Ozzard

From my own experience of telling family and friends about me wearing skirts...

• Work from the folks you most expect a positive response from, towards the ones you think you need to tell but don't want to. Each encounter will tell you something, that you can learn to make the later ones easier.
• Pick your time, and be prepared to delay if something else happens and you judge it's a bad time. I wouldn't turn up in heels - it forces the timing. Don't use this as an excuse for never telling anyone, though.
• Be confident, but not aggressive. This is easier if you expect a positive response, hence telling the people who you think will take it well first :-).
• Accept that some people might not like what you're telling them, and might take it badly. For friends, that's not so bad - there are generally other friends out there for the making if it gets really bad. For family, it can be more of a problem - so I'd tell friends first and learn from it!

Over the last 5 years, I've gone from being secretive (and worried) to cheerfully going out to regular events in skirt'n'heels. Oh - and my parents-in-law are staying over next week. I'll be wearing skirts round the house, as I usually do. A big change! Still won't go over to my mum's in a skirt, though.

The "gay village" in Manchester is probably as good a place as any. Liberal and accepting of T*, blokes in skirts, exhibitionists etc, and a good sprinkling of bouncers in case some idiot decides to be somewhat less accepting! Certainly in the early evening, I've not seen any trouble there. You might also want to check www.northernconcord.co.uk - I'm not a member, but they have reasonably up-to-date information. They meet in the village and have changing facilities.

Good luck!

Anyone do World of Warcraft?

Ah. World of Warcrack... erm... Warcraft. That'd be me, then - Ozzard on Kilrogg, plus sundry alternate characters.

Another satisfied Tall and All customer here. Got two, looking at some of their light tiered skirts for summer wear.

What's he on about?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game) might enlighten you. It is a classically English comment (and a classically English game).

guys dont have any shape or hips so a guy in a skirt just looks like a long shapeless tube!

I have plenty of shape - it's just all on my belly :-(. Still, being the wrong shape ain't going to stop me wearing skirts any more than being 50lbs overweight is going to stop me wearing heels. Both give me an incentive to lose weight, in one case to gain a waist* and in the other to take some weight off my feet in heels!

* OK, I already have a waist. I want one that goes *in* rather than coming out... :-)

(ad hominem comment deleted)

So how's your regime doing? Are they still shooting suspected terrorists dead in the streets and holding inquirys later?

Yup. These days they're typically shot because they look Middle Eastern rather than because they look Irish, but it's still happening :-(.

As for the male high-heeled moral relativist - he's certifiable!

Nope. Been on Prozac a couple of times for depression, but my family doctor says I'm one of the sanest and most self-aware people he's met and my local consultant psychiatrist appears to be a long, long way from committing me. I call this a good thing, as I'm not a great fan of staying anywhere that the locks are on the outside of the rooms....

Fortunately, political and religious beliefs are not currently grounds for being sectioned in the UK - even if they are obviously delusional, as you seem to think mine are - unless I am a danger to myself or those around me. I'm glad of this; a representational democracy needs a good cross-section of beliefs to stay healthy. I happen to represent one extreme of a number of those beliefs :-).

I'd much rather be here, in a (relatively) healthy democracy, than in a totalitarian regime where my freedom to express my beliefs was more limited - say Nazi Germany, current North Korea, Iraq under Saddam Hussein (and, in fact, now) or 16th century England. What about you?

- Peter

(Aside: Dr. Shoe makes a number of points and his post deserves a detailed reply. This requires more time than I have in this visit - consider this a placeholder. Sorry!)

The first and foremost problem that I find with your challenge, is the notion that the lunatic and mentally & emotionally defectives represent 1% of the population of this world. It is my personal belief that the truly sane people represent less than 1% of the population. Consequently, I am finding far less "middle ground" between us.

Just a quick check, then:

- Do you consider yourself "truly sane"? Why or why not?

- Who should be allowed to participate in decision-making: everyone, or only those designated "truly sane"?

- If it is not everyone, who decides which people should be called "truly sane" and hence be allowed to participate in decision-making? And how do you prevent that spiralling into a nasty little system where "people like us" take over from the initial well-meaning people and "everyone else" is branded insane - where, if the atheists initially came into power, theists would be taken from their homes at night and never seen again, or put into secure hospitals and given treatment for their "insanity" until they were "cured", or where if (say) the Discordians, or Sunni Muslims, or Shia Muslims, or Quakers, or Roman Catholics, or Methodists, or... came into power, all the atheists and anyone who didn't share their exact beliefs had the same fate?

Are these absolutes?

Missed one.

4) Enforcment of these "absolute" laws is relative. It is a criminal offence (in the UK) to give a copy of a piece of recorded music to someone. Prosecutions are rare, especially for small-scale infringement. Why is this law not enforced with the same zeal as (say) the law making the sale of alcohol to under-16s a criminal offence, where undercover officers attempt to entrap shopkeepers into a sale?

Actually, the bible does not say "thou shalt not kill" (unless you read King James) what it says is "You should not murder". In the original Hebrew, murder and kill are the same word which is why Genesis goes on to define what is meant and then advocates the death penalty, ie stoning.

Thanks for the clarification. It seems I'm a little odd in reckoning that taking someone's life - for whatever reason - is the same: a life has been taken, whether by a murderer, a terrorist, a freedom fighter, an executioner or a warrior.

This is why we have laws which in themselves are absolute because in the event where two people both believe they are right then they have the Law or a rule book of some kind to refer to. Take for example a situation where one driver drives into the back of another. He would try to say that the driver in front stopped suddenly (he probably did) and the other driver would say that the guy behind was too close. We have the convention that the driver behind is always at fault- and this stops arguments that could escalate to violence or worse. Obviously I would feel a little sorry for the guy if it happened to me but at the end of the dayI would expect him (or his insurance) to make good any damage to my car...

... I'm sorry? Laws are absolute? First I've heard.

Firstly, laws apply within a particular jurisdiction. I am aware of no worldwide jurisdiction. There is no World Court. This in itself makes it difficult to argue that laws are absolute.

Secondly, laws within a particular jurisdiction are subject to modification by whatever body created them in the first place. They are mutable. I accept this is a weak point, as they can be considered at a point in time, but laws change over time. My mother recently pointed out to me that she found it hard to accept civil partnerships given that homosexuality was illegal as she was growing up - how times change. I suspect that few of us have done our pike practice recently, either, and I'm not aware of anyone living having been fined or imprisoned for failing to go to the State-sponsored church in England. All of these have been past laws.

Thirdly (and more strongly) laws are subject to interpretation. Take your convention above: that whoever drives into the back of another vehicle is considered at fault. This was arrived at by case law, and is presently being modified by case law as groups of (typically) youths deliberately drive erratically ahead of vehicles in the hope that the vehicle behind will drive into them and they can all get compensation payments for whiplash from the "at fault" driver behind. Someone - a judge in the English legal system - has to interpret the law as written and the existing case law and precedents as they are aware of them, to arrive at a guess as to what the law actually means. In some cases, for example European law, the judge is allowed to scrutinise the Parliamentary debate that led up the law being passed in its current form; in others, for example English law (except where overruled by European law in a very peculiar way that can be further patched as circumstance allows) the judge is not allowed to examine the intent of Parliament and must deal with the law as worded. It's really all very confusing.

Are these absolutes?

The first and foremost problem that I see with your construct is: Who is to determine what is "right" and what sort of standards are to be employed?

That is precisely the question, yes.

As I understand your construct, what is "right" is what is determined by whoever is in power.

No.

I believe that *there is no absolute notion of right*. Big, big difference. What is right to you may not be right to me, and vice versa. Then I added a paragraph to the effect that one could construct a consistent view of Right as Power - read through again, please, and tell me where I said or implied that I believed it?

Therefore, I see no difference between your construct and the more pragmatic: Power flows from the barrel of a gun." Therefore, whoever happens to be in power at the moment (ergo, whoever has the gun) gets to determine what what is "right" and what is "wrong". So in the absence of any absolute standards, if the color of your hair, or the color of your skin happens to be "wrong" or offensive to the one in power, then according to your assessment, the one with the gun has the "right" to wipe you out and remove your offensive presence from the face of the earth.

That seems to be present usage in parts of the United States, yes. They (you) have the power, so apparently get to determine what is "right".

It sounds much to whimsical or capricious to me. I would much rather have some absolute values and the rule of law rather than the whim or caprice of some "moral relativist" who happens to have superior firepower in his hands at the moment.

I would much rather prevent the superior firepower from being used and allow individuals to sort it out. I accept this is impractical - we can't get there from here, and we probably couldn't get there at all.

Here's a challenge for you: State any one belief that a) you believe to be absolutely Right, is internally consistent (so you cannot for example cite "Thou shalt not kill" unless you also cite "the death penalty is Absolutely Wrong) and c) you believe fewer than one person in a hundred, worldwide, would disagree with you, including the internal-consistency corollories. We'll leave 1% room for lunatics to have their lunatic views here. The key point is *worldwide* - your sample cannot be constrained by country, political system, race, relative wealth, religious belief or similar.

I can't find any belief that satisfies these criteria; nor can I find any way of moving the world to a state where these criteria could be satisfied. Therefore I am a relativist, not an absolutist.

The process is tantamount to gerrymandering!

Correct. Which is why the commission that changes the boundaries (a continuous process, by the way, rather than a rare one) is so powerful.

Are some of us quiet because we feel like misfits the way we're attired, and would we be more open if we changed? I've certainly had (very positive) feedback that I've become more open and more extroverted at my gaming group since I started showing up in a skirt - which matches my self-image. One datum, statistically insignificant I accept.

So I take it that the constituencies are, by and large, defined by geographic bounderies as opposed to population?

Depends. Yes in the country, no in the cities. For example, there was a re-drawing of the boundaries in Trafford (where I live) a few years ago due to lower voter numbers* in the area. Four constituences were merged into three, and the "vanished" seat was reallocated elsewhere in the country. The constituency that disappeared was a strongly Conservative area held by Winston Churchill, the grandson of the war leader and an utter maverick in the British parliament. This is, of course, pure coincidence and nothing at all to do with them as wot's in power wanting him out of the way. Nothing at all, I stress.

So boundaries do change as the population changes, although like all administrative changes they tend to lag somewhat.

* Lower voter numbers were principally due to people not registering to vote so that they had a better chance of vanishing off council records and not paying local taxes, but that is a completely different story...

See http://www.hhplace.org/discuss/hhplace_cafe_general_chit_chat/7916-political_correctness_fascism-2.html#post129627 for context - this has moved away from political correctness so I'm breaking it out into a separate thread.

Now let's see if I understand this business of moral relativism correctly. (examples elided for brevity - see the original article)

Other than some wording you've carefully chosen to be asymmetric, yes, I think you have the idea.

- Under certain circumstances I may kill someone who is causing problems in my life. I may also not want to be killed by them. This situation is symmetric. Consider a kill-or-be-killed situation - I don't care what anyone says about it being wrong to kill, I consider it more wrong for me to die :-). Similarly, the person who is trying to kill me would rather they lived and I died. I don't consider there is anything absolute that allows the two of us to get together, look at the situation according to some external set of rules, and decide which death is morally Right.

- I have had an affair in the past. I have also watched a partner have an affair. (In each case we're now living with the person with whom we had the affair, but that's irrelevant to the discussion at hand.) Again, I don't think there's anything absolute that would have allowed us to get together and decide who was morally Right - not least because it's difficult to evaluate the short-term and long-term effects of the action on the people concerned.

I *do* think that attempts to form absolute sets of morals based on any premise other than "might is right" are doomed to failure due to internal inconsistency, however. As a (fictional?) example, consider a majority-Christian country where the death penalty is used sufficiently widely to cause concern among human rights groups monitoring the situation, where intimidation and electoral fraud have been used to change electoral outcomes to the point that the UN has been asked to send in monitoring teams, and where the nominally Christian leaders are willing to go to war, condemning tens or hundreds of thousands on both sides to death in exchange for possibly preventing a few hundred to a few thousand deaths. One can construct an absolute moral code based on "might is right" where that is Right; otherwise, we're down to moral relativism - it's Right for the leaders (and perhaps some/most of the inabitants of) that country.

The real problem revolves around the fact that most leaders in this day and time lack the fortitude to take a stand, or stand up for what's right.

And then you get folks like Dubya and Blair, who most certainly have the fortitude to make a stand - and (in my opinion) have both managed to foul up considerably more spectacularly than those who go for consensus. Consensus politics, like democracy, is the politics of mediocrity. It's rare to get a decision that seems superb in retrospect, but it's also rare to get one that seems absolutely crazy. Conviction politics, on the other hand, allows the full range from genius to lunacy. I'd rather be protected from the lunatics.

But then, I am an utter moral relativist - I do not believe one can "stand up for what's right" because I do not believe it is possible to define absolute notions of right, wrong, good or evil. I rather suspect Guy N. Heels and I are at opposite ends of the spectrum here.

the definition of fascisim is being told what to think

Could you show me a reputable source that defines fascism that way? The sources I've seen typically define it along the lines of it being:

- a totalitarian political system

- led by a single dictator who allows no opposition

- promoting an aggressive nationalism and often racism.

Totalitarian political systems, like all others, work on the basis of "might is right". They can stop any observable behaviour by coming down on it like a ton of bricks - oh, sorry, a tonne of bricks, we can't use imperial measures over here any more. They can't stop you thinking whatever you wish. PC is independent of fascism, I would argue.

I'd also argue that the definition of Mass Media is being told what to think, but that's just me.

I don't speak English anyway, i speak Computerese. And my favourite there is still: "Keyboard error or no keyboard present. Press F1 to continue." Anyway, I'm English. I live in Manchester. I reasonably regularly go to gigs in North Wales, where all the signs are bilingual. I also work on e-learning software that has English, Welsh, Gaelic (Scottish) and Weegie* localisations. So it even bites us over here. * Glaswegian, which even most Scots can't follow at full speed.

Any suggestions as to the ones that are the easiest to get into without help?

Front-lacing corsets are easier to lace unaided, but there's a simple experiment you can do:

- Stand up straight

- Put your hands behind your back at waist level

- With one hand, try to touch (ideally clasp) the other wrist.

If you can do that, you've plenty of stretch to lace a corset solo- the worst problem you'll have the first couple of times is tying a decent bow!

20 minute walk (each way) in new heels? Ouch! I think I'd do the old trick of taking some flats with me - I have a couple of pairs of flat felt MJs that pack to the thickness of the soles, so will tuck into a bag with no problem. Chicken? Yes. Cramp? No thank you :-).

Macintosh - Most Applications Crash... If Not, The Operating System Hangs. FIAT - Frustrated Italians Attempting Transportation (or "Fix It Again, Tony") Ford - Fix Our Rotten Designs (Dear lawyer for $large_company_of_choice, the above is posted in a spirit of humour and is not intended as defamatory. I drive a Ford and own two Macs)

(could someone with moderator privs split this this thread about where we started talking about viruses? It's now off-topic, but this is not the right point in the discussion to start a new thread) Most AV software has heuristics to spot "virus-ish" behaviour - hooking into the operating system at a low level (usually on disk I/O) is a prime example. Such a thing may or may not be a virus; the company would rather you packaged it up and reported it. Similarly, people change viruses - script kiddies the world over will take an existing virus, mutate it, and re-release it. The new virus still does damage, but isn't the same as the old one. Most AV software detects virus strains that look "a bit like" existing ones, and invite you to report them so that they can be confirmed. When you were running Windows with AV, did you have any other software along with the AV package, notably a firewall? A good firewall will stop most of the worms and other nasties trying to get in over your broadband connection; running with the firewall disabled is asking for infection. For example, I used to think I was safe on dial-up without a firewall and with file+print sharing disabled until I got hit by CodeRed*. If you're interested, try the same "honeypot" trick again and then run an open-source virus scanner such as CLaM across the system. If necessary, review the source code of CLaM first to make sure it's not dropping viruses or reporting false signatures. OSX *does* have to worry about viruses, just not as much, for a number of reasons: - It's not as popular, so fewer virus writers target it; - It's not as popular, so there are fewer systems out there trying to infect yours; - It's harder to write viruses for, so fewer virus writers target it; - Most users don't routinely run as root, so the damage a typical virus can do is more limited - there has to be another exploit that the virus can use to gain root before it can do any major damage. - Peter * Yes, I do run a SQL Server installation at home.

Glad to see the events happening and spreading. It's a message that needs to be spread - nationally and internationally, as widely as possible. If that can be done in a way that's striking, makes the news, and is coincidentally fun, then great. One sometimes needs a shock/surprise in order to initiate change. It's why new managers will often make a big change immediately they come in - it's easier to change the organisation thereafter. A walk/march of men in heels is shocking to most people; hopefully that makes them less resistant to change. It's generally an effective approach - probably more so in more conservative communities, which may be an advantage if the abused in those communities have a harder time of it.

God save us all from radical zealots and do-gooders.

Amen... or something like that.

- Peter the atheist