Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Sunday, November 20, 2022
·
39 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter
Five people killed in shooting at gay nightclub in Colorado Springs
Not much in the way of details, other than they beat the shit out of the asshole and held him for the cops.
Somebody put the cart before the horse.
@OzarkHillbilly: I wondered about that equity requirement. A large part of the licenses are reserved for prior offenders, IIRC. People are going to push back if they believe they are being locked out of a profitable enterprise.
Damn, it’s a slow day at OTB, isn’t it?
@CSK: Beat me to it. I got up to watch the F1 race and found only three comments at OTB. Checked back ten minutes ago and still only three comments. Slackers. Wake up and entertain me. I’m gonna go find something in Dr. T’s Tabs to comment on.
@Jen:
On the other hand, the drug war has been so one-sidedly fought against marginalized people that equity makes sense. Not only that, but dealing drugs is hard. The buyers are often white but the dealers/delivery services are almost always not. I’ve had a high-end weed delivery service for the past 10 years and if I text them, they’re at my place in an hour. They are very reliable. My view is that the people who were busting their asses to give people like me my illegal drugs deserve more than your average businessman.
@OzarkHillbilly:
The suspect is Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22. Police are treating this as a hate crime.
@CSK: …slow day at OTB,..
So what are we supposed to believe?
(Wasn’t Reynolds going to check on this while he was in Spain?)
@Mister Bluster:
An event that for years afterward brought us jokes about Franco being still dead.
A few links re understanding the twitter situation:
https://twitter.com/MosquitoCapital/status/1593541177965678592
https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904
http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2022/11/twitter-is-people.html
@Mister Bluster: Entertaining trivia about apparently hiding his death. But the important thing is that Chevy Chase was right, he’s still dead.
Somebody suggested Spain as an example of democracy emerging from autocracy. As I read the story it was far from inevitable. Luck and skill. Skill on the part of the king and prime minister, and luck that the right guys were in line for those posts.
@OzarkHillbilly:
The club in question was scheduled to have a family-friendly drag brunch this morning, so there is speculation that last night’s shooting was intended to disrupt that event.
@Stormy Dragon:
So why not just shoot up the drag brunch itself?
@gVOR08:..far from inevitable…
Back in 1971 one of my college roommates visited Spain while in Europe. He was well versed in the history and language which I understand is not quite the same as what is spoken in Mexico. (He was fluent in that language too.) When he returned from Spain he claimed based on his conversations with the locals that he met that there would be a bloodbath when Franco died.
I never did have the chance to catch up with him to find out his take on events after Franco’s demise.
Just signed up for Mastodon. Fosstodon to be specific. Not sure how I’ll use it or for how long, but I’ve been part of many social networks over the decades and I’m always curious about how they will evolve and perhaps devolve. The concept of Mastodon reminds me most of Usenet, and so I would expect it to evolve much like that distributed social network did. The “great space” where there are perhaps a few hundred active uses and 5-10 times that many lurkers always seems great. It is when it becomes popular that the spammers, trolls and bots overwhelm it. But Mastodon is doing some things differently so we will see how that plays out.
@Mister Bluster:
Sure, but he won’t be able to let us know what he found out for a while. He got Covid on his trip and has to quarantine.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:..Covid…
Yeah. I saw that. Hope he recovers soon.
@Mister Bluster: It was a happy day for my wife and her family. Her grandfather was one of the disappeared and her mother was born in prison during an air raid.
It’s not. I was conversant with Mexican Spanish when I went to Spain with my wife to meet her family. It’s a different language in many ways while the same in most. I managed, but it wasn’t easy. The same can be said of Colombian Spanish and Argentinian Spanish.
@Modulo Myself: Oh, I know. I completely understand the rationale behind it.
When there’s money to be made, however, I can see how people would challenge the law. It’s a form of affirmative action, and that’s always going to chaff some.
Okay, so I got approved on my Mastodon server, Fosstodon and quickly discovered two things:
1) The “Federated” feed appears to be all the feeds posted on Mastodon (?). In any case, it is now scrolling by too fast to read. I’m sure it was fine when there were just thousands of users instead of millions.
2) Fosstodon may be too specific in its nerdiness (Python jokes, discussions of open source development environments). So – if I want to change servers, how does that work? And given that there are 7K+ servers, how would I find one? Any ideas?
@Just nutha ignint cracker: @Mister Bluster:
Michael says the symptoms haven’t risen to the annoyance level of cold.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I had to take 4 years of Spanish in college. Everything was fine until we got a teacher from Barcelona. The wheels came rocketing off the bus. I couldn’t understand a word that man said. I realized that I spent so much time around Spanish speakers from Mexico and Puerto Rico that that’s what my brain regarded as “proper” Spanish.
@Mister Bluster:
There are many variations between regions. Think of how Latin became Italian, French, Spanish, etc. Remember, too, there were people living in the Americas when the Spaniards imposed their language, and these were assimilated into the Spanish colonies rather than kept apart or driven out. Therefore, a lot of local languages influenced the development of Spanish in the Western hemisphere.
Overall they are the same language, but there’s enough variation in word usage. and slang in particular, that it takes some effort sometimes to understand another region’s Spanish.
Round 2 of college tours. This time we’re in the biggest town in Wyoming, Casper. Roads were great.
Don’t judge, but we’re going to Red Lobster. Neither one of my kids have ever been to a place that ACTUALLY serves crab or lobster of any sort. 😛 😛
Round 1 was Laramie, Wyoming, at University of Wyoming. They require freshmen to live on campus, and the dorms are horrible, so we’ve crossed that one off the list until she’s a transfer student and can live off campus. The roads were shit on those days, of course.
@Jax: No judgement from this little cracker at all. I find Red Lobster perfectly cromulent. I like Olive Garden, too.
@MarkedMan:
I’m trying it out myself just now. You can look me up by, I think @na****@un**********.com I go by “Nareed.”
We’ll see. I wasn’t active on Twitter, and not much on Fakebook. On the latter I liked links to interesting articles, particularly science and technology ones. that died more when paywalls started going up. That problem will recur everywhere.
@Just nutha: Three words: Cheddar. Bay. Biscuits.
Far better than they have any business being.
@Jax:..
It’s been a while since I’ve been to a Red Lobster however I remember enjoying the meal at all of the three different locations. I remember one was in Columbia, Missouri with my mom and sister a few years after dad died. We were seated near the door to the kitchen and when a loud crashing sound came from behind those doors mom quipped: “Sounds like somebody’s brains fell on the floor!” I laughed out loud. Never knew she was such a jokester!
Tried to make it to Laraime one December night before Christmas on my way to California via Salt Lake City. Got to Cheyenne where I-80 westbound was closed due to a blizzard. I had already made a non cancellable reservation on the Super 8 website for the Laramie motel. I called and told the desk clerk that I wasn’t going to make it due to the road being closed. “What do you want to do cancel?” He said. English was clearly not his first language. “Yes. If I can.”
“If you can’t get here, you can’t get here. I will cancel the reservation and here is your cancellation number.” I thanked him and ended up at the Super 8 in Cheyenne.
I did get to Salt Lake City a year or two later on my return from California and drove I-80 eastbound to Cheyenne where I turned south to Denver. Great scenery by towns like Echo, Green River, Red Desert and Elk mountain. Some day I want to drive I-90 out that way.
@Beth:
Barcelona is in a region of Spain called Catalonia, and many there speak Catalan as well as Spanish. This may affect both languages.
One of my favorite Spanish musicians is a man named Joan Manuel Serrat, who is from Barcelona. Many of his songs, in Spanish, require a trip to the dictionary. Many more use expressions that are odd. For instance in “Mediterraneo” he says “Si un dia para mi mal viene a buscarme la Parca.” This translates literally as “If one day to my bad Death comes looking for me.” What he means is “If someday to my misfortune Death comes for me.”
On first hearing it, one can deduce the meaning from the context in the rest of that part. He speaks of having his boat sunk at sea, and where he wants to be buried and why (it’s really a cheerful song for all that). But the words themselves are not immediately comprehensible.
@Jax:
No judgement from me. I don’t like Red Lobster myself, but on the other hand I live in an ocean-side state and can get truly great seafood even at neighborhood restaurants that serve only Natty Boh (National Bohemian), Bud and Bud Light.
I have long since passed the age where I feel the need to feel superior over what I like, or even worse, don’t like. If anyone finds something they like, I’m happy for them.
(Except the Yankees)
Red Lobster was everything the girls wanted, so I’m happy. And it’s a Sunday night, so that terrible road construction on I-25 they’ve got going on is doable. I hope to navigate AROUND that tomorrow.
@Mister Bluster: When we were driving to Laramie last week, we could see NOTHING as far as scenery, until we got to Elk Mountain. Then the ground blizzard cleared for a couple miles and we could see the cloud ceiling hovering about halfway up Elk Mountain. It was pretty cool looking!
@Jax:
Given that you live in Wyoming, we coastal elites will forgive you for going to Red Lobster. 🙂
Looks like there’s another potential pitfall for Musk’s Twitter to fall into….copyright law.
(Basically, there’s nobody home to take down uploaded movie bits that violate copyright. Anyone got some Mickey Mouse cartoons to put up?)
….and the 4channing of Twitter proceeds apace.
@Kathy: Having trouble signing in on my iPad. (Signed up on my Mac with an obfuscating email). I’ll get it sorted tomorrow and follow you.
@Sleeping Dog: I know, I was telling the kids it’s not even close to the seafood you can get on either coast….but it’ll do, given our location! 😛
@grumpy realist:
What if St. Elon buys Disney?
More seriously, or maybe not, how about an anonymously produced and published short of Mickey Mouse doing drugs?
@MarkedMan:
I appreciate it.
But I don’t expect I’ll post much.
@Kathy: I am @Ro***********@ha*******.io — I mostly just post little drawings I do on my iPad.