On other websites, "clicked links" have a color change, with the same browser. So perhaps there's a super-sekrit browser setting for "change those colors NO MATTER WHAT the server wants", but I haven't found it yet.
But then again, I still haven't found the "click this button on the browser to make this webserver crash and burn", so maybe it's my own fault.
it’s pretty simple to add color to visited links in wordpress:
I visited the site cleek pointed to. Just for the record, the CSS it recommends uses both pseudo elements and the !important modifier. I oppose both of those on general principle because they exist outside the JavaScript document model so cannot be modified by the user. As I've said in other places, "If there's some aspect of your page's styling that is so critical the user must not be allowed to change it you ought to be using PDF."
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.
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.
I'mthinking that, to prove their bona fides loyalty, they would be told to do something sketchy outside the US -- no doubt they can find another war crime somewhere. Might start with the scenario you give, given how dumb they all are. But something more like the military equivalent of his cabinet meetings seems likely.
Whichever way it goes, they discover, when there is a big negative reaction, that Trump loyalty goes one way. Meaning they get thrown under the bus, too.
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.
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?
It does use general and specific information from outside the images it processes. And it just flat-out guesses a lot.
I gave it a Monet painting to interpret. The result was startling. I thought there was no possible way it could create the result just from the image of the painting I gave it.
I asked for and got an explanation. Here's the interpretation and explanation.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, perhaps the only good thing about Trump is his willingness to fall asleep during utterly pointless meetings.
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.
But we’re heading for no rain for at least the first half of December, and that’s usually the month with the precipitation.
When I moved to Colorado 38 years ago, the two big snow months were November and March. I don't do detailed statistical analyses of the history, but my perception is that has shifted to December and April. Maybe only two-three weeks rather than a full month. Spring rain also seems to be later: the foothills used to be much browner by July 4 than they have been in recent years. The monsoon is all over the place. I actually read technical papers about the North American Monsoon, as (a) it's dependent on enough fine-grain details that the models aren't reliable and (b) it's an important part of how the climate actually changes in the Southwest. The best guesses so far seem to be that it will be slightly stronger and later than now.
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.
It seems to me that every thread on ObWi has been more or less open in the 17 years I've been hanging around. In fact, my general sense is that "open" threads tend to stay on a single topic more than others do. In that spirit, let me say this on the page-layout theme:
Showing 20 Recent Comments would be better than the current 12.
If paging the Comments is really necessary, I'd appreciate more comments per page, at least.
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.
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.
[W]ould [ObWi] be better if there were many more threads, like LGM or BJ?
Please, don't strive to be LGM. Four prolific front-pagers (Loomis*, Campos, Lemieux, and Farley), one not-so-prolific but usually more than once-a-week (Rofer), and some others less frequently. Enough comments that threading (and Disqus) is absolutely mandatory. Gods help them, there are even people commenting there who follow me.
I quit reading BJ because they wouldn't rein in the overuse of Xitter links on the front page. Also, last time I looked, they have enough comments that they really ought to be threading.
* Loomis makes me exhausted. In addition to the political commentary, he does his "Erik visits an American grave" series (more than 2,000 posts), a monthly music post grading new albums and listing what he listened to, an irregular monthly post of his reading list, a weekly college football post during the season, and appears to read every comment that goes up. Plus teaching, book writing, etc.
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.
...and for whatever reason, comment links that one has previously clicked don’t change color...
Visited vs unvisited link color changes are traditionally a browser preference setting. (Keeping track of it server side across logins and sessions and addresses is hard, and doing a lookup for every link included in every generated page is expensive.) In the current version of Firefox on Linux it's buried in Edit/Settings/General/Contrast Control.
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.
On the war crimes in the Caribbean, I note that Hegseth seems to have decided to throw the admiral, who he ordered to kill the survivors, under the bus. Perhaps this will motivate those folks in the military to not obey illegal orders. If not just because they are illegal, then to avoid being scapegoated for following those illegal orders.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Thread”
Pseudo-class. Sounds like me when I have to wear a suit and tie.
"
it recommends altering the ‘visited’ pseudo-class (one colon, not two as with a pseudo-element)
Yes, pseudo-class. My mistake.
"
On other websites, "clicked links" have a color change, with the same browser. So perhaps there's a super-sekrit browser setting for "change those colors NO MATTER WHAT the server wants", but I haven't found it yet.
But then again, I still haven't found the "click this button on the browser to make this webserver crash and burn", so maybe it's my own fault.
"
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.
"
it’s pretty simple to add color to visited links in wordpress:
I visited the site cleek pointed to. Just for the record, the CSS it recommends uses both pseudo elements and the !important modifier. I oppose both of those on general principle because they exist outside the JavaScript document model so cannot be modified by the user. As I've said in other places, "If there's some aspect of your page's styling that is so critical the user must not be allowed to change it you ought to be using PDF."
On “It’s Your Party, you can cry if…”
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.
On “Open Thread”
it's pretty simple to add color to visited links in wordpress:
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/altering-link-appearance-throughout-the-site/
On “It’s Your Party, you can cry if…”
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.
"
I'mthinking that, to prove their
bona fidesloyalty, they would be told to do something sketchy outside the US -- no doubt they can find another war crime somewhere. Might start with the scenario you give, given how dumb they all are. But something more like the military equivalent of his cabinet meetings seems likely.Whichever way it goes, they discover, when there is a big negative reaction, that Trump loyalty goes one way. Meaning they get thrown under the bus, too.
On “Open Thread”
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.
"
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?
It does use general and specific information from outside the images it processes. And it just flat-out guesses a lot.
I gave it a Monet painting to interpret. The result was startling. I thought there was no possible way it could create the result just from the image of the painting I gave it.
I asked for and got an explanation. Here's the interpretation and explanation.
Monet's Japanese bridge.
"
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.
"
Oh, and my eye skipped over Michael Cain's 2nd comment, no objections to the plugin or experimentation on the site.
"
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.
On “It’s Your Party, you can cry if…”
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.
Meanwhile, perhaps the only good thing about Trump is his willingness to fall asleep during utterly pointless meetings.
On “Open Thread”
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.
"
But we’re heading for no rain for at least the first half of December, and that’s usually the month with the precipitation.
When I moved to Colorado 38 years ago, the two big snow months were November and March. I don't do detailed statistical analyses of the history, but my perception is that has shifted to December and April. Maybe only two-three weeks rather than a full month. Spring rain also seems to be later: the foothills used to be much browner by July 4 than they have been in recent years. The monsoon is all over the place. I actually read technical papers about the North American Monsoon, as (a) it's dependent on enough fine-grain details that the models aren't reliable and (b) it's an important part of how the climate actually changes in the Southwest. The best guesses so far seem to be that it will be slightly stronger and later than now.
On “It’s Your Party, you can cry if…”
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.
On “Open Thread”
It seems to me that every thread on ObWi has been more or less open in the 17 years I've been hanging around. In fact, my general sense is that "open" threads tend to stay on a single topic more than others do. In that spirit, let me say this on the page-layout theme:
Showing 20 Recent Comments would be better than the current 12.
If paging the Comments is really necessary, I'd appreciate more comments per page, at least.
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.
Please excuse my nitpicking. Carry on.
--TP
"
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.
"
[W]ould [ObWi] be better if there were many more threads, like LGM or BJ?
Please, don't strive to be LGM. Four prolific front-pagers (Loomis*, Campos, Lemieux, and Farley), one not-so-prolific but usually more than once-a-week (Rofer), and some others less frequently. Enough comments that threading (and Disqus) is absolutely mandatory. Gods help them, there are even people commenting there who follow me.
I quit reading BJ because they wouldn't rein in the overuse of Xitter links on the front page. Also, last time I looked, they have enough comments that they really ought to be threading.
* Loomis makes me exhausted. In addition to the political commentary, he does his "Erik visits an American grave" series (more than 2,000 posts), a monthly music post grading new albums and listing what he listened to, an irregular monthly post of his reading list, a weekly college football post during the season, and appears to read every comment that goes up. Plus teaching, book writing, etc.
"
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.
"
...and for whatever reason, comment links that one has previously clicked don’t change color...
Visited vs unvisited link color changes are traditionally a browser preference setting. (Keeping track of it server side across logins and sessions and addresses is hard, and doing a lookup for every link included in every generated page is expensive.) In the current version of Firefox on Linux it's buried in Edit/Settings/General/Contrast Control.
On “It’s Your Party, you can cry if…”
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.
"
On the war crimes in the Caribbean, I note that Hegseth seems to have decided to throw the admiral, who he ordered to kill the survivors, under the bus. Perhaps this will motivate those folks in the military to not obey illegal orders. If not just because they are illegal, then to avoid being scapegoated for following those illegal orders.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.