State of the Discussion

My immediate reaction to Trump's "invitation" was... Wait. Did you just invite China to bring their aircraft carrier in, and give them a chance to fly planes around measuring US carriers' premier radar signals, and getting a chance to bounce radar off F-35s? The US very carefully did not deploy F-35s over much of Syria while the Russians were there, because they didn't want the Russians to know what the returns were like.

Trump seven days ago, still very pissed off that Starmer had refused permission for the US to launch offensives from UK air bases:

 “The United Kingdom, our once Great Ally, maybe the Greatest of them all, is finally giving serious thought to sending two aircraft carriers to the Middle East. That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer – But we will remember. We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”

Trump today:

“We have already destroyed 100 per cent of Iran’s military capability, but it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close-range missile somewhere along, or in, this waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are.”
In what appeared to be an appeal to the UK and other nations, he added: “Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint will send ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a nation that has been totally decapitated.”



May Pete's end be as sticky and icky as anyone could come up with for a B movie (extended cut) with a count Rugen organized prelude.
At the minimum at the next security conference a bunch of foreign defense officials should gang up on him with knuckledusters and blunt instruments and then run the video of the event non-stop with laughing track and looney tunes sound effects attached. "Dick season! Rabid Season!" Then send him home (alive but wishing not to be) in an empty (American) beer keg with a big sticker: "Spoiled and rejected. Turn back to sender (Fox)" and another with "special/toxic refuse".

Civil War and Nuclear War.

I thougt perhaps one would come after the other, but now I believe they will be simulataneous.

These vermin will murder all of us.

Run for your fucking lives.

I liked this, in today's Times (a Murdoch paper, don't forget).

Pete Hegseth’s rhetoric gives me that sinking feelingWhen the US gloats over Iranian deaths and pumps out propaganda war videos, it’s not just their enemies who recoil

Hugo Rifkind

Wednesday March 11 2026, 7.11pm, The Times

Already sinking under heavy fire at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba in 1898, the Spanish cruiser Vizcaya burst into flames. The ammunition store ignited, a torpedo went off, hell was unleashed and desperate, burning men hurled themselves into the sea. Watching all this was John Woodward Philip, commanding the USS Texas on the other side. “Don’t cheer, boys,” he admonished his men. “The poor devils are dying.”

Last week, the Iranian warship Iris Dena was sunk by the Americans off the coast of Sri Lanka, claiming almost 100 lives. Perhaps you saw President Trump at a Republican conference recounting what a navy official told him when he asked why ships like this hadn’t instead been captured. “He said, ‘It’s more fun to to sink ’em’,” reported Trump, with a smirk. And his audience guffawed.
From one to the other. From “Don’t cheer, boys” to “It’s more fun to sink ’em.” Really, I could stop there.

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-declared secretary of war, has also had a chatty week. Here he is talking about Iran’s long-running antipathy towards the US: “They didn’t always declare it openly,” he said, “except for their constant chants of ‘Death to America’.” Ah, that old giveaway.
His own rhetoric, though, isn’t terribly different. In the same speech, he gloated: “The regime who chanted ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ was gifted death from America and death from Israel.” Over the past fortnight, he has also said: “They are toast and they know it,” and, “We will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you.” Plus, “This was never meant to be a fair fight, we are punching them while they are down, as it should be.” And more, and more, and more.

One might say Hegseth sounds like he thinks he is in a film, but only if it were a really bad film, perhaps written by a 15-year-old using ChatGPT. A comic, perhaps. A computer game. Probably, one should not use the phrase “small dick energy” on the comment pages, and particularly not when accusing other people of cheapening the discourse. But damn it, I think I must.

Hegseth is a veteran. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan. What he’s trying to channel here, I suppose, is a sort of gung-ho military pep talk; how soldiers talk to other soldiers before leading them into war. Not all of them, though. Perhaps you recall Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins addressing his men in 2003 before leading them into battle in the Iraq War. “Iraq is steeped in history,” he told them. “It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there."

“Is it something they teach at Sandhurst,” wrote Jane Shilling in these pages, “that beautiful, bleak, apocalyptic turn of phrase?” Don’t assume my intent is to crassly contrast Britain and America. George W Bush admired Collins’s speech so much he had it displayed on the wall of the Oval Office.

Listening to Hegseth this week, and to Trump, I also found myself remembering Tony Soprano’s despairing wail to his psychiatrist. “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?” he demanded. “The strong silent type? That was an American!” That’s Tony bloody Soprano. It’s quite something when the White House’s view of American values is less appealing than his.

Speaking of TV shows, you may have also seen the videos pumped out by the White House as another part of their propaganda blitz. Computer games mixed with real war footage alongside clips from films and TV shows. “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY!” said the attached tweet, no matter that it includes Bryan Cranston saying “I AM the danger!” in Breaking Bad, from a sequence in which his character brags about being a murderer.

Bad enough if you thought this was just an administration trying to communicate with its public in language it assumes they’ll understand. The suspicion, though, has to be that it’s worse than that. This is real. This is them. This is how they see what they are doing, their world view and their oomph.

Doubtless Hegseth, in his likeable way, would regard all this as “pearl clutching”. That’s what he said about those among America’s traditional allies, including the UK, who were sceptical about this war at the start. But language matters. When Trump smirks about dead sailors you can only conclude he is without doubts, without those 3am ceiling-staring moments of normal human horror at those poor devils lost at the bottom of the sea. Which in turn makes you wonder what he thinks about the collateral damage in Tehran as flames engulf the city.
But you don’t need to wonder. “The president doesn’t like the attack,” a White House insider told Axios after Israel bombed Iranian fuel supplies. Why? “It reminds people of higher gas prices”.

So no, it’s not just pearl clutching. Nor is it just about aesthetics. This is a real war with real, huge costs, and not just for America’s enemies. Few in Britain would instinctively side with the Iranian regime even in a war of at best dubious legality, begun seemingly on a whim, with little coherent plan for how it might end. But do they grasp, these chest-thumping war bros, how hard they are making it for their traditional, instinctive allies, whose own populations can see and hear every word?
“It’s more fun to sink ’em.” When our enemies talk like this we conclude they are dangerous and immoral lunatics. It’s going to take some circumspection, biting of tongues and blinkers if we’re to avoid the same conclusion about our friends.

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.

(BTW, I died of Ebola. Thanks, Obama.)

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.

The version of the SAVE Act that passed the House and has been submitted to the Senate affects registration. The most onerous provisions that Trump rattles off in his social postings -- restrictions on mail-distributed ballots, photo id for in-person voting, etc -- are not in this bill. Thune has already said he doesn't have the votes to dump the filibuster for this bill; some people believe he doesn't have enough votes to pass it even w/o the filibuster. As for Trump's demands, I don't think either Thune or Johnson have the votes to pass something that requires state/local Republicans to implement a new voting system on the fly, in a very short period, sans funding.

WJ - GOP: perhaps on its way to becoming just another example of “everything Trump touches dies.”

...but it's been working swimmingly so far for Putin - guess that's because Vlad is the dom and Donald is the sub in that relationship.

I shouldn't try to write coherently when sleep deprived.

I meant that Article 9 remained in place because many (most?) Japanese felt secure leaving it alone. The assumption on which that feeling of security rested is dead and gone.

My sense is that Japan's constitutional restrictions on military activity are very much based on a confident belief that, if Japan were attacked, the US would (as promised) come to its defense. But today we have a US administration which could care less about what the US might have promised, what treaty obligations we might have made.

Japan would have to be crazy, suicidal even, not to rethink their policies on their military. What kind of Constitutional change might be best, I can't say. But refusing to change isn't really a viable option.

Some countries launched campaigns, made laws to rid themselves of loan words. Some did so with a certain creativity like Iceland where computer has become tölva, a portmanteau from tala and völva (=> "number prophetess"). France was pedantic and not much short of making it a misdemeanor not to use the prescribed neologisms. Germany did in WW1 with official dictionaries to give people guidance with which words to replace real or perceived French imports.
Although it went far over the top, quite a bit actually stuck and superfluous French words got replaced by fully suitable German equivalents. Some older purists had come up with simply ridiculous substitutes for words no one normal would have considered foreign*, like Nase (nose). I doubt the old Germans needed the Romans to get a word for this part of anatomy or would have gone for Gesichtserker (face oriel) as more natural. Dörrleiche (jerky corpse) for mummy did not catch on either.
A newer trend is to invent English terms for items that are not used by actual English speaking people. E.g Handy for cellphone or Beamer for video projector. They seem so fitting that most Germans do not even know that those are fake loans.

*admittedly some of their proposals got into common language but usually as alternatives not replacements.

Since this is a thread about language.....

It occurs to me to wonder. How many of the ultra-macho xenophobes in this administration have a clue that "macho" is of Spanish origin?

Can we get a Hegseth/Miller cage match? Preferably with weapons like brass knuckles, which are non-lethal enough to have both get seriously damaged before one strokes out.

Not all of our immigrants are people. A lot of words came here and settled, too.

I've read a few articles about Spanish being either overlooked or resistant to AI. Some of the arguments were Spanish had more dialectical variants, Spain had stronger data laws. The articles vary from lauding it to complaining that AI models are English-centric. The point of your roommate may also play into it, a fully duplex language has reduced information density, which means that it is more difficult to derive logical principals out of it that a language that requires alternating turns

cf: https://www.youtube.com/live/CyyL0yDhr7I?si=1RiobEdzk1GiuOHp&t=2083

Back when I was in grad school, and looking to test out of German for the language requirement, I did a literal translation first**, and used that to do a free translation. Because what was wanted was to demonstrate understanding of the article being translated.

In basic modern algebra, many of the structures are named using words for common items: group, ring, field, etc. In German, the same sort of convention is used but not all of the common terms are the same as the ones used in English. I had to do a final project translating a chapter from a German college math text. I put a cover note on it for the instructor pointing out that I knew der Körper translated to body in general use, but the structure it was used for was called a field in English.

It comes down to What are you trying to do? If your intention is to translate the message, then go with "three words." If your intention is to translate the words, "stick with "four words" like the translation we have here.

Or, as I learned it, are you doing a literal translation or a free translation? Back when I was in grad school, and looking to test out of German for the language requirement, I did a literal translation first**, and used that to do a free translation. Because what was wanted was to demonstrate understanding of the article being translated.

** It was a pretty trivial test. Time to look up (open dictionary!) every word that wasn't a cognate for the literal translation. And still plenty of time to do the free translation. Good thing, though, that they didn't require a translation going the other way!

"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?

I'm not sure what I would do with the translation, but I'd consider saying it as something like 'one simple phrase' or 'one short phrase'

Counting words reminds me of the West Wing debate between Jed Bartlett and Florida gov Ritchie
https://youtu.be/sS4UAZ5UfGY?si=-aIzURqqN19_mgbP

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.

Spanish tends to use about a third more words than English to express the same thing. Japanese is also less information-dense than English. Vietnamese and spoken Chinese are more information-dense.