Communes are fine, except for other people.
I would have made a really bad hippie for so many reasons.
If I knew they had biscuits, I might have given them a second try.
There are biscuits at the commune, if Moby is willing to give them a second try.
||
I gave my computer to the IT guy for some updates this morning. "Oh, you know how to pop your laptop out from the dock!" he said. Apparently a lot of faculty members do not know how to pop their laptop out of its docking station, which fine, and haven't asked despite the fact that they chose a laptop over a desktop at some point.
To me this means that they think it would be a really complicated process, not worth learning.
|>
Isn't it just a lift-and-separate kind of thing?
There's a button that's fairly hard to push since it's a physical catch instead of just an electronic button- on ours at least it lights up with an eject symbol to let you know what it will do when you push it and OH GOD WHAT DOES A LINE AND TRIANGLE MEAN IT'S AN ALIEN SYMBOL ISN'T IT?
No, there is a button. A big prominent eject button. Then you pick up your laptop.
Now that I look at it, it's actually the "play" symbol, which is perhaps confusing if they also comment on Unfogged.
Fancy. I have a desktop with two monitors. I don't have room for a third.
No, you don't use your laptop screen. Just the screen that is plugged into the docking station, and a real keyboard, also plugged into the docking station.
Could you have two monitors, a real keyboard, and a docking station?
If you ask, will they give you a dot matrix printer?
If I answer, does that mean I'm playing a biscuit conditional game?
15 is my setup- I have the laptop open to use that screen, then two 22" monitors, and a regular keyboard. I'm also going to get a 65" monitor set up on the wall so I can hold meetings in my office and display up there when I want to show people my screen.
I'm so glad we have WebEx meetings so people can't see my screen unless I deliberately show it to them.
Several people have these shields where you can only see the screen when looking at it within something like +/- 15 degrees viewing angle, so unless someone is standing right behind you they can't see it.
Wait...what about the 40 comment rule? Is there an exception if you're the poster?
The pictures of the communes were cool, though I'd actually seen some of them before. When I was a kid, my dream in life was to live on a commune, do hard labor, and sing folk songs. My initial interest in China came from learning about the sent-down movement during the Cultural Revolution, and decided I would like to be able to take part in that. My inner ascetic liked the idea of laboring in the rice paddies, having no personal possessions, and getting weekly oil rations.
Couldn't you just have gone to a progressive summer camp?
22: When I was a kid, my dream life was being Indiana Jones.
Your inner ascetic needs some re-eductation.
The valley fever read is horrifying. Yet another case where a quirk of biology that happens to be worse for African Americans is amplified by structural racism and propping up dying towns' economies with the prison-industrial complex.
Actually, my childhood dream was to send people to work on labor communes, so it sounds like Britta and I could be a good match.
There can't really be people who have laptops and never move them, can there?
I just finished the valley fever article and was also horrified. When we have the New World Order (Halfordismo or whatever), the first against the wall should be those in the prison-industrial complex. Also, California sucks way more than it's given (dis)credit for. Also that we don't have a national healthcare system and an American is becoming permanently disabled and unable to work because he can't fucking afford Diflucan for a disease he caught while being involuntarily held in a place known to be able to kill him is going to give me rage aneurysm. Those in the healthcare-industrial complex will be next against the wall.
Thinking about how we ignore horrible deadly diseases that disproportionately affects men of color reminds me of how there was EBOLA!!!!! coverage on the media 24-7 for months until we realized that apparently white people not in Africa don't actually die of the disease, and then all coverage just basically stopped.
In a world full of people, only some want to fly.
9: I'm on a conference call and I almost laughed out loud at 9.
Today seems like it would have been a good day to just stay in bed. The snow last week was kind of nice but at this point it's just overkill.
My childhood dream was to be a martyr for the faith. When I was a bit older, I thought there would be a nuclear war, so my dream was to become military dictator in the aftermath. Both being a martyr and nuclear war sound preferable to working in a rice paddy.
I used to want to live on a commune. I read extensively about it. Now I realize I'd suck at commune living because I hate everyone.
34: Weren't there more than a few dictators who also had childhood dreams of martyrdom, and then realized that it's not so great on the fun-and-profit side? What I'm saying is, don't give up hope. You too could rule with an iron fist.
I should post photos. I have rare color photos of commune life at my house. it was awesome sometimes, having so many people staying for parties that there were tents in the yard and the sleeping porch downstairs was wall to wall. we would go out and get oysters and cast for shrimp, and I would help my mom and the other women (who were like 19--they all seemed so beautiful to me with their long hair) make vegetables and rice in the huge pots you'd normally do crab boil in (we had ring burners outside for that; still do.) live music all the time. we'd make ice cream in the old ice-cream-maker, where it got so hard to turn the handle at the end, and my mom would let my and my bro lick the dasher. the best ice cream I've ever had was fresh peach ice cream we made like that, four batches in a row to be enough. they used to have these pills called "west coast turnarounds," my dad told us about them later; it was dexamphetamine on the outside, valium, and then a little b-12 or something in the middle? like an everlasting gobstopper of pharmeceutical goodness. things went to shit and we couldn't support ourselves and everyone got in fights and started dealing hard drugs.
When I was a kid, I believed that I was oppressed and abused, and to be happy I only needed to grow up and get away from my parents and teachers. Despite the fact that my childhood was pretty ordinary for my time and place, this turned out to be exactly correct.
so my dream was to become military dictator in the aftermath
Haha, nice try. My fantasy dictatorship took over yours and you're now working some rice paddy in Hunan.
Wait...what about the 40 comment rule? Is there an exception if you're the poster?
I sternly reprimanded myself.
Thinking about how we ignore horrible deadly diseases that disproportionately affects men of color reminds me of how there was EBOLA!!!!! coverage on the media 24-7 for months until we realized that apparently white people not in Africa don't actually die of the disease, and then all coverage just basically stopped.
Coverage stopped because the midterm elections were over.
35 is also me, sort of. Nothing cured my desire to live in the past more decisively than the internet.
You could build a cob house with wifi.
Not because I grew informed about the past, just that if I lived in the past, I couldn't play online.
That is, you can install wifi in your cob house.
Your fantasy dictatorship is people running in rat mazes to earn the right to consume "sponsored content". My fantasy dictatorship is like Mad Max, but with tanks. I like my odds.
Plus, my fantasy hero was Napoleon, which gives me superior fantasy tactical acumen.
My wife once told my daughter that my boyhood hero was Napoleon. She asked who he was, so she explained he was a maniac who conquered half of Europe. This led to an awkward conversation when my daughter asked "Why did you like Napoleon? He was bad."
My fantasy dictatorship is like Mad Max, but with tanks.
You seem to have forgotten the key foundational fact about the Mad Max universe, also why Hitler was going for Azerbijan. Those tanks are going nowhere. Advantage fantasy IP-protection, historical materialism dictatorship, off to the rice paddies with you. Don't feel too bad, Britta seems like she'd be good company.
I don't have much of a fantasy. Sabbatical was pretty much it. Now I have to wait all the way until May to have it back.
I bet you could run a tank using pig-butt methane if you tried.
48: The geographic distribution of fracking oil/gas production across America makes that fantasy a bit more obtainable. You may want to move to Upstate New York (the shale there should be untouched, but you'll have to bring your own refinery) or North Dakota beforehand so you'll be ready.
You poor heavy-metal besotted fool. You never stood a chance.
I think I'm going to Skype into a meeting today instead of wading through all the unshoveled sidewalks to get to the subway. Being able to attend committee meetings without leaving home doesn't rise that high on the "fantasy" list, I guess, but it seems pretty great for now.
Being able to attend committee meetings without leaving home doesn't rise that high on the "fantasy" list, I guess,
Instead, think about Skyping your minions who are building a 500ft high colossus sculpture of you bestriding the ruined, charred grounds of the University of Chicago. Doesn't that feel better?
54: Leave the Harper Library aloooooone! (Seriously. You're not allowed to tear that down.)
I never understood Napoleon worship/admiration. I was raised Anglophile (my grandfather was actually born in England), so he wasn't my "side" historically. I never knew anyone who admired him, so I never heard any valorizing stories, and we didn't have any books about him around the house (by contrast, I read about and was pretty fascinated by Genghis Kahn). And of course his empire was so much smaller than Alexander's or the Kahns.
Oh yeah, and he lost. Twice, really. Just a mystery to me.
Knecht is right - the whole conquering other countries thing may be less important than the creation of a new kind of government in his own country.
Early Napoleon did the equivalent of making the trains run on time; I'd count the Code Napoleon as a practical and theoretical improvement. There's a narrow strata of contemporaneous English literature with heros that admire Napoleon for rewarding competence rather than inheritance.
It's pretty amazing to take a country that was falling apart against itself and use it to defeat, conquer, or at least hold off the most powerful nations in the world for years. And he came out of nowhere, Corsican corporal and whatnot. And the results. How many places follow a Civil Law system, essentially due to Napoleon?
My theory was that it had the most to do with him having been born a commoner -- this gave egotistical young men license to dream bigger dreams. The proof for my theory is Raskolnikov.
I'm not sure if it hurts my case that he's fictional.
I know a couple people who grew up in good-enough communes, generally those that valued skilled labor & live on selling it. Plus also group meals & songs.
I think one of Seattle's city council members still lives in a mansion run as a cooperative multifamily dwelling. I had a CSA pickup on their porch for a while.
61 - also that he's an axe murderer?
There's a good book about crypto in the Napoleonic Wars that covers N's over-centralized, micro-managing, breaking-his-own-rules decline. It's still amazing that nations which sold their military commissions, & only to some men, won (and was it as near a thing as Waterloo makes it seem?).
How many places follow a Civil Law system, essentially due to Napoleon?
Shifting back to earnestness: this is a way incorrect exaggeration of his role in that. But I agree with your broader point. I have a lot to say on the Napoleon topic generally, but no time today. To violate the ban shamelessly, the best analogy is something like the Japanese role in Southeast Asia in WWII -- they were pretty clearly terrible people who were in fact bloodthirsty conquerors, but also tied to knocking down shitty, exploitative older regimes and thus also kind of a force for liberation. Except expand the analogy to the home country, and then forget it was ever made.
OP: When I got pneumonia repeatedly for several winters running doing fieldwork in the Central Valley, I had to keep reminding the Berkeley doctors about Valley Fever. It's not so much of a risk in the prettier parts of the state that more sensible people work in, and who thinks about poor people diseases?
If I ever have a chest X-ray that looks like TB, I'll need to remind them again, IIRC. I wasn't tracking really well by the end of the season. One doc said they'd ruled it out & one said they hadn't.
64: My just-so-story is that Napoleon exported his Code everywhere the French conquered, but thinking about it harder many of those places were probably under some sort of a Civil Law system, the Napoleonic Code didn't take in as many places as I thought (e.g. Croatia), and places where it did take might be due to later colonization.
SNOBOL was the other pig with Napoleon, right?
Why do people always want to use video with Skype? I strongly prefer audio-only.
Have you tried WebEx? You can share a computer screen but not video.
No computer screen. They want to see my face. I want to do audio-only and put my end on mute and mostly ignore them.
That's the common goal of all humanity.
When the other end of the call is a room containing seven people talking over each other, it's not very useful to be on the line anyway.
I say just do what they want but have someone in the background doing distracting and increasingly surreal things through the entire call.
We use WebEx all the time, generally with a separate audio usually on mute. It's nice; it's easy to have 95%+ of a meeting be the essearian dream.
Statistically speaking, it's only a matter of time before I get careless and broadcast unfogged on a conference call.
75: You need to make an essear cut-out figure to put in front of the screen.
(just like Pee Wee did in his Christmas special!)
I say just do what they want but have someone in the background doing distracting and increasingly surreal things through the entire call.
Be the bad left shark you want to see in the world.
78: My greatest fear is trying to press "cmd+[" to go back to the front page, but accidentally hitting "cmd+p" and clicking affirmative in the resulting dialog, sending Unfogged to a printer somewhere in my office.
Pwned by everybody, but for me it was that Napoleon seemed like the first self-made man in Europe in a thousand years. Previous European rulers who came to power in civil wars were always 17th in line for the throne or something, and came to power in some Game of Thrones bullshit. Napoleon's opportunities were of his own making.
Napoleon as the destroyer of medieval institutions is a big part of his myth. He's been credited with ending feudalism, creating modern law, ending serfdom, emancipating the Jews. His Continental opponents were hidebound reactionaries determined to freeze the world in place to preserve their hereditary privileges, while he was in the vanguard of modernity.
81: I've done that. Printed unfogged by mistake, that is. I don't even had a CMD button.
I briefly screen-shared an unfogged comment thread in a very unwise venue.
Alright, thanks everyone. I guess the snippets I got were mostly about his military genius or whatever, when that was really the least of what made him interesting.
I mean, I still don't really care, but at least I get why other people do.
Napolean also enjoyed the reputation (even among the English for a few years) as The Man Who Tamed the Revolution.
Napoleon
A good historical materialist not addicted to self-serving myths of Romantic individualism tries to apply the fact that "the times and places create the person" very very seriously. An instructive counter-example would be his farcical descendant Louis Napoleon and his tools Rothschild and Haussmann.
Marxists even have a Radically Controversial Field of Study
The 19th century was certainly a period of uneven development, but one would look at Bolivar, Hong Xiuquan, Bismarck, Cavour, Andrew Jackson (Lincoln?), the Meiji leaders, Clive of India? etc to try to find the common themes and practices of bourgeois revolutions rather than superstitiously worshiping coincidence and Great Men.
The Wiki article claims that the French citizen could only follow a great man to the frozen wastes, or the materialist is imputing false consciousness, but the materialist says that the soldier-mass citizen is exactly that person who creates a hero to follow. Romanticism was not only the delusion of elites.
I think he's been riding on Napoleon III's coattails.
Stupid question: when people shovel snow off a sidewalk, where do they usually put it? I assumed that since there were cars in the street, the safest place is to direct it toward the front yard. But I just heard one of my upstairs neighbors outside shoveling complaining to someone that "the fucker who lives in the first-floor apartment [that would be me] shoveled snow into the yard."
91: you're not allowed to shovel into the street, in theory.
I think you're supposed to put it in the yard.
I always bag it and bring it to the curb with the trash.
Then he threw several shovelfuls of snow at my windows. I guess it's best not to confront an angry neighbor who is currently holding a shovel.
Take it to work and give it to your colleagues.
95: did you put it someplace (like intruding on a driveway or walk or something) where it had to be shoveled again?
91: You're supposed to pick up the snow with a spoon and then run into your house and dump it into your sink.
Your neighbors sound as crazy as your cow-orkers.
95: He's clearly in the wrong. Go grab your own shovel and yell at him.
97: Nope. Just a big heap in the front yard. Unless part of that later collapsed down into the front walk or something.
83.1 : yeah, only really if you ignore Oliver Cromwell. Who had some things in common with Napoleon, but was less prone to massacre and restricted his endless warring more or less to his own country rather than spreading it across the entire continent.
The wall of snow between our sidewalk and the street is about my height now. Partly this is because the neighbors across the street also put their snow there. Where to put all this fucking snow: an important cause of inter-neighbor strife!
Is it somehow more his yard than your yard?
101: Ireland is "more or less" Britain?
And was conquered without massacres?
You're supposed to pick up the snow with a spoon and then run into your house and dump it into your sink.
Why do you insist on torturing the snow? It was born outside and should be allowed to die there.
You know who got in trouble b/c snow? Napoleon.
Is it possible the guy is concerned about de-icing salt killing the grass on the yard? Or does Boston not have grass.
102: Where to put all this fucking snow: an important cause of inter-neighbor strife!
It's really about ethics in weather journalism.
101: As a 10-year old, I never heard of Cromwell. Elementary school European history in the US is surprisingly shitty.
In my row of townhouses the rental company maintains seemingly random assemblages of bushes and plants in everyone's front "yard" (really a sort of garden plot, no grass), so I have to put the snow on top of a bunch of bushes whereas the people next door have only one bush so there's a lot more space. And yet I feel a strong resistance to put the snow in the neighbor's area. Even though neither of us owns it anyway.
102: Battlements! Sallyports! Trebuchets!
Why didn't the Roundheads collapse in purity quibbles? Cromwell? Also, I thought Cromwell *was* remembered as fondly as Napoleon; the statue outside Parliament, lots of Victorian novels, Gillian Bradshaw?
As a 10-year old
Wow. You come across as much older.
Briefly contemplated posting as OPINIONATED WOODY ALLEN or ROMAN POLANSKI but decided that would have been wrong.
110: wow. The Puritans just appear at Plimoth, no context, no communication with the Old World?
Also, I thought Cromwell *was* remembered as fondly as Napoleon
Not by the Irish, he isn't.
I think no one outside Britain cares about him, and w/in Britain his legacy is too mixed for widespread admiration. Smashing stained glass isn't really anyone's bag anymore, and while he remains a signal general in the War on Christmas, the other side doesn't treat him as respectfully as the US Army treats Lee.
No, we hear that the Puritans were driven out of the Old World because of religious intolerance. And we spell it "Plymouth".
Also, I thought Cromwell *was* remembered as fondly as Napoleon
Not by me.
115: How did you learn it? In elementary school, for some reason the British are mean to the Puritans, so they all move to the US. They were just minding their own business, and then boom! Religious oppression.
To be fair, when the Puritans came here in the 1620s they could be fairly described as "marginalized and persecuted" in Britain. It's not like they fled here after the Restoration.
I assumed it had something to do with the buckles on the hats.
119: Yes, exactly. The implication is that the Puritans were a small, reformist sect that the powers that be didn't appreciate. No greater context.
I'm 100% certain I didn't even know there was an English Civil War until I was in HS. I think I mostly learned about it from studying Irish history in college.
I should add that this is partly a fluke: I switched school systems after 8th grade, which meant missing European (World? no idea) history coming and going. And then in 12th grade I was loaded up with AP classes such that I didn't have room for World history.
I'm not sure I leaned anything about Napoleon in primary school. After LaSalle and his sojourn on the treacherous Lavaca River, (and then, I guess, Montcalm getting outwitted by frontiersmen) what's to know of France?
Some regicides did, but that's not elementary school stuff, even in Connecticut, I'd guess. They probably do learn the Charter Oak story -- it's no Alamo, obviously, but it's all they've got.
(I've never been on the Lavaca, but at Six Flags they repeatedly referred to it as treacherous, and that's good enough for me.)
The implication is that the Puritans were a small, reformist sect that the powers that be didn't appreciate.
That's more accurate than saying that they sailed to Plymouth Rock because of the English Civil War or because of Cromwell.
1620 is before the Civil War. Parliament and the Protectorate were more sympathetic to dissenters than the Stuart kings.
(I see that Six Flags retired that ride long ago. Remind me a few years hence to ask what the heeblets are learning in school about LaSalle.)
The "Puritans" (US usage) also didn't leave in 1620 or arrive at Plymouth, but when they did leave in 1630, with the ancestors of many assholes on board the Arbella, it definitely wasn't because of persecution by Cromwell. But read generously Clew's comment just meant that it's bizarre to separate Pilgrims/Puritans from any narrative of what was going on in England beyond "religious persecution," yet that in fact is how elementary school US history is taught, to the extent it's taught at all any more.
Trying to dredge up early elementary school memories, I think it went something like: the Puritans told people not to do fun things like, um, dance or... go to movies? no, go to the theater, which is just another word for movies, right?... and other people got annoyed because they liked fun, which, duh, so they said mean things to the Puritans until the Puritans went across the ocean and had turkey with friendly Indians.
I think that was more like first or second grade than fifth grade, where the whole Pilgrim part was skipped over in a hurry to get to the fun stuff about self-sufficient frontier life and diseases on the Oregon Trail and whatnot.
I mean it was two totally separate colonies until like 1690 or so, and Massachusetts hated Plymouth, until eventually absorbing them because they were weak and creating the giant unified Masshole of today.
75. The worst thing is when you only have a half-duplex telephone (yeah, an actual telephone) because then whoever talks gets the connection, so you overtalk each other all the time.
Second worst is VOIP in any form. The sound quality is almost invariably terrible. Maybe some day we will all have Google fiber, but for now the net just doesn't substitute for a wire connecting you to them.
132: first the University of Chicago, now Massachusetts--keep going a little longer and you'll have maligned every place I've ever lived.
I got a weird message yesterday about a possible job in LA. Maybe I should apply for it.
We don't teach the kids that our scaredycat left-behinds in Tea Tax Town backed the father of the Mother of Parliaments & therefore produced all the freedom the world had until Teddy Roosevelt? Missed opportunity! I gotta write a proposal for the Texas School Board.
Is there a shorter word for Parliament?
Compound's ready, slave robot army is getting manufactured, we just need a competent high end scientist, do it.
130, 131: You have died of Infralapsarianism.
I think there were a few nods in high school US History to Plymouth being Separatists and Boston being Puritans or people who wanted to "purify from within", though I might be mixing up with Larry Gonick's history.
135 -- That valley fever business sounds pretty bad.
There can be only one point.
Actually, my only point is that I have an urgent, electronically-enforced, deadline coming up, so my need to procrastinate is equally urgent.
Is there a shorter word for Parliament?
Voteshack
And when you aren't on the floor, you retire to the cloacaroom
I went to the OED to find if there was a freals answer to this question, and didn't find much, but did learn about the Parliament of Bats.
I'm sure it wasn't the message the teachers were trying to get across, but I recall in early grade school being of the opinion that whoever drove the Puritans out had the right idea.
I also recall that we spent a kind of absurd amount of time covering the careers of the various conquistadors in detail.
'every man was warnyd and i cryde throughe the towne that they shulde leve hyr wepyn yn hyr ynnys that ys to saye hyr swerdys and bokelers, bowys and arowys'What a weird, chaotic place with orthography to match. No wonder the Pilgrims left.
Wonders of the Historical Thesaurus:
society > authority > rule or government > ruler or governor > deliberative, legislative, or administrative assembly > governing or legislative body of a nation or community > procedure of parliament or national assembly > consonant with the usage of parliament [adjective] > subjected to whip (6)
whipped
Subject to a Parliamentary whip.
Subcategories:
-- not (2)
-- type of whip (3)
My favorite part of Colonial House was when the Baptist minister portraying the governor praised the establishment of Plymouth Colony as a victory for religious freedom, then punished people for not observing the Sabbath.
149 is correct. "Thing" has the advantage of being Icelandic and thus brings in Bjork, elves, and geothermal power. What's not to like?
63: Waterloo would have been a closer thing if the Prussians hadn't come up when they did. But if I recall correctly, if Napoleon had managed to win Waterloo, he would have had to fight and defeat the Austrian army next, with whichever forces he had that survived the first battle. And if he had managed to beat the Austrians, he would then have had to fight and defeat the Russian army that was also on the way. Napoleon in his prime could probably have done that - but by 1815, neither Napoleon nor the army he commanded were in their prime. So I'd say the overall strategic odds were very much against him, even if he had managed to beat Wellington at Waterloo.
when people shovel snow off a sidewalk, where do they usually put it?
Where I lived last year, it seemed like the goal was to put the snow between the sidewalk and the street. The city utterly failed at plowing the streets, though, and actually generated an SUV-sized pile of snow in front of where I parked my car. Clearing that pile was a lost cause - the city wasn't going to do it and neither were the residents - so during the weeks when I was shoveling off my car every few days, I just kept throwing snow onto the pile when it was easier to do that than put it between the car and the sidewalk.
161: and let's not forget that his whole plan for Waterloo rested on the assumption that the Prussians would be hopelessly disorganised for as long as it took for Wellington to get scared and run away. These are not good foundations for an operational concept.
A little banner was just unfurled in my brain at the end of that article that says "Welcome, Nightmares!"
163. Especially since Wellington clearly understood that his principal task at Waterloo was to stay there until the Prussians did arrive, however long that took.
"Would that night or Blucher were here!" Exactly.
500ft high colossus sculpture of you bestriding the ruined, charred grounds of the University of Chicago
Ever since visiting the former Stasi HQ, I've had a major rethink about the University's future under Halfordismo. I think it should be lovingly maintained as a cautionary museum by volunteers from the association of the revolutionaries who stormed it. Tour groups would be led around it on Sundays. "This is the refectory where the favoured circle of the Regents were served roast baby...here is Arthur Laffer's office...the plaque over there marks the spot where Becker was hanged with Posner's guts"
Where I lived last year, it seemed like the goal was to put the snow between the sidewalk and the street.
In the bike lane?
Around here at least any pretense that bike lanes are treated like a meaningful part of the road goes out the window when it snows. They never get plowed.
Communes still exist, but as festivals. Burning Man is a commune, just without the depressing parts that require hard work, or kids.