If you exclude gay people, the streets will probably pave themselves. Asphalt is attracted to heterosexuality like Ohioans to Fentanyl.
Conservatives will be OK. They don't mind taxes as long as they themselves (or people like themselves) benefit. If this was libertarians it would be a whole 'nother thing. I've been watching the efforts of libertarians to found a floating Utopia in international waters for going on 30 years. They can't organize a barbecue, let alone a country.
To be fair, everything is harder when it has to float.
Aren't they supposed to do that kind of thing in Florida, with the Domino's Pizza founder? Florida is more irremediably awful while Texas has decent parts.
That and whatever Disney calls its version of artificial Scarsdale.
5: Isn't that super-Catholic? In the most awful way, of course. Protestant assholes have to go somewhere, too.
Let's see protestants try to get Ivanka Trump to dress like a Sicilian widow.
In general I appreciate the idea of experimental utopian communities. They do, generally, end badly but it doesn't mean that they aren't worth trying.
Charlie Black: Fourierism was tried in the late nineteenth century... and it failed. Wasn't Brookfarm Fourierist? It failed.
Tom Townsend: That's debatable.
Charlie Black: Whether Brookfarm failed?
Tom Townsend: That it ceased to exist, I'll grant you, but whether or not it failed cannot be definitively said.
Charlie Black: Well, for me, ceasing to exist is - is failure. I mean, that's pretty definitive.
Tom Townsend: Well, everyone ceases to exist. Doesn't mean everyone's a failure.
Maybe this will distract the libertarians from their plot to ruin New Hampshire. Because nothing promotes Freedom like harassing meter maids.
while Texas has decent parts
Aw, shucks.
Alexander Woolcott was born on a property that his family had bought from a failed Fourierist community. I can't imagine why I know that.
I feel like I'm now in a Fortean community, or world.
10:
I think referring to them as meter MAIDS might be considered a form of harassment also.
10:
I think referring to them as meter MAIDS might be considered a form of harassment also.
14: They're meter matrons after they have a husband or a baby.
15. As for so many things, I blame Paul McCartney.
Wouldn't the libertarian thing to do be to open a private car park? Or a railroad, I guess.
Whatever the theory, in practice, libertarianism is privatizing gains and socializing costs. Cattle owners shitting in government offices they took over by force of arms to protest having to pay the highly subsidized rents on land used to graze cattle they sell for private profit is about as close as you can get to pure libertarianism.
Texas has decent parts
I'd prefer a stinking summer trip through Southern Hell.
14: well, just wrong, because one of them is or rather was male. (He didn't stop being male, he stopped being a parking attendant.)
If there were a market for elective libertarian communities you would find them all over the place. But you don't, so there's obviously no point in starting one.
How does Somalia differ functionally from a Libertarian utopia? If we think about it: Non-functioning federal government? check. Decentralized local control? check. Randian warlords? check. Pirates? check.
The thing about Keene is that the parking situation there is really nice. There is a lot of great, metered on-street parking all through the central business district. Parking is very cheap, but the meters ensure that enough turnover happens that you can always find a spot. and if you screw it up, a $5 ticket ain't the end of the world. And the money helps to cover the cost of having a really nice downtown.
One would think this represents a libertarian dream of a market mechanism actually being used to effectively manage a limited resource. But apparently there is another libertarian principal that says FREEDOM means free parking.
Freedom's just another word for "I got mine."
Why parking only in metered spots? Why not just leave your car in the middle of the road closest to where you want to go? Your stupid "traffic laws" are oppressing my right to use land any way I want.
The radio ad said, "Void where prohibited" so that's why I have to pee in the fountain.
That may be my father's favorite joke. I worry about him sometimes.
Apparently the both of you are weird enough to have arrived at it independently.
You'd think they'd pick a place with few enough people that a contingent could move the needle, but this county already has a population of over 900,000. And it may be part of the coming bluing urban South - 37% for Obama in 2008, 34% in 2012, 39% for Clinton in 2016.
I suspect they picked that part of Texas because they happen to sell real estate in that part of Texas.
"Conservative Utopia: It's Not Just A Shithole Any More!"
Are we reading this as anything other than a real estate marketing ploy?
35. Surely the point of gerrymandering is to bottle up all your opponents in a handful of districts, not your own side. I agree this is more likely about marketing than politics.
Have we discussed "Prosperity States" or the Compact for America?
http://www.compactforamerica.org/restoreprosperitynow
39: ACTUALLY. The main forms of gerrymandering are 1. cracking and packing, and 2. entrenchment (which is not relevant here) but cracking is relevant, and involves wasting as many of your opponents votes as possible in safe districts for your guy. Ie 60-40 district are better for the majority than 70-30 districts, because you're wasting more of your opponents' votes and using yours more efficiently.
Note: this is not exactly the much-celebrated efficiency gap, which has some flaws.
Families that move to Texas can now hunt wild hogs from hot air balloons. No word yet on ekranoplans.
That's a good thing. The feral hogs are seriously nuts. And enormous.
And it's way less destructive than about ten other bills that are in progress or currently passed.
39: I was thinking more of those who have the bright idea of moving somewhere en masse and taking over local government in particular, like 10.links.
Hopefully the bill is written sufficiently loosely that it includes Zeppelins. I would totally shoot pigs from a steerable craft. Something that just drifts scares me a bit.
42: That sounds fun. Helicopters would be unsporting, but balloons seems fine.
The bill (HR 3535) is really short, and just says "hot air balloons" without defining them. It instructs a state commission to start issuing implementation rules as soon as possible, though. Assuming Texas has the Chevron rule, could they plausibly interpret zeppelins as included?
I mean, I'm sure purists would gasp, but.
Zeppelins count if you heat the hydrogen.
Since this is a thread about assholes, I have a relevant comment. After the NLRB ruling the Columbia University grad students had the right to unionize, we've been trying to unionize, and unsurprisingly our university has been fighting it. Their most recent tactic is to appeal the Columbia decision, and they've been doing it by arguing grad student labor doesn't actually benefit the university in any way, and that TAs, RAs, and grad student lecturers are just giant time and energy sucks for faculty. I'm reading the transcripts now, and oh my god are they all a bunch of weasel dicks!
The whole strategy has been blowing up in their faces because they've managed to piss off the physical sciences grad students, who up until now had been pretty anti union. Telling them that they don't provide any useful labor to their PI and that they're not real scientists because most of their experiments fail is apparently not the way to win their hearts.
I'm reading the transcripts because the deans who've testified are having giant snits over mass email and arguing that their words have been taken out of context, and OMG the context is only making them look like even bigger smug, supercilious assholes.
Sorry 'bout the weasel dicks, Buttercup. Glad the Physical Sciences are coming around. I'm not surprised they lean anti-union given my experience. Nor that insulting their work is the best way to motivate them to sign up. Own goals are the best goals.
The blatant lying pisses me off the most. Brief paraphrase:
Union lawyer: Do TAs ever hold office hours?
Evil dean: I don't know, but probably not.
UL: Probably not? You don't know?
ED: Personally, I never make my TAs hold office hours, or do anything really, and any paper I have them learn how to grade, I am literally holding their hand the entire time, it's so exhausting for me, but I don't care about crass things like money or being compensated for my labor, because I believe in the life of the mind. It's approximately 50 times more work for me to have TAs, but I do it out of the altruism of giving graduate students the opportunity of the experience of learning how to teach.
UL: So, no grad student has ever provided useful labor to professors in the form of grading papers, running sections, or holding office hours.
ED: I literally know nothing whatsoever about anything, but my guess is no.
You will all be interested to know that Cal Ripken has a new girlfriend. We like her.
The link in 40 was impressive in that the only person of color in that whole animation was part of the evil "back room deal crowd."
53: you gotta be fuckin' kidding me.
I declare it morally correct to punch Evil Dean is his -- and this is definitely a he -- motherfucking face.
56
Perhaps sensing this is a common attitude, the upper level administration have literally barricaded themselves in a locked building with security guards and multiple barriers to entry.*
*The student body president let in some dangerous rabble graduate student union organizers to present a petition to the college president last year, and almost got expelled for that. They only backed down after bad PR.
Those weasels are so fucking dickish. I worked as an RA for a dean who was producing a textbook and you bet I added value. I TAed and worked as a reader /grader too. Value added again.
I do wonder, how does the admin at your school have standing to appeal the Columbia decision? Is it a party?
I love the exchange quoted in 9. What's it from?
58
They are arguing that graduate students at my elite private university are completely different in every way from graduate students at Columbia. Columbia relies on graduate student labor to teach undergrads, whereas here give us the privilege of learning how to teach undergrads solely for our own benefit, and we provide no economic value to the university, if you want to even sully the purely intellectual collaboration we engage in such crass terms.
One dean argued that his book *took longer* to publish with an RA, and that the RA got far more out of the "collaboration" than the dean did. He also claimed he has throngs of graduate students clamoring to work collaborate for free, but he magnanimously pays them (about $13/hour) out of his research budget.
It is so fucking gross to wade through this, and the lying drives me crazy. They "provide intense mentoring through every step of the teaching process," i.e., in the quarters we teach, they make us attend a weekly staff meeting where post docs argue about Marx for an hour (the faculty don't bother to show up). Our "intensive pedagogical training" is a 2 day workshop we're required to attend at the beginning of our third year. Here we learn helpful things like, "don't sleep with your students even if they're really cute." Or, "You might be disgusted having to teach the few poors we admit for PR purposes, but they can actually be surprisingly intelligent."*
*I wish I could tell you I was making this up but this is actually something the dean of undergrads told us in a "know your student" presentation. At least the line got booed.
So yeah, reading the transcript they're not able to actually appeal the Columbia ruling, just trying to get it declared irrelevant.
"don't sleep with your students even if they're really cute."
"You guys must be able to mate with each other, right? Drink until you aren't repulsive to each other."
62
Actually, the first year of grad school I had a professor make us look around the room and then told us, "chances are you will marry someone in this room, since you won't ever have another chance to meet someone outside of grad school."
I'm surprised half my cohort didn't just drop out right then and there.
59: Metropolitans (by Whit Stillman). Very sharp throughout, we'll worth watching.
|| Looks like we're falling short. Fox news geezers aren't bailing on Trump in sufficient numbers yet. |>
Jesus, Buttercup, it's like they're begging you all to strike. Also I haven't had my long-standing allergy to your instutition triggered so acutely for a good long time (although I suspect the class-based elitism is worse now than it was 20 years ago).
Sorry about the election.
Very sorry to hear about the election. Was it mostly a question of being outspent? What were the margins there?
Something weirdly Zen about the idea of shooting wild pigs from a hot-air balloon. With a side of Hunter Thompson.
68 I don't think outside money would have made the difference. A bunch of things were part of this, and while Rob significantly out-performed Clinton nearly everywhere, he wasn't able to do as well in a number of places as hoped. The media environment was unexpectedly negative, for which there may well be some consequences.
Trumpism, though, is the biggest problem. You have small town people saying things like Gianforte is a businessman, and will figure out ways to get their dying small town back on track. Hello: he's going to vote to end the federal subsidy to your small town hospital, which is already the biggest employer in your county.
They are the common clay of the new west.
Rob won my county 63-32. That's not quite good enough, but I knew we were going to lose last night when the mail-in figures for Yellowstone County were released soon after the polls closed.
Turnout was weak in Indian country. That accounts for, say, 1500 votes out of a 24,000 vote loss, so not an explanation all by itself.
I wouldn't be surprised if much of the loss in Yellowstone county (and let's just call that 9,000 out of the 24,000) is attributable to the role fossil fuels play in the economy out there. The turnout for the Bernie Sanders rally in Yellowstone County was a lot lower than it should have been, so that's a bellwether.
I haven't seen precinct level turnout figures yet, but the number of votes in the University precinct is abysmal. Proving, once again, that college students don't vote.
I expect the contenders for Ginaforte's seat will start to emerge this summer
Well, proving that college students don't vote in the summer.
I really don't understand why people have such a high opinion of "business" and whether that's going to change. It's a big problem here where our business school is slowly destroying the university.
Here is a ranked table of Quist gains over Clinton by county. A gain in every one, but a few (small plains counties mostly were less than one percent. Yellowstone (Billings) is relatively far down the list at 4.5%. Highest was Deer Lodge at 13.4%; Missoula was 9.6%.
The correct comparison is Quist against Bullock. I haven't seen it, but pretty sure Rob underperformed most everywhere.
Understand that. But that table is interesting as well. The outside money may well not have been a significant factor, but am still curious as to whether the pre-Citizens United Montana laws would have limited it somewhat.
The law that the US Supreme Court struck down banned corporate contributions. Most of the relevant laws are federal anyway.
Robocalling is banned, and apparently calls from Trump and Pence were made. I don't think the constitutionality of the ban has been tested.
The day of or the day after the primary, I got a robocall for a guy named Mongo seeking the Republican nomination for governor. That is, he called me about an election I can't vote in that won't happen for a year.
His name is actually "Mango," but I like to picture him as Alex Karras in a vest with no shirt.
29-33: Unrelated googling brought this thread to my attention. I clearly got the "void where prohibited" from Stanley. If LB's dad ever met Stanley, the he is patient zero.