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.
My serious (but not far) lefty mates think well of her. I don't know much about her, but her participation in this absolute clownshow so far makes me wonder about her judgement. However, I agree that lefties do deserve effective political representation, and if she turns out to be capable of it, good.
Corbyn's judgement, on the other hand, is and has always been execrable. And most serious lefties of my acquaintance say he is also not very bright.
Zack Polanski's past as a hypnotherapist, and his (disputed) claims that he could hypnotise women to have bigger breasts, are rather hard to forget when considering how serious he is capable of being.
That aside, however, our politics are in such a mess at the moment, and most of the alternatives so frightful, that a vote for the Greens could make sense under some circumstances.
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've written here before about the one day while working an inventory job across CO, NE, SD, WY, MT that I drove from Fort Morgan to Fort Collins and drove through sunny weather into fog, hail, sun, rain, fog, light snow, and sun again over about 35 miles of empty state highways.
Colorado: sunny weather punctuated by acts of god.
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.
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.
The northern part of the Front Range urban corridor -- from 20 miles south of Denver to 20 miles north of Fort Collins, and 25 miles east onto the plains -- is a strange little area for weather. At the north end of that is the Cheyenne Ridge, a 2,000 ft high east-west barrier. At the south is the Palmer Divide, a 2,500 ft high east-west barrier. Plus the mountains to the west, of course. Among the weird things that happen is the Denver Cyclone. Broadly speaking, some or all of that area is protected from the worst of the regional weather.
The area was a traditional site for winter camps for Native American tribes, avoiding the much more severe weather in the mountains or more than 20 miles out onto the plains.
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.
Would adding the following style setting to the head work? Or are the comments isolated from the overall webpage?
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>My Page</title>
<style>
a:visited {
color: purple;
}
</style>
But then you may not be able to change the headers for the site.
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.
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.
Anyway, that's my current thoughts.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Thread”
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.
On “It’s Your Party, you can cry if…”
She could do a lot of good in the future.
My serious (but not far) lefty mates think well of her. I don't know much about her, but her participation in this absolute clownshow so far makes me wonder about her judgement. However, I agree that lefties do deserve effective political representation, and if she turns out to be capable of it, good.
Corbyn's judgement, on the other hand, is and has always been execrable. And most serious lefties of my acquaintance say he is also not very bright.
Zack Polanski's past as a hypnotherapist, and his (disputed) claims that he could hypnotise women to have bigger breasts, are rather hard to forget when considering how serious he is capable of being.
https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/zack-polanski-deputy-green-party-hypnotherapy-womens-breasts-5HjcmXc_2/
That aside, however, our politics are in such a mess at the moment, and most of the alternatives so frightful, that a vote for the Greens could make sense under some circumstances.
On “Open Thread”
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?
"
It's said about Iceland: If you don't like the weather, just wait 15 minutes.
On “It’s Your Party, you can cry if…”
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.
On “Open Thread”
I've written here before about the one day while working an inventory job across CO, NE, SD, WY, MT that I drove from Fort Morgan to Fort Collins and drove through sunny weather into fog, hail, sun, rain, fog, light snow, and sun again over about 35 miles of empty state highways.
Colorado: sunny weather punctuated by acts of god.
"
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.
"
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.
The northern part of the Front Range urban corridor -- from 20 miles south of Denver to 20 miles north of Fort Collins, and 25 miles east onto the plains -- is a strange little area for weather. At the north end of that is the Cheyenne Ridge, a 2,000 ft high east-west barrier. At the south is the Palmer Divide, a 2,500 ft high east-west barrier. Plus the mountains to the west, of course. Among the weird things that happen is the Denver Cyclone. Broadly speaking, some or all of that area is protected from the worst of the regional weather.
The area was a traditional site for winter camps for Native American tribes, avoiding the much more severe weather in the mountains or more than 20 miles out onto the plains.
"
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.
"
Would adding the following style setting to the head work? Or are the comments isolated from the overall webpage?
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>My Page</title>
<style>
a:visited {
color: purple;
}
</style>
But then you may not be able to change the headers for the site.
"
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.
"
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.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.