(a)there's a huge difference between being firm and honest with your kids, being honest and fair about disabilities and so on, and verbal/emotional abuse that everyone is completely ignoring. having been abused can be your badge of honor if you want. more power to you. but don't force that badge on your children- learn from your experiences. your children might just break instead of standing up proudly under your rain of abuse.

(b)am i the only one who detect the *slightest* bit of sarcasm at the notion that the days of spankings and verbal abuse were the "good ol days"?

she was just trying to preserve her "edge" see: http://rabbitblog.com/2007_04_01_rabbitblog_archive.html#1821653295350908700%231821653295350908700

refer to it as moral superiority. kingsolver was demonstrating that it can be done, and how it worked for her. i doubt than anyone, anywhere, can live on exclusively local food, nor that they really want to. the point of the whole experiment, the book, and the larger cultural conversation is that we need to take steps to make everyone's lives healthier and that it's not that easy to just up and do it. do you think kingsolver is going to continue to eat only local food now that her book isn't paying for it? probably not. but she's probably learned a lot about doing so, and probably wants to work on some ways that she and others can improve their food chain without having to put forth some ridiculously large effort.

justin, you ought to visit amy's ice cream in austin, texas. they have super premium ice cream (by def. a certain huge percent must be butterfat) that is pretty great. the basic flavors are the focus. the mexican vanilla will knock your socks off! i think the steve you mention was amy's guru. and i know that amy's isn't as great as it used to be, but i bet it's still pretty good.

i would also like to note that i thought this article, in general, sucked the big one.

there's plenty of evidence that the usual calories in- calories expended formula isn't really working when it comes to weight, obesity, etc. there's also plenty of evidence that, say, diets rich in animal fats and alcohol don't necessarily make for unhealthy people. this evidence usually points to the fact that people who eat real food, not the grotesque products of our industrial food chain, and people who engage in community/family meals instead of eating alone in the car as they dart through their stress ridden corporate dominated lives, are much better off. GET A CLUE, AMERICA!

the class issue here is that not everyone can afford to step out of the cycle, and those who are in the cycle are mercilessly harangued by our awful awful culture of overwork and what marx would've called alienation.

do you have to be so literal?

1) bloom obviously meant "set fruit."

2)fertilization like, sperm-and-egg type fertilization.

these aren't so much factual errors as they are non-scientific terms...and after all, this is just the intro, meant to ease non-scientists into the discussion.

welcome home opus and berkely!

you forget that by and large, yelpers are ill-informed oafs with no sense of anything but their egos!

but i guess that's just layman's terms for alot of what you just said. :)

you're such a patriotic little apologist, aren't you?

like you said, there's not much to argue with in moore's assertations. americans obviously need some fairly facile connections drawn for them...and for the record? my dad, among many other people i know, still parrots the old "dangers of socialized x" line constantly. facile connections WORK, whether for good or for bad.

so...michael is adressing a very fundamental issue on the hierarchy of issues: BASIC healthcare. maybe an understanding about that would be in order before we go wondering who jails homosexuals and poets?

maybe instead of publishing a bunch of pretentious tripe and using peurile gimmicks to get your authors noticed, peeps should get into the social aspects n shizz? i mean...yay for 826 valencia, but that's really the closest these supposedly hip kids have come to having anything beyond the pretension of social conscience/love of literature/cultural relevance...and for reals? it's just a tutoring center with a self-deprecatingly stodgy hipster veneer. been disenchanted with that lot for a long while.

ps- i live amongst these posers, and have met a few, so i do feel qualified to comment. and really, independent voices will always find a way to be heard- writers will always love writing, whether they break even or not- mcsweeney's is not exactly a shining example of how vital voices are suffering at the hands of late capitalism.

is hilarious- it's true- NO ONE wants to tear down the white christian male power structure. i mean, i do, but you know. no group, and no one in power. even feminists tend to like it...i don't think any of us would know what to do with a truly liberated, diverse environment. well, again, i mean...i would! but you know. :)

i didn't think the article was particularly mind-blowingly brilliant- after all, it neglected the obvious idea that the universe is so perfect for us because we evolved from its conditions. but i think it's funny that all the people decrying this POV do so on the grounds of such limited perspective. their perspective is as limited and naive as they claim paulson's is, only they, unlike him, are under the impression that there are already answers out there, and that they've got them.

i don't think paulson is particularly naive or stupid or erroneous. he's got interesting, thought provoking ideas. this is just one voice in, and one side of, a much larger conversation. this convo doesn't necessarily spring from fear of the unexplained or unexplainable...just an engagement with it. which i think is just great. :)