Some people just aren't.

My dad was 16 when his mom was dying of cancer, and he had a summer trip coming up where they were supposed to bike all over Europe, and everyone agreed that since she was going to die anyway, he might as well not miss the bike trip. So he was in Europe when his mother died.

I cannot make sense of this story on any level.

Also "Snivel" would be a good name for a dog.

How much cheaper is gas in Mexico?

Pretty cheap if you go with the street tacos.

Having watched someone due and now starting to see what teenagers are like from the perspective of a patent, I can see wanting to send away a teenager when someone was dying.

This thread is already so tender and sweet.

1: Can't you picture it as a scene in a movie?

Heebie's dad (weeping): No, Mom! I can't go!

Heebie's grandma: You must go. This is your chance to live! Here, take this pendant. Wherever you go, I will be you.

Wherever you go, I will be you.

That's interesting, peep! But maybe you left out "with".

I'm not very sentimental. I guess I don't see the point.

9: Ok, Spock.

You have a housekeeper?

I think quality of childhood and sentimentality are orthogonal. Also personal politics, probably, in terms of looking forward vs looking back. If I think hard enough I can probably find people in each octant.

I think quality of childhood and sentimentality are orthogonal.

I agree with this.

What do you mean by personal politics?

11: Yes and I love her very, very much.

I meant whether you pine for the good ol' days--which seems sentimental-like but I think it can be something else--or are pushing towards a better future. And I mean orthogonal in that I think the 80s were a shit time but I get all gooshy over those pictures of busy malls (which I think were an awful trend, but I have many good memories of them).

We used to drive to the mall about this time of year to buy Christmas gifts for each other. It was a nice road trip.

It was in the same direction as going to Mexico, but we stopped like 20 hours too soon.

16 is so horrifying I'm literally going to go and buy liquour right now.

I was raised in a very small town. It was two hours to get to a store that didn't sell bait next to the sweaters.

5: I second that!

If you're super low on sentimentality but cry ridiculously in movies does that signify something? Asking for a friend and/or president.

It means you are responsible for the career of Steven Spielberg; do with that what you will. I'm sure you'll take the honorable course.

I cried when the shark got blown up.

That was Deep Blue Sea, a totally respectable B-movie that ate Sam Jackson.

And LL Cool J makes a sushi joke. Great stuff.

Yes, I liked that movie.

1. This is so much how I was raised. I'm okay with it. I have one sister (of my parents' eight children) who isn't this way, and she is suffering our family's current disintegration much more than the rest of us.
2. I think the word you wanted was "sniffle."

If you're super low on sentimentality but cry ridiculously in movies does that signify something? Asking for a friend and/or president.

This is me!

And as I know you suspect: It means you're a bad person.

My complicated feelings of nostalgia have been focused on my favorite podcast, Good Christian Fun, about evangelical pop culture of the 90s and 00s. A guest comes on and gives their "guestimony" about their history with faith stuff (often complicated and traumatic) and then they shift gears to talking about their nostalgia for their favorite Christian music album from when they were a teenager. Speaking of exvangelicals, our own Adam Kotsko has a fantastic piece on evangelicalism and exvangelicalism that I don't think I saw posted here yet.

23-25:

I thought I was nearly alone in liking that movie. I saw it in the theater and the audience loved Samuel L. Jackson's mid-dramatic speech death.

A favorite moment of mine is when one of the lead scientists arms has just been bitten off by a giant shark and another member of the team cries out "He's hemorrhaging!" You think?

Haven't you ever heard of a spoiler alert.

Anyway, it's on Netflix now.

Might be worth reading the link in 29 alongside this one, which I think I got from Anne Helen Petersen's Twitter or something similar.

Indeed, as scholars have gathered more data concerning evangelicals' views of Trump and his policies, it seems increasingly clear that specifically religious or "moral" considerations played at best a modest role in driving white evangelical support for the President. And yet, I think it is worth asking why the myth of a discrete evangelical voting bloc motivated by explicitly religious concerns persists. Why, for example, do so many pundits - and their readers - continue to believe that evangelical leaders hold the power to sway presidential elections? Why do candidates - on both the left and the right - continue to pepper their stump speeches with targeted appeals to religious voters? And why do prominent newspapers continue to publish op-eds suggesting that better messaging on the part of Democratic candidates might prompt an evangelical exodus from the Republican coalition?

Part of the explanation, as I argue in a forthcoming book, can be traced to a critical but underexamined transformation in the institutional structure of American Protestantism. In short, for much of American history, Protestant religious elites actually did have the power to shape their followers' political behavior in significant ways, at least on occasion. But the elites in question were typically theologically liberal mainline Protestants, and much of their power derived from a now-defunct ecumenical infrastructure that facilitated the transmission of information and arguments from elites to average churchgoers (and vice versa). Most of today's evangelical Protestant leaders, in contrast, possess neither the intrinsic religious authority nor the institutional resources necessary to influence their purported followers' views of particular candidates or policies. On the contrary, evangelical elites tend to take their marching orders from the men and women in the pews - men and women who, again, overwhelmingly identify as conservative Republicans.

The Kotsko piece is indeed excellent.

Fred Clark comments on Kotsko's piece (and a couple of others) over at Slactivist today.

The link in 33 is also good, and consistent with what Kotsko says about the radically decentralized individualism of the evangelical worldview.

Shit I probably would enjoy the 90s xtian bands stuff. Mxpx, Johnny q public, starflyer 59.

The Kotsko piece got me wondering about how the tribe I was raised with -- the Catholics -- performed in the 2016 election.

52-45 for Trump, it turns out, but among white Catholics it was 60-37.

They don't do a similar ethnic breakdown for Protestants, but that comes to 58-39 overall, with an 81-16 edge among Evangelicals.

So I think this counts as a win for the Catholics against the Protestants. Whatever their other sins, the Papists have always been less reprehensible politically.

Personally, I thank the Franciscans.

I'm always glad when the Catholics turn out to be less evil than somebody else, in much the way that I find the Tory landslide heartening because it shows the citizens of some other country are as inexcusably awful as Americans. In my own fashion, I am loyal to my tribes.

Except old white men. Try as I might, I can't come up with an excuse for us, or a favorable comparison.

Don't trust anyone over 56.

||

I'm having a (very civil) argument with someone about whether M4America would be universal coverage. I maintain that anything that charges premiums can't, by definition, be universal.

His argument is mainly that it's universal because it would automatically enroll newborns and, p.s., Vox calls it universal.

(Vox links to the summary of the 2018 version of the bill; this is the 2019. The relevant difference is that the max premium drops from 9.96% to 8% of income.)

Frex, a two-person household with an income of $34,000 would pay a maximum of $225/month. There would be sliding scale subsidies, but there's no information on what those would be. (No premiums at all under 200% of the FPL.)

I appeal to the Unfoggetariat: It seems blindingly obvious to me that having any premiums means a plan doesn't provide universal coverage, full stop. Right?

|>

If you have to pay the premiums, it's a tax and this universal.

The devil is in the details. There are ways to administer it where I'd call it universal -- if it's a salary deduction for anyone employed, and there are no premiums for anyone who doesn't have a salary to deduct from, I'd call that effectively universal. Like, Social Security isn't absolutely universal, but it's close enough for most purposes.

Unfortunately there's no hard-and-fast definition like that. I think universality comes down to, is it comprehensive coverage, and does everyone have that coverage in practice.

Within those constraints, universal coverage can be funded by premiums or by taxes or both, but the standardization makes premiums look like another form of taxes - especially if they're income-scaled. Social Security taxes are technically named "insurance contributions" (FICA), but we think of them as taxes.

If it's an opportunity to pay for coverage, but lots of people can't afford it, or the sliding scale is so complicated to apply for that many do not, I would call it non-universal. But on the other end of the spectrum, if it's like $5/month for everyone who makes between $50k and $100k, it might be reasonable to call it universal.

Hmm, very good points. Given the way it's currently being explained, it would be difficult to make it a payroll deduction -- I think the calculation is just too complex. It makes sense to think of it as a tax, but then we should call it that instead of a premium. (Among friends, I mean. I'm for calling it whatever we need to to pass the best bill we can.)

I looked at the actual bill text. The numbering of subsections is a little confusing, but if I am correct in reading its (i) and (iii) as actually meaning (A) and (C), it's saying the sliding scale starts at $0 for people at the 200% FPL level ($34k for a two-person household) and scales up to to 9.69% of income for people at 600% FPL, so a two-person household earning that much, $102k, would pay $819/month.

It looks like 8% is the figure for what a large employer can contribute to the Medicare Trust Fund in lieu of offering qualified coverage, not individual premiums.

47: The real issue is (1) is there any practical way for an individual to screw up and go uninsured? If the answer is no, that'd it'd be really hard to not participate out of inattention or error, then that's pretty close to universal (again, like Social Security. Completely incompetent (not adjudged incompetent, just bad at getting stuff done) people get Social Security checks because the system is set up so that they will. And (2) is it still worth it for the health care provider to carefully check whether you're covered, or is coverage near-universal enough that they just sort of check ID and assume you're covered because the vast majority of people are?

But that kind of thing is in the regulatory setup -- do they really want it to be universal in practice?

Adjudged incompetent people get social security checks too. I've seen it.

48: So the summary of the 2019 bill is wrong? Or are you reading the 2018 bill?

From the 2019 summary:

What Does It Cost Me?

Premiums, to be established by the Secretary, will be no more than 8% of individuals' or households' monthly income. ... And, individuals and families between 200 and 600 percent of the Federal Poverty Level will receive subsidies. Those below 200 percent will have no premiums or cost-sharing.

8% is also the proposed employer contribution to the trust fund.

I would usually use a definition of "universal health care" for which the sentence "every advanced democracy in the world except for the US has universal health care", but certainly lots of those countries have premiums.

I want Premium Universal Healthcare.

is it still worth it for the health care provider to carefully check whether you're covered, or is coverage near-universal enough that they just sort of check ID and assume you're covered because the vast majority of people are?

M4America keeps employer-sponsored insurance. (Employers can opt to pay into the Medicare Trust Fund instead of offering insurance and employees can choose Medicare even if their employers offer insurance.) So providers will still have to check whether you're on Medicare or an employer plan. Standards for employer plans would be higher/stricter and so plans might be more uniform, but there would still be multiple insurers with multiple plans.

do they really want it to be universal in practice?

I think M4America does. (I don't think all of the other soundalikes do.)

If I like my actuary, can I keep my actuary.

I would usually use a definition of "universal health care" for which the sentence "every advanced democracy in the world except for the US has universal health care", but certainly lots of those countries have premiums.

Another good point.

Thanks, everyone. This has been quite helpful in clarifying my thinking, as is often the case here. OT, I'm feeling genuinely sentimental about this weird intellectual collective of ours.

What's the point of not dying young of a preventable disease if anybody can do that?

29 and 33 links are very good.
1. making you sit through a boring and outdated musical performance
Really? Hymn-singing was the only thing about Anglicanism I actually enjoyed. All the boring time in between I was staring at the architecture and stained glass and whatnot. I would think aesthetics would be one of the few things conventional religion had going for it.
2. On the level of substance, however, it is impossible to understand contemporary evangelicalism as anything but a reaction to the counterculture of the 1960s.
and
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, most of the mainline denominations began to experience sharp attendance declines and budget shortfalls, which led to the rapid decay of the Protestant ecumenical movement
So the churches asked people to examine their consciences and they didn't want to? Is that actually the whole thing? What exactly were those churches preaching on white supremacy all the years before 1964, anyway?

I always thought it was more than the young Boomers weren't going to church and this caused the decline. I don't doubt that some of the attempts to attract young adults didn't put off some of the elders, but I don't think that was the big problem.

Local people in my church we complaining in the 70s because some of the masses switched to music by a choir with guitars instead of the organ. And they were right to complain, but really a bit rude to all the people willing to play guitars before a crowd despite not being very good at playing the guitar.

Christ didn't say anything about suffering the shitty guitarists.

Some of them were children and he did say we were to suffer them.

To come unto Him. Not to say, much less play, anything.

I think maybe some people were still upset about having mass in English.

English is the guitar choir of languages.

I used to get hired occasionally as the fill-in drummer for the "alternative" Sunday service at a big local protestant church. It was a comparatively lucrative gig (like $100/hour for 2-3 hours [counting rehearsal]). But then one of the band members committed adultery with one of the other band members, and I think the cheated-on spouse was also in the band. And then they stopped having that alternative service.

It was like a total rock-and-roll cliché, except that shit never happened in any of my secular rock bands.

You should have tried to get into Fleetwood Mac.

Plus, I bet they get like $125/hour.

So the summary of the 2019 bill is wrong? Or are you reading the 2018 bill?

Ah, you're right. In the 2019 version they pushed the top of the sliding scale down from 9.69% to 8%. Yesterday I read the prior version, then 2019, and thought the language was identical, but I missed that change. (They also fixed the subsection problem.)

But it's still "no more than" 8%, so potentially a flat 8% for people with employer insurance, but for probably a large majority of everyone else, significantly less than 8%. (I don't know offhand how much of the population is below 600% FPL, but 60% of the country is under 400% FPL.) And zero

Evangelicals in Brazil do it differently, motherfuckers.

See also a paywalled FT story from which I excerpt

"The evangelicals' support is also valuable to the government on social issues. When police charged into the São Paulo slum of Paraisópolis to break up a loud street party, nine young people were killed in the ensuing commotion. Marco Feliciano, a neo-Pentecostal pastor and congressman, was quick to speak out. 'The bandit-loving media is demonising the police and victimising the funk dances,' he wrote on Twitter. 'I want to know what those journalists would do if they couldn't sleep for four days of the week because thugs had transformed the street into a modern version of Sodom and Gomorrah.'"

Some of the "Cosy Catastrophe" scifi of the fifties (I'm thinking of John Wyndham) used to postulate Brazil as the future. I fear that may have been prophetic.

I used to get hired occasionally as the fill-in drummer for the "alternative" Sunday service at a big local protestant church.

My friend calls this music "Jesus Is My Boyfriend" music.

"God Is My Sidepiece", we called it in my day.

"Christian Fleetwood Mac" is giving me waking nightmares, punctuated by morbid curiosity about a Jesus-centered version of "Gold Dust Woman" or "Tusk." Or "Rhiannon." (This canonical live version one of my guiltiest pleasures. It's completely terrible, don't click through! I mean it's terrible. Mmmhmmm.)

I blame Stanley.

Christian Fleetwood Mac would surely have the kinkiest sex and the most epic fights of any possible Fleetwood Mac.

Aztec Fleetwood Mac would have eaten each other.

Well, thinking of Peter Green Fleetwood Mac as the pagan precursor is cheering me up, so let's not be too hard on Stanley.

75.last It is the country of the future, and it always will be, as someone famously said.

I was going to say that the truly canonical live version has to be from those Buckingham Nicks concerts in Alabama, but while down the rabbit hole looking for a good version, I learned of Nicks' response to the BN album cover. (I still have the record, I'm pretty sure). My God, what epic bullshit.

Quote? Link?

What do you want next? Journalism?

Epic bullshit, but incredible hair.

"Some of the "Cosy Catastrophe" scifi of the fifties (I'm thinking of John Wyndham)"

Really, really disagree with this term as a description of a genre in general and Wyndham in particular. It is an ideological cliche developed by people who had not read Wyndham very attentively.

83: Attributed to Charles de Gaulle. Was a NYT headline in 1995. Sorry, don't know how to cut and paste on my phone.

Spin that out some? That is, I recognize "cozy catastrophe" as denoting a recognizable genre, but I hadn't thought much about the connotations.

I feel like I should defend using cliches to judge books one is unwilling to read.

There's probably more than a thousand books. You have to take some short cuts to knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckingham_Nicks#Promotion

I used to blame that sort of music on cocaine but maybe it was hairspray still along

I'm away from my laptop but would definitely defend both triffids and the Kraken as cosy. Horrible things happen but the decent people survive with their decencies intact. Compare and contrast The Death of Grass.

I reread the midwich cuckoo's the other day and it is astonishing how many bullets the heroes dodge.

"Horrible things happen but the decent people survive with their decencies intact."

I mean, yes, but how does that differentiate them from any other novel about a catastrophe? The norm is not "horrible things happen and the decent people are killed or become monsters".
"Cosy catastrophe" is a very specific term used to describe a sort of British novel in which, supposedly, the untidy working classes are killed and the middle classes left unharmed and unaffected. I am paraphrasing here both Brian Aldiss and Jo Walton. That is not a good description of any Wyndham book. Horrific things happen to the middle class characters in all Wtndham books and they are definitely not left unaffected.

The Redshirts of Wigan Pier.

I mean, The War of the Worlds fits that description much better than anything by Wyndham.

I'm not saying Wyndham is the only one. But horrible things happen to the middle class characters in the Death of Grass and they lose their decencies. Station Eleven horrible things happen and some do lose their decencies.

Nk Jemisin: horrible things happen and the hero literally losses his humanity.

Lots of middle class people die in Wyndham but none were care about and all behave decently

I also didn't know what Charley was talking about, but 93 almost exactly matches my assumption. (I almost wrote "this is inevitably another story of Lindsey Buckingham being a terrible human being, right?" But it didn't even need saying.) I don't know about canon, but I do enjoy Christine McVie's keyboard playing in the version I linked.

Also hey Charley, you and your family are in our thoughts during this pitiless holiday season.

Apparently the person who coined the term was trying to throw shade on Wyndham, but it doesn't actually characterize anything of Wyndham?

Thanks for that.. We were going to hide -- Dec 24 is my son's birthday -- but the granddaughter insisted we come to San Diego for Xmas..

Thinking of you, Charley. xoxo.

Any Unfogged people at pro-impeachment protests? I went to one at a nearby shopping plaza (Graceland, for those who know Columbus). Pretty good turnout! Lots of honking by passing motorists which we interpreted as expressing support.

Thinking also of you Charley

Minivet's link agrees with me, but enjoys the books as I also do. The chrysalids is a partial exception. The Dei ex machina who appear at the end are so horribly smug that they provided Paul Kantner with lyrics*. Which links of course with cocaine and hairspray.

[I dearly love blows against the empire but it's a very guilty pleasure]

* To crown of creation

The end of The Chrysalids is its weakest point, but it's otherwise pretty good.

Oh yes. I think some of the baddies (both mutants and normal lgrownups) in the Chrysalids are his most frightening villains, even if the Triffids are the most memorable.

I read it first around the same time I read The Handmaid's Tale and thought the Chrysalids by far the better book. Better paced, less ponderous, better use of language, better villains.

It still isn't his best though.

Was The Chrysalids the first YA dystopian novel? I can't think of anything else that has all the tropes until at least a decade later.

The first YA dystopian novel is "Treasure Island."

Anybody who disagrees with me is objectively pro-pirate.

Or has read more novels.

I suppose a strict phenomenologist could be intersubjectively pro-pirate even if they were actively stealing booty.

The bottle of rum is a social construct.

No, it isn't. But the money I'll use to buy it is.

Some phenomenologists are very strict.

110. I agree. ISTR reading a chunk of "The Chrysalids" that was presented as a short story, and had a different name. It ended with the kids being exiled, and wasn't cosy at all. I also read the full novel later, which I still remember.

"Cosy Catastrophes" is definitely a Brit genre, and for a long time if you wanted a catastrophe of any sort, you ended up with something British, and most were "cosy." Even "The Purple Cloud" was cosy, along with being creepy.

Can anyone come up with a decent list of cosy catastrophes not written by Brits? (Could "Farnham's Freehold" count? It ends up cosy. There's "Triumph," by Philip Wylie*, which ends up cosy-ish (in spite of the entire northern hemisphere being utterly nuked) in exactly the same way The Chrysalids does, except it's an Australian submarine doing the rescuing.

* Wylie was co-author of "When Worlds Collide", also cosy once you get to the sequel. Most people only read the first one, but "After Worlds Collide" has some great moments, such as a flat declaration by the leader of the survivors that species on the new world will not have Latin genus-species names, but good, solid English ones, because the Latin ones are stupid. (Wylie had many weird ideas.)

Where does "Roadside Picnic"/Stalker fit into these categories? The ending is more or less happy but it is never cosy.

Never read Farnham's Freehold.

I think Moby is for once being silly. Treasure Island isn't a catastrophe book at all.

But if you're looking for the first CC book, what about Robinson Crusoe? I know the rest of the world's population are not annihilated but they might as well have been for most of the book.

Maybe I was thinking of "Kidnapped"?

121: Not the first Cosy Catastrophe, the first Young Adult Dystopia, with the tropes parodied so wonderfully by @DystopianYA on Twitter ("I never asked for this, but it turns out I'm the only one who can save us"). I'm thinking of things like The Tripods or The Changes, even before we get to the Hunger Games. Treasure Island is an adventure story, not a dystopia; it also doesn't have the group, or at least the couple, of teenagers that's a prerequisite of the genre.

I read Long John Silvers as being 15, but disguised.

That would be much younger than his big brother Phil.

"Can anyone come up with a decent list of cosy catastrophes not written by Brits?"

Doesn't basically every American disaster novel count? Airport. Lucifer's Hammer. The Stand. Footfall.

I like how J.G. Ballard started by writing Cosy Catastrophes and then moved into just Catastrophes, followed by Perpetual Chaos.

The Changes are interesting. First because the books are extremely good. Second, the catastrophe is localised to England rather than global. It not very cosy at all in the second and third books, while in the first the colony of virtuous survivors are Sikhs, who take in a lost middle class white child.
I reread them last year, and they are still wonderfully frightening in parts.

They are, especially The Devil's Children, a massive Brexit metaphor.

126. They aren't cosy enough. The catastrophe itself is always emphasized more than the cosy coping.

Stanley, way back at 70:

You were in a Tom T. Hall song!

The Little Lady Preacher

Is Alas, Babylon sufficiently cosy?

I don't think roadside Picnic is cosy at all; the ending is too ambiguous to be cosy. I found Farnham's Freehold disgusting at the age of 12 and nothing has happened to change my mind since. It would be cosy for people who find Rand Paul rallies cosy.

126 is very true.

132. I'm shocked to discover that, based on the Wikipedia plot summary, I never read Alas, Babylon. So I can't tell if you are saying it is cosy, or isn't. It doesn't sound all that cosy.
133. Farnham's Freehold is pretty disgusting, but it's a perfectly cosy plot if you are Farnham. Everything falls into place for him in a way that is utterly improbable, while he thinks he's just executing the "omni-competent man" script.

133: I think Alas, Babylon might have fallen under the working definition of "cosy catastrophe" we're using here, but I don't think that I have read it since 1982 or thereabouts so I don't remember for sure.

I shared your reaction to Farnham's Freehold at about the same age. That and The Number of the Beast effectively put an end to my Heinlein reading.