bc, maybe I'm misreading, but it looks like you brought up Hitler by talking about Godwin's law. I found the 'felon love' facebook post, but why is that something that puts what he wrote off-limits rather than a joke that missed the target? I won't go back to the archive, but unless you have never complained that liberals can't be such snowflakes, well, physician, heal thyself.
I'm not sure how much we weigh the various eulogies and such. Is Trump's proclamation and flying flags at half mast, along with the resolution in the house when none of these steps were done for Hortman indicative of something? Why did/does the right's reaction to what seems to be much more like politically motivated violence not rise to being a "turning point"? Or is the phrase under trademark now?
It's no surprise that this plugs into a belief of might is right. It also suggests that you can't deal with folks like that by reasoning, you just have to show them a bigger stick.
Looking at the Disqus agreement, you retain the ownership of your comments, you give Disqus a license to handle them in order to provide their service. It doesn't seem like a stretch that they could use them for AI under the guise of giving you better service. I realize that this is probably a losing battle (and it's not like they can't scrape these comments) but at least they would have to go thru a few more steps. The whole model is set up to track for ads and allow commenters to keep track of their comments on multiple sites, which just lends itself to big data shenanigans.
This Politico piece talks about that. It’s clear the 54-year-old Texan is wagering that at some future date, when he’s still young enough to run for president again, his party will drift back to its free market and free speech moorings. I know Cruz well enough to hear him saying it on the stump at some future Pizza Ranch stop: Look, folks, I think Trump did a lot of good and his critics never gave him a fair shot, but I stood up for our conservative values when it wasn’t totally popular in our party. (And, yes, it’s also no coincidence that Cruz has used his two major critiques to target other actors in the administration rather than Trump himself.)
One thing that I'm struck by about Cruz' defense of free speech (and Rand Paul's I think) is not that we do this because strength comes from a diversity of opinions, but because the liberals might do it to us. This suggests that if there wasn't that argument, he's be all in.
Interesting stuff, thanks everyone. I've never had a 'home', but have always felt that there should be some place that should function as that. This may be because we are soaked in the idea (writing the post, I started a list of works that had that idea in them, but after jotting down 10 or 15, I thought it might be a bit much).
In college, we had a lot of fun with 'my people' and 'your people'. Sarcastic and full of ourselves, you can imagine when we might use it.
I was trying to find a line in a Pico Ayer essay about asking someone, a person who was basically a cosmopolitan, where he was from and him being totally baffled by the question. Couldn't find it, but did find this Tedtalk that might be of interest.
bc's comment is a bit of a misapprehension, because in this context, I imagine that there would be new principles enshrined as amendments rather than trying to contort current rulings into something new. We don't have a lot of history to work with, but I see amendments as making new law to specifically overturn earlier decisions. They didn't say 'how can we reinterpret Dred Scott so that African-Americans are actually citizens'.
I accidentally skipped over a part to go to the dialogue where Klein notes that he had taped his coversation with Shapiro before Kirk's death, so it was wrong for me to link the two.
I mentioned that I hadn't seen the video associated (if there is one) to the first Klein piece, though looking at it, it is probably too short to record. I have seen the link for the YouTube video of the Shapiro conversation (It's here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAqG00FUOK8&t=1s ) but haven't seen it, so I appreciate GftNC for putting it up here.
Some thoughts about the two. Klein says in the second that Many appreciated the [previous] piece, particularly on the right. It saw their friend and ally more as he saw himself. There were many, closer to my own politics, who were infuriated by it.
It's amazing that he doesn't really analyze what his piece did, which was basically white/sanewashing Kirk, and take the divided response as supporting it. I'd also say that the fact that he brought Shapiro on is indicative that Klein doesn't want to take a side and thinks that bringing Shapiro will let him play the centrist. He seems to edge up to understanding when he says Much of what I would describe as Kirk’s worst moments were standard-fare MAGA Republicanism. And the leader of that movement is the president of the United States. He is now in the White House, having won about half the country’s votes in the last election. But then he ends the paragraph with We are going to have to live here with one another, believing what we believe, disagreeing in the ways we disagree.
I don't understand how, if one side doesn't want us to live here, doesn't want us to participate in society, doesn't want us to exist, we can actually do this.
OK made the font a little bigger. I totally agree with Michael, but the whole installation seems to have as its goal, keeping you as far away from the html as possible.
If anyone has an urge, here are some wordpress themes
https://wordpress.org/themes/
Everything seems more for an e-business website than for a group of people to communicate with each other. More's the pity.
I was just thinking of the Constitution, I'm sure if Trump falls, there will be other things, sekaijin's list is good. Tariffs are probably difficult to tackle constitutionally, especially when one side has ignored the guardrails. Of course, after Smoot-Hawley, they gave control of the tariffs to the President, so it's not clear who could be trusted with it.
It might be instructive to consider what sort of laws were put in place after Nixon. I don't think there was any talk of amending the constitution, which might be a measure of how much more Trump has broken the system.
(I'm being incredibly optimistic that Trump will overreach and him and the people around him will be called into account, though that optimism calls to facts not in evidence...)
I'm replying to this comment in the admin interface to see how this works.
The only aches and pains I get are normal ones, gone after a hot shower or a night’s sleep.
I'm curious how you are defining 'normal ones'. 20 years ago, if I was hurting, I would generally know why. Ache in the wrist, ahh, we were doing this technique a lot. I always had a pretty good idea of what caused it. Now, I'm living in a world where I have aches and pains and I have no f**king idea where they came from. As a friend said, 'getting old is like you have the flu, but it is more like a baseline rather than an exception.'
That's wonkie, I've been going into the backend and changing it and was going to contact her about fixing it, but that was sort of down on my list. I'll change these, and I've just written a message to her and we will sort it oul.
GftNC was thinking of putting a gift link to the Klein piece. I haven't read it, usually, those articles are read by Klein as a YouTube video, but I haven't seen this one, and I am thinking that he knows he's going to get clobbered. As I think he should. Ta Nehisi Coates only mentions Klein at the beginning of this piece, but the whole thing is basically a reply to Klein.
Michael, you've got me rethinking things. If I had to narrow it down to a single event, during COVID, when we were having some classes on campus but still a lot of online stuff, a colleague and I went to the basketball gym on campus. I used to play a lot of basketball, but that was over 40 years ago and I was totally embarrassed that my shots were basically a foot or two short of the basket. Free throws seemed like a heave. While we were 'playing', a gym class where the students played basketball came in and the teacher asked if I wanted to run with them. I said sure, and did about 15 minutes of running up and down. It was a PE class, so none of the students were very good, but they were young and running and about 5 minutes in, I thought 'I could really hurt myself doing this'. After they did the first rotation, I said thanks and bowed out, but now, any kind of really strenuous play that is random seems like asking for trouble.
Thanks so much for posting that. I'm tempted to post Rick Blaine's line at the end of Casablanca, but I don't want to scare you off.
I wonder if it is a possibility that, after all the dust has settled (if it does) and the MAGAists are cast out (if they are), we would have a round of amendments. ERA, possibly expanded to deal with the Roberts court's assaults on it, something dealing with tariffs, an amendment specifically about environmental protection, possibly couched in terms of the rights of future generations, would be what I would hope for. I realize this is improbably optimistic, but that's what's for dinner.
Thanks for the observations and comments. After I posted this, LGM posted about another person I should have suggested as a precursor, Alexey Stakhanov. When lining them up, Horst Wessel, because he was shot by a communist, is probably the closest parallel, whereas Lei Feng supposedly died when a telephone pole hit him while he was guiding a truck, (which I take to be part of an electrification project for China along the lines of 'serve the people'), while Stakhanov lived to the age of 71. Nous' point about the 'soldier of Christ' aspect of Wessel and Kirk has me wonder why these conservative types are so damn violent. You can't really imagine their role models dying while helping out others, or living to an old age. This plugs in to my idée fixe, which is that the problem with Western society is the hard nougat filling of individuality.
OK, just got up and posted the pending comments, which were only GftNC and wonkie. I'll contact you both off list this weekend and try to figure out what's up.
Just a quick comment here, Russell's comment had to be approved, but I believe that nous' comment wasn't. So whatever nous did and Russell didn't, that is the key
Wordpress is still holding up comments in moderation and I think that people have to become a 'subscriber', so they can enter their username and password. I'm not happy about that, but if I just leave it open, I'm worried about a flood of spam.
I'm glad some others have weighed in. I tend, when in a situation that is uncomfortable, to simply back out the way I came in. In fact, one of the reasons I have spent so much time at ObWi has been to be able to talk about politics with people. Being here in Japan offers a measure of separation, and Japanese usually don't talk about politics unless pressed and even then, they will often not get too deeply into the weeds. They (or at least the people I am with) also don't have much in-depth knowledge of particular people or parties, just a larger sense of this party likes this or this spokesperson feels this. Speeches aren't closely parsed, and problems and fights seem to go into a memory hole.
However, I've had a couple situations that parallel yours, though not dealing with politics. My western upbringing wants me to sit them down, try to figure out what the problem is, work to some resolution. However, I never do that, because it never seems to result in a conclusion that is better.
I realize that is probably a big downer and it is no useful advice, and I'm still wrestling with this, especially as I head into retirement and will not have the outlets to meet and talk to people.
I know it can be confusing, but in this case 'post' is main article/item and 'comment' is something that follows from it. There is NO problem with people writing a long comment with links, it's just very difficult to post an resourced article on breaking news and people shouldn't expect that. For example, trying to write a post about Charlie Kirk, you had a situation where mainstream outlets were posting mistaken information and it is difficult to impossible to link to social media information. I have really felt that lack when looking at the archive and seeing posts that carefully laid out a position that was referenced fully, allowing you to check and understand. So the posts here are probably going to be, at least from me, more conversation starters, especially for things that are in the news.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Precursors”
bc, maybe I'm misreading, but it looks like you brought up Hitler by talking about Godwin's law. I found the 'felon love' facebook post, but why is that something that puts what he wrote off-limits rather than a joke that missed the target? I won't go back to the archive, but unless you have never complained that liberals can't be such snowflakes, well, physician, heal thyself.
I'm not sure how much we weigh the various eulogies and such. Is Trump's proclamation and flying flags at half mast, along with the resolution in the house when none of these steps were done for Hortman indicative of something? Why did/does the right's reaction to what seems to be much more like politically motivated violence not rise to being a "turning point"? Or is the phrase under trademark now?
On “Indefinitely isn’t what it used to be”
It's no surprise that this plugs into a belief of might is right. It also suggests that you can't deal with folks like that by reasoning, you just have to show them a bigger stick.
On “Precursors continued”
Looking at the Disqus agreement, you retain the ownership of your comments, you give Disqus a license to handle them in order to provide their service. It doesn't seem like a stretch that they could use them for AI under the guise of giving you better service. I realize that this is probably a losing battle (and it's not like they can't scrape these comments) but at least they would have to go thru a few more steps. The whole model is set up to track for ads and allow commenters to keep track of their comments on multiple sites, which just lends itself to big data shenanigans.
On “Indefinitely isn’t what it used to be”
This Politico piece talks about that.
It’s clear the 54-year-old Texan is wagering that at some future date, when he’s still young enough to run for president again, his party will drift back to its free market and free speech moorings. I know Cruz well enough to hear him saying it on the stump at some future Pizza Ranch stop: Look, folks, I think Trump did a lot of good and his critics never gave him a fair shot, but I stood up for our conservative values when it wasn’t totally popular in our party. (And, yes, it’s also no coincidence that Cruz has used his two major critiques to target other actors in the administration rather than Trump himself.)
One thing that I'm struck by about Cruz' defense of free speech (and Rand Paul's I think) is not that we do this because strength comes from a diversity of opinions, but because the liberals might do it to us. This suggests that if there wasn't that argument, he's be all in.
On “Rule Six, there is NO … Rule Six!…”
Interesting stuff, thanks everyone. I've never had a 'home', but have always felt that there should be some place that should function as that. This may be because we are soaked in the idea (writing the post, I started a list of works that had that idea in them, but after jotting down 10 or 15, I thought it might be a bit much).
In college, we had a lot of fun with 'my people' and 'your people'. Sarcastic and full of ourselves, you can imagine when we might use it.
I was trying to find a line in a Pico Ayer essay about asking someone, a person who was basically a cosmopolitan, where he was from and him being totally baffled by the question. Couldn't find it, but did find this Tedtalk that might be of interest.
On “An experimental first post”
bc's comment is a bit of a misapprehension, because in this context, I imagine that there would be new principles enshrined as amendments rather than trying to contort current rulings into something new. We don't have a lot of history to work with, but I see amendments as making new law to specifically overturn earlier decisions. They didn't say 'how can we reinterpret Dred Scott so that African-Americans are actually citizens'.
"
No, not really, I was thinking of these
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/29/historic-german-ruling-says-climate-goals-not-tough-enough
and
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/29/south-korea-court-climate-law-violates-rights-future-generations
On “Don’t know much about [ObWi] history…”
Thanks! Can I ask you a few more questions off list? Email me at libjpn@gmail.com.
On “Precursors”
I accidentally skipped over a part to go to the dialogue where Klein notes that he had taped his coversation with Shapiro before Kirk's death, so it was wrong for me to link the two.
"
I mentioned that I hadn't seen the video associated (if there is one) to the first Klein piece, though looking at it, it is probably too short to record. I have seen the link for the YouTube video of the Shapiro conversation (It's here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAqG00FUOK8&t=1s ) but haven't seen it, so I appreciate GftNC for putting it up here.
Some thoughts about the two. Klein says in the second that
Many appreciated the [previous] piece, particularly on the right. It saw their friend and ally more as he saw himself. There were many, closer to my own politics, who were infuriated by it.
It's amazing that he doesn't really analyze what his piece did, which was basically white/sanewashing Kirk, and take the divided response as supporting it. I'd also say that the fact that he brought Shapiro on is indicative that Klein doesn't want to take a side and thinks that bringing Shapiro will let him play the centrist. He seems to edge up to understanding when he says Much of what I would describe as Kirk’s worst moments were standard-fare MAGA Republicanism. And the leader of that movement is the president of the United States. He is now in the White House, having won about half the country’s votes in the last election. But then he ends the paragraph with We are going to have to live here with one another, believing what we believe, disagreeing in the ways we disagree.
I don't understand how, if one side doesn't want us to live here, doesn't want us to participate in society, doesn't want us to exist, we can actually do this.
On “We are all Usain Bolt now”
No particular answers, just wanted to grumble.
On “Time for a makeover: a webpage design thread”
OK made the font a little bigger. I totally agree with Michael, but the whole installation seems to have as its goal, keeping you as far away from the html as possible.
If anyone has an urge, here are some wordpress themes
https://wordpress.org/themes/
Everything seems more for an e-business website than for a group of people to communicate with each other. More's the pity.
On “An experimental first post”
I was just thinking of the Constitution, I'm sure if Trump falls, there will be other things, sekaijin's list is good. Tariffs are probably difficult to tackle constitutionally, especially when one side has ignored the guardrails. Of course, after Smoot-Hawley, they gave control of the tariffs to the President, so it's not clear who could be trusted with it.
It might be instructive to consider what sort of laws were put in place after Nixon. I don't think there was any talk of amending the constitution, which might be a measure of how much more Trump has broken the system.
(I'm being incredibly optimistic that Trump will overreach and him and the people around him will be called into account, though that optimism calls to facts not in evidence...)
On “We are all Usain Bolt now”
I'm replying to this comment in the admin interface to see how this works.
The only aches and pains I get are normal ones, gone after a hot shower or a night’s sleep.
I'm curious how you are defining 'normal ones'. 20 years ago, if I was hurting, I would generally know why. Ache in the wrist, ahh, we were doing this technique a lot. I always had a pretty good idea of what caused it. Now, I'm living in a world where I have aches and pains and I have no f**king idea where they came from. As a friend said, 'getting old is like you have the flu, but it is more like a baseline rather than an exception.'
"
That's wonkie, I've been going into the backend and changing it and was going to contact her about fixing it, but that was sort of down on my list. I'll change these, and I've just written a message to her and we will sort it oul.
On “Precursors”
GftNC was thinking of putting a gift link to the Klein piece. I haven't read it, usually, those articles are read by Klein as a YouTube video, but I haven't seen this one, and I am thinking that he knows he's going to get clobbered. As I think he should. Ta Nehisi Coates only mentions Klein at the beginning of this piece, but the whole thing is basically a reply to Klein.
On “We are all Usain Bolt now”
Michael, you've got me rethinking things. If I had to narrow it down to a single event, during COVID, when we were having some classes on campus but still a lot of online stuff, a colleague and I went to the basketball gym on campus. I used to play a lot of basketball, but that was over 40 years ago and I was totally embarrassed that my shots were basically a foot or two short of the basket. Free throws seemed like a heave. While we were 'playing', a gym class where the students played basketball came in and the teacher asked if I wanted to run with them. I said sure, and did about 15 minutes of running up and down. It was a PE class, so none of the students were very good, but they were young and running and about 5 minutes in, I thought 'I could really hurt myself doing this'. After they did the first rotation, I said thanks and bowed out, but now, any kind of really strenuous play that is random seems like asking for trouble.
On “An experimental first post”
Thanks so much for posting that. I'm tempted to post Rick Blaine's line at the end of Casablanca, but I don't want to scare you off.
I wonder if it is a possibility that, after all the dust has settled (if it does) and the MAGAists are cast out (if they are), we would have a round of amendments. ERA, possibly expanded to deal with the Roberts court's assaults on it, something dealing with tariffs, an amendment specifically about environmental protection, possibly couched in terms of the rights of future generations, would be what I would hope for. I realize this is improbably optimistic, but that's what's for dinner.
On “Precursors”
Thanks for the observations and comments. After I posted this, LGM posted about another person I should have suggested as a precursor, Alexey Stakhanov. When lining them up, Horst Wessel, because he was shot by a communist, is probably the closest parallel, whereas Lei Feng supposedly died when a telephone pole hit him while he was guiding a truck, (which I take to be part of an electrification project for China along the lines of 'serve the people'), while Stakhanov lived to the age of 71. Nous' point about the 'soldier of Christ' aspect of Wessel and Kirk has me wonder why these conservative types are so damn violent. You can't really imagine their role models dying while helping out others, or living to an old age. This plugs in to my idée fixe, which is that the problem with Western society is the hard nougat filling of individuality.
On “Notes about commenting”
OK, just got up and posted the pending comments, which were only GftNC and wonkie. I'll contact you both off list this weekend and try to figure out what's up.
On “Kuzushi and Charlie Kirk”
Hartmut, great minds. I'm working on a post about this and it should be up soon.
On “Notes about commenting”
Tomorrow, when I can get on the university computers that don't have my password saved, I'll see what I can figure out.
On “Guestpost from Wonkie”
Just a quick comment here, Russell's comment had to be approved, but I believe that nous' comment wasn't. So whatever nous did and Russell didn't, that is the key
"
Wordpress is still holding up comments in moderation and I think that people have to become a 'subscriber', so they can enter their username and password. I'm not happy about that, but if I just leave it open, I'm worried about a flood of spam.
I'm glad some others have weighed in. I tend, when in a situation that is uncomfortable, to simply back out the way I came in. In fact, one of the reasons I have spent so much time at ObWi has been to be able to talk about politics with people. Being here in Japan offers a measure of separation, and Japanese usually don't talk about politics unless pressed and even then, they will often not get too deeply into the weeds. They (or at least the people I am with) also don't have much in-depth knowledge of particular people or parties, just a larger sense of this party likes this or this spokesperson feels this. Speeches aren't closely parsed, and problems and fights seem to go into a memory hole.
However, I've had a couple situations that parallel yours, though not dealing with politics. My western upbringing wants me to sit them down, try to figure out what the problem is, work to some resolution. However, I never do that, because it never seems to result in a conclusion that is better.
I realize that is probably a big downer and it is no useful advice, and I'm still wrestling with this, especially as I head into retirement and will not have the outlets to meet and talk to people.
On “Excelsior 2.0: more details about the site and requests”
GftNC, I'll email you with some details.
I know it can be confusing, but in this case 'post' is main article/item and 'comment' is something that follows from it. There is NO problem with people writing a long comment with links, it's just very difficult to post an resourced article on breaking news and people shouldn't expect that. For example, trying to write a post about Charlie Kirk, you had a situation where mainstream outlets were posting mistaken information and it is difficult to impossible to link to social media information. I have really felt that lack when looking at the archive and seeing posts that carefully laid out a position that was referenced fully, allowing you to check and understand. So the posts here are probably going to be, at least from me, more conversation starters, especially for things that are in the news.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.