was altogether nicer than the one I currently inhabit both aesthetically and functionally. Alas, the chaos was not particularly pleasant and I had to hurt some people. The pain woke me up. then I dreamed of a spy vs. spy vampire war with intricate politics and rules, but again, the pain woke me up. Rinse and repeat. Sigh.
* The cats have been taking my illness seriously. They've been doing guard shifts, like they would for one of them. They've been coming for pettins, but not being intrusive, hanging close, but not being demanding. Hector's still waking me periodically to see if I'm dead or not, but he means well and has otherwise dialed his mental illness related behaviors way down for which I am appreciative. I just don't have the energy for one of his bad patches just now. They are generally dialing down the aggression as a group and cooperating on mesting spots, which is really sweet. Poor LM had an unfortunate adventure tonight. After Squirrel left she trotted out of his room for a check in pet and I did covered she had a huge amount of some unknown sticky substance all over one side. (It wasn't any of the obvious ones and I wasn't willing to taste it for identification purposes and no way was she letting me sniff her up close which was my only option given the current state of my nose. When Squirrel got home we gave her first ever bath which she considered a major betrayal. Poor sweetie. Her life is so hard.
This entry was originally posted at http://gwydion.dreamwidth.org/288502.html. Please comment there using OpenID.