[E]ven Fox didn’t tout Bartiromo’s big scoops on Trump’s legislative agenda, because 10 months into the Trump presidency, nobody is so foolish as to believe that him saying, “We’re doing a big infrastructure bill,” means that the Trump administration is, in fact, doing a big infrastructure bill. The president just mouths off at turns ignorantly and dishonestly, and nobody pays much attention to it unless he says something unusually inflammatory.On some level, it’s a little bit funny. On another level, Puerto Rico is still languishing in the dark without power (and in many cases without safe drinking water) with no end in sight. Trump is less popular at this point in his administration than any previous president despite a generally benign economic climate, and shows no sign of changing course. Perhaps it will all work out for the best, and someday we’ll look back and chuckle about the time when we had a president who didn’t know anything about anything that was happening and could never be counted on to make coherent, factual statements on any subject. But traditionally, we haven’t elected presidents like that — for what have always seemed like pretty good reasons — and the risks of compounding disaster are still very much out there.
So, does Mitchell make any money on the work, which has been shared so many times? He uploaded a high-res image of the symbol and granted permission for anyone to use it personally for free. But for those who want to support his work or simply want something readymade, you can also buy T-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and journals emblazoned with the symbol through Threadless.“I really just want to spread the image as much as possible and cement it in history,” Mitchell says. “In all honesty, the amount I’ve made from my Threadless shop so far is still less than my hourly rate, so I don’t really see it as a big deal. If you look at my Twitter, half the replies are people wanting to know where they can buy a shirt. Threadless is happy to help them out with that, and so I’m happy to let that happen.”Now that the symbol has flooded our streets and our timelines, Mitchell just has one request: “Impeach this idiot already,” he says.
This is a Waterloo moment for Trump, the tea party and their alliance. They have been stopped in their tracks not only by Democratic opposition but because of a mutiny within their own ranks. Although never particularly liked or respected, it is now clear that they are no longer feared. The bankruptcy of their ideas and their incompetence have been exposed. Their momentum has been dissipated. Their rejection of political norms has itself been scorned. Our long national nightmare may finally be coming to an end.
One seasoned Democrat told me that among the reasons Trump won in 2016 was that a long year of Crooked Hillary talk, about emails and Goldman Sachs and the like, had steadily demoralised and demobilised the liberal base. If sustaining fury at Trump helps keep those same voters energised, so they eventually turn out to defeat him, it’ll be worth it, he says.
But it can’t just be in the form of world-weary, if witty, tweets. What’s needed is a coherent argument, one that explains why Trump’s repulsive behaviour matters. For Americans, that will surely centre on the state of their society. The civic realm is being degraded by Trump’s lies, vanities and insults. The national conversation is being coarsened. The basic democratic assumption, that disagreements can be resolved through discussion rather than coercion and violence, is being eroded from the very top. Note the language of Scaramucci’s outburst: “I want to fucking kill all the leakers.”
[C]limate scientists have a strange kind of faith: We will find a way to forestall radical warming, they say, because we must.
It is not easy to know how much to be reassured by that bleak certainty, and how much to wonder whether it is another form of delusion; for global warming to work as parable, of course, someone needs to survive to tell the story. The scientists know that to even meet the Paris goals, by 2050, carbon emissions from energy and industry, which are still rising, will have to fall by half each decade; emissions from land use (deforestation, cow farts, etc.) will have to zero out; and we will need to have invented technologies to extract, annually, twice as much carbon from the atmosphere as the entire planet’s plants now do. Nevertheless, by and large, the scientists have an enormous confidence in the ingenuity of humans — a confidence perhaps bolstered by their appreciation for climate change, which is, after all, a human invention, too. They point to the Apollo project, the hole in the ozone we patched in the 1980s, the passing of the fear of mutually assured destruction. Now we’ve found a way to engineer our own doomsday, and surely we will find a way to engineer our way out of it, one way or another. The planet is not used to being provoked like this, and climate systems designed to give feedback over centuries or millennia prevent us — even those who may be watching closely — from fully imagining the damage done already to the planet. But when we do truly see the world we’ve made, they say, we will also find a way to make it livable. For them, the alternative is simply unimaginable.
Intercom is a relatively recently created cross-platform messaging tool, in use at around 25,000 sites, whose “Inbox” app or sub-app can work as a slick customer support/interaction alternative to older systems like ZenDesk. It will work out of the virtual box in WordPress, and some aspects of its appearance and other features can be managed via the Intercom control panel. Substantially modifying the initial look of the Intercom “launcher,” however – for instance, to replace Intercom’s icon with one of your own – requires a bit of custom coding.
Intercom launcher at Pippa
You can see the Intercom launcher in use at WordPress-based sites like Tradeshift.com and Pippa.io, where it has been modified in color. Because the launcher operates via iframe, its other visible characteristics will not be accessible to regular site-level CSS. To reach further into it, you will have to create a “custom launcher,” requiring a process or series of steps whose requirements may not be initially clear from a perusal of Intercom’s help pages, which do not happen as of this writing to include any WordPress-specific implementation examples.
The techniques in this simple explainer/tutorial may also be helpful if you’re working on, say, a Stripe payment widget or a Vimeo player or other javascript-enabled, iframe-dependent add-on with an accessible API. Read more ›
[T]he Korea issue is but an extreme expression of a tendency that blights the entire field. We are uncomfortable with democratic accountability, unwilling to subject ourselves to public debate, and uninterested in the constraints public opinion and popular politics place on the policies we craft. This complacency is not excusable. It is not sustainable. We cannot defend the cause of freedom without the support of the people. To try and do this is to risk terrible disaster.
We cannot defend the cause of freedom without the support of the people. To try and do this is to risk terrible disaster.
When have “the people” ever risen to defend the cause of freedom other than in the face of disaster?
There is also a contradiction in terms here: To commit to any project at all, and especially to great military or defense project, is to accept constraint, in some senses or for some even radical constraint, on freedom. This philosophical problem will undermine all projects seeking American strategic coherence. The American idea simply does not permit the latter. They are mutually exclusive.
“The world of things calls for art, in which intellectual accession to being moves into enjoyment, in which the Infinity of the idea is idolized in the finite, but sufficient, image.” — Emmanuel Levinas
Or at least that’s what some people seem to think about the new “page-builder” style editor with which WordPress.org seems to be planning to replace the current post editor:
While the developers working on the Gutenberg editor plugin have obviously put a lot of work into creating the plugin and I commend them on their efforts so far, the truth is, this plugin is nowhere near ready to be included in WordPress and needs a lot more work, in particular, UX work.The WordPress.org Gutenberg page states: “The goal of the block editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable.”
Unfortunately, the plugin as it currently functions is a long, long way from achieving this goal.
Scott observes a process of the trans-nationalization of baseball alongside the seemingly contradictory patriotic and militaristic displays at Angels pre-season games. He refers specifically to members of the military being asked to stand for rounds of applause, and he wonders why women who have not had cosmetic surgery are not instead asked to stand. As further discussion confirmed, and as consideration of the ritualistic singing of the national anthem at modern American Major League baseball games ought to confirm, the relationship of baseball to American (American-style) nationalism is a complex and possibly contradictory, possibly dialectical one.
I believe that Scott was referring to the notion that our Washingtonian empire of Unitedstatesia has managed to seize the grand metonym “America” for itself along with the economically most promising expanse of the North American continent, arguably (materially-demonstrably: historically) the most geo-politically and geo-economically exploitable terrain on the planet under our loosely speaking modern conditions of commerce and technology – secure, resource-rich, underpopulated, arable, temperate, benefiting from relatively unobstructed internal and external connections: To employ the baseball cliche, the United States is the country that was born on third base geographically.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO, Cecilia Wessels, mandatory credit
According to the photo caption at Times Colonist, “Cecilia Wessels snapped the picture of her husband, Theunis, as the twister passed near their home in Three Hills.”
There has been some attempted pushback – including in the comments here – on the notion that Donald Trump has uniquely damaged German-American relations, particularly in relation to the views of the German public – for example:
Merkel chose a Munich beer hall as her venue to speak out and she was on the campaign trail for the elections to the Bundestag in October. She was speaking to a German audience which holds the United States in poor esteem. By the way, this has nothing to do with Trump. The percentage of Germans who trusted the US plunged from 76% to 34% during the first six years of the Barack Obama presidency. (On the other hand, sixty percent of Germans admire the ex-CIA whistle blower Edward Snowden as a heroic figure.)
The plural-realist or perspectivist thought (or anti-thought) can never be understood as generally valid except by reference to a standard that would govern the truth and consistency of all such assertions. This problem has always stood in the way of taking the "post-modernist insight" seriously: If it means what it is meant to mean, then it is at best provisional, and otherwise meaningless.
The President's summary of his policy on the Islamic State or on "the group known as ISIL" was not elegantly enunciated: "To degrade and ultimately destroy" is a compound infinitive phrase that is pitched to the demotic or colloquial in ways that contribute to misinterpretation and distortion.
The infinitive "to degrade," a somewhat esoteric military term of art roughly inserted into public discourse some years ago, is meant to refer us immediately to an enemy's capabilities, which are to be brought to a lower level, but the second and more common connotation of "degrade" is quietly also conveyed, perhaps somewhat intentionally if not entirely consciously: to humiliate, to render an object of spite. ((To complete the linguistic circuit from the high to the low, we can observe that in the language of the street, or perhaps the language of the President's "anger translator," to degrade IS is to fuck IS up, to chingar IS, or perhaps to smash IS, like a bug.)) Regarding the phrase in its entirety, the absence of pauses (which could be indicated by commas) and the omission of the second particle "to" run the two parts of the President's program together, and encourage his critics to indulge their impatience or polemical convenience, to drop the qualifying adverb "ultimately" altogether or to treat it as an intensifier, and, as events unfold, to expound on each day's, week's, or month's necessarily mixed results as somehow contradicting a solemn promise or revealing a strategy already "in ruins" or "in full-scale... meltdown," or suffering from a fatal mismatch of minimal means and maximal ends, or, also premature if less dramatic, simply "not working."
"To degrade and, ultimately, to destroy" might have been more difficult to misinterpret, since a more careful phrasing would clearly designate and distinguish two phases of a long-term strategy. As offered and initially implemented, if not as articulated or heard or unconscientiously translated, the strategy seems to mean "at first primarily to contain, but actively to contain in such a way, specifically by reduction of capacities and potentials, as to expose the targeted entity to destruction." Indeed, the two-part program does not exclude - or perhaps can be taken to imply - a policy shaped to the nature of a presumed ultimately self-destructive phenomenon.
To go much further would require a willingness to suspend judgment and start as though at a beginning, yet from closer to an end, on the part of all participants. Yet that requirement, even if the one thing needful, will always be too much to demand of the citizens of a democratic republic, CKM included.
About contemporary "liberalism" as an ideology: to an extent it seems to go into deliberate "we're not being ideological!" style expressions, becoming practically a nervous [...]
I find that indulgence of verbal "license" almost invariably leads to deterioration of discussion, as the resort to words generally deemed offensive almost always marks [...]
"The reality is, on any public forum there is going to be a peanut gallery, and I’ve never seen a moderation policy that can quite eliminate them, but not eliminate interesting people who I want to hear from. So, culled lists, either individually (as here) or collectively (as was needed in a larger space such as Twitter), are a fine thing. They make a forum far more pleasant to use."[...]
The Tweet-storm, in the new era of President Tweet, remains a nostalgia-inducing afterimage of the blog and of the era of President Blog, but it may also portend a return or attempted return to coherent, accountable, and consequential civic discussion in a mass society, back from the Great Flood of clicks.[...]
There are progressive and liberal ideologies or ideological constructs, but the desirability of progress and its attainment via rational and open ("liberal") inquiry remain pre-conditions of any authentic (authentically "discursive") discussion.[...]
Commenter Ignore Button (CIB) lets a user to put one or more commenters "on ignore." To have such an option enabled is a frequent request at blogs and other sites where comment threads are plagued by trolls or other problematic commenters, but where site operators prefer to err on the side of open discussion - or don't want to get involved unless they really have to. Once users become generally aware of the option, people just seeking attention may either be more polite or move somewhere else, while regular commenters - and lurkers - may become more willing to engage.[...]
If you're not able to perfect your theme yourself, or not willing to hire a designer, then being a perfectionist is unrealistic. Yet just getting good enough on first glance results when adding CIB to customized comment templates, even before fine-tuning, may require some more complicated work. For those intimidated by the prospect, here is an example of curing the output on one typically atypical theme.[...]
We would be compelled to conclude that something must have been (and very likely remains) profoundly wrong with a political culture or political media - of which Matthew Yglesias and Vox are, of course, typical parts - that could be dominated by an issue to be judged intrinsically trivial, and dominated to the point of determining eventual collective decisions of undoubted significance.[...]
