Bio

Update: Where has Midge gone?

Midge has a habit of mysteriously disappearing for prolonged stretches now and then. Several times, this has been to take care of family emergencies. Other times, it's because easily-distracted snakes just need to stay the Hades away from a place as addictive as Ricochet until their time-management improves.
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Other rattlesnakes make fun of the Midget Faded Rattlesnake because even though it's a rattlesnake, it's both midget and faded (how embarrassing). Mainly it puts up with this, because it's fairly even-tempered (for a rattlesnake), though it's surprisingly venomous for such an unprepossessing creature.

Politics: Fairly libertarian ("hardcore libertarian" according to The World's Smallest Political Quiz -- but the quiz steers people that way).

Religion: Ecumenical Christian of some kind, too orthodox for some, not enough for others.


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Midget Faded Rattlesnake
Name:
Midget Faded Rattlesnake
Joined:
Aug 4, 2010

Recent Comments

Midget Faded Rattlesnake

Denise McAllister

Jeff

Beautiful women must take more care for modesty.

A beautiful woman should not have to be ashamed of her beauty in any way, or hide it, or assume that if she is beautiful she has to "cover" herself because she is beautiful. To relate beauty to immodesty in any way is so very offensive.

Denise, Jeff is right that beautiful women must take more care for modesty. You're reading into Jeff's argument something that's not there.

Beauty isn't innately immodest or shameful. But beauty is innately attractive, no? Women who are more beautiful tend to attract more attention, which includes unwanted attention. And unwanted attention that isn't repelled before things get too heated can have terrible consequences.

A beautiful woman who is not adept at repelling unwanted attention by other means might consider whether modifying how she dresses could reduce the amount of unwanted attention she receives in the first place. That's not a moral judgment, merely prudent risk analysis.

Midget Faded Rattlesnake

Crow's Nest

I'm interested in examining how we've adapted to these natural changes in the past on this thread, and the way they may have impacted the course of human events. The Mongol hordes are just one possible example.

Read up on the Sahara when it was green. That's prehistory, so there's just archeological evidence. But it's interesting.

Crow's Nest

I imagine even in the Viking age, the mild warming did not ameliorate the conditions terribly much and it was still an arduous sail. But, yes, I think it would have aided them in founding colonies in Canada and Greenland. 

The warm weather did help, though it was also unpredictable:

[B]etween 800 and 1300 AD, the regions around the fjords of southern Greenland experienced a relatively mild climate... with trees and herbaceous plants growing and livestock being farmed. Barley was grown as a crop up to the 70th parallel.... [T]he ice cores indicate Greenland has experienced dramatic temperature shifts many times over the past 100,000 years. Similarly the Icelandic Book of Settlements records famines during the winters in which "the old and helpless were killed and thrown over cliffs".

Midget Faded Rattlesnake
Rachel Lu: I’ve certainly never been inclined towards the sort of wild outbursts of religious fervor that the Pentecostals would see as the quintessential religious experience.

Well, I am. Or would be if I thought that's what they were.

I'm no stranger to visionary fervor, though it's inevitably riddled with doubt. If poets have a lover's quarrel with the world, perhaps my faith life is best described as a lover's quarrel with God.  I don't naturally have a happy medium -- being halfway between visionary ecstasy and acedia is medium, maybe, but hardly happy.

I attribute this to an over-vivid imagination. I don't need drugs to take a head trip (one reason, perhaps, I'm not attracted to them), my mind just works that way. Having visions straight out of a mystic's diary is not hard for me. But that, by itself, doesn't mean these visions have moral weight.

So, in the end, the moral content of my faith comes down to cold conviction, though perhaps conviction is the wrong word, as it suggests absence of doubt.

Midget Faded Rattlesnake
Rachel Lu: Anyone ever had what they once regarded as a saving experience, which they later came to reject as in inauthentic?

When I was about nine, and my gran took me to communion for the first time, the pastor's injunction to "Go and sin no more" influenced my behavior for months afterwards. Oh, I was sickeningly good during that time!

Now that I'm older, communion doesn't change my behavior as easily. Sometimes I'm afraid to take communion because I doubt my sincere resolve to sin no more. Oh, I  feel  repentant, all right. But if that feeling doesn't lead to a significant change of habits, how sincere is it, really?

Does that count?

Midget Faded Rattlesnake

Casey Taylor

Midget Faded Rattlesnake

But can  we leave aside a blurry definition of sexual assault?

I would hope that the military hasn't adopted anything close to the mystifying definitions of sexual crimes cultivated on many college campuses. But to be honest, I'm more pessimistic about this than I'd like to be.

That's the issue.  The definition is pretty straightforward in the Manual for Courts-Martial, but what is put out in instruction is broadened every year or so.  I'm afraid that we're getting some bleed-over from the outside, a la your college example.

That's very sad, since laws that are vague or over-broad usually hurt the people they're supposed to help.

Suppose I can prosecute something as a sex crime when it's not a sex crime. How does that help my credibility if, God forbid, I should ever have to report a real sex crime?

Midget Faded Rattlesnake

Xennady

I don't question anyone's  sincerity.

Thanks for answering.

(Dumb as such questions sound, they can help people figure each other out.)

Midget Faded Rattlesnake

Xennady

Midget Faded Rattlesnake

If a person claims to support a simpler tax code, or a lower tax burden, because he thinks our current tax burdens hurt the American worker, can he be sincere?

Why do you think I don't share those goals?

I don't think you don't share those goals. I supposed you must share most of these goals, actually, to be here.

My question wasn't about your goals or your sincerity, but what you make of the sincerity of others. Do you think we're being dishonest with you? Or do you just think we're being stupid? Or what?

Midget Faded Rattlesnake

Xennady

Excuse me? Greater governmental intervention?

I'm not the guy who expressed the opinion that it would be great if the US intervened in Syria, because it would save plenty of Syrians and their treasure, while expending plenty of Americans lives and much American wealth.

I do not wish the armed forces of the Republic to go abroad in search of monsters to slay- or save, in the case of Syria.

In that respect, you're most likely in agreement with the majority of libertarians.

But- again, yet again- I'll note that I don't believe either the US, the EU, Argentina, you name it- has actual free market capitalism.

And many here on Ricochet agree with that -- I would. A perfectly free market has never existed, and given the nature of politics, is unlikely to ever exist.

Nonetheless, some countries approximate a free market better than others, or approximate the free market in differing respects.

Is it unreasonable to think that, though a perfect free market will never be achieved, approximating a free market makes life better for the average Joe?

Midget Faded Rattlesnake

Xennady

I will say, however, that what inspired to write that has been what I would describe as a remarkable disinterest in the fate of Americans workers...

Is protectionist economic policy the only way for someone to prove his concern for the American worker?

If a person claims to support a simpler tax code, or a lower tax burden, because he thinks our current tax burdens hurt the American worker, can he be sincere?

If a person claims that abolishing the minimum wage and removing burdensome licensing requirements will help the American worker (especially the less privileged American worker), can he be sincere?

Or is such a person only sincere if he also supports protectionism (American mercantilism)?

Midget Faded Rattlesnake

Robert Lux: And to be sure, I have in mindabject libertarians. Belief in thoroughgoing "spontaneous order" is magical thinking, and mesmerizes the mind.

All honor otherwise to people like Sowell whom I revere -- but the determinism is picked up even occasionally in his writings.

What distinguishes a belief in  thoroughgoing  spontaneous order from an ordinary appreciation for spontaneous order?

And what is so deterministic about thinking that spontaneous order is a fact of life?

Midget Faded Rattlesnake

Xennady

The policies followed by the US government have made the rest of the world much more prosperous, which many people here seem to believe is the only goal.

Do you honestly think that the only goal of many Ricochetians is to make the world outside the United States more prosperous?

(At the very least, you're forgetting self-interest.)

Midget Faded Rattlesnake

EThompson

And at least he wrote one good song, Tiny Dancer.

Noooo........ Not................. Tiny Dancer....

Every  time I go to the pharmacy, that song is playing.  Every  time.  I think I trigger it when I walk through the door.

And  why  is the tiny dancer in his hand? What is she, a Christmas tree ornament?

Edited 21 hours ago
Midget Faded Rattlesnake
R. Craigen: [A] slightly older co-ed invited me to her room, socially one evening.  I learned it was for (quite a) bit more than that, and skedaddled.  Fortunately, as a guy I suppose I'm a winner of the muscle mass lottery and she could not, at any rate, hold me down once I determined I was getting out.

Guys do tend have the mechanical advantage.

I just chose to avoid her.

I eventually talked to a campus policewoman. She said I could file an informational report without pressing charges, so that if I, or another woman on campus, had further trouble from this guy, there'd already be some history on him. So I did.

What happened to me was too bad to leave unreported, but I also didn't want to ruin a young man's life over what  might... maybe... have been some sort of disastrous misunderstanding.

But social signals are enigmas for us guys

Social signals are enigmas for us  nerds.  When Captain Subtext is transmitting, we're not receiving.

In retrospect, perhaps all the guys who surprised me were sending signals in advance that I just didn't pick up on at the time.

Midget Faded Rattlesnake

Denise McAllister

Sheepdog: What is the easiest way to prevent rape and sexual assault? Who would have guessed- not putting yourself in danger.

Many women are raped when they don'tthink they are in danger. Most are raped by acquaintances. What kind of "prevention" can there be?

I have never, thank God, been raped. But I was assaulted once, and groped more than once, and in retrospect, there are cues I could have picked up on, decisions I could have made, that may have avoided some of these outcomes.

In the case of the assault, I had offered to lend a fellow college student something stored in my room, and because we were passing my room at the time, I invited him to follow me as I got it. I was too innocent at the time to think he might take this invitation as... that  kind of invitation, but he did. He surprised me before I could react.

I was innocent, but stupid. There are reasons a girl doesn't invite a guy she don't know very well to her room when she's alone: I was a fool for not realizing those reasons applied to me.

Midget Faded Rattlesnake

Sheepdog

I have to post more words than a better man might to convey the same idea- but I can't help thinking you all are ganging up on me without just cause... But none of you see that.

No, I saw it. I also think that perhaps your intent has been obscured by some unlucky word choices:

Sheepdog

The author of this post compared assault to a door being left unlocked in a home. The truth is it IS irresponsible to do something like that- does it mean that a crime isn't a crime? NO. But it does mean you  could  have prevented it if only you had cared to be careful.

None of us can be 100% sure that we  could  have avoided a robbery by locking the door. While most robberies are crimes of opportunity, it's possible that this particular robber would have smashed through a window anyhow if the door were locked. What we can say is that there's a decent chance locking our door  may  have prevented the robbery.

It's hard to make an appealing case for prudent risk-reduction using words that make prudent risk-reduction sound like outright prevention.

Midget Faded Rattlesnake

Palaeologus

I'm dating myself again, aren't I?

I won't judge. Dating yourself can be the beginning of a lifelong romance.

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