State of the Discussion

Kindness and human decency weigh a tremendous amount with me, and more and more as I get older. But in politicians, and especially those who aspire to lead the country, with all the enormous complications and problems that involves, I feel intelligence (or at least the lack of stupidity) are a necessity.

And just an observation about italics. If you look at the image I'm adding below, you can see that the middle comment has the italics but the ones on the left and right don't. I've never been happy with how the site doesn't italicize in the summary, so it looks like the author is saying something that they are quoting. The same problem happens in summarized posts on LGM (see here for an example).

What makes this a bit strange is that the middle one is what would be ideal, but the other two are not. Not sure if there is a fix, but just noticed it.

Pro bono, thanks, I must have skipped over that chunk of the file. The archive was out of sight, out of mind, so thanks for noting that.

I’ve written here before about the one day while working an inventory job across CO, NE, SD, WY, MT...

Did you go through Casper? Was the wind blowing? (That's a trick question, for those who have not spent time in Casper.) The utilization factor at 80 meters for wind turbines near Casper is 49%. That is very likely the best in world for onshore turbines. Even the old school fossil fuel members of the Wyoming legislature are figuring out the state can derive far more revenue selling wind power to out-of-state customers than they can make burning coal.

I’ve noticed that the archive site has nothing June-December 2017. Is it lost, or did it not exist for some reason I’ve forgotten?

None of the archive is lost, except possibly a few things during the transition earlier this year. Feeding it from the Typepad export files into WordPress has to be done in chunks, and is tedious. Kudos to lj for the effort he's put in.

In 1971-72, I was on the southwest coast of Iceland. There were gale-force winds several times. But everything that could blow away had already blown away. We'd get snowstorms immediately followed by rainstorms. Once the temperature got to a record high of 59°F.

I had quite a lot to say about Corbyn when he was Labour leader, little of it good.

Zarah Sultana: I know I'm older and I think I'm wiser than she is. She could do a lot of good in the future.

Zack Polanski: Rory Stewart's gotcha about debt interest didn't prove much: few could have answered it accurately (it's the other side of the coin from asking a politician if they know the price of a pint of milk). . But when it comes to economics Polanski doesn't actually seem to know what he's talking about. I may well vote Green at some point anyway.

I was in Colorado in early May 2024, spending some time in Denver and more time in Estes Park, plus driving between the two. I will simply say that I experienced a very wide range of weather while I was there, sometimes during a single day.

cleek:

also… you might not need ‘!important’ on ObWi’s WP theme.

CharlesWT:

Would adding the following style setting to the head work?

I suspect you're both on the right track, and that adding a bit of CSS for a:visited in the "Additional CSS" section of the site customization would do the job. And that !important wouldn't be necessary.

also... you might not need '!important' on ObWi's WP theme.

simply adding the style:

a:visited {color:red;}

in the Firefox debugger was enough to change the visited link colors here.

it wasn't enough on my WP site; but we're using different WP themes and so i probably have something in my CSS taking priority. i needed !important to make it work.

the CSS it recommends uses both pseudo elements and the !important modifier.

it recommends altering the 'visited' pseudo-class (one colon, not two as with a pseudo-element)

a:visited {color: purple !important; text-decoration: underline !important;}

I oppose both of those on general principle because they exist outside the JavaScript document model so cannot be modified by the user.

"make it easy for the user to modify the DOM" is a requirement that no front-end developer will ever encounter.

Thanks for all of the comments. I'm still curious what people think of Corbyn and Sultana as well as Polanski. He was recently on The rest is politics and I thought Cory Stewart was going to have a heart attack because Polanski didn't have totals of debt interest the UK gov was liable for at his fingertips. I'm not sure if it was an ambush, Polanski does come off as a bit glib to me, but given the Green's position, I think he has to push the aspirational stuff over the actual planning. I suppose this opens him up to the charge that he is unserious, but this seems like the way they always dismiss any left of center ideas.

Sultana seems like a person who relishes being a chaos agent so the combination of her and Corbyn seems doomed to failure, but I can't tell if that's because every thing I have read pushes that point. The New Statesman podcast was discussing how it was a clash between a federated system, where each group would get a vote or a more purely democratic system where each member would get a vote (if I understood it correctly) but I wasn't sure who was for what.

Pro Bono - There are people in the UK well to the left of me whom I respect. They ought to have a party to represent their views. But Your Party seems to me to represent almost no one apart from its activists.

I recognize this impulse from the perspective of someone who has been (somewhat reluctantly) involved in union leadership for a few years now. And I think, given what I have seen from the Project 2025 wing of my family, that it also holds true of the far/religious right.

Your Party, as a populist socialist movement, wants to be radically democratic and represent all its members, but there is tremendous asymmetry in how involved members in these types of movements are, and how involved they want to be, in the day to day. Consensus building is tedious, time consuming and exhausting. Only a small fraction of the membership in any of these groups has the time, interest, or characteristics to actually do this sort of work long term. What you end up with is a mixture of scrappy, fearless pragmatists, and people for whom the institution takes the place of a sort of political church in their lives. They love to hear the testimony of others and have people affirm their faith in the institution. In my union, I think of myself as part of the former group and find the latter to be utterly exhausting to deal with.

I suspect that what Pro Bono is seeing is a result of this sort of dynamic. The scrappy pragmatists mostly stay on the edges and pick their battles, fighting activist burnout the entire time as the High Church idealists sap momentum with committees and leadership retreats and another round of membership questionnaires because the last round didn't get the number of responses that would give them the confidence to move forward on any major issue. But since the majority of those involved at the leadership level are the ideological activists, they do all manage to unite around a few small ginger faction sorts of issues that they start to mistake for a consensus, so the leadership communications all come out sounding a bit too strident.

All of which makes the rank-and-file less likely to want to get involved because of the culture clash.

Solidarity is hard.

Open thread -

I live in MA, where we definitely have winter, but I live pretty near the ocean, which has a mind of it's own as far as seasonal cycles of warm and cold go.

Net/net, we get less snow than places even as close as 10 miles away.

And that's the way I like it.

To me, snow means I have to drag my sorry behind out there in the wet and cold with a shovel before I can go anywhere. It means half the parking spaces are not available again until April or May.

In short, it's a PITA.

Basically, I'm over the romance of snow.

My wife tells me it's good for the plants - helps insulate them from a hard freeze while they are dormant. So i'll put up with it.

But not gracefully.

lj: I think ObWi is infinitely preferable to LGM and BJ, so I definitely don't think there should be more threads, and I also agree that the non-US commenters add interest (but then, to quote Mandy Rice-Davies, I would, wouldn't I?). But I've always been far more interested in e.g. American politics etc than British, to the consternation of some of my friends, so the balance on ObWi seems excellent to me.

One trouble with too-frequent posts is that conversations in Comments sometimes fizzle out prematurely, as people move on to comment under the latest post.

This of Tony P's is something I've noticed as well, so I guess I prefer fewer threads. The great thing about our open or open-ish ones, IMO, is that people introduce new subjects during them, which may or may not get talked about, and then people can circle back to prior subjects as they get around to catching up, or have time to think about them. There's something about the less staccato rhythm of that which seems more relaxed to me, and more conducive to an atmosphere like friends hanging out together and talking about what interests them, and generally chewing the fat.

But the old ObWi was the site which formed my (first and only personal) experience of blogs, so I guess a lot of it is personal taste and familiarity.

lj, is it your belief that ObWi would be better if there were many more threads, like LGM or BJ?

I'm not sure about the enforced binary here and it ignores the underlying dynamics of this site and the sites mentioned. Both LGM and BJ have a stable of frontpagers, so it is not simply a question of more threads, it is more viewpoints. Also, both of those sites have istm a commentariat that is pretty US-centric. It's a bit silly to compare because I think the numbers are so different, but I think the non-US commentators here provide a pretty good counter balance for discussions. With that in mind (and sounding selfish), I want to have enough posts that allow them in particular (as well as everyone in general) to give their viewpoints on things that interest me. That is balanced with a desire not to troll anyone, which I think is an easy thing to slip into.

As far as posting frequency, I feel like I need to post around 2-3 things a week, though it's getting to term end and the weekend music post had me listen to a bunch of stuff and not get it out until (I hope) tomorrow. If that's too many, I can certainly pull back, if people think there need to be more, it might be tough to pull off. This is because there is a ton of stuff to post about the US, but it's getting to the point where it takes me to the point of physical disgust to write about some of the stuff that is happening.

I agree with Tony P's point that all threads are generally open, (and I'll try to get to his suggestions, thanks for those) and they are open because we generally don't have people trying to distract or avoid questions by engaging in what-abouterry.

Anyway, that's my current thoughts.

Charles's summer version of the picture is surprisingly accurate, less details that are concealed by the snow. The rock/bushes/edging is very much typical of the Front Range Colorado urban corridor; was the AI guessing, or did it have some location information? I wish I saw neighbors' windows lit as much as in the holiday picture. The townhouses' interiors are laid out so that the kitchen and living rooms are away from the front windows.

Perhaps this will motivate those folks in the military to not obey illegal orders.

I seem to be horribly pessimistic today. I find it more likely that it will motivate flag officers to leave the military, to be replaced by officers who will have no problem when Trump/Vance declare martial law and order them to halt the 2028 federal elections. If their big military project in 2027 is pulling the 100,000+ uniformed troops stationed in Europe and Asia home, that will be the real giveaway.

In addition to Snarki’s nitpickery, I would also love it if the actual pages of comments were longer, I think it’s distracting to have to turn the page forward and back so much on occasion.

I took the liberty of bumping up the number of comments per page.

At another site, I maintain a WordPress plugin that provides the most comment-centric view of a blog that I've ever seen. The guy who originally wrote it turned it over to that site to do with as they see fit when he abandoned it. Since that turned out to be "Mike keeps it running across new versions of WordPress and PHP", my working assumption is that I am free to install it here. To reassure lj, it doesn't interact with any other settings or plugins, just provides a different view of what's in the database.

More threads aren’t needed.
What I mostly want is to be able to easily find if there are new comments, and read them.

This pretty much sums up my attitude. I think the number of threads we've been having can be a real distraction, and disrupts the easy flow of conversation we've tended to have in the past. Also, IMO, what's in most of them can just as (or more) usefully go in Open Threads. And although historically I may possibly have been the worst at thread discipline, it's become obvious that I am not alone.

In addition to Snarki's nitpickery, I would also love it if the actual pages of comments were longer, I think it's distracting to have to turn the page forward and back so much on occasion.

Anyone else's MMV on all of this, of course.

On Your Party, and lj's question, IMO the whole phenomenon demonstrates yet again the factionalism of the far/mid left, and its incredibly self-defeating tendency which seems to (in fact if not in theory) value purity and virtue as against electoral success and the ability to actually achieve anything. There's no question that there are "stubborn attitudes to anything on the left", although admittedly not in the same league as in the US, but the far/mid left makes it awfully easy for them. The Monty Python sketch has never been far from mind during these developments.