"No, I mean, this guy isn't effeminate or anything."

Sweet.

Well, the lunch hour meeting where there was serious debate over whether I, a mere secretary, should be able to order a sandwich along with everyone else or whether I should simply place the orders for everyone else's sandwiches, pay for them with my university credit card and distribute them, then sit and take notes while everyone else talked and ate--that was certainly a low.

O mighty Unfoggers, should you at some point in life be fortunate enough to have a secretary who has a college degree, some basic programming skills, and enough real design background to make genuinely professional promotional stuff using genuinely professional design software---well, should you have such a secretary, please do not grudge him or her a five dollar sandwich to eat while everyone else at the meeting (including the lowly undergraduate representative) is also eating. Such a secretary can almost certainly take the few notes needed during the period while people actually eat, most of which are on the order of "Dr. CelebrityInField: "[mmmpphh, chew, chew] We could ask Dr. FamousWomanWriter, or wait, no, she gave a talk here last year."

What a fucking moron.

And Frowner, that seriously sucks; rude, rude people. I'll buy you a sandwich, even though you're grumpy a lot of the time.

Eating in meetings is rude, irrespective of what you do or say in addition.

When you read items like the Female Science Professors, you remember how highly realistic are the allegedly absurdist works of Lewis Carroll, who held a day job as a maths lecturer.

should you at some point in life be fortunate enough to have a secretary who has ... please do not grudge him or her a five dollar sandwich

Jesus.

Remember the "who's most likely to show up at work with an assault rifle" thread? Frowner just jumped way up on my list.

Jeez, Frowner, I'm sorry. At my department the secretary is a goddess, if only because she's been here longer than most of the junior faculty have been alive, and no one knows how anything works without her.

Why thank you, Ogged!

Of course, if I weren't grumpy all the time I'd have to change my name to Smiler. Or Grinner. Or Laugher, or maybe Chortler. And that just wouldn't be punk rock at all.

The people at work are classic examples of a certain kind of employer--they think very well of my work and when I ask for things like vacation or fancy extra programming classes, they say yes; but there's still this "she's only a secretary and we must preserve this distinction" script running in their heads at all times. It's a class thing, I think--they don't want to admit that luck and class background play just as big a role in their success/PhD status as raw brilliance, so they can't admit that anyone without a PhD can really be fairly intelligent. (Or for that matter, that you can have a PhD and still be a bit stupid about a lot of important things.)

(I would note, though, that in general I like being a very very good secretary; I certainly like it better than the alternative of being a genuinely mediocre English professor, which is all I could really have been--when I realized this, I changed my ambitions a bit.)

Chortler would be punk rock.

Nah, it sounds too much like the kinda-rock-y "alternative" stuff that was going on after Nir-vaaaah-na, back when I was a pup.

Members of Chortler would all be white guys in their early twenties with not-quite-shoulder-length hair. They'd wear tee-shirts with alterna-funny things on them but nothing parodic or sexually explicit. I see them in safety-orange loose tee shirts and cords. They'd be a little bit Mudhoney, a little bit Butthole Surfers, and a little bit of Pearl Jam, and they'd come from maybe Portland or Denver.

No punk rock points for Chortler, I think.

Huh, Frowner, that was the same career trajectory that my department's previous secretary had. She got about halfway through the PhD before deciding to take a full-time job as administrator, and she was incredible. She had to sit in on meetings and take notes, but you can bet your patoot no one denied her sandwich access. I can't even imagine such a thing.

Working at a university is mostly pretty fun...and I get free classes! Even grad classes, should I want them. I'm actually working up a proposal to (essentially) do another BA in the sort of Design-Your-Own-Degree/ Tutorial System program they have here.

Also, since I work with scientists, I can shuffle in wearing clunky combat-like black boots, a weird skirt and a tee shirt and I'm still the most formally-dressed person on our floor.

Then too, they don't have strong opinions about design, so I can design all our brochures, web material and so on almost exactly as I please.

That does sound sweet, aside from the already-mentioned drawbacks.

Frowner, I'll have you know that in Irvine, the secretaries are treated with respect, as almost all of them are former students chosen by their predecessors for the shit they refuse to take from the faculty. A few weeks here, and you'd be ready to demand two sandwiches, and by the way, these fuckers are comping my martinis too, damn it...you'd be able to do that in no time.

we must preserve this distinction" script running in their heads at all times.

They sure do. I was privy to a long series of memos going back and forth between a department chairman and two tenured faculty members who stated and kept re-stating their case that their ID numbers (computers were relatively new things on campus then) were higher than those of some others of lower rank, and that this *really* needed to be changed.

It finally ended when the chairman wrote them, in almost these words, "Get back to productive work, or else!".

Strangely enough, one of the better things about being a university secretary is the long-term nature of it--it's very satisfying to know how to do things, to know the ways to work the system, to know the answers to various grant budget questions without having to look it up. I've always liked behind-the-scenes-ness, and my newfound extremely-late-bloomer interpersonal skills make it kind of exciting when I can actually think strategic things like "I'll wait until she's gone home for the day and then ask the assistant secretary, because he'll say yes and she'll say no".

Now watch, not only will tomorrow be absolutely hideous, but I'll probably be summarily fired and have to pack up and live in a crate under the bridge...I'll become some kind of local character, and people will throw down crusts and coins to see me mudlark for them. Then I can blog about it and become an internet celebrity!

Frowner, I'll have you know that in Irvine, the secretaries are treated with respect, as almost all of them are former students chosen

This seems like a recipe for extra disrespect. So, couldn't hack it in academia, huh?

t's a class thing, I think--they don't want to admit that luck and class background play just as big a role in their success/PhD status as raw brilliance, so they can't admit that anyone without a PhD can really be fairly intelligent.

This is an interesting (and generous) explanation. In my experience, people who pull those stunts are obsessed with whether or not it is a "legitimate" expense -- that is, whether the foundation or government agency funding the program will one day audit the spending and say "A-HA! You let NON-PROGRAM staff eat lunch on our dime! Death for you -- or at least, no more funding." It's the same kind of petty, hierarchical mindset, though.

17: The key is to work outside your field--that's why I work for scientists. Also they have money, or more money than the humanities folks.

Actually, in my one of my interviews the director asked whether I felt that as a "humanities person" I would be comfortable working for scientists.

I knew that I wanted my current job when I saw the inflatable sharks hanging from the ceiling, the identically dressed identical twins working in the lab and the giant plastic rat on the centrifuge.

Also when someone who later was revealed to be an extremely famous and important fellow started joking with me in the elevator--he was telling me that he had the ability to forgive sins and I should let him know if I ever needed absolution.

18: Well, I am program staff...in fact, there was a lot more budgetary lee-way for feeding me than for feeding most of the people who were at the meeting in question. How do I know? I do some low-level budget reconciliation and since we feed people pretty regularly I know the rules for food very well.

(I did order myself a sandwich, but I ate it later at my desk.)

I worked in a science research U for many years and came to like a lot of the people. The problem is that they work too hard to hang out much.

17: Well, I might as well triple post my last thought on this and then go to bed. I think a lot would depend on the climate of the department and on why people didn't want to go on to/with grad work. In a paranoid department, it might be nice to have people who were smart enough to catch the references but far enough down on the academic totem pole to seem unthreatening; in a warm fuzzy department it might be recognized that we can't all be faculty and that, indeed, it's perfectly legitimate to do other things. It could be horrid, though.

In the sciences, most people who end up as secretaries--no matter how over-educated--are not from a scientific background. This simplifies things a lot--people think I'm stupid (when they do) because I'm a secretary, not because I haven't read Hegel in the original. They don't really expect me to know anything much about, say, Banana Streak virus.

I used to work as a technician in an academic biochem lab. From what I understand, this lab was a total anomaly in that we had a work meeting every morning and a social meeting every afternoon with tea and Japanese delicacies. Every couple of months, there was a party at the main prof's house, to which each of us was charged with bringing food from our cultural heritage. We'd drink a lot and make ridiculous, inappropriate jokes, and then go back to work the next day. It was great.

When I started working at a pathology lab the next year, I realized I'd been led to believe untrue things about science labs. It was dismal, no one spoke (or was even learning) the same language, problems were blamed on whoever the lowest-ranking person was, and, from what I could tell, their work was sloppy, underfunded, and sad.

Banana Streak virus, while a nuisance for supermarket displays, is a godsend when one has to make institutional orders of banana bread.

AWB: Every lab is an anomaly. Or so I think from my experience of them. Also, a lab can change radically if even one person leaves. People work--at least around here--really closely together, in a way that doesn't (I think) happen in the humanities much.

If the person making the mutants (and yes, that is a job description) is a Good-Time Charlie, the lab may well have a totally different character than if he's replaced by someone who, say, has a short temper.

Hey, you know what's an awesome city? Montreal.

Okay, I can tell I'm being boring and platitudinous...it's been a long weekend of socially-responsible labor among humorless left-wingers and my repartee, never very sharp, is actually starting to rust. Good night.

That biochem lab was indeed an anomaly. Not because there was camaraderie, but because you apparently socialized with the bosses outside the lab.

BTW, you people may have heard vague bad things about the NIH funding situation, but it is a REALLY bad situation and quite worrying for almost all scientists. Only a sociopath enjoys writing grants (there are at least three sociopaths in my department), and having to write four similar ones in order to get one of them funded is more or less an insane amount of busywork. My lab has lots of drawbacks, but the fact that we're lucky enough to have a large grant-independent slush fund (from charging hospitals to perform a certain test on clinical specimens) is definitely going to keep me from giving up. This year it seems like 75% of PIs can't in good faith tell a prospective PhD student that they know they'll have any funding four years from now, so 75% of PIs are planning to rely on 1.5-year MS students and overqualified postdocs with no particular horizon in sight.

That's terrifying, Ned. One of the things that made my lab so happy was that our lead prof was a grant-reviewer for NIH, so funding was never a problem. Part of what made my later lab such a horrible place to work was that they were constantly scraping for money. They cut corners, cut salaries, and couldn't offer the kind of incentives that researchers need to work well together. We'd run out of something, like sterile hats, and the prof would send me to the morgue to steal some. How can anything get done in that environment?

"We're lucky enough to have a large grant-independent slush fund (from charging hospitals to perform a certain test on clinical specimens)...."

The lab I worked at had that kind of deal, and at some point bean-counters somewhere (Feds? Insurance? Hospitals?) changed the rules on us.

4: Eating in meetings is rude? What-ever. That's what meetings are *for*.

We've already established that you were raised by wolves, B.

Hippies.

Same-same.

My son only can associate with atheists raised by wolves. Fortunately, they are not rare in Portland.

Isn't your dad a Republican, B?

No, my dad's a yellow dog Democrat, actually. He's pretty Catholic, but rooted in the Catholic tradition of giving a shit about the poor more than in the neoCatholic tradition of pretending to be Baptist.

Ah, I thought I remembered him having some reactionary views.

Less graciously, he's not a hippie and you know it, wolf child.

He was, though, when I was a kid. And even now, for a 60-odd guy born in the valley who spent his whole life there, he's pretty granola.

E.g., he once paid a coyote to help bring some relatives of a church aquaintance over from Mexico.

Smuggling people doesn't sound very granola to me.

What if the people were made of hemp?

"Only a sociopath enjoys writing grants..."

Word. This is exactly why I got out of academia -- hard science nonetheless -- and went into law.

Now stop laughing for a minute:

I work for a small, high quality firm (less than ten lawyers). We have an insanely large load of high-profile cases, given our size.

So meetings have to matter. We don't have time to bullshit. Meetings consist only of what they should: Deciding who's doing what, and when.

Meeting adjourned.

In that case the act of smuggling hemp-people qua hemp would be granola; smuggling hemp-people qua people, not so much.

Teo's logic is unassailable.

36: I'm in precisely the same boat.

There's quite a large contingent of older, liberal Catholic folks out there, wherein "liberal" is defined somewhat differently than young/modern folks define it.

In conservative parts of the west, helping illegals get across the border isn't a pretty lefty kinda thing for an aging white guy to do? Huh.

"lefty" ≠ "granola", necessarily.

re: 47

Damn right.

Okay, fine, you guys all know my dad better than I do.

OT: More squirrel stories than you can shake a stick at. The winner is the AP article about the guy in Alabama who offered two undercover police officers posing as prostitutes some squirrels he'd just shot in exchange for sex.

46: It would be interesting to list all the ways in which older liberal Catholics aren't actually liberal, at least by our standards.

My parents, while voting against the Republicans, still tend to be rather racist and sexist.

I attribute the racism to mere ignorance. They recoil from black people because they don't know any. It's simply fear of the unknown.

I'm not sure how to explain the sexism. In the abstract, I can get my dad to agree that women should earn $1 for every $1 men earn, but then he comes up with all kinds of untenable rationalizations for why that isn't so...

A more vivid example of sexism: I'll ask my dad why can't women be priests, bishops, or -- God forbid -- the Pope.

My mom, who's probably more racist than my dad, is all, "right on!"

But my dad just shakes his head and emits gibberish.

My dad's adamantly anti-racist and, like my mom, did local civil rights work when I was a kid. I think he's anti-abortion, but I also think he differentiates between criminalizing abortion and simply thinking that it's a sad and regrettable thing.

His sexism is funny: he's a pretty good feminist, but he's homophobic and upset by boys who do "girlish" things or have "girlish" mannerisms. Not by girls doing boy things, though, which he fully supports. The homophobia is his primary non-liberal attribute. To his great credit, he's tried really hard to think about why I want to avoid gender stereotyping PK, and his grandfatherly instincts mean that his discomfort with little things like boys wearing nail polish don't even register.

It's kind of cute. The few times he's had a problem with some aspect of my parenting, it's been with *me*. He has zero problem with PK, and would never dream of implying that anything PK did was less than perfect.

Interesting.

My parents' racism is only in the details (which is to say, in reality). Abstractly, they supported civil rights laws, but they're still uncomfortable with non-whiteness. It's an intellectual-versus-visceral thing.

And my dad is more uncomfortable with women acting masculine. I think that's because his mother was extremely dominant.

Lots of 'populist' left-wingers hold fairly non-liberal views on race and sexuality. Just in the same way that lots of (most) liberals aren't really left-wing at all in their politics.

In the same way many (most) people with left-wing politics aren't 'granola' at all, either.

My Baptist parents were decidedly liberal and anti-racist.

Is there a place to sign up to buy Frowner a sandwhich or do we just register our displeasure so that she doesnt shoot us?

Just tell her she's much prettier when she smiles.

In the late sixties, it was part of the prevailing narrative in the suburb where I grew up that your parents were clueless and reflexively conservative. There seems to have been a lot of truth to it in general, but it had an oddly marginalizing effect on those of us whose parents were more to the left than the kids I knew taking their oppositional stances.

Part of the difference was knowledge. My dad particularly had seen and lived a lot of history that seemed not to have had much impact on the lives of the parents around me, whom I would guess were mostly people who had met in college just before or after the war. Their expectations of social life, particularly between the sexes, the general whiteness of the world as they saw it, and the cocoon-like world of middle-class protestantism at least in that strata, is startling to me looking back.

So my cohort was all about defining itself by taking oppositional stances which made no sense in the context of our household. Neighbor kids were virtually lighting out for the territories by refusing haircuts, expressing sympathy for Black Power, or suggesting that sex-before-marriage might, in some unlikely and remote but theoretically conceivable circumstances, not make you a bad person. My dad, by contrast, had read the Port Huron statement, and was not impressed.

My Yukon grandparents were virulently anti-Catholic. Somewhere along the line that turned into their being actually pro-abortion. They disapproved strongly when my parents had a third child, one over replacement level.

I spent my childhood with various women living with us for short periods of time so that they could place their babies for adoption without the hometown people knowing that they were pregnant.

I also have fond memories of my dad getting yelled out by crazy anti-choice people.

William Burroughs' "Dr. Benway" was a back-alley abortionist who offered his services to every pregnant women he saw.

The replacement level is something like 2.3, though, so your sibling needn't be consumed with self-hatred. Maybe 70% self hatred, but if you divided it fairly between the siblings, that would only be 23% self-hatred, which is actually less than average on the Woody Allen Self-hatred Scale.

anti-Catholicism must have had a special resonance in Canada, due to the English/French divide, and the number of Canadians whose recent ancestors were involved in warfare on some level based on Catholic identity, as with the Irish, Poles and Croats—as we called them then. It was also a more protestant country, at least in the cities, although in the country the US is too, particularly in the South.

My dad says that in his little town, Amherst NS, the KKK chapter that existed for a while in the twenties was all about Catholicism, and couldn't have cared less about the Blacks who were fairly numerous there. So when I saw the American Experience about Knute Rockne, that described the huge parade of the Indiana Klan past the gates of Notre Dame, which provoked Rockne's conversion in reaction, I had context for that.

54: My parents' racism is only in the details (which is to say, in reality). Abstractly, they supported civil rights laws, but they're still uncomfortable with non-whiteness.

Yeah, this is mine pretty much. Although it's covered up by some fairly solid politeness; you end up with intellectual anti-racism controlling voting behavior and position on actual issues, covered by a fair amount of discomfort with anyone not firmly Anglo, covered by good enough manners that actual interaction with people who aren't firmly Anglo doesn't involve displaying their racism. It's not ideal, but it's not terrible.

57: I'm pretty clumsy, so you might be safer if I were actually aiming at you. And besides, can you really envision a scenario where I spare Ogged because he bought me a sandwich, but wreak havoc among the other Unfoggers?

Luckily, I'm spending all my money on weird shoes and organic asparagus this month, so I don't think I'll be able to budget for a gun.

And guns don't really run in my family, although my grandmother kept a handgun in the desk at home in case the Reds (or the Yellow Peril) came over the back fence. My father found it while we were working on their estate and was not at all comfortable with handling it to dispose of it.

Now that I think of it, too, wouldn't it be a little more alarming if I started calling myself Grinner? It would suggest the kind of fixed, maniacal grin that one grins after one snaps and just before one wreaks teh havoc.

Or with skulls. I'm afraid certain grins put me in mind of totenkopfen.

I should say that the marking rank within a meeting by who gets fed is about the worst office behavior I've ever heard of. I could see a meeting where food wasn't ordered for secretaries because they, you know, weren't attending the meeting, but once someone's attending, and food's been ordered, how could you not order food for everyone? That's just all the way messed up.

So if you end up gunning down your department in an understandable fit of office rage, call me and I'll help you find a lawyer.

"Now that I think of it, too, wouldn't it be a little more alarming if I started calling myself Grinner? It would suggest the kind of fixed, maniacal grin that one grins after one snaps and just before one wreaks teh havoc. "

As always, Frowner nails it. I absolutely trust negative people more than always positive people.

"So if you end up gunning down your department in an understandable fit of office rage, call me and I'll help you find a lawyer."

HEY NOW!!!!!! Don't go encouraging her! Lawyers have enough people mad at us.

67: Thank you, LB...I'll bear that in mind. But I prefer simply to imagine the chaos which would ensue if I were to leave, and the massive unliklihood of finding someone with my skillset willing to work for my wages ever ever again.

People do get weird about food here--even people who are generally pleasant. It made a higher-up here markedly uncomfortable that at our annual smallish conference (for which, again, I had ordered the food and at which I was serving as sommelier--seriously, I was a waitress that evening as well as pouring the wine for everyone, which was rather humiliating; and I had to be there from 6:30am until 7pm) I actually ate a plate of food while others were eating. He didn't say much, but he wasn't best pleased.

64: LB, Irish Catholics aren't Anglo. Don't get uppity, papist.

71: That fact explained a small part of the tension in my parents marriage (Dad, Anglo mutt without any dominant ethnicity or connection to anyplace other than Queens; Mom, all Irish Catholic). The rest of it was explained by failure to adhere to the no relationship policy.

The winner is the AP article about the guy in Alabama who offered two undercover police officers posing as prostitutes some squirrels he'd just shot in exchange for sex.

This sort of thing reminds me that I do in fact live in a very staid and boring country.

So if you end up gunning down your department in an understandable fit of office rage, call me and I'll help you find a lawyer.

Shooting scientists:shooting lawyers::unfiltered cigarettes:nicotine gum.

Did your Mom bring her Virgin Mary images into the home? When normal people marry idol-worshippers that's often a source of tension.

I've done a small study of PhD-level murderers, and they're much more systematic and rational than low-class murderers. Of course, Frowner doesn't have a PhD, but as I understand she has quite a few grad credits.

In my first alma mater the student --> secretary --> faculty wife --> faculty track had at least one instance.

My Catholic Grandfather--my dad's father--was an ardent FDR Democrat his entire life. After he retired from a successful business career, he spent his free time writing acerbic letters to newspapers and politicians. He was passionately opposed to Gov. Ronald Reagan--whom he called "Reagan the Pagan"--and the Vietnam War. He'd have made a great blogger. He was very pro-civil rights, very involved with foreign missionary work. But I can't say with any certainty what his deeper feelings about people of color might've been. Probably sympathetic, but paternalistic.

Minnesota politics is still heavily influenced by the old social Christianity. As a result Minnesota is one of the most liberal states on all issues except the social issues. It's not especially rightwing on social issues either, but not really liberal. Wellstone voted for the DOMA.

56: Yes, I realize that Baptists are people too.

The squirrel for sex story Apo linked to is incredible. The best part is that the FBI agents decided not to report this guy, even though his final offer was some dead squirrels, a broken washing machine, and six dollars in exchange for sex.

Is there some exception to the solicitation laws for offers that are too pathetic to take seriously?

I absolutely trust negative people more than always positive people.

It's a widely cited factoid, but I can't help but repeat it - clinically depressed people tend to make the most accurate descriptive evaluations about their own lives and predictions about their likely prospects for the future. So it's probably right to trust negative people, but for your own health, try not to be one.

My parents are both lobotomized wingnuts. My mother frequently says startling things about race (slavery should be reinstituted, etc) and watching her cognitive dissonance as she tries to cope with having a gay son would be comical if I weren't so close to it. Yet my eyes nearly popped out of my head one day as she pulled the car over to give a ride to a young and clearly very poor black couple whose car had stopped. It was summertime in Florida and the woman was super-pregnant, and after we left them at a gas station, my mother said, "I remember what it was like to be pregnant. We couldn't let that poor girl walk in this heat."

My father was actually a Republican politician back in the day and is now a full-time Fox news watcher. He never talks about race really, although he is obsessed with illegal immigration, which as far as I can tell is really nothing but disguised racism, but I always assumed he was standard-issue white southern racist. Yet, a few years ago I found out that when he had a law practice in the 60's, almost all of his pro-bono work was for indigent black people who could scarcely secure legal services at any cost in our semi-rural southern town. He was known through the county as the only lawyer who would have black people sitting in his waiting room right there alongside the white folks.

So, people are complicated, surprise.

Yes, I realize that Baptists are people too.

I didn't mean it that way. They were pretty unusual in the churches we went to in my childhood, until we found a liberal Baptist church when I was in the 7th grade or so.

Clinically depressed people tend to make the most accurate descriptive evaluations about their own lives and predictions about their likely prospects for the future.

Yet people sneer at me.

I'll soon be moving to Part II: The Career-free Life.

Is there some exception to the solicitation laws for offers that are too pathetic to take seriously?

I wondered if perhaps he was mentally challenged and known to the officers.

I used to work for a Baptist college. As far as I could tell everyone involved held fairly standard centre-left liberal views (this was in the UK, mind).

My parents are both pretty liberal (in the US sense) and left-wing -- although my dad is more of an anarchist misanthrope than he is of the mainstream left.

My dad is given to the occasional deliberately contrarian announcement on race, gender and/or sexuality but has several close gay friends. He is generally, but not always, pro-feminist in what he says but, in action, much more of an unreconstructed middle-aged guy.

80: Would GSW syndrome explain the apparently aberrant behavior in your family? (I know it does in mine.)

clinically depressed people tend to make the most accurate descriptive evaluations about their own lives and predictions about their likely prospects for the future

I've heard this, too, but it's not very useful, is it? Clinical depression is in some sense defined by repeated behavior. Like an alcoholic telling you that, odds are, tomorrow he'll be having a drink?

I used to work for a Baptist college. As far as I could tell everyone involved held fairly standard centre-left liberal views (this was in the UK, mind)

I can't think of any reason why this can't eventually be true here, too, aside from that rule about Southern whites and blacks needing to be in different parties. Always seems to come back to the same thing.
/GunnarMyrdal>

GSW=Ground Saucer Watch?

Guilty Southern White (usually seen as Guilty Southern White Boys).

I think that point is that we cinical depressives are right all the time. People are twisting the truth because they're in denial.

My father the small town doctor was often paid in produce. The squabs were tasty but we got tired of turnips.

85b: Not really, no. Depression actually gets rid of overconfidence bias, but it doesn't otherwise enhance predictive ability. It's not about depressive people being predictable, it's that the average depressed person doesn't consider themselves more sociable and attractive and competent than 90% of other people, like non-depressed people do. (The amount of average overconfidence varies between 60 and 90% for different traits.)

Odd. My comment shows up after John's in the thread, but before John's in the recent comments.

85: GSW as in gunshot wound?

I think it stands for GSW Shoe Warehouse.

I can't think of any reason why this can't eventually be true here

The Southern Baptist Convention, which is the largest of the various Baptist organizations in the US, has been taken over by extremists who believe in mandating specific beliefs (which is historically a very un-Baptist tendency) regarding abortion, homosexuality, and the like upon threat of expulsion. By and large, liberal and moderate Christians have left the SBC. The seminaries, which were formerly bastions of progressive theology, have all been purged. I don't think there's any going back now.

The church in Durham where I spent my youth voluntarily left the SBC after seeing the two other liberal congregations in Raleigh and Chapel Hill get expelled for not hating on teh gays. The three churches opted to go with the American Baptist Convention instead, which in the South is almost all Black churches.

92: You could comment as Billy Shears?

The 60-90% overconfidence bias is the ground for my no-relationship no-career argument. You can call it "hope" or "aspiration", but what it means 60-90% of the time is that you end up with unhappy people who are regarded as (and regard themselves as) losers. We are swamped with heart-warming underdog stories, but the "I could have been a contender" stories are the normal ones.

"Dream the impossible dream", "reach for the stars", "They said it couldn't be done, but we did it!" are all advertising slogans. Fake liberation.

At the same time, I have found that if you positively reject the normal aspirations people are brainwashed with, you might have trouble attaining even your own more reasonable goals. People don't like you when they can tell that you think they're deluded.

The Southern Baptists were defined by support for slavery, IIRC, so it's not surprising.

96: These people aren't properly overconfident - they haven't deluded themselves into believing that their life is great. Much like the people in the happy marraiges who held wildly inaccurate beliefs about their spouse's behavior and mannerisms - it's an all or nothing situation.

97: Yeah, they don't like to talk about that so much.

...