State of the Discussion

None of the acting-out behavior, the normal REM “paralysis” seems to be working just fine.

A couple of times, I've woken and been completely paralyzed. But recovered in less than a minute.

This is great, as an add-on not as a replacement, which is what I assume was the intention? Does this now happen automatically, or does someone have to do things to it intermittently?

It's a very non-traditional add-on, intended to let someone get a feel for what's going on. State of the Discussion, not the discussion itself. CK MacLeod, the original author, figured out how to organize a lot of information into a little space. To be honest, despite the links back to the real pages, it tempts someone to jump straight to comments w/o reading the post proper first. That's a potentially serious downside. There's a widget version of the code that might be better, added at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar.

Every invocation generates a new page that's up-to-date. Speaking broadly, it doesn't require any attention except sometimes following a WordPress or PHP update. I got involved at the other site where it runs after cumulative updates had broken it completely.

If the code in cwp.css is working correctly, these errors may not be significant. Functionally, they may not matter.

/* Original (Incorrect) */
padding: 6px; 6px; 8px; 6px;

/* Corrected */
padding: 6px 6px 8px 6px;

------------
/* Original (Incorrect) */
//  max-width: 40px;
//  max-height: 42px;

/* Corrected */
/*  max-width: 40px; */
/*  max-height: 42px; */

------------
/* Original (Incorrect) */
vertical-align: text;

/* Corrected */
vertical-align: text-bottom;

------------
/* Original (Incorrect) */
width: 100%
font-size: 18px;

/* Corrected */
width: 100%;
font-size: 18px;

After he collaborated with Eisenstein on Alexandr Newsky and Ivan Grozny, he refused to do any other film music since he thought he would never again get such a good working relationship.

Kindness and human decency weigh a tremendous amount with me, and more and more as I get older. But in politicians, and especially those who aspire to lead the country, with all the enormous complications and problems that involves, I feel intelligence (or at least the lack of stupidity) are a necessity.

And just an observation about italics. If you look at the image I'm adding below, you can see that the middle comment has the italics but the ones on the left and right don't. I've never been happy with how the site doesn't italicize in the summary, so it looks like the author is saying something that they are quoting. The same problem happens in summarized posts on LGM (see here for an example).

What makes this a bit strange is that the middle one is what would be ideal, but the other two are not. Not sure if there is a fix, but just noticed it.

Pro bono, thanks, I must have skipped over that chunk of the file. The archive was out of sight, out of mind, so thanks for noting that.

I’ve written here before about the one day while working an inventory job across CO, NE, SD, WY, MT...

Did you go through Casper? Was the wind blowing? (That's a trick question, for those who have not spent time in Casper.) The utilization factor at 80 meters for wind turbines near Casper is 49%. That is very likely the best in world for onshore turbines. Even the old school fossil fuel members of the Wyoming legislature are figuring out the state can derive far more revenue selling wind power to out-of-state customers than they can make burning coal.

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?

None of the archive is lost, except possibly a few things during the transition earlier this year. Feeding it from the Typepad export files into WordPress has to be done in chunks, and is tedious. Kudos to lj for the effort he's put in.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Solidarity is hard.