NPR freaks me out because all the women sound the same. Out maybe I just always tune in to the same show.
If your ears can't tell the difference between Nina Totenberg and Sylvia Poggioli, you might want to visit an audiologist.
I don't watch Fox News. I don't much listen to NPR, but sometimes I do.
I mostly read news and dread the way the internet is shifting to video.
It could just as well be called the Donald Trump effect: we criticize him--and for that matter the media criticizes him--but there's such a stream of awfulness that there's no way we could criticize him in proportion to how we criticize anyone else. We have an upper bound to how much we can complain, so we get a clipping effect.
On the other end, the quiet things that are interesting have to be amplified out of proportion. I suppose it's frustrating, but it's still serving a use. I got a lot out of the Warren thread, and I suspect others did, too.
Oh but TV gets a pass for shifting to video?!?
I didn't learn a damn thing except that liberals will not drop anything even when the world is burning.
but there's such a stream of awfulness that there's no way we could criticize him in proportion to how we criticize anyone else.
This is literally what Pokey's teacher said about him yesterday afternoon during the teacher-parent conference. That when the other kids start copying him, she nips it in the bud, but when he does his thing, it's so incessant that she can't possibly deal with every little thing that comes out of his mouth, and so she chooses her battle.
And where to bring weed in from Canada.
A related but different phenomenon is how the murder of Khasoggi is garnering so much attention and outrage, compared to all the horrible stuff Saudi Arabia has done and continues to do (with American weaponry and full support) in Yemen.
Are we all going to be back-up dancers for Peter Singer by the end of this thread?
I don't watch TV news, so pretty much all my yelling at the media is at NPR. Which I try to avoid because yelling at stupid shit isn't a very useful way to spend time.
That is, I try to avoid NPR, but the wife tries to listen to it, despite my yelling. Fortunately, we're often not in the same place during news intervals, so she can listen in peace.
8: I dunno. It's mild criticism in an essentially private venue, and was mostly amplification/discussion of what Native American leaders were saying. I don't see it as meaningfully different from us doing anything else for entertainment. It'd be different if we were publicly calling for her head, though.
16 is probably right. Still, I refuse to learn anything.
12: Peter Singer? Am I missing the joke, or is that supposed to be some other Peter?
17: Moby! Do you want to have to wear the dunce cap again?
That being said, using your entertainment time to play Pokémon is probably a better way to fight the power. When the inevitable civil war comes, you should already be in good shape.
When and if Trump is gone, I'll learn stuff.
Not for heebie, or the teacher, or the classmates, or anyone in Texas, but for me. And that is enough.
23: As long as you are amused, we have served our purpose.
how the murder of Khasoggi is garnering so much attention and outrage, compared to all the horrible stuff Saudi Arabia has done and continues to do (with American weaponry and full support) in Yemen.
This makes a sort of sense. Wars are difficult to understand, civil wars especially. There's not a lot of clear reporting from Yemen and both sides are doing horrible things to each other all the time. Khashoggi is simple and vivid and horrific - a journalist walked into his country's consulate and they murdered him and took him to bits, if he was lucky in that order. It's just a better story. Same reason that we gave so much more attention to the Kavanaugh confirmation than to the latest round of tariffs against China, even though the tariffs are a far more important story that will affect far more people.
I like an imaginary friend that knows his place.
I think the Supreme Court is objectively more important and will affect more people than tariffs.
Echoing Charlie, we tend to criticize what we know about, and what we're invested in. We don't criticize CNN, or FoxNews, because we don't watch them. We criticize NPR because we listen to it, and sometimes contribute to it.
Warren got some votes and some contributions from this crowd also.
18: it was mostly just a pretty dumb joke, along the lines of "uh-oh, if we start being realistic about the moral harm of things we're usually flippant about, well, that way lies madness."
27: The extended consequences of the Kavanaugh confirmation, maybe; but by the same logic the tariffs may drive a spiraling trade war that destroys the whole world economy.
It's basically an ingroup/outgroup thing, no? We critique and debate more to the extent we perceive those being critiqued as part of "us", i.e., subject to social pressure, capable of being influenced.
The tariffs also are a departure for Republicans. They've been pushing shitty judges for decades, but not protectionism.
But, the Supreme Court is cutting away at voting rights protections. That's going to have a huge influence on who runs the country and sets trade policy.
31: Otherwise known as the narcissism of small differences.
29: Thanks for the explanation, heebie. I'm slightly less perplexed.
My criticism of NPR is that it makes liberals complacent. If your primary media source is CNN or USA Today, chances are you are already complacent.
By extension, 32 to 33. Republicans have been becoming increasingly shitty since Nixon, but they have hitherto been doing so while maintaining in foreign policy the central elements of the 1945 settlement; even GWB in 8 years did nothing like the damage Trump has done in 2.
On the Supreme Court decision: maybe the lawyers here can inform my ignorant ass, but what is there to say? It's disgusting. It clearly further disenfranchises a historically disenfranchised group. It goes against the tradition of not changing the rules right before an election. Is there anything that can be said in defense of it? It is there anything that can be done before the Democrats regain the Senate and/or Presidency? Without any of those, there's nothing to talk about. We'd just be concurring.
37: Damage to the world order, that is. Trump hasn't actually destroyed any states yet.
37: They can only be shitty to the extent that they can maintain office.
40: True. This argument is really futile. Which of these things really matters more will only be determinable in the future, maybe after we're all dead. My point is that US politics has worldwide ramifications of which US discourse often seems neglectful.
38: This awful disenfranchisement of Native Americans in ND could cost Dems the Senate but is galvanizing Native American voters so dramatically that the GOP scheme could backfire.
https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1052007037482295296
I think that's our only hope.
41: It's too late to fix the worst of that. I think maybe Trump winning the primary would have been enough to start the collapse of the post war order.
Any recommendations on who to throw money at?
If you rolled one of those Yap Islander jobs in the right place you could wipe out a whole caucus.
The House candidates appear to be rolling in money, so I'm using the last tranche of my election contributions on state house candidates. Redistricting 2021!
20 That did it, you reprobates finally convinced me to download Pokemon Go on my phone just to see if anyone is playing it here in Arrakis.
I might hit level 40 before Halloween.
I think Kavanaugh is worse than the tariffs, but it's debatable. The tariffs are easier to reverse.
The tariffs are easier to reverse
What about the long-term erosion of economic stability? I'd like to reverse that too.
42: A fundraiser for "North Dakota Native Vote" (which I hope is a real organization), to send out info and get people set up with address documentation, had a $100k goal and is now at $330k a day later. I hope that helps.
In the interest of reducing my ignorance, if Native American tribes are "sovereign states" (as people in the linked Twitter thread state), why do their citizens get to vote in federal or state elections at all? Why does the Supreme Court have jurisdiction over them at all (thinking of the adoption thing that came up in the Ancestry thread)? Is all of this an outgrowth of treaties signed with the tribes a hundred-plus years ago, or what? Or is it a giant hodge-podge of ad hoc court rulings over the decades?
Not trolling here; there must some interesting references that would explain it all. Right?
The English were more commonly referred to as the thosaung kala, the 'sheep-wearing kala', a reference to their woollen clothes and hats.
If they are sovereign in the way you seem to be using the word, they should be able to make their own treaties with foreign governments.
That's so I can say without actually learning something.
That'll do marketing people. That'll do.
53: my understanding was that it was kinda both.
53: because they're also all U.S. citizens. It's complicated, but I don't think that part of it is complicated, is it? It's not the same as dual citizenship, but U.S. citizenship isn't inherently exclusive.
That should have been: http://blog.nativepartnership.org/what-is-tribal-sovereignty/
53 It's a complicated patchwork of stops and starts, backs and forths, ups and downs. At 30,000 feet, the current legal answer is that they are domestic dependent nations (that's from Chief Justice Marshall) over which Congress has plenary power. The US stopped making treaties that required Senate ratification a few years after the Civil War, and just legislated. Natives were given citizenship in the 1920s.
Tribes retain whatever sovereignty that Congress has not explicitly taken from them.
I know I've quoted before from Cherokee Nation v. Georgia:
The bill set forth the complainants to be
"the Cherokee Nation of Indians, a foreign state, not owing allegiance to the United States, nor to any State of this union, nor to any prince, potentate or State, other than their own."
"That, from time immemorial, the Cherokee Nation have composed a sovereign and independent State, and in this character have been repeatedly recognized, and still stand recognized by the United States, in the various treaties subsisting between their nation and the United States."
That the Cherokees were the occupants and owners of the territory in which they now reside before the first approach of the white men of Europe to the western continent, "deriving their title from the Great Spirit, who is the common father of the human family, and to whom the whole earth belongs." Composing the Cherokee Nation, they and their ancestors have been and are the sole and exclusive masters of this territory, governed by their own laws, usages, and customs.
The bill states the grant, by a charter in 1732, of the country on this continent lying between the Savannah and Alatahama rivers, by George the Second, "monarch of several islands on the eastern coast of the Atlantic," the same country being then in the ownership of several distinct, sovereign, and independent nations of Indians, and amongst them the Cherokee Nation.
The foundation of this charter, the bill states, is asserted to be the right of discovery to the territory granted; a ship manned by the subjects of the king having,
"about two centuries and a half before, sailed along the coast of the western hemisphere, from the fifty-sixth to the thirty-eighth degree of north latitude, and looked upon the face of that coast without even landing on any part of it."
This right, as affecting the right of the Indian nation, the bill denies, and asserts that the whole length to which the right of discovery is claimed to extend among European nations is to give to the first discoverer the prior and exclusive right to purchase these lands from the Indian proprietors, against all other European sovereigns, to which principle the Indians have never assented, and which they deny to be a principle of the natural law of nations or obligatory on them.
The US Supreme Court determined that the Cherokee Nation was not a foreign state as those words are used in Article III.
65: How does that compare with other US territories (Guam, Samoa, Virgins etc.)?
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We have a couple of big letters on the mountains just east of town: a big M looms above the University, and a big L, for Loyola high school, on the mountain just across the river. Some enterprising group installed, last night, IAR after the L, in honor of the President's visit later today.
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BTW, not wishing to open up the Warren thing again but I will not that the Eastern Band of Cherokees put out a quite different statement than the Cherokee Nation. (It looks like they are much smaller and less influential.)
"Senator Elizabeth Warren does not claim to be a citizen of any tribal nation, and she is not a citizen of the Eastern Band," he said. "Like many other Americans, she has a family story of Cherokee and Delaware ancestry and evidence of Native ancestry."
Sneed went on to say that Warren "has not used her family story or evidence of Native ancestry to gain employment or other advantage" and that "on the contrary, she demonstrates respect for tribal sovereignty."
Not for heebie, or the teacher, or the classmates, or anyone in Texas, but for me. And that is enough.
Boy was it a rough conference. The teacher basically talked at me for 75 minutes. At times she said really horrific things like, "We had to transfer a student out of the class after Pokey was so mean to her," at which I almost started crying, and she walked the claim back a bit. (Then she also revisited that particular anecdote throughout the hour, and the sum total is that they were already planning on transferring the girl out of the class because Pokey's class has all the GT kids, and a different class had a lot of kids needing interventions, which she did, and Pokey was in fact cruel to her on the day of her transfer, and got chewed out for it, but it was a one-time-thing, not a pattern of bullying.)
Other times she said, "He's really a different kid from the beginning of the year. He's a work in progress," which sounds like a win to me.
She did also say that in 19 years of teaching, she's never had a kid be as relentlessly rude as he is. No filter whatsoever. Mostly it's backtalk: you can't make me/I don't have to/that's not how I do it/etc, and not personal attacks on other kids. But it is still an overwhelming amount of backtalk.
The other thing that she talked about a lot was his constant obsessive rushing. I don't know what to make of this at all, except that I know exactly what he's talking about. He lives life like he's on a segue, leaning forward as far as possible to go as fast as possible. He's always in a panic to get to the next thing as quick as possible, to get through it as fast as possible, and move on. If anything it reminds me of some of the Parkinson's patients in Awakenings that had acceleration problems.
This teacher does not seem very empathetic or even collaborative.
That sounds really rough, Heebie.
Re: the Khashoggi thing, I know that anything Grump days is self-serving dishonest bullshit, but am I correct in thinking that the rogue actors theory isn't even remotely plausible? Like, even without the connections between MBS and the 15 men, there's no plausible story in which K shows up to the consulate and is murdered inside that doesn't include MBS, right?
She's certainly a little hard to track in conversation - she says things that seem to contradict each other, and then when you try to clarify, offers up a third thing that seems totally distinct from the first two. And she's pretty frustrated with him, but then again, he's very frustrating and she's the one logging the hours with 16 second graders, so god bless her.
70: I'm sorry. Sounds like my son--both the lack of filter and the rushing around. After a few conferences of that nature, and a move to a special needs private school, he was diagnosed with ADHD and responded very well to medication. He's back in public high school now and doing fine.
If you haven't yet, I strongly recommend you look into that possibility. Amphetamine dependency isn't great but for some kids it beats the alternatives.
god bless her
Not to be confused with "bless her heart."
My dad says that he tried amphetamines in college and they made him jumpy and unable to study. I think the moral of the story is that they only work if you have ADHD or at least that should get them from an actual medical person with training.
Or just call them "greenies." Then they help you hit home runs.
Anyway, I don't like stimulants, even the ones that are cold medicine. I prefer to be high on life and just slightly drunk in the evenings.
I guess my recommendation is to buy the teacher hey favorite booze, because getting a second grader drunk is bad.
69: Yeah, as ttaM pointed out in the other thread, there's a huge range of Native opinion (both between tribes and among their individual members) on basically everything so it's difficult to generalize. Part of the reason the Warren thing developed the way it did is that the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma happens to care a lot about this particular issue for idiosyncratic historical reasons.
am I correct in thinking that the rogue actors theory isn't even remotely plausible?
Its roughly as plausible as saying, "sure, Christine Ford may remember been attacked, but she is clearly mistaken about who her attacker was."
And that story worked. Why wouldn't they try something like that again?
80: Do those reasons boil down to "white people in Oklahoma are greedy for Cherokee property?"
82: No, I think it's largely a mix of "white people make spurious claims of Cherokee ancestry a lot for some reason" and "black people whose ancestors were enslaved by Cherokees want to be Cherokees."
The FBI has interviewed Christine Ford now, but only regarding her knowledge of the death of Khashoggi.
"I believe Czechoslovakia was invaded and seized by somebody, but Herr Masaryk must be mistaken about who was responsible."
I can't recall whether I participated in dismembering Mr. Khashoggi or not. I was pretty drunk at the time.
Sounds like my son--both the lack of filter and the rushing around. After a few conferences of that nature, and a move to a special needs private school, he was diagnosed with ADHD and responded very well to medication.
Holy moly, I just took some of those Does Your Kid Have ADD/ADHD quizzes, and they all follow the exact same pattern. For the first half of it, it's never, never, never, and then abruptly it switches, and the second half is exactly Pokey to a T. Hmmm.
(Honestly I'm not recalling what the acronym stands for right now. I don't intend any actual implications from that joke. Hope there aren't any, but if there are, I don't mean them.)
It's kind of weird that we've had major behavioral problems since he was 3, he's been in and out of therapy and done the rigorous testing, and now is meeting with the counselor, and no one has mentioned ADHD as a possibility. I could explain it away by saying that the counselors/testing tend to be 1 on 1 situations in which he's fully engaged, but still.
(A better person would have done a quick search, but I didn't. Because the joke comes first. Jesus, what if Moby beat me to it?)
Perhaps one day Pokey can turn his hyperactivity into a career of music and stage antics. He'd be AD⚡HD.
So, also someone put a big peach next to the M. It's gone, but now there's an I on one side and a P E A on the other, and I can't tell if they're still writing or what. Oh, wait, a C is starting to appear.
I have been pretty sure I have ADD for a while, but going through this quiz was excruciating. I didn't even bother scoring it because I felt the point was more or less taken.
I should see if the science behind it has gotten better over time. The fact that there are all these known comorbidities makes me think the diagnostic categories are not very precise. I do clearly respond pretty well to (legal) stimulants.
re: 90
That all sounds stressful.
xelA used to have fairly whopping tantrums when he was younger, largely only with us, but he properly flipped out a couple of times at nursery -- flipping furniture around like a tiny Hulk, etc. -- and they started having very stern conversations with us about behaviour, and talking about getting professionals involved.
There seems to be wild variance in how good teachers are at controlling genuinely challenging behaviour, and how good schools are at providing the right kind of additional help.
xelA has a kid in his class with Down Syndrome, and his school have been fantastic about dealing with it. She has additional helpers, and they seem to have done a good job on making the other kids accept her presence. Not because she has Downs syndrome -- I think 5 year olds are generally cool about "difference" if adults aren't setting a bad example -- but because she's also really quite badly behaved, and can be aggressive with other kids. xelA had to go to hospital after one event, and he regularly comes home with stories about her. The kids all just seem to accept her kicking off as a fact of life.
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Additional kid story.
xelA is, by 5 year old standards, a total lady killer. He's had one girlfriend since he was 2, and when he started school he quickly acquired another. He talks about X as his girlfriend, and Y as his 'school girlfriend'. The one he's had the longest, they had this genuinely super intense relationship for a long time, "Me and [name redacted], we begin together, Daddy.", where he'd mope about and complain if he thought she was cooling on him. He'd always want bedtime stories where he rescued her in some way, and then they got married.
Then, I was at a party with him a few weeks ago, and one of the mums came up to me to tell me she'd heard another girl telling someone she was going to marry xelA.
When I asked him about it (teasing him), he said that she wasn't his girlfriend, she was just a (and I quote), "a hugging fool".
"What's that?"
"It means she's one of the girls at school who always wants to hug me."
Then, this week, Mrs ttaM was going through his coat pockets and found a note from a different girl in his pockets, "You are my boyfriend."
"Oh, that's from Z, and it's NOT TRUE!"
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89: If the day ever comes where you need to apologize for a joke like that, it should be shut down.
99: I think that qualifies as being a total lady killer by the standards of any age group.
He lives life like he's on a segue, leaning forward as far as possible to go as fast as possible. He's always in a panic to get to the next thing as quick as possible, to get through it as fast as possible, and move on.
ADDing to the chorus... This fits someone I live with to a T. Long-standing diagnosis of ADHD. Meds definitely help. (Like, the other day he ran back into the house, "I forgot to take my meds." Apparently I may have said out loud and not just inside my brain: "Yeah, I can tell.")
I was actually recently prescribed ADHD medication. I've been taking it for about 6 weeks or so.
It mainly is related to work. I don't feel the need for it around the house or in social situations so much. My job involves lots of organization and juggling lots of different things at once. This has never been my forte and over the past 6 months or so it became even more of a problem than it used to be. I considered the possibility that it was a return of depression (I had been on anti-depressants for about two years in my 20s), or a garden-variety whole bunch of bad days in a row (work was much, much busier than usual around let's say September, and politics was depressing lately too, of course), but a doctor thought it was worth treating as ADHD, so I took her word for it.
Both Cassandane and my parents seemed surprised that I thought it was necessary. I'm not sure whether I can/should say "I have been diagnosed with ADHD". I respond to the medication, but a stimulant's a stimulant, right? It hasn't been a cure-all for my issues but it seems to help.
90: Part of it may be that ADHD is not a valid diagnosis before some arbitrary age (8? something around there).
Oh wow. That would explain that.
I'm really blown away by the possibility that this might actually have a common solution. It seemed so intractable.
His teacher promised us all a pizza party if we steered you toward Ritalin.
His teacher promised us all a pizza party if we steered you toward Ritalin.
His teacherNovartis Pharmaceuticals promised us all a pizza party if we steered you toward Ritalin.
96: The fact that there are all these known comorbidities makes me think the diagnostic categories are not very precise.
As I remember the science from years ago when my son was diagnosed, a large part of the problem is that there are a bunch of objective brain measurements that are quite good at the group level but not very helpful at diagnosing individuals.
At the risk of violating the analogy ban, the way I understand it is like trying to diagnose gender by measuring height. If you have the average height of a group of 50 men and a group of 50 women, you can tell which group is which with a high degree of precision (barring exceptional circumstances like the women all being chosen from players in the WNBA). But just knowing that someone is 5'8" isn't very precise if you are trying to determine what gender they are from that information alone.
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Whoa! Our weird three-way gubernatorial race just became a much more winnable two-way.
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Incidentally, this link seems to give the comprehensive rundown of Elizabeth Warren's genealogy. By comprehensive, I mean way tf into the weeds.
