Illjwamh

Mon. Oct. 28, 2019
Grace: 883
Tedd: 769
 
Wed. Oct. 30, 2019
Grace: 884
Tedd: 770
Susan: 519
Diane: 213
 
Fri. Nov. 1, 2019
Tedd: 771
Susan: 520
Diane: 214
Grace: 885
 
Mon. Nov. 4, 2019
Ellen: 689
Sarah: 686
Justin: 449
Susan: 521
Diane: 215
 
Wed. Nov. 6, 2019
Susan: 522
Diane: 216
Nanase: 608
Ellen: 690
Elliot: 963
Ashley: 212
Sarah: 687
Justin: 450
Grace: 886
 
Fri. Nov. 8, 2019
Diane: 217
Susan: 523
Grace: 887
Sarah: 688
Tedd: 772
 
Mon. Nov. 11, 2019
Diane: 218
Sarah: 689
Tedd: 773
Ellen: 691
Justin: 451
Elliot: 964
Grace: 888
 
Wed. Nov. 13, 2019
Diane: 219
Tedd: 774
Susan: 524
Ellen: 692
Sarah: 690
Ashley: 213
 
Fri. Nov. 15, 2019
Diane: 220
Ashley: 214
Tedd: 775
Elliot: 965
Justin: 452
Susan: 525
Sarah: 691
Grace: 889
*The back of Nanase's head is insufficient
 
Mon. Nov. 18, 2019
Tedd: 776
Ashley: 215
Diane: 221
Nanase: 609
Ellen: 693
 
Wed. Nov. 20, 2019
Ashley: 216
Diane: 222
Tedd: 777
Elliot: 966
Susan: 526
Sarah: 692
 
**If there's anyone out there who still considers the main cast to consist of only 8 instead of 10, may I direct your attention to this storyline right here.
 
FULL COUNT

*scratches head* I don't get it. Obama issues an executive order, and when Republicans file lawsuits against it, they are upholding the Constitution. Trump issues an executive order, and when Democrats file lawsuits against it, they are tearing the Constitution down. The logic seems to be that Democratic actions and lawsuits are inherently unconstitutional.
So, the Republicans controlled House, Senate and the Oval Office for two years and still couldn't manage to end DACA. It wasn't Trump's fault. Therefore, the GOP itself couldn't manage to uphold the Constitution even while holding all the cards. That's not a good look.
I have some simple yes or no questions I would like answered.
Is it acceptable for a US president to react to a Russian offer to 'take charge of' US citizens and 'get them to tell the truth' by calling it 'incredibly generous' on TV transmitted across the world?
Is it acceptable for a US president to hand platforms to dictators and strongmen while disparaging democracies and alienating democratic allies?
Is it acceptable for a US president to sit in meetings with a dictator without his own staff and Secret Service in attendance?
Is it acceptable for a US president to unilaterally and without warning withdraw support of an ally, ordering US forces to depart in such haste that Russian troops are now using US military facilities left intact behind and flying the Russian flag over them, having not paid even a penny for them?
Is it acceptable for a US president to employ witness intimidation during an impeachment inquiry?
Is it acceptable for a US president to solicit bribes and employ extortion to promote his own personal agenda at the expense of that of the US?
Are we to believe that your intent is that all these actions are okay for a Republican President to take because past Democrat Presidents might hypothetically have done the same?
Rick Wilson quite presciently wrote that the Republicans who cheer on Trump are failing to realise that it will take no more than a left wing statist to win an election to put the jackboot on the other foot. Do you think that no Democrat would even consider using the precedents Trump will have successfully set if the GOP keeps protecting and enabling him? I have no such optimism. I may be doing them an ill turn, but I can mention at least two Democratic candidates this election I am convinced will gleefully turn the presidency's newly enlarged power and independence from its formerly co-equal branches against Republicans if they win. And I will not be cheering if they do.
By the way, since you ignored it the last time -- if Obama was shredding the Constitution, why did the Republicans not launch impeachment inquiries against him when they held both House and Senate during his presidency?

Hear, hear. Enough deflection. Back to the topic at hand.

It was determined by the republicans' own department of justice that the whistleblower followed proper procedure and provided substantive and verifiable material. This much was made clear from the very beginning. They violated no laws and provided real information that they were authorized to submit. Any other statement is just white noise intended to drown out the truth.

I'd like to go a little bit more into partisanship.
Not all partisanship is unreasonable. There are people on both sides who may have good reason to fear the extremists on the other side. Those fears are not easily laid to rest and while there is no communication there cannot be compromise. Worse, some things are impossible to compromise on.
Take me, for example. I am a trans woman. The right wing, not only in the US but in Denmark, considers me a threat to society. They make laws designed to protect society from the danger they believe I pose. For example, I might go into a bathroom and commit rape on people there. Or, I should be kept from serving my country in its armed forces. (I am fifty-three, and I served my duty when I was much younger. My identity notwithstanding I engaged in no act of treason nor did I endanger my comrades in arms.) I should not be allowed to have a job purely based on my conviction that I am a woman. What society thinks is more important than me, and it is better than I be destroyed than I be allowed my personal conception of myself.
Which part of that should I be willing to compromise on?
I cannot offhand give examples of similar attitudes on the right wing for obvious reasons, but I am sure they exist and I am equally sure that these beliefs are as valid to them as mine are to me. I don't think that the people who hold their beliefs sacred have any great hope of the other side being willing to listen to them, either.
Now let me speak briefly of a gentleman named Justin Amash. He was a founder of the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives and I suspect I have few political ideals in common with him. And yet he gave me a political gut punch mere months ago. When the Mueller Report came out, he was the only Republican who saw it as concerning enough to question the President's fitness to serve. And yet that was not what stunned me. What stunned me was that he said -- I am paraphrasing, mind you -- "I have spent four days reading this report. I have had my staff help me analyse it and discuss critical issues with me. And yet when I speak with my fellow members of this institution, I get the impression that nine out of ten of them have not even bothered to read it. They have made up their minds based on partisanship alone."
And of course he got me there. I hadn't tried to read it, either. I'd made my mind up on partisanship alone, too.
Now, you could argue that it wasn't my duty to, and that I don't have a staff to help me, but that is not the point. The point is, I didn't even try. With that one remark Mr. Amash cast the entire nightmare of partisanship into stark relief for me and I was deeply shaken for the rest of the evening. He has since been repudiated by his own former caucus and his party, and I honestly doubt that the Democrats will welcome him either. Nor do I think him capable of such a drastic political flip-flop even if they would. Even so, I still deeply respect him for his commitment and his willingness to lay his political life on the line. He is the loyal opposition that any government could only dream of, and were he in the majority he would be the kind of leader I would wish my political adversaries to have. In fact, I would rather have just one Justin Amash than ten million Bernie Sanderses or Elizabeth Warrens. And if it came to picking a political leader of my country and I could choose between a Justin Amash and either of those other two, Mr. Amash would get my vote. That is all.

When did prior Presidents this grotesquely undermine the Constitution?
And why do you call me to task for not criticising Clinton in your presence more than ten years before we met?
And when did we have a debate about President Obama where he had potentially violated the Constitution and where we gave him a free pass? I seem to specifically remember agreeing with you that governing by executive order was a bad idea. My 'defense' of him was that he had 'no choice', which even I could hear was thin. If the stipulation is that overriding Congress with executive orders is putting the President on Constitutionally shaky ground, Obama is not free of sin.
Also, name a President that made grotesque concessions to the Russians and other dictators and betrayed allies that I ever spoke approvingly of.
What made Trump's offense against the Kurds so egregious was not merely ending the alliance with them -- which could theoretically be defended if it had been considered policy -- but doing it unilaterally, without warning and leaving them in an extremely vulnerable position against the Turks and the Russians. Whatever Obama's other foreign policy failures, bad as they might have potentially been, none of them came even close to this. He also did not hand dictators a platform. He also did not own two expensive hotels in Istanbul that resulted in his motives being cloudy. Please note that it is not about whether Trump's motives are impure or not, the emoluments clause is there to ensure that the President's motives are not exposed to doubt in this way at all.
And when they so informed him, he yielded. How curious that Trump and the Republican Party are completely ignoring this precedent. Especially since it was a precedent the Republican Party itself established.

This is demonstrably false. Regardless, could we maybe keep the political discussion to the Political Discussion Thread?

No. Not worth noting. What is worth noting is that back then a large number of Republicans rallied behind impeachment, too. They realised the dangers of undermining the Constitution very clearly and wanted no part of it.
Also, Clinton is an example. He, too, underwent impeachment proceedings. It is how he responded to it that matters.

Nonsense.
Clinton and Nixon both handed over their files and had their various staffers attend the House of Representatives when subpoenaed for their respective impeachment inquiries. Admittedly I do not think Clinton actually erased important tapes during his but we shall disregard that for this purpose.
I am sorry but I missed the impeachment inquiry raised against President Obama. Could you please link me to sources of when it happened and in which ways he failed to cooperate with it?

Name the last Democratic president who claimed 'absolute immunity' from the investigative powers of either Senate or House of Representatives, please.
In fact, name any president of any historical party who ever did.
I no longer have patience for President Trump nor his apologists. He just issued a pardon for a war criminal who shot and killed an unarmed girl for his own amusement, against the wishes of the Pentagon. The man is bereft of any sort of either morals or ethics. He kowtows to and fawns over dictators. Oh, and hours ago he engaged in blatant witness intimidation during an ongoing investigation where the witness was being questioned. He is unabashedly misogynistic, racist, queerphobic and disablist. He has constantly been engaged in violations of the emoluments clause ever since he ascended to the Presidency.
Any equivalents to presidents past are irrelevant even if they could somehow be found, no matter their party. Did a Democratic president engage in this sort of behavior, they should unquestionably be impeached, too. It is future presidencies that concern me, for if the current President is granted a free pass, Republicans have just opened the door for allowing Democratic presidents to act in the same way. And that is not a jot or tittle more acceptable to me than this is.
There are Republicans who without hesitation condemn the way the creature squatting in the Oval Office is acting. Former Republicans, some may claim. To that I respond that they had sufficient conscience, patriotism and respect for the rule of law to disassociate themselves from the ongoing disaster that is the Trump administration. I salute Justin Amash, Jennifer Rubin, Rick Wilson and all who still remember what the Grand Old Party once stood for. It most assuredly did not stand for the Klan.

Nobody’s yet claimed that a Democratic Party candidate ought to be able to shoot a person on Fifth Avenue (or any other public place) with no repercussions.

 
IPA is actually pretty easy to read once you get the hang of it. A large part of that of course being that it's based on the Latin alphabet, which gives us an unfair advantage. Though also, as a Linguistics major, I too have an unfair advantage, as I had to learn to transcribe speech directly into IPA, so I have a lot of practice.
 
You are of course right in your observation that readers tend to look at and associate meaning to whole words as a unit rather than as a collection of sounds. This is a known and documented phenomenon. The msot fmauos elpxmae is the ppuoalr doniometsarn of how wrdos rimean lgeilbe wehn sraclbmed as lnog as the fsrit and lsat lrtetets raimen the smae.
 
 
Hangul is great as a system. In practice, however, Koreans leave out just as many of the written sounds as we English speakers do. It's quite frustrating when you're trying to learn, he said, using one of the most notoriously difficult orthographies in the Western world.
 
 
I actually had this conversation with a friend of mine on Facebook, who has taken to writing all his status updates in IPA (though neither he nor anyone else can read them except for me and at least one other person I've seen. He uses a converter, and recently accidentally used one for RP British English and didn't notice until I pointed it out). His argument is that written language should reflect spoken language, and that words should be written how people actually say them. My argument was that while there is certainly merit in simplifying a lot of our orthography, dialectical variations will always make a purely phonetic alphabet impractical and unfeasible outside of academic settings, as he inadvertently proved.

I do not wish to enter the internal American political discussions but I do feel a need to describe how this looks from the Danish point of view.
We have seen the President of the United States again and again yield way to dictators and embrace their praise of him when he did. We saw President Trump in Helsinki where he praised Putin and called Putin's offer to take charge of American citizens and have his intelligence service interrogate them 'incredibly generous.' We witnessed the United States rightly demand the expulsion of Putin's Russia from the G8 when the Russians invaded Ukraine -- and now later we have beheld the sight of Trump agitating for Russia's readmission even though her attack on Ukraine is ongoing.
Now, most lately, we have witnessed how Trump withdrew his support from Kurdish allies without warning, leaving them to the untender mercies of the dictator Erdogan. And we  wonder why Trump seems to be fighting so hard for Putin's goals.
Not long ago President Emmanuel Macron declaimed that the United States could no longer be trusted to uphold its NATO obligations.
As a citizen of Denmark and a veteran of the Danish Army, I have long supported the United States. Not just out of gratitude for my life and freedom, which I owe to an America that did not embrace the craven and shortsighted 'America First' doctrine, but also later on when Danish troops, planes and naval vessels supported the US during the Iraq war, in Afghanistan and also in the second Iraq war. I believed in the 'weapons of mass destructions' claim and even after it was disproven, I would still have supported a US attack on Iraq if it had used the simple justification of Saddam Hussein being a clear and present danger to peace in the middle east. I met an Iraqi immigrant in Denmark who told me that he did not care what anybody else accused the United States of. He would forever be grateful to them for removing Saddam Hussein.
I live in a country which Russia during the Cold War considered a simple obstacle, nothing more. The presence of Denmark to them consisted of an inconvenient bottleneck in which they risked getting their fleet blocked from entering the Atlantic during a potential war. Their plan to deal with this was to drop nuclear devices on every single Danish major city and airport -- even the small local sports airfields -- as well as carpet nuke the entire width of southern Jutland to keep NATO troops from entering the country. They would have left nothing alive in the place I call home and in spite of all still love.
These are the people which Trump unhesitatingly would leave us at the mercy of, in spite of any treaty obligations.
I do not agree with President Macron on very much. I consider him repellent. But I agree with him about the United States, and that terrifies me.

Yeah, it just keeps falling apa ... oh, wait, there went another testifier, and he directly linked quid pro quo to the president. And aren't the republicans giving in on that now, too?
No, what you've got going for you are the republicans' Moving Goalposts®. Every time one of their definitions of an impeachable/removable offense gets met, they just roll them goalposts back another 15 yards and declare a new definition. Convenient.

The violin, obviously. You've all heard the fuss about Sax and violins.

He certainly seems unable to resist tooting his own horn at every opportunity.

Yes.
No, no. Don't thank me. You did ask, and it was a pleasure to answer you.

Errr, Frederiks, but yes, that's true. I guess I just am kinda miffed by that unevenness of the numbering. Then again I was not alone in that. Many generations of Danish nitpickers have complained about it.

I was being facetious, but I won't deny that keeping track of things I enjoy is a fun way to pass the time.

As for laughing, I do that after a lot of things. Have been now for, let's see...36! 36 years! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Well he is hardly going to present a counter-argument to that, is he now.

It's my birthday!

To celebrate, I will count things, and then post them on the internet.

Fri. Oct. 11, 2019
Tedd: 766
Elliot: 958
Ashley: 206
Grace: 879
Nanase: 603
Sarah: 682
Justin: 445
 
Mon. Oct. 14, 2019
Sarah: 683
Grace: 880
Justin: 446
Nanase: 604
Ashley: 207
Ellen: 686
Tedd: 767
 
Wed. Oct. 16, 2019
Grace: 881
Tedd: 768
Elliot: 959
Nanase: 605
Ashley: 208
Ellen: 687
Sarah: 684
Justin: 447
 
Fri. Oct. 18, 2019  
Grace: 882
Elliot: 960
Ashley: 209
Nanase: 606
Ellen: 688
Sarah: 685
Justin: 448
 
 
FULL COUNT

It's my birthday!

To celebrate, I will count things, and then post them on the internet.

Fri. Oct. 11, 2019
Tedd: 766
Elliot: 958
Ashley: 206
Grace: 879
Nanase: 603
Sarah: 682
Justin: 445
 
Mon. Oct. 14, 2019
Sarah: 683
Grace: 880
Justin: 446
Nanase: 604
Ashley: 207
Ellen: 686
Tedd: 767
 
Wed. Oct. 16, 2019
Grace: 881
Tedd: 768
Elliot: 959
Nanase: 605
Ashley: 208
Ellen: 687
Sarah: 684
Justin: 447
 
Fri. Oct. 18, 2019  
Grace: 882
Elliot: 960
Ashley: 209
Nanase: 606
Ellen: 688
Sarah: 685
Justin: 448
 
 
FULL COUNT

The package containing my notebook arrived yesterday, so this is as good a time as any to get caught up.

Mon. Aug. 19, 2019
Tedd: 759
Ashley: 188
Elliot: 952
Ellen: 678
Jeremy: 58 (1st appearance since 2017)
 
Wed. Aug. 21, 2019
Tedd: 760
Jeremy: 59
Ashley: 189
 
Fri. Aug. 23, 2019
Justin: 436
Sarah: 674
Nanase: 595
Elliot: 953
Ashley: 190
Ellen: 679
Grace: 867
 
Mon. Aug. 26, 2019
Nanase: 596
Justin: 437
Sarah: 675
Ashley: 191
 
Wed. Aug. 28, 2019
Ashley: 192
Nanase: 597
Ellen: 680
 
Fri. Aug. 30, 2019
Ashley: 193
Grace: 868
Ellen: 681
Nanase: 598
Justin: 438
Tedd: 761
 
Mon. Sept. 2, 2019
Mr. Tensaided: 68
Susan: 513
Diane: 207
Justin: 439
Ashley: 194
Ellen: 682
Grace: 869
Sarah: 676
 
Wed. Sept. 4, 2019
Ashley: 195
Justin: 440
Elliot: 954
Tedd: 762
 
Fri. Sept. 6, 2019
Nanase: 599
Ellen: 683
Ashley: 196
Sarah: 677
Tedd: 763
Elliot: 955
Grace: 870
 
Mon. Sept. 9, 2019
Ashley: 197
Justin: 441
Grace: 871
Nanase: 600 (6th)
 
Wed. Sept. 11, 2019
Grace: 872
Ashley: 198
Sarah: 678
 
Fri. Sept. 13, 2019
Grace: 873
Ashley: 199
Tedd: 764
Elliot: 956
Ellen: 684
Nanase: 601
Sarah: 679
Justin: 442
 
Mon. Sept. 16, 2019
Diane: 208
Rick: 12 (2019 debut)
Rhea: 18 (1st appearance since 2016)
Elijah: 12 (2019 debut)
Susan: 514
 
Wed. Sept. 18, 2019
Diane: 209
Susan: 515
 
Fri. Sept. 20, 2019
Susan: 516
Diane: 210
 
Mon. Sept. 23, 2019
Susan: 517
Diane: 211
 
Wed. Sept. 25, 2019
Grace: 874
Ashley: 200 (10th)
 
Fri. Sept. 27, 2019
Sarah: 680
Justin: 443
Ashley: 201
Grace: 875
 
Mon. Sept. 30, 2019
Grace: 876
Ashley: 202
 
Wed. Oct. 2, 2019
Grace: 877
Ashley: 203
 
Fri. Oct. 4, 2019
Ashley: 204
Grace: 878
 
Mon. Oct. 7, 2019
Ellen: 685
Sarah: 681
Justin: 444
Nanase: 602
Ashley: 205
 
Wed. Oct. 9, 2019
Elliot: 957
Tedd: 765
 
 
FULL COUNT

Don't mind me then, there's a federal election happening this coming Monday, it's got me in fact check mode.

He was just using a hypothetical to illustrate the absurdity of "buying Greenland".