State of the Discussion

My childhood home is still "home", as I still have many friends in the area and zoning laws as well as environmental preserves have kept development from completely overwhelming the place. Still a lot more McMansions than we had growing up, but the basic complexion is recognizable.

I've lived in other places, but the Northeast is my preferred world. Dunno if it's the weather or the landscape or the culture or what. Lived on the Pacific coast for a bit - which was beautiful. But it wasn't *my* ocean. I can't explain it.

On the other hand, I know more than a few George "I'm shakin' the dust of this crummy little town off my feet" Baileys who never looked back and for whom home is where they chose to make it.

So, I dunno. I think "home" is an idea - a place of comfort and familiarity - much more than a point on a map. But I can see how people might be attached to a specific patch of ground, especially if it's been in the same hands for generations. I've always wondered how the perceptions on that differ in, say, Western Europe.

I vaguely recall a conversation a while back about relocating Israel to a carve-out in Baja California. Would it still be "Israel"? Ship of Theseus and all that. I'm pretty sure substances were involved and are at least partially responsible for my lack of recollection.

Since we're on the subject of homes, I'm glad ObWi has found a new one!

I wonder if I'm a born nomad, because I have no sense of an ancestral "home." I've lived in different parts of the country and liked or disliked them for what I found there, not for any larger ethnic or familial attachments.

The yearning for a "true homeland" has been at the foundation of many wars, pogroms, dispossessions, and conquests - either by an entity out to capture the homeland, or the former inhabitants thereof trying to reclaim it.

In dramas where conflict is central to the plot, there is often a scene where the main character loses a loved one - a sibling, usually - to that conflict. And thereafter the main character burns with a special rage for vengeance. I've always considered this either bad plotting, a form of "fridging" or - if it does happen in real life - sheer lunacy. It's a WAR, you nitwit; one that you and your loved one willingly signed up to fight, or even instigated yourselves. People die in wars. Maybe if you didn't want to risk your loved one, you shouldn't have pushed for this battle, eh?

I kind of feel the same way about that yearning for an ancestral homeland. Maybe the way you lost it was horrific and unjust, but inflicting similar or worse damage on the people currently occupying it (who may not even be the same ones who drove your ancestors off) will only set up another cycle of dispossession-revenge-war. If it were as clearcut as getting rid of the usurpers and replacing them, that would be one thing. But it is seldom that clearcut.

The I/P horror is non clearcut beyond description, with claim to the same bit of land going back generations on one side, centuries on the other, possibly millenia on both sides. At what point do ancestral claims cease to be arguable? One generation? Ten? A thousand? At what point do past atrocities justify, or cease to justify, current and future ones?

Someone once said, "'Home' is where you bury your bone." I've always liked that.

Home is where you make it. Wherever you find yourself, you can bury your bone there.

The think I noticed was that the rhetoric of retribution was about evenly split between End Times dogwhistles and QAnon dogwhistles. Either way, it's pretty clear that I, being an academic, am on the wrong side of the friend/enemy distinction.

I think the potential for some sort of campaign of retribution is very high, and California campuses have to be near the top of that list. I especially worry for my friends and colleagues at UCLA, but I think we all need to be wary.

Well, these are people who have been absolutely hammered with eliminationist propaganda for a generation now. If you can accept the premise the rest flows naturally, despite the lack of names. Anecdotal violence is pumped up to provide examples of the violent left, and that is sufficient for these warriors for Truth and Good. They love the righteous feeling, but will that be enough to pull the trigger when the moment arrives? We will all find out together, because this kind of worldview never stays controlled, only unleashed.

At some point, with any luck at all, an administration which actually believes in the law may try to arrest and try those responsible.

In my honest but non-lawyer opinion, not a chance. US Navy action in international waters: the legal questions that may reach civilian courts will be about authorization to use force; those under the UCMJ will be about rules of engagement. Obama and Biden weren't as bad as Bush and Trump, but all four stretched the hell out of Congress's AUMFs on terrorism including rules of engagement. To be blunt about it, from 2001 the US military has been in the assassination business. My prediction is the best we might expect is that suspected drug smugglers outside of US waters will be made non-targets going forward*.

Part of me says that this is an inevitable outgrowth of drone technology. The idea has been kicking around for many years. In Real Genius (1985) the purpose of the 5 MW one-shot laser is assassination from a bomber flying tens/hundreds of miles away. The main piece of military porn in Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon (2000) is smart bombs that can be dumped from high altitude, then autonomously identify targets and strike straight down, wiping out whole divisions' worth of armor while the top brass watch from the other side of the world via a drone called Marilyn Monroe.

* I have an occasional nightmare that my kids probably and my granddaughters certainly will live to see the day when the 20 km on the Mexican side of the border will be labeled a no-go zone. Spotter drones and artillery will enforce it against climate refugees. And yes, in the nightmare Tijuana and Juárez and all the smaller cities have been reduced to rubble.

Funnily enough, I only posted that last Klein/Shapiro piece for the preamble about the reaction to Klein's last piece! I didn't even read the Shapiro stuff - I barely knew of his existence until he was interviewed by Andrew Neil, one of our best known rightwing journalists (and ex-editor of the Sunday Times), fearsome and respected enough that BoJo refused to be interviewed by him the last time he ran, and saw Shapiro (obviously completely unaware of who Neil was and his background) responding to his proper questioning by calling him a leftwinger! Andrew Neil merely chuckled and moved on. But it was such an astonishing exhibition of ignorance and arrogance (Shapiro hadn't even bothered to look up who was interviewing him), and such an example of the tendency of these people immediately and brainlessly to label anyone who disagrees with them "leftwing", that I lost any interest in ever hearing anything else from him again. However, I suppose this phenomenon is now so widespread in the US that journalists can't just decide to boycott any politician or commentator who displays it.

i have some minor WP coding experience: i've written a couple of plugins that i use on my own site, and i've tweaked the PHP for some theming things I couldn't get from plugins.

if there's anything specific you need, i could possibly help. or possibly not - WP is large and ever-changing.

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.

That Shapiro conversation really captures the reasons why I think Klein is an unproductive voice. Shapiro claims over and over throughout the conversation that "the right" saw Obama in a particular way, and Klein spends all of his time trying to empathize with how they might have felt, rather than stating that Shapiro spent his entire career crafting the very narratives by which the right learned to see Obama in that way.

It's the asymmetry of empathy that is just allowed to sit there and not be spoken of that makes me dismiss Klein. Shapiro can just passive voice away his own role as an ideological insurrectionist and sower of division and Klein cedes that ground in order to imagine himself a good and sensitive listener and participant in dialogue.

Yes, a preview button would be great if not too troublesome to set up. Otherwise, it's taking me time to get used to the new layout, but no doubt it will get easier with more use.

The Academica theme is oriented a little more towards discussions. It's what I used when I was fooling around at the beginning of the month and trying to recreate the old layout. I prefer the new look overall. My main complaint (with my script disabled) is that there's way too much vertical white space.

WordPress provides an "Additional CSS" textbox in one of its configuration places that's a convenient way to override the theme's styling. Of course, using it requires that you have some understanding of the theme's use of CSS classes, ids, etc. Or you can define a plug-in that has just enough PHP to load a CSS file that overrides the style. I probably haven't said this here before since the old site was Typepad, but between the core/theme/plugin model, PHP, and CSS, WordPress has managed to recreate all of the development nightmares of late-90s Microsoft Windows.

I won't be of any help here. I have a piece of JavaScript that runs on every page that I download. It forces my own choice of fonts, sizes, vertical spacing, and color adjustments on the text. I've already changed the small part that is specific to Obsidian Wings. Between a good adblocker and my script, my view of the Web is much more consistent and less garish than what non-fanatic people see. Y'all may decide that Papyrus is the official Font of Moderation, but I'll still see Noto Serif.

The JavaScript thing got started one day when I encountered too many pages that made you want to find the designer so you could ask, "Did you study ugly and unreadable in school, or are you just naturally gifted?"

I'm a believer in the original spirit of HTML -- the writer gets to specify structure, but presentation decisions belong to the reader. If it's important that the text be rendered in some obscure spidery gothic font, well, that's what PDF is for.

lj - Mostly muscle stiffness in my legs and back, because I am deliberately doing difficult-for-me hikes. Predictable, explicable, and - so far, knock wood - non-permanent.

I have a history of getting banged up and not paying much attention to it, unless (1) I need to go to an ER; or (2) the hurt doesn't go away after a few days. I've fallen on trails (have a patch of numb on my right leg from a fall that smashed a nerve). I have a tricky knee from bending and twisting while over-enthusiastically ripping up invasive blackberry vines. I've been kicked, bitten, and stepped on by horses; broke my arm riding. (Well, not *riding* per se; it was the falling-off-the-horse part that did the actual breakage.)

One impairment that might be age-related, or due to my history as an ex-smoker/current vaper, or a combo of the two, is I have to stop and rest frequently to catch my breath if I'm going upslope. Doesn't happen on the flat, only if I'm climbing. Stairs or trails. It's been that way for a few years now, and at least doesn't seem to be getting worse (knock wood, again).

Not sure that answers what you wanted to know...?