England has a surfeit of terms for obnoxious people.

• Jobsworth (obstructive clerk or bureaucrat)
• God-botherer (religious fanatic)
• Cockwomble
• Minging cockwomble
• Tremulous bollock-for-lobsters cockwomble
• Sir Æthelbert Plonker Cockwomble of the Drubbing-over-Head Cockwombles

I may have made those last two up.

Lichess may be the best board game software for any board game ever. It’s that good.

Eight: English, German, French, Spanish, Latin, Russian, Japanese, ASL.

Bonus question: do you ever do your counting in a non-native language, just to make it more interesting?

Russian occasionally. ASL when I’m counting how many seconds the cat has to stay quiet before I give her a treat.

Remember when a “pop-up blocker” was a browser plug-in because the browsers didn’t yet consider it a competitive feature?

(Well, okay, Opera and iCab did.)

Number of ads my OS shows me: 0

Split Colemak on an Iris keyboard.

Mother mother duck

Oh, shove it up your heck!

Famously, The Lion King is Hamlet with a happy ending, for example. Any other ones you’re thinking of?

anarchocristianism

To me this means Dorothy Day or Tolstoy. What does it mean to you?

For a start, look at the history of major companies traded in the first stock markets, such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the British East India Company (EIC), the Hudson’s Bay Company, etc. These were colonial ventures, but they raised money through the sale of shares traded publicly.

However, they were not subject to competition in the market, as they enjoyed legal monopolies and used military force. They also frequently employed slave labor.

Too many American right-wingers use “freedom” to mean “I get to impose costs on you; you don’t get to impose costs on me.” It’s not equality; it’s strictly positional. Look at the association of “freedom” with shitty driving for a little example: “I get to threaten you on the highway, pollute your air, tear up the land with my off-roading … but taxing my gasoline is on offense to the Founders.”

Thing is, the economists are right about free markets being a good idea; and free markets depend on a certain kind of regulation to exist. The trouble with capitalism is that it’s never been a reliable ally of freedom of any sort; going back to the origins of capitalism in the private funding of colonial slaver monopolies. The association of capitalism with free markets is largely propaganda; capitalism started with colonial slaver monopolies like the VOC; to a first approximation every firm wants to be a monopoly, and a great way of doing that is political corruption; see today’s USA.

But there’s a reason every government since ever — from empires to democracies — has done things like standardize weights & measures, build public goods like roads to enable trade, and establish courts of law to enforce contracts and fair dealing. Those things are really good ideas! And I’m not sure I can credit the left-anarchist proposals to replace them any more than I can credit the anarcho-capitalist ones.

Mutualism sure has some nice ideas though.

I use an Iris split keyboard from keeb.io. it’s comfy. Actually I have two of them; the heavy clicky custom one with steel plates stays home; the light quiet one is for travel.

I drifted slowly from right-libertarian to a more leftish position: pro-union, pro-social-programs, skeptical of the compatibility of unregulated capitalism with individual freedom. Still no fan of tankies.

This wasn’t from anyone sitting down and trying to convince me, though. Part of it was discovering how close right-libertarianism had always been to white-supremacism: some old Ron Paul newsletters were unpleasantly enlightening. Part was seeing people who called themselves “libertarians” line up with the far right to support state violence, especially against black and brown people. And heck, part was from getting richer and seeing how that worked.

I have a lot of sympathy for the frustrations that get young men into right-wing positions and occasionally I try to puncture some of the nonsense they’re being fed.

Ever play Q*bert?

🦊

The 45 RPM adapter is this already, between generations.

exploiting the fact that literacy among blacks was lower

That wasn’t the exploit. The exploit was twofold:

1. Whites didn’t have to pass the literacy tests. For instance, in some states any man who could show that his grandfather had voted, was assumed to have the right to vote, without having to take a literacy test. This is the origin of the terms grandfather clause and to be grandfathered in.
2. The literacy tests were rigged with trick questions, geometry puzzles, and outright nonsense questions; so they did not effectively test literacy anyway!

Levitating. Ballistic. Catastrophe. Incandescent. Shivering. Sultry. Sauté.