Following on GftNC, I picked this particular link because it's from almost a year ago yet is pertinent to the US strike killing scores of school girls in Iran. There are more recent articles linking the two directly, but I find there's something more biting about this older article that simply raises the question "What could go wrong?" now that we know one thing that went horribly wrong.
This is the text google provides as an intro to a Faux News story. (I do not follow links to Faux News, nor will I provide them for others to follow.)
House Speaker Mike Johnson sounds the alarm on what he calls a growing Sharia law threat in the U.S., urging vigilance to protect American ...
Sharia law was one of my go-tos when listing old Republican boogeymen that had fallen by the wayside and amounted to nothing. I don't know if this means this one is back, but someone's doing CPR on it.
Thanks for the clarification, MC. I've since discovered the MEGA (Make Elections Great Again - how original!) act with even more neat stuff in it. Holy hell.
I suppose this is the best thread to discuss the SAVE America Act. Don l'orange is pushing hard to sign it into law before the midterms. I wonder, though, if it will really help the GOP as much as he seems to think were it to pass in time.
Midterms are dominated by the most reliable voters, which means they're already registered and probably have ID. At least I would think so.
Of the people the act would disenfranchise, the question becomes what the breakdown in party would be - particularly as concerns mail-in voting. It's more popular with Democrats, but I think the split has moved closer to being even in recent years. (The act has exceptions for military, disabled people, and a few others.)
The biggest skews are toward older people and white people. The act has exceptions for military, disabled people, and a few others. Letting people in the military vote by mail obviously helps Republicans. To the extent that there's overlap between older people and disabled people, there's also some benefit for Republicans.
"He might have said “en pocas palabras” but decided, rightly, that giving the actual number of words is pithier."
So you must sacrifice the pithiness. Isn't that part of the message?
I considered the use of something that simply avoided the specific number for the English translation. But my previous thought was limited to translating "cuatro" to "three."
More seriously, I thought about the translation going from a 4-word Spanish phrase to a 3-word English phrase as uncontroversial because it best conveyed the intended meaning. But with the preceding reference to the number words in the phrase, going from "cuatro" to "three" wouldn't convey the intended meaning. It's just no longer the correct number of words after the translation.
I don't know if there's a convention for translating in that kind of situation, but somehow translating a word that has a more or less perfect analog for the intended meaning in another language to a different word seems fundamentally wrong to me. Words for numbers are about as exact in meaning as language can manage. There's no selecting for sense or feeling or inference.
When I heard they (she?) awarded a nine-figure contract to an 8-day-old company, a big thought bubble with a question mark showed up above my head. It's not funny enough to be an Onion article, but it is ridiculous enough.
I could just as easily have used "the private sector" or "for-profit entities." The government, in a normal country, is usually the one installing the guardrails to keep the capitalists from running amok.
I think this whole discussion of how boys and girls behave in school is a wild goose chase. Even if girls tend to be, on the whole, more well behaved in school than boys, that doesn't mean that expecting both girls and boys to behave themselves equates to "making boys act like girls." It's a stupid and lazy framing. And, really, what's the alternative - letting boys be disruptive while keeping girls in line?
Isn't curious, though, that the likes of Elon Musk, currently the richest person in the world - which I have to think makes him the richest person in all of human history - seems intent on upending the system of institutions in which he became so obscenely rich. (Or at least that's how it looked to me when he was out DOGEing for Dear Leader.)
I guess in his mind the system was holding him back. Ketamine, anyone?
Listening to the radio (old-timey FM), right after they announced the SCOTUS decision against tariffs, they moved to an audio clip of His Orangeness saying the US has pledged $10B to the Bored of Piece (of sh*t).
The radio announcer then said, "The president offered no details on how this would be... (noticeable pause) at all legal." I LOLed in my office at that one.
Another neat trick is justifying an intrusive and violent crackdown on immigration based on the purported criminality of immigrants while at the same time taking credit for declining crime rates - a decline that preceded the crackdown and was ongoing during the previous administration's "open border policy," during which all the rapists, murderers, human traffickers, and drug dealers were supposedly flooding into the country.
Gutting consumer protections, environmental regulations, and financial rules to benefit your billionaire donors while blaming the commoners' problems on poor immigrants is quite the trick. PT Barnum would be proud.
That laser focus on the ‘illegality’ of brown folks doing the back breaking labor but total inability to consider that the people who are hiring them are doing something illegal is amazing to me.
In fairness to the interviewee, I took this to be referring to the people doing the hiring, not the workers.
And I couldn’t hire an illegal alien. It just didn’t seem right. And it’s illegal, by the way, but people are getting away with it.
What I don't understand is why more people aren't put off by the sheer chaos and conflict that a tRump presidency brings. I get that some people are fine with it. It's more a matter of how many people are fine with it that confounds me.
Things were far more dull, in a good way, when Biden (or anyone else in my lifetime, for that matter, in varying degrees) was president.
We veer from one stupid, unnecessary, and destructive whim to the next with barely a breath in between. Somehow, a significant minority of people in this country, roughly 40% of them, don't seem to mind.
Even GWB looks like a f**king teddy bear by comparison.
Badger: In summation, I think you just got to not do it, man. That's all.
Mr. Fox: I understand what you're saying, and your comments are valuable, but I'm gonna ignore your advice.
Badger: The cuss you are.
Mr. Fox: The cuss am I? Are you cussing with me?
Badger: No, you cussing with me?
Mr. Fox: Don't cussing point at me!
Badger: If you're gonna cuss with somebody, you're not gonna cuss with me, you little cuss!
Mr. Fox: You're not gonna cuss with me!
[Both start snarling at each other, and then settle down]
Mr. Fox: Just buy the tree.
Badger: Okay.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran”
Mad Max, you say? Don't forget about the water.
https://apnews.com/article/iran-war-desalination-water-oil-middle-east-12b23f2fa26ed5c4a10f80c4077e61ce
"
Following on GftNC, I picked this particular link because it's from almost a year ago yet is pertinent to the US strike killing scores of school girls in Iran. There are more recent articles linking the two directly, but I find there's something more biting about this older article that simply raises the question "What could go wrong?" now that we know one thing that went horribly wrong.
https://theintercept.com/2025/04/15/pete-hegseth-pentagon-civilian-casualties-harm/
The f**kface won't lose a second of sleep over it, I'd bet.
On “As it all falls down around our ears: An open thread”
This is the text google provides as an intro to a Faux News story. (I do not follow links to Faux News, nor will I provide them for others to follow.)
Sharia law was one of my go-tos when listing old Republican boogeymen that had fallen by the wayside and amounted to nothing. I don't know if this means this one is back, but someone's doing CPR on it.
(BTW, I died of Ebola. Thanks, Obama.)
On “The ides of Texas”
Thanks for the clarification, MC. I've since discovered the MEGA (Make Elections Great Again - how original!) act with even more neat stuff in it. Holy hell.
"
I suppose this is the best thread to discuss the SAVE America Act. Don l'orange is pushing hard to sign it into law before the midterms. I wonder, though, if it will really help the GOP as much as he seems to think were it to pass in time.
Midterms are dominated by the most reliable voters, which means they're already registered and probably have ID. At least I would think so.
Of the people the act would disenfranchise, the question becomes what the breakdown in party would be - particularly as concerns mail-in voting. It's more popular with Democrats, but I think the split has moved closer to being even in recent years. (The act has exceptions for military, disabled people, and a few others.)
Some stats here:
https://statesunited.org/resources/americans-vote-by-mail-2024/
The biggest skews are toward older people and white people. The act has exceptions for military, disabled people, and a few others. Letting people in the military vote by mail obviously helps Republicans. To the extent that there's overlap between older people and disabled people, there's also some benefit for Republicans.
On “A little language practice”
Okay. You (whoever that includes) win. Make the English "three."
"
"He might have said “en pocas palabras” but decided, rightly, that giving the actual number of words is pithier."
So you must sacrifice the pithiness. Isn't that part of the message?
I considered the use of something that simply avoided the specific number for the English translation. But my previous thought was limited to translating "cuatro" to "three."
Would anyone here argue for that?
"
More seriously, I thought about the translation going from a 4-word Spanish phrase to a 3-word English phrase as uncontroversial because it best conveyed the intended meaning. But with the preceding reference to the number words in the phrase, going from "cuatro" to "three" wouldn't convey the intended meaning. It's just no longer the correct number of words after the translation.
I don't know if there's a convention for translating in that kind of situation, but somehow translating a word that has a more or less perfect analog for the intended meaning in another language to a different word seems fundamentally wrong to me. Words for numbers are about as exact in meaning as language can manage. There's no selecting for sense or feeling or inference.
Four is just f**king four, right?
"
This is such a square bunch on this blog. The Spanish play it fast and loose when it comes to counting. Just relax and go with it.
On “The Last Noem Standing”
Yes, that is noteworthy and I should have included it. It's hard to keep up with all the absurd elements of these, um ... goings on.
"
When I heard they (she?) awarded a nine-figure contract to an 8-day-old company, a big thought bubble with a question mark showed up above my head. It's not funny enough to be an Onion article, but it is ridiculous enough.
On “A little language practice”
Full disclosure: My brain went straight to Napoleon Dynamite.
On “As it all falls down around our ears: An open thread”
I could just as easily have used "the private sector" or "for-profit entities." The government, in a normal country, is usually the one installing the guardrails to keep the capitalists from running amok.
"
Anyone have thoughts on this Anthropic thing? It's a topsy-turvy world when the tech bros have more restraint than the federal government.
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
I think this whole discussion of how boys and girls behave in school is a wild goose chase. Even if girls tend to be, on the whole, more well behaved in school than boys, that doesn't mean that expecting both girls and boys to behave themselves equates to "making boys act like girls." It's a stupid and lazy framing. And, really, what's the alternative - letting boys be disruptive while keeping girls in line?
It's f**king ridiculous.
On “As it all falls down around our ears: An open thread”
Isn't curious, though, that the likes of Elon Musk, currently the richest person in the world - which I have to think makes him the richest person in all of human history - seems intent on upending the system of institutions in which he became so obscenely rich. (Or at least that's how it looked to me when he was out DOGEing for Dear Leader.)
I guess in his mind the system was holding him back. Ketamine, anyone?
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
Yeah, and girls brush their teeth. Why is my dentist trying to feminize me?
On “Open Thread”
Listening to the radio (old-timey FM), right after they announced the SCOTUS decision against tariffs, they moved to an audio clip of His Orangeness saying the US has pledged $10B to the Bored of Piece (of sh*t).
The radio announcer then said, "The president offered no details on how this would be... (noticeable pause) at all legal." I LOLed in my office at that one.
F**king clown show.
"
In a sane world, this would be a bombshell of a story and we'd be hearing bipartisan talk of impeachment. Instead, I'm only learning about it here.
On “The Aiken formula”
This first thing I thought of when they announced the withdrawal as a victory was W's "Mission Accomplished" banner on the aircraft carrier.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice ... um, well ... don't get fooled again!
On “Unsure on the definition of ‘torn’”
Another neat trick is justifying an intrusive and violent crackdown on immigration based on the purported criminality of immigrants while at the same time taking credit for declining crime rates - a decline that preceded the crackdown and was ongoing during the previous administration's "open border policy," during which all the rapists, murderers, human traffickers, and drug dealers were supposedly flooding into the country.
"
Gutting consumer protections, environmental regulations, and financial rules to benefit your billionaire donors while blaming the commoners' problems on poor immigrants is quite the trick. PT Barnum would be proud.
"
lj:
In fairness to the interviewee, I took this to be referring to the people doing the hiring, not the workers.
And I couldn’t hire an illegal alien. It just didn’t seem right. And it’s illegal, by the way, but people are getting away with it.
On “Separated by a common language”
What I don't understand is why more people aren't put off by the sheer chaos and conflict that a tRump presidency brings. I get that some people are fine with it. It's more a matter of how many people are fine with it that confounds me.
Things were far more dull, in a good way, when Biden (or anyone else in my lifetime, for that matter, in varying degrees) was president.
We veer from one stupid, unnecessary, and destructive whim to the next with barely a breath in between. Somehow, a significant minority of people in this country, roughly 40% of them, don't seem to mind.
Even GWB looks like a f**king teddy bear by comparison.
Am I repeating myself repeating myself?
On “It is never “Simple as that””
You could go the route of Fantastic Mr. Fox:
Badger: In summation, I think you just got to not do it, man. That's all.
Mr. Fox: I understand what you're saying, and your comments are valuable, but I'm gonna ignore your advice.
Badger: The cuss you are.
Mr. Fox: The cuss am I? Are you cussing with me?
Badger: No, you cussing with me?
Mr. Fox: Don't cussing point at me!
Badger: If you're gonna cuss with somebody, you're not gonna cuss with me, you little cuss!
Mr. Fox: You're not gonna cuss with me!
[Both start snarling at each other, and then settle down]
Mr. Fox: Just buy the tree.
Badger: Okay.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.