Live Q&As

You know, I'm confused too. But definitely let's keep the cat involved.

That is a nice start to a Tuesday!

As long as you're on a kindle!

Sorry, I had difficulty getting into the chat!

But only a tool blames the chat carpenter.

My favorite part was the quote, which I saw highlighted on Twitter and am imperfectly reconstructing, that "this was the first time anyone remembered finding a pair of lungs on the sidewalk."

That and the 10 Things I Wish My Daughter Knew As She Turns 10 both are going viral around where I'm from. 

On the Specialdom, I think, honestly, as a child of the 90's, I had less of a problem being helicoptered and constantly overpraised than the reverse. At least what I felt to be the reverse. My biggest problem as a child was that I read more parenting books than my parents did. I thought it would give me ammunition. I kept coming downstairs pointing at highlighted passages and bellowing that "I think we're trapped in a dependent love cycle." I don't know if your ten year-old has ever told you that you're trapped in a dependent love cycle, but I'm told that it's the sort of experience that gives you the immediate urge to destroy all the psychology books in the house. I only imperfectly remember the remainder of the contents of the book, enough to say that "the pendulum of overattachment and abandonment swings again!" when we disagreed about allowance or bedtime but it had less of a pronounced effect.

What I'm getting at is that I think the helicopter/overpraise era was winding down when I started out. I only got possibly one trophy for participation, and my folks did their best not to tell me I was good at things when I wasn't. I still remember the vivid grimace on my mother's face after she finished my first antebellum novel The Sisters of Mountingbrook, which was exactly every jot as bad as the title implies.

Then again, the speech makes me think that was just my folks, in which case, er, thanks, folks. You see, vindication! From a viral YouTube guy!

To lose one lung can be regarded as a misfortune, but to lose both looks like carelessness...

As long as we're geting into the free speech controversy territory, how do folks feel about Caiden Cowger? *throws every possible card onto the chat table* He's the "14 year-old pundit" who delivered a pretty pitch-perfect impression of a man thrice his age claiming the president was turning people gay and saying a variety of other hateful things. Then Spreaker, his radio service, shut him down, and now everyone's trying to flag his youtube videos as fast as they pop up. I know the question is different because he's 14 and it's not, "is he entitled to this opinion" so much as "is he entitled to a platform for this opinion," but once you start viewing the Internet as a platform for speech rather than a forum for speech, to me, that opens up some worrisome questions, because there are different rules for giving people megaphones than for allowing them to shout deranged things in parks. Which is it? And should there be somewhere on the Internet where a 14 year-old and/or his parents should be allowed to post that sort of thing, awful as it is?

Apologies for the variable degree of coherence in the foregoing...

One of the sneaking questions I had on reading the article was whether they planned to do the cleanup in their trademark ensembles or not. Just the idea that you're driving along the highway and suddenly you see a small herd of Klansmen and you know, terror, panic, start calling the relevant authorities, but it turns out they're just picking up cans by the roadside.

As a friend wisely observed, though, once you're the KKK there are certain lines of community volunteering that you really can't get into, just for the headlines. Clean-up being one of them.

Ooh, link, please!

When I saw the headline it reminded me of the KKK chapter who showed up to protest against the Westboro Baptist Church. It's that slight frisson of discomfort as you think, "Well, I want someone to (clean up the highway) (protest the WBC) but... urgh, it's the KKK." Still at this rate, next the headline will be that the KKK wants to start a cat-sitting service or plant herbaceous borders.

Yeeergh..

No, but see, this is the interesting part to me. It's just because they'd get their name on the stretch of highway, yes? And then anyone who drove past and thought "wow, what an immaculate stretch of highway" might think "Gee, that KKK really knows what it's doing, I should pick up some of their membership literature"? Not that I've ever had that response to a clean section of highway, I'm just trying to follow this through. But does this really do more than say "This particular chapter of the KKK is good at picking up stray cans?"

I've always said the mere fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his poetry. (Well, I haven't, Oscar Wilde has, but I keep quoting it.) The KKK is by definition a horrible, execrable organization, but what if they are, in spite of that, good at keeping the side of highways clean? Do we lose more by letting them clean up and tack up their name than by leaving the highway as is?

Okay, that's a distinction that makes sense.

Still, in Web 2.0, when most of us do our internet posting not by creating a site ourselves but by going through a middleman like YouTube or Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, it's an interesting reminder that the rules of speech differ because of that. You can, and people frequently do, get shut off. I think folks sometimes forget that. I certainly did. In some countries it's Big Brother, and we all agree that's wrong. It's unsubtle. It's visible. It's state suppression. We have been pretty well set up to distrust all those things. In cases like this one, it's Little Sister, like Bradbury said, which only some of us think is a bad idea. Maybe he had a point that this was where the real danger lies.

Then again, this is already a small molehill that is being transformed into a progressively more gigantic molehill. Not sure how much we can conclude.

I would hardly call the KKK a CONSERVATIVE group, because I think that's unfair to conservative groups. The KKK's in a category of their own.

Let's try another example -- NAMBLA. What if NAMBLA wanted to adopt a highway? I mean, I guess we would be against it because it would be creepy for NAMBLA to adopt anything, but you know what I mean.

Oh wow, see, I didn't see your question, and I just posed the same one! Group?

Yeah, but can you stop people from doing humanitarian things on the grounds that "if you do a good job, people might like you better"? I mean, if you were in the hunger games and needed medicine, and the KKK were willing to drop you down a tin, I think many of you would probably take the tin. And then you would feel a little more kindly disposed towards the people who had given it to you, but I don't think you'd go off and embrace their ideology. Ideally it would make you think, well, there's a person in there capable of good, maybe I can help improve his thinking in other areas. But that's ideally.

See, this is the trouble with people. There are always more shades of gray than you would like. And of Grey, for that matter. The Racist Old Great-Grandfather is almost a trope at this point. And just because you had to grimace all through Easter dinner every time certain subjects surfaced didn't mean that you thought Great-Grampy Delane was a bad man through and through. There are always more sides to people than you would like. Of course, the KKK is premised on the idea of not seeing people as multi-faceted individuals whom you have to like or dislike as you come to know them, so maybe this is more credit than we should give anyone willing to join.

Yaaagh, I'm not sure we can let them off the hook quite that easily. This is an organization with a history, and if they don't know that history and their only thought on joining is "oh, Biff down the road's a swell guy and he says they have delightful salad brunches" (I don't think this is what anyone quite thinks) they should still be held accountable for it. Those who don't learn their history are doomed to join awful racist organizations who aren't allowed to appear in public after Labor Day.

The second half, though, I agree with. If you want to get together with Biff and have delightful salads and clean up the highway, then for heaven's sake join an organization without a century and a half of miserable baggage and heinous crimes to its name.

I thought the CNN article said that they gave you vests and you did the pickup yourself!

WAIT I WANT TO BE BETTE MIDLER'S ADOPTED HIGHWAY!

Nicely reiterated.

Actually, this time, you had about as much context as anyone!

Here is a picture of a cat, to further confuse you.

How about the WBC?

As long as we're getting into the deep woods here...

Ha!

I don't know, he's been deceased for some time now...

I think "government sponsored website where you can rant all you want" seems almost guaranteed to be one of those miserable oxymorons.

Right, and that's the whole trouble.

I guess highway cleanup is actually a better example of Enhancing The Common Weal so as to make all boats rise equally, and which doesn't allow them to demonstrate their ideology in any way.

Aha!

See, if this conversation is otherwise fruitless, we'll all have learned a little more about how Adopting Highways works, which is all to the good!

This is nicely put! Still, I think, just a few paragraphs ago, we heard people saying that you can restrict charitable do-gooding if it also promotes their cause.

On a hypothetical scale from Donating a Nickel To Beautify Times Square and Getting A Giant Billboard With Your Group Name On It And A Picture of Mother Teresa (or Christopher Hitchens, as you designate) Waving And Saying 'I Endorse This' to cleaning up a highway without getting any credit whatsoever for doing so, I think everyone agrees that one end is unacceptable and the other end is fine. It's the middle that gets tricky. It's not that they don't have the right to clean up the highway. It's the signage that's the tricky bit.

It wasn't for fear of government attack, though. That's where the tricky Big Brother/Little Sister divide comes in.

Ray Bradbury said: ""The real threat is not from Big Brother, but from little sister (and) all those groups, men and women, who want to impose their views from below," he told the Times of London in 1993. "If you allow every minority to grab one book off the shelf, you'll have nothing in the library."

But that's food for a whole 'nother discussion.

According to Google Maps, the way of the Dodo leads 10,000 miles to Gunung Dodo in Indonesia somewhere. Which bodes badly for Google maps.

Westboro Baptist Church!

I mean, as indicated by my earlier suggestion about their getting together and enjoying salads, I have no idea what a typical KKK meeting sounds like. One of my general life precepts is that people are more often incompetent than malicious, so my vote would be that in some strange way they didn't realize it would create this media storm and just thought it "might be sort of a nice thing" and then this happened. But maybe I'm not cynical enough. Definitely, in fact, am I not cynical enough.

Ha to the first half!

Now I'd like to see a nice man named something unprintable like Bill Mothaf***** or controversial like Dave I'mreallyracist or Carl Womenareterribleatmathandscience try to adopt a highway (or, heck, the guy who changed his name to Tyrannosaurus Rex Joseph Gold) just to see what happens!

To the second half, yeah, I don't think you can disclaim responsibility for the history of an organization like this just because you joined in the 21st century. I haven't read any of their lit, but I don't doubt it was ugly.

Right. And no plaques there.

Another voice!

Practical!

Here it is!

I know! I wrote this one! There are references to Oscar Wilde, because obviously. The venue is air conditioned, unlike last year.

Heyo!

Well, on that note, I'm out! Thank you for an invigorating chat! Please keep reading the Compost and feel free but unobligated to follow me on Twitter!