Scylla Rhiadra

Not really necessary, Gopi. My comment was more about the discussion here than your title. In general, though, I think one is asking for trouble by restricting responses in that way?

Why are we even limiting who can judge or comment? I'm a straight woman, but I feel entirely qualified to judge the looks of women or gay men.

You're suggesting, in effect, that you can tell the sexual orientation of a person just by their appearance? Really?

I have no insights, really, into how straight men judge the looks of other men, but the gay and bi men I know are quite happy to talk about their views. What's kind of interesting is that it so often differs from my own. But that could of course be just personal taste, rather than a more general thing. The straight women I know don't hesitate to pass judgement on how other women look. Sometimes it's negative, of course, but that's usually about style choices rather than facial features and so forth. But I'll often have conversations about how pretty, or cute, or whatever another woman looks, as well as about her style. What is also kind of interesting is that my observation has been that women have different ideas of what is attractive in a woman than men do. But, again . . . maybe that's just my friends?

I don't doubt it. And I'm equally and genuinely sure it was not meant at all as a homophobic reference.

This ^^^ has probably happened to all of us at one time or another. And my guess is that one of your first responses, Ajay, was like mine: distress at having unintentionally hurt or insulted someone. I really don't like hurting people. Any new information that helps prevent that from happening is good and welcome information.

That's legitimately wonderful. I'm glad to hear it: I don't want to think of you being hurt. I am not personally offended by terms like "pansy" or "poncy": they just don't apply to me. They don't "hurt" me. But I recognize that they are offensive and hurtful to others -- and it's not my place to tell them that they should just "toughen up" and "accept it." And such language does sometimes (although not, I think, in the present case) signify underlying bigotry and hatred that does need to be confronted directly -- or change doesn't happen.

This cuts both ways, doesn't it? If someone calls me a "ho" or a "b*tch," regardless of their understanding of those words, they've done a pretty good job of making communication with me a whole lot harder. I'll repeat -- the point of being careful about the language we use isn't to impose a set of "rules" -- it's to make communication better and easier because we're using language that doesn't also imply negative stereotypes. And the point of correcting people -- gently, so, one would hope -- is not to revel in "gotcha" moments. It's to make communication easier for them, and ensure that they are not unintentionally alienating or insulting people when they speak. I don't believe that either of the people addressed above are homophobic. I think they are using outdated language without thinking about the implications and impacts of that. And I also firmly believe that both are caring enough that they will learn from it.

Silent, I'm sorry . . . but Luna is right on this. Please, you were NOT suggesting that the gentleman in question is a member of the genus/species Viola × wittrockiana. I offer you a definition from the American Merriam-Webster dictionary: pansy (adjective) -- offensive : effeminate sense 1 also : gay —used as a term of abuse and disparagement And from the British Oxford English Dictionary: b. A homosexual man; an effeminate man; a weakling. Frequently derogatory. This is not a new usage: examples in the OED go back to the 1920s. I can find similar entries in both dictionaries for the term “poncy.” I get that it sometimes seems difficult and annoying to find that terms one has been using without any intention of implying a derogatory or insulting connotation are now accepted to be doing that. I’ve been “caught out” using terms myself that are now understood to be insulting. I thanked those who corrected me, and stopped using them – not because I am afraid of the PC Police, but because I don’t want to be insulting or inconsiderate if I can at all avoid being so. It’s a learning process, and no one expects everyone to get it right all the time, or at first. But for it to be a learning process, one has to first acknowledge the justness of the criticism.

😳

Um, Lindal, please can we not use terms like "poncy"? They are freighted with all sorts of homophobic subtexts. Yes, yes, I'm being all "PC" -- but really, honestly, it's just about being considerate. It's about not using language that carries for many extremely insulting associations and meanings. There are other ways to express this idea that don't make it sound as though we've forgotten the last 40 years of work in accepting gay men for who they are.

Let me know when that happens. It'll be worth framing as a rarity.

I think -- I'm pretty sure -- that you mean the physiologically stronger gender. I get that. I'm reminded of a comment that Patti Smith once made about her own sexuality -- that she'd tried sleeping with a woman, but it didn't do it for her because she wanted "hard" rather than "soft" in her sexual partner. I also totally get that. But Smith was, of course, talking about physical "hardness," which is, for reasons I don't need to explain, particularly desirable in a male partner, regardless of one's sexual orientation. No one who knows anything about Patti Smith is likely to deny that she is "strong" and, in her own way, "hard": intellectually, musically, in terms of her personality and work ethic, she has been nicknamed the Godmother of Punk for a reason. (Michael Stipe once remarked that the first time he heard her album Horses, it "'It pretty much tore my limbs off" -- not the way one would describe a "weak" or "soft" experience.) But one of the things I love most about her is that she is unafraid to be "soft" (although not "weak") as well. I will always treasure that moment when, in 2016, she performed Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" for his induction as a Nobel Prize winner, and forgot the words. What made her failure a victory, of a sort, was her grace and the fact that she gently but insistently embraced her own vulnerability. And, paradoxically, acknowledging and displaying that "softness" publicly was the ultimate index of her strength. So, yeah. I like the "hardness" of men too. But "hardness" and "strength" come in many shapes and forms, and labour -- the creation of value and meaning -- can consist of building roads with rough, calloused hands, and writing poetry with soft ones. I want a man whose strength is also in evidence in his willingness to acknowledge and exercise his own vulnerability, his "softness." I want a man who is unafraid to cry at a sad story, or weep for the horror that so often surrounds us -- but who also has the strength to undertake to do something about it. And that's about character, not gender. And it's certainly not about looks or social class.

Well, I was told that I could join the Party . . . I thought they meant, with cake and balloons, and stuff . . . 🙁

Lovely lovely pic, Cath. Thank you for sharing it! Happy International Women's Day!

Thanks for this CaithLynn. We've still have much to do. But look at how much we've accomplished!

I love Heterocera! One of my "homes" is there, and it's one of my favourite places to explore! Is your parcel there listed in your picks?

Like @StarlanderGoods, I know of a number of really robust, dynamic, and also quite beautiful mainland communities. Most of these, I might add, depend upon rentals to help support tier -- I doubt that they'd be possible on the scale at which they currently exist, were it necessary to relocate them to estates. At the same time, you're quite right that a great deal of mainland is an eyesore -- that's part of the problem that a restriction on land flipping is designed to solve, or at least mitigate. I should also say that one of my favourite leisure time activities is walking(!) the routes of the SLRR, or scootering the mainland highways. Not so much because I'm a "vehicle" person (I'm an awful driver!), but because it's astonishing the hidden gems one can find on the mainland. I actually don't think it's as bad as some would have you believe.

Possibly true to some degree, but such people are of course not flipping land. What needs to be addressed is the issue of land speculation and monopolistic practices.

Yes. And the system sucks, and is in fact counterproductive to the development of communities and a viable culture on the mainland. Which is precisely why it needs to be changed.

It's a problem because it is strangling development on the mainland, making it more expensive, and more difficult to consolidate parcels into something large enough to be worth developing. Land flippers are also deliberately buying small parcels that block future development, and using them as well to make the land around them less valuable so that it will be abandoned. It's not, in other words, about individual renters or buyers, but rather about the larger malaise that grips the mainland outside of Belli. Those who do nothing but flip land are pernicious scum who contribute nothing of value to SL's culture or economy. They are neoliberalism at its most gross. I'd love to see them eradicated.

The first part of your post I wholeheartedly endorse -- and possibly parts of the second. Prohibiting rentals on mainland would, however, literally kill it. That would certainly get rid of the land flipping problem, as most mainland would become essentially valueless, but what that in turn would mean is that the only options for renting or owning land would be on private estates, which would effectively make land ownership prohibitively expensive for many, as well as probably inflating rental rate on estates.

This isn't really "flipping," in the sense that I think most people here mean, Marigold. The point is that you were adding value to the land before your re-sold it. Land speculators do not do this. In fact, on the contrary, they sometimes use property holdings to devalue nearby land so as to encourage owners to sell up at a reduced rates. I don't think that the legitimate sale of land, particularly in smallish parcels, is the problem here. It's people who do literally nothing but buy and sell land to make quick profits that are the problem.

I have both of those too, as well as the Genus Baby Face, which was given free to owners of the Classic. And yes, one of the things I look for during weekend sales are cheap makeup sets for my Kaya, which I use not as my main head, but as an "extra" in photos. It certainly is possible to put together a high-end look quite cheaply . . . if one has the time and patience to look and/or wait for sales and special giveaways. I think that the LeLutka EvoX heads are quantifiably superior to anything else available now, for all sorts of reasons (although, again, I wish they weren't using a proprietary texture map, which means essentially owning TWO sets of everything if you're using more than one make of head). But in my case, I'm very happy with my current "look" using the Genus Classic, and really don't want to change over. Like most Genus users, I'm waiting for Genus to finally produce the needed update that fixes some of the known and well-documented problems with the head and HUDs. It'll happen . . . eventually. In the meantime, I can manage.

Indeed. One of the points Johnson was making was that southerners fighting for independence were specifically fighting for the "liberty" to own slaves, an important point given the rising calls in Britain for an end to the slave trade. In the years leading up to the American Civil War, the same arguments and motivations buttressed the fight for "states rights" in the growing conflict between free and slave states in the union. None of this, btw, "exonerates" Britain. The British Empire of the 18th century (especially the acquisition of Canada and India) was funded by the slave trade. As importantly, the Industrial Revolution in the UK, which made that nation the most powerful in the world by the mid-19th century, wouldn't have been possible without the immense wealth it generated. The British are only now coming to terms with their role in this historical monstrosity: it's no longer possible to smugly condemn the US for a barbarity that was actually a British innovation.