Rov_Scam
2d ago
I remember seeing, at the start of Trump's first term, a meme on Facebook with a picture of Trump walking on the beach with Christ and the caption "Obama kicked you out, but I brought you back in" or something similar, and there have been several preachers of standing unknown to me who have stood on stage with Trump and called him Christ's vessel here on earth. The first item was probably the work of redneck fringe Christians who don't bother going to church or leading lifestyles that could be described as anything approaching biblical, and the second is probably from the wackaloon end of actual practicing Christians, but these poles are far enough apart to suggest that there's a broader element among religious people who think that Trump is doing God's work in a way that they don't attribute to normal politicians. Even openly religious politicians like Mike Pence or Rick Santorum never seemed to receive the kind of awe that Trump does, probably because they're humble enough to realize that such adoration is kind of sacrilegious.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
True "Open" relationships in which both partners are free to pursue other lovers as they choose and are doing so. They tend to just be a glide path to breaking up, or very loosely attached to begin with. Tend to break down due to gender imbalances, because a woman of any given quality can find a man much more easily than a man of a similar quality can find a woman.
I agree that this is probably just a glide path to breaking up, but I'm not sure if the dynamics are different for men and women. Sure, women might find it easier to find a man willing to sleep with them, but men are usually more motivated and less selective.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Thanks for posting this and defending it for me because I was going to post pretty much the same thing. I'm not a fan of when someone takes a term with a vague but widely understood meaning and then creates a very specific definition and uses the term as if that's the real definition. Academics do this a lot, but I'm afraid you did this yourself a while back with your precise definition of tackiness. I realized that throughout the rest of that thread I was very careful to use alternate language whenever I was tempted to say tacky in a context that didn't fit your definition, which made me realize that, as fun as your definition was, it didn't really reflect how people talk in real life.
Anyway, I think the rule should be that if the people using the term can't tell you what they mean by it exactly, it means nothing. It may make people feel smart to come up with a hyper-specific definition of LARP but then they just find the general public using the expression the way they want. So it's pointless.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
It's still irritating and anachronistic. It's like describing Da Vinci as an LGBTQ+ artist.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
I used to practice title law, and while I mostly did oil and gas, I did an odd residential title here and there. Most policies, at least in Pennsylvania, specifically exclude any issues relating to zoning. There's already enough courthouse work relying on state law. Doing zoning would require us to know and understand the zoning codes for every municipality we dealt with and do in-person inspections to ensure compliance as well as an investigation into whether any nonconformities have been excused. I'm surprised the carrier caught this in the first place.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
I think "homeschool prom" says it all right there. First of all, as much as homeschool parents like to protest that, no, their kids don't have any problem socializing because we make sure they have plenty of friends, etc., how many of these kids were ever in a situation with a member of the opposite sex who wasn't a family friend? I've known a lot of homeschool guys in my life and none of them were exactly players in the dating world until they figured it out with the help of friends who weren't homeschooled.
More importantly, though, I don't think this guy knows what a prom is. Prom is an event where it's expected you come with a date. It would be socially awkward for a member of either sex to show up without one, if only because 95% of the people there are going to dance with their dates all night. It's a formal event, not a dance club. What he's describing is a middle school dance, and it sounds like most of these kids are acting like one would at a middle school dance.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
I have a Kobo and I can't recommend anything else. It has an integrated dictionary and basically no other functionality besides reading books (though it does have those annotation features you said you don't use). It supposedly has an associated store, but I've never used it. I bought it because it's the only reader I'm aware of that allows you to sideload books on it without jailbreaking it. That and they made a sensibly-priced waterproof version before anyone else.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
If you believe Trump is trying to dismantle the government and you think that’s a bad thing, why would you make it easier for him to do it?
Because a brief shock is much better than a gradual erosion, and temporary furloughs aren't as damaging long-term as permanent layoffs. Trump with the power a shutdown would give him gives America a sneak preview of how his political philosophy would play out if he had the unfettered power he seems to be looking for. He isn't going to be scrambling to do whatever he can to preserve the status quo; you're exactly right that he's going to use it as a blank check. America operating a shutdown with Trump at the helm isn't like a shutdown under Obama where it's a temporary setback while a budget is in the works—it's the ultimate destination of a Trump government. It's what America looks like if Trump gets everything he wants, and it's what America will ultimately look like if they keep passing Republican budgets that legitimize Trump's illegal impoundments. The only chance we have of getting out of this mess is if congress is willing to make a stand, and Democrats and a few Republicans would be the only ones willing to make that stand.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
It depends on the city. I agree that some transit authorities have problems with lawlessness and crime. But just because some transit systems have crime doesn't mean that all do. I've been riding Pittsburgh's transit system off and on all my life, and I never once experienced anything remotely untoward, even in bad areas. I've never heard anyone, including the most insulated suburbanites, express any apprehension whatsoever about using transit. And this is a system where anyone boarding an outbound bus or train pays upon egress, and that has a free zone, meaning bums can board pretty much without restriction, and we still don't have problems. I've used transit systems in New York, DC, and Chicago various times in the last 25 years, and my experience was no different, though it's been a while so this may have changed. I know that complaints about transit in New York are a relatively recent problem, and circa 2010 the idea that subways were dangerous was seen as a relic of the '80s.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
I agree that the mass firings aren't something that can easily be reversed, and that the effects of this will reverberate for years to come. Ironically enough, this actually makes the Democratic position stronger when it comes to shutdown politics, not weaker, as you imply. The reason Schumer and some Democrats buckled the last go-round was because of a widespread perception that the party refusing to play ball will get blamed for the pain caused by the shutdown, and electoral consequences may follow. Less cynically, some may have felt that a shutdown was a losing effort that wasn't worth the collateral damage to those who would suffer because of it.
The events of the past few months, though, have made the Republican endgame pretty clear. If the Democrats can sell a government stripped to essential services as the inevitable result of Trump's cuts, then why bother passing a budget in the first place? It's a slow march to perdition. It will be easier for them to salvage what they have if congress makes a strong statement that it intends to keep government working as it had been regardless of presidential caprice.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
Because for them, it might as well be. The war you're describing about giving up a small slice of land isn't the war Ukraine is fighting. Since the beginning, Putin has been consistent in his rhetoric denying Ukraine's existence as a separate people, attempted to take the capital at the beginning of the war, and is demanding terms that would not only cede larger amounts of territory than this "small slice" but also effectively end rump Ukraine's existence as anything other than a Russian satellite. I'm not sure how this is anything close to the breakup of the USSR, or what you're even getting at, really. What foreign power launched a full scale invasion of the Soviet Union with the goal of integrating territory into its own country?
So Ukraine would likely have to do some ethnic cleansing to actually take control of those regions.
Why? Those regions were part of Ukraine for over 20 years without any ethnic cleansing.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
To be fair about the Anthony case, at least the initial wave of support wasn't for his defense per se. Anthony was initially given a 1 million bond, which was reduced to $250,000 after a hearing, and his family was able to post the bond. Some fringe right-wing websites decided this was unacceptable and protestors started showing up outside the family's home and sending death threats. The fundraiser was initially to pay for alternative lodging for the kid, since being forced into hiding isn't easy for people of modest means.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
True, but most of the Ukrainian refugees left at the beginning of the war. It's not like war casualties where there's a continual drip drip for years. In 2023 and 2024, Ukraine had one of the highest rates of in-migration of any country, almost all of whom were returning refugees.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
Ukraine lost about a half million in casualties in three years of combat, in a country with a population of about 38 million. In World War I, Germany lost about 6.3 million out of 65 million total before calling it quits, and even then it was controversial. At a consistent rate of attrition, it would take Ukraine another 20 years to hit those kind of numbers. While you can argue about the population pyramid being more favorable to Germany, this is balanced by the fact that the relatively slow rate of attrition gives Ukraine a much bigger pool to draw from, including people not yet born. After all, Germany started another war 20 years after than one ended and managed to double their casualty numbers. Those of us who have never lived through a serious war don't understand how huge casualty numbers can get before they become unsustainable.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
I guess the Soviets should have just let the Germans roll over them, then, as soon as they started surrendering by the hundreds of thousands. 20 million dead could have easily been avoided if they had just seen the writing on the wall and given up.
I think the anti-car people need to get realistic. I'm in favor of better transit options, bike lanes, zoning reform, congestion pricing, and all the other things the armchair urbanists like, but cars aren't going anywhere. To tie in to my recent Pittsburgh installment, all of the recent affordable housing developments that are obstensibly based in the New Urbanist style have made modifications that "recognize the relity of the automobile". When Allequippa Terrace converted to mixed-income in the early 2000s and pushed out the riff raff around 2010, they became a somewhat popular option for Pitt students, despite effectively being a housing project. One of the biggest reasons behind this is because it's one of the few places near campus where it's easy to have a car, and Pitt's campus is in the middle of the third-largest commercial district in the state, and is only behind Downtown as the neighborhood with the best transit connections in the city.
The especially amazing thing about this is that most students who live at Oak Hill walk to campus, which walk is much longer and sketchier than the walk from the student ghetto in Oakland itself. So people are nearly doubling the length of their daily walk, and putting themself outside the radius of walkable amenities, just to keep a car. To be fair, this isn't the only reason, since Oak Hill is also newer and nicer and quieter than anything in South Oakland, and still comparably priced, so that factors into it, but when people are asking on Reddit about whether it's safe to essentially live in the projects, one thing often brought up is that dealing with a small amount of sketchiness is worth it if only because you never have to worry about parking.
It would have been really easy for these dedicated urbanist types to talk about how they could fit more units in and give the neighborhood a more cohesive character if they just eliminated off-street parking or relegated it to areas where there was literally no better use of the land, and maybe charged people an appropriate fee for it, but even in a low-income area that would be a hard sell. You'd certainly get less interest from the working class people who need cars to get to work, and the development wouldn't look nearly as attractive to people willing to pay market rate. It would turn into another case of forcing social experiments on poor people who are only living there because they don't have a choice. Part of ending concentrated poverty is recognizing that people with options expect certain amenities and are willing to pay for them, and are willing to move elsewhere if you aren't offering them. Getting people who aren't poor to live in a former housing project that's not in a trendy area was going to be a hard sell to begin with. In a trendy neighborhood people might be willing to jump through hoops for the privilege of living there, but not in the Hill District.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
I don't think it was so much about the amount of domestic bloodshed with Qadafi versus some unknown quantity. We had already been through Iraq and Afghanistan and weren't naive about what a power vacuum could look like. The problem was that it was a volatile time in the Middle East due to Arab Spring, and Qadafi had a history of sending troops into nearby countries and destabilizing them so as to get his own mini-sphere of influence. It was bad enough when he did it in places like Chad or Niger, but the possibility of something similar happening in Egypt was probably more than Western governments were willing to tolerate. This is all speculation on my part, but it wouldn't surprise me if the State Department wasn't adamant about this narrative when it came to selling the operation to the American public, because a history lesson involving the complex histories of countries they've never heard of combined with hypotheticals doesn't pack quite the same punch as "there will be civilian reprisals if he regains power".
Rov_Scam
7d ago
The regime change that Democrats ran against was very specific to what had gone on post-9/11. Democrats were by no means advocating any kind of peacenik isolationism; they were responding to a brash neocon foreign policy that suggested we could remake problematic countries in our own image by unilateral military action. We had attempted to do it in Iraq and there was talk suggesting we should try it again in Iran. To be clear, I was opposed to action in Libya at the time, but the context in which it occurred was very different from Iraq or even Afghanistan. One of the big problems identified in the years following the Iraq invasion was that by removing Sadaam Hussein without any obvious successor we created a power vacuum that ignited sectarian conflict that had been supressed by decades of Baathism. And then, as Colin Powell said. "You break it, you bought it". Combine this with the questionable justification, presence of US ground troops and the associated casualties, and lack of international cooperation, and it was an easy war to criticize.
And yet, the Republicans kept saying that the problem was a lack of all-out commitment. Hell, even as the war's popularity hit a low ebb in 2008, John McCain was running for president saying he wanted to commit more troops to Iraq. Libya had several advantages. There was an active civil war against the regime, and opposition leaders made a natural governing class once Qadafi was taken out. We weren't going to attempt to remake the government ourselves once the war ended. Limiting it to airstrikes decreased the risk of US casualties to near zero. And the whole thing was a NATO operation, not a unilateral adventure with a "coalition of the willing" that had the stink of a failed UN Security Council resolution. It would have, and did have, more in common with the air wars in the Balkans than with Iraq or Afghanistan.
Contrast this approach with what Republicans were saying at the time. They were criticizing Obama for not acting decisively enough. Qadafi, like Sadaam, needed to go; we didn't need to wait for NATO to see what they wanted to do; we needed to take control of the situation with massive airstrikes. The contrast was put in much clearer terms after the Benghazi attacks, which Republicans alleged could have been prevented had Obama taken the threat of terrorism more seriously and provided actual military support for the diplomatic mission in Libya. Instead, Obama was too much of a squish to stamp out terrorist influence along with Qadafi, and was allowing the country to go to shit. "We Came, we saw, he died" was offered as a pithy summary of the quick in-and-out operation that Libya was, and how we were able to take out a dictator without it turning into a quagmire.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
I don't know how old you or your peers are, but I was in law school in 2008 and was following both the primary and general election campaigns pretty closely. There wasn't any consensus among Democrats at the time regarding the gay marriage issue. Minority voters were generally opposed to it, and the only people seriously in favor were activists and gay people themselves. Even the more leftist wing of the party didn't exactly place a top priority on it. The mainstream opinion, held by both Obama and Clinton, was to be in favor of civil unions and against statewide initiatives to prohibit gay marriage outright. They basically punted, and it basically worked, since the issue was at the bottom of most voters' list of priorities. Republicans would occasionally bait Democrats with the issue since gay marriage wasn't particularly popular among the general public at the time, but the moderate, boring, amorphous position gave them sufficient cover that only the true religious firebrands bothered to bait them that often. Neither Obama nor McCain mentioned it much during the 2008 campaign.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Even still, there have been other direct protests in this vein before, so I don't see what the big deal is. In 2008 Allegheny County instituted a "poured drink tax" of 10% on alcohol sold in bars and restaurants to cover a funding gap for public transit. It was passed by county council and signed into law by county executive Dan Onorato over the objections of the local bar and restaurant owners association. All the bars and restaurants that weren't chains immediately added an "Onorato Tax" line item to their receipts, in addition to putting signs in their windows protesting "Dan Dan the Tax Man". Onorato defended the tax but didn't seem to take any of the protests personally, and never suggested they should stop doing it. And the proposals here aren't saying "Trump Tariff" or anything similar.All this demonstrates is the inability of republicans to handle any criticism.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
The jury never knew about any of that. After the tapes came out, the defense wanted to admit them to demonstrate that Fuhrman lied about his use of racial epithets and wanted to call additional witnesses who would testify to his use of them. This is an interesting story in and of itself, but the upshot is that the defense wanted to recall Fuhrman so they could cross-examine him about the newly discovered evidence. Given that the goal of such a cross-examination would be to show that Fuhrman had committed perjury, there was a strong likelihood that he would take the fifth upon being questioned about it. When the fifth is invoked in a criminal trial, the judge will instruct the jury that they can't make any negative inference from it. Courts aren't stupid, though, so if they anticipate that a witness will take the fifth, they will insist that the witness be questioned outside the presence of the jury, and if the witness indeed takes the fifth, then they won't testify in open court.
So when Fuhrman took the fifth, it wasn't during the trial proper, but during a hearing to determine whether he could be recalled. Now, if a witness intends to take the fifth, they can't answer any questions, period. If they take the fifth as to one question then start answering others, they are said to have waived the privilege. So the standard format is that the attorney will ask a few questions, the witness will assert the privilege, the attorney will then ask the witness if he intends to assert the privilege for all the questions, the witness says yes, and the questioning ends. When Gerald Uelman asked Fuhrman if he had planted evidence, Fuhrman couldn't have said no regardless of the situation.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
I heard a young person describe the Depp–Heard trial as the Simpson Trial of their generation and, no. Not even close. Those who weren't around for it don't understand how big OJ was, because it's unlikely anything will again be as big for at least another few decades. I got about 50 channels at the time and the trial was always on 3 or 4 of the channels, and sometimes it was on most of the channels. Minor figures like Kato and Rosa Lopez were household names. I found a book about the murders in a garbage can within a month of them, seemingly not enough time for a book to be written let alone published, read, and discarded.
The only other crime in American history that generated a comparable level of interest was the Lindbergh kidnapping, and that was in the 30s. I think that after a media circus to that degree the media and public as a whole take a step back,.and it can only happen again once anyone old enough to have any real memory of such an event is too old to have had any involvement with the coverage. Maybe once everyone who covered the OJ trial is retired and the zoomers are running the media machine, we'll get a case of similar interest, but I think this is the kind of thing that can only happen once every 50 years or so.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
The question was about Cochran, not the jury. And I left out the bloody socks because they come with their own problems, but suffice it to say that one would expect to find more in a house with a white tile floor and white carpeting than a sock with a single drop of blood on it. This only played into the defense theory that evidence had been planted.
Would you mind expanding on this a little? In Pittsburgh everybody is Catholic and the few who aren't are some kind of mainstream Protestant. Megachurches weren't really a thing here until the late '90s and even now I probably know more Jehovah's Witnesses (and a lot more Greek Orthodox) than Evangelicals. The upshot is that anything I know about what the actual "religious right" is getting across the pulpit is more my own interpolation based on media reports rather than the actual cultural experience of living among these people, so it's hard to figure out what's widely believed versus what's overhyped by the media.
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