Wait. What is "syrup" a metaphor of?
I'm a man, so I have leadership but don't like children. That explains so much.
Argh. I'm having flashbacks to the mid-2000s here, back when arguing about things on the internet seemed to have some point.
Waffles? Waffles?
I feel like it's a bad thing if I'm the only one who comments on this thread about how women are encouraged not to interrupt men. Still, it's worth noting that it is true that I don't like to be connected when making a presentation, but making efforts not to fuck up seems like a better way to deal with it than pouting enough that women find it easier to ignore errors I make.
4 means I can now say whatever I want without being part of the problem.
that I don't like to be connected when making a presentation
This is a trap, right?
There's obvious validity to the premise that men, especially older men, are irredeemable assholes who must be either murdered or managed.
I think a big chunk of the problem is that it's #notallmen. Just a sizable portion of them. Which leaves women in a weird double-bind of (a) having to size up every man who they need to work to figure out if he's one of the ones who's going to knife you if you're not pleasingly deferential, and then (b) having all the men who don't have psycho gendered expectations of deferential behavior wondering what's wrong with you for being all femininely self-effacing.
I mean, you blunder through and everything works out somehow, but it sure is irritating.
Also, even leaving aside breakfast foods, women's professional clothing is weirdly hemmed in a narrow corridor between too sexualized and not sexualized enough. It's not like the guy complaining about short skirts is giving women the option of trousers (mostly) or floor-length business suits. No, he's got to see calves, but not knees or higher.
It occurs to me that one of the advantages to teaching is that it forces me to go against my natural introverted tendencies and actually interact with people, which in turn reminds me that actually most people aren't horrible.
If I only knew about people from reading stuff on the internet (present eclectic web magazine and its denizens excepted, of course), I would probably turn into a terminal misanthrope.
Wait pancakes soak up syrup really well in my experience.
9 Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
12: In a shamefully uncontrolled fashion! Without tiny squares!
But waffles don't. The hide of a waffle is tough and impenetrable compared to that of a pancake. Waffles _hold_ syrup well because of their shape but they don't really soak it up; it just sits there in the wee square holes. If you invert the waffle the syrup drains away.
That's why you should never eat waffles on a roller coaster that does loops.
An option sadly closed to my nation since 1982.
Famously, we left them on the Falklands.
Someone left my cake out in the rain.
I like my men like I like my waffles; hot, Belgian, and a little fruity.
I like my women like I like my pancakes; flat, absorbent, and $3 at Denny's.
Say more?
Just yesterday I realized one of the things I missed from living here is frozen waffles, so this thread is pretty painful for me.
23: That's a really strong indictment of America.
24: This is one of those US/UK things like elk/moose/wapiti. UK flapjacks are some kind of bizarre granola bar thing, and you wouldn't put syrup on them I don't think.
I wouldn't put anything on a moose if the moose was alive.
My fatal flaw is an inability to detect feigned ignorance. I will answer pretty much any question I know the answer to as if it was asked in good faith. I do recognize that this must be super irritating.
I take that tack when someone is being aggressively sarcastic to move conversation along.
It seems to me a waffle brain would be good at accumulating discrete pieces of information, but would have no ability to see the bigger picture. To lead the organization, you would need pancakes brains with their ability to integrate all the separate pieces of information into a coherent round whole.
I'm on ex-pat Facebook groups, and people are always complaining how they can't get completely disgusting processed food, like Apple Jacks or something. It's never something unembarrassing, like "pulled pork sandwiches" or "fajitas". It's always some crappy name-brand product. For me it's frozen waffles, apparently. If I were a real American, I would miss a specific brand, like Eggos. Now I miss Eggos.
I have a waffle maker, but making waffles that way has multiple steps so I never do it. Frozen waffles have one step.
At my local farmers market, a stand sells hand held Belgian waffles that you can put various toppings on. There's no pancake equivalent that I've seen.
I'm not sure what this implies about men's and women's brains, though.
34: When I was an American kid in Israel, it seemed like the food other Americans missed the most was fast food. But those dark days are over -- in the mall near my mom's apartment, there's a McDonalds and a Burger King!
The food I missed was peanut butter - there was peanut butter in Israel, but it was the weird health food kind of peanut butter with the oil separated and no sugar. Of course that's the kind of peanut butter I eat all the time now.
You know what I love so goddamn much? The stroop waffles that you get on United flights and possibly grocery stores.
You can get camping versions at REI.
Camping waffles are the worst. On and on and on when all you want is some quiet.
Yesterday a man tried to rob a bank and made a thread to attack local schools so that the police would be otherwise occupied while he robbed the bank. But, men are waffles, so he missed the big picture. He didn't even get to try to rob a bank because it turns out that if you threaten to attack schools, you shouldn't deliver those threats in person and, failing that, shouldn't let people see what your car looks like.
The waffle knows many things but the pancake knows one big thing.
As someone who prefers not to soak his waffles but instead lightly touch each forkfull to a pool of syrup I find this metaphor surprisingly accurate.
Also I sometimes take a swig directly from the bottle.
41: Good one. Maybe it should have been from Sir Isaiah Breakfast.
A woman needs a man like a pancake needs a waffle.
An unexpected benefit of ex-pattery in the UK for me is the general disinterest in breakfast foods in the category of grilled doughy cakes meant to be piled with/drowned in sweet shit. I always feel like a killjoy when I'm around other Americans who invariably treat pancakes as cause for excitement and it's all I can do to stifle retching sounds. A good English fry-up is the right kind of breakfast for adults. They even fry the toast!
I do miss peanut butter though.
I think interrupting people is the only part of masculinity that brings me any joy, and so I'm sad to give it up. It's like the old Colbert Report joke about race "I don't see gender. People tell me I'm a man, and I believe them because I interrupt people too much."
Piling on the article in the OP would be superfluous, but in that article I found a link to this, which I liked. It vindicates my prejudices.
When it comes to accuracy, if you put a horoscope on one end and a heart monitor on the other, the MBTI falls about halfway in between. Now, if you're an MBTI fan, you might say it's typical of an INTJ to turn to science. Touche. But regardless of your type, it's hard to argue with the idea that if we're going to divide people into categories, those categories ought to be meaningful. In social science, we use four standards: are the categories reliable, valid, independent, and comprehensive? For the MBTI, the evidence says not very, no, no, and not really.
I have/had some family who were into the MBTI in a big way. I haven't heard so much about it lately, mostly because the worst of them is retired or semiretired and in another country, but if I do, I'll try to remember to show them that.
Meanwhile I can't even engage with the actual thread topic because ffs but I'm going to pretend to by wondering aloud if it's a cultural thing here or if I just work with assholes that every time I go to a departmental talk or seminar or whatever, the speaker is invariably derailed by extensive interruptions (from faculty), mostly questions that would be answered anyway if people would stfu. And yet every time I lecture for students here I could break into scat singing and nobody would cut in to ask me to repeat myself or attempt a polite mental health check.
Interrupting is a very very very complicated topic, I say as someone who both interrupts constantly and expects to be interrupted in a harmoniously sensitive manner if I'm talking to someone who talks the same way I do.
Can I do my favorite MB rant?
Of all the MB traits, only one pair actually constitutes a dimension, in that if you are more of one, you must be less of the other. That's Introversion-Extroversion, which not coincidentally is and actually psychometrically validated Big Five trait.
The rest of them are not actually opposed to each other, and are not dimensions. They have only been artificially set up that way. If I said, "do you like pizza or ice cream?" I would not have magically wished into being a pizza vs ice cream dimensional trait. Even though you can express a preference for one another, degree of liking pizza and degree of liking ice cream are probably somewhat positively correlated. Similarly, people who feel more are not necessarily less analytical, and people who feel less not necessarily more so. If I had the predict the shape of that relationship I'd guess it's more like inverted U, with both very low and and very high levels of emotionality being associated with being less logical and analytical.
Also, if you're going to pick one of those recreational divide people up systems, Enneagram 4 Eva. Seriously the Enneagram descriptions are so psychodynamically rich and describe real developmental and personality processes I have seen in myself and others, compared to MBTI just creating a bunch of static bins to put people in.
Right, but how do you feel about engineering magazines?
Yeah
I feel vaguely like there's something to the intuition-sensation axis, but I could easily be convinced otherwise.
41 is awesome. From this, you derive that men are foxes and women are hedgehogs, and suddenly Jordan Peterson's lobsters look pretty subtle and nuanced.
The N/S axis is so broken. Anyone smart comes out as an N, regardless of how they actually reflect the supposed N/S traits.
At work I have definitely felt like the hedgehog sitting quietly amid a crowd of oblivious barking foxes, but my big idea is usually just "this meeting is pointless."
Is there a personality type for a person that can't answer questions for personality quizzes? I always want to answer, "sort of", or "it depends" or "what?"
The terrier knows many loud things; the porcupine many sharp ones.
59: the way I put it is, I don't like personality tests, because I'm worried about failing them.
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O Canada! Please explain your election, while we pour your syrup on our pancakes and/or waffles.
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Or while the Americans do. I prefer cane syrup, myself.
62: I woke up yesterday to find 12 middle-of-the-night texts from Newt, which had me hyperventilating with worry until I read them. He's in college in Canada, and needed to share his thoughts on how the election turned out at 1am.
the way I put it is, I don't like personality tests, because I'm worried about failing them.
The way I put it is that likert scale answers are bullshit.
Any time I've done enneagram or MB, I'm in the middle of everything. No distinctive traits of any kind.
65: He's 6'3" and working on an engineering degree. When I showed up here I was telling stories about how he couldn't pronounce the initial 's' in 'snuggle'.
iNtelligent/Stupid
I laughed.
64: So what did he have to say about the election in Canada? Mossy is curious.
So bad that NDP lost about half their seats and conservatives actually won a plurality of votes
Thankfully, it's a minority lib government
In other news, Quebec separatism is back on the menu
And the greens got a very respectable chunk of the national popular vote
They really need ranked choice up in this country
And they'd have ndp governments for days
Or proper progressive coalitions which govern with the equal consent of the centre and far left
3 seats for greens, not 4 (so they added one unexpected one, and had a couple close races)
1 notable independent (who was kicked out of libs earlier this year)
Otherwise the Bloc came back unexpectedly and is mostly responsible for the loss of NDP seats, i.e. in quebec.
Conservatives pretty much swept the prairies with a mix of populist/redneck sentiment at oil economy stuff that doesn't entirely make sense.
liberal minority decided today to go it alone rather than form a coalition, so they have interesting times ahead.
the "alt-right" candidate who formed a new party because the conservatives weren't alt-right enough, lost everywhere and lost his own seat in parliament. Overall
oops forgot abut the bracket problem:
... Overall less than 2% popular vote so i guess US style populism and anti-immigrant sentiment hasn't found a home there yet.
Canada not nearly as benighted as the US electorally, but FPTP is clearly a problem there too.
LIB: 33% of popular vote, 46% of seats
CON: 34% / 56%
NDP: 16% / 7%
BQ: 8% / 9%
GRN: 7% / 1%
Oops. CON 36% of seats that should have been, of course.
87: How did the Libs do it? Is there gerrymandering in Canada?
89: I assume they are more likely than the Conservatives district by district to reap the benefits of divided opposition.
Did Newt write some kind of messaging app integration for Unfogged commenting? Nice work. (And thanks for the Canada updates.)
No, I cut and pasted his text messages from the other night. I have no respect for my children's privacy.
89: gerrymandering doesn't really happen in Canada, at least not the way it does in the US. There is automatic re-districting, and an indepenedent commission to review them.
Con's tend to have very high vote rates in "safe" con seats, so far more than needed to win.
Libs tend to do well through strategic voting in contentious seats. There isn't really a split on the right so that doesn't happen (although PPC tried to create one, without much impact).
So arguments about "but the cons got more popular vote" aren't really useful, because if it really were down to that, they almost certainly wouldn't have.
further to 93: in the safe lib seats, left leaning people will vote green or ndp on issues thinking it "sends a message".
The Conservatives won
47 out of 48 seats in Alberta and Saskatchewan
24 out of 56 seats in British Columbia and Manitoba
50 of the 234 seats in Ontario, Quebec, and the rest
It looks like the FPTP edge for the Liberals (where strategic voting per 93 is a strength) is especially prominent in Ontario, where Liberals won 41% of the votes but 65% of the seats - and that province elects over a third of all the seats in the country.
I imagine similar to if we had a stronger Green party and a strengthened separate Berniecrat party, the rump Democrats would still be very competitive in most places precisely because of that split opposition.
96: a little perhaps relevant (boring) history, the current conservative party (CPC) is a recently formed one (2003) made via what can be looked at as a merger of right-wing parties with effectively the Reform party in the drivers seat. Reform was a Western populist movement, so not surprising they still do well in Alberta & Saskatchewan. T
i finally perfected a solidly reproducible recipe for hippie pancakes just in time for the step-grandchild to start exploring solid foods, so feeling pretty damn smug about that. waffles - also great, but the irons make a mess and tend to smoke even if we use ghee so given the underwhelming/inadequate ventilation in the new flat and my frustratingly tetchy lungs they just aren't deployed too frequently.
i am v surprised to hear uk is a pb-less wasteland, thought they even sold it pre-mixed with marmite over there? once again, the breakfast of champions: adequately toasted bread,* peanut butter, marmite, kim chee. strong black tea. mmmmmmmmmmm ........
*give it some char, folks!
I'm very wary of this new emphasis on the "popular vote" in a Canadian context. The Canadian Cons are using an American/Americanized understanding of the "popular vote" (which totally makes sense in the American system/context, of course, where there are basically only two parties in play, and where voters sort of/almost directly vote for the president, in a way that Canadians do NOT do for the Prime Minister...) in an attempt to de-legitimize the Liberals' right to attempt to form a government in a multiparty, parliamentary system.
"We won the popular vote!" is an attempt by Scheer and the Cons to suggest/insinuate that they actually got more than 50 percent of the votes nationally, but are being prevented from forming a government thanks to the evil machinations of some sort of liberal-left coalition. Which is total nonsense, but which is now being repeated and recycled by our lazy Canadian media...
"i am v surprised to hear uk is a pb-less wasteland"
It isn't! The UK is well supplied with peanut butter.
Israel, according to 36, a bit less so.
A colleague in Canada once told me, in an attempt to explain a strange arrangement between different campuses if the same university, "contradictions can last longer in Canada." That said, what is the point of three left-of-center parties? Why does NDP even exist at this point? I don't understand at all how anyone would decide between three similar alternatives.
101: I'm one of those weirdos who actually sort of likes UK foodstuffs. Beans on toast; a cheddar and spring onion sandwich; mincemeat pies at Christmas...
But UK peanut butter? No. Sorry, but just no. The Americans just do this one so much better. (UK peanut butter is too weak and grainy, imo).
100: It's not a critique of our presidential voting system, but of all first-past-the-post systems. It would be a problem independently in the U.S. House of Representatives if it weren't masked by gerrymandering - you can see it more purely in California, where we don't have gerrymandering anymore, and where Democrats won 66% of the vote for Congress but 87% of the seats. And similarly in the UK, where the Tories in 2017 won 42% of the votes but 49% of the seats.
First-past-the-post inherently pushes down minority views that can't fight their way to plurality status. If Canada had PR or RCV, the same vote distribution could have created a Liberal-NDP-Green coalition government, since the Conservatives would have been hard pressed to join their 34% with any other coalition partner of any size.
Wanting to reflect overall population preferences, and not squash them down via chopping up into districts, is not motivated reasoning but principled reasoning that most countries use.
Peanut butter options in both the UK and Germany are much much better than they were 15 years ago. The containers are weirdly small, and they're not as good as US peanut butter, but they're basically fine, and basically available in even smallish grocery stores. The weird thing in Germany though is that the labelling is weirdly plastered in American flags and whatnot.
I don't know about in Germany, but here when the put an American flag on a food product, they mean they have the freedom to use unnatural fillers and extra animal by-products.
105: It has come to be a Conservative party position that coalition governments are "illegitimate" and, before the election, their leader was pushing for the (inaccurate) view that the party with the most seats should get to form government.
So, unfortunately any complaints about popular vote raised by the Conservatives would likely be motivated reasoning. Although realistically I haven't heard too many complaints of FPTP by them (quite possibly because it helps them more than it hurts).
105: Totally agree with your points as they apply to any FPTP system. What I'm saying, though, is that the Canadian Cons are using a specifically American complaint about the popular vote versus the electoral college vote in a very different (Canadian, Brit-derived, parliamentary) system in an attempt to de-legitimize a left-liberal electoral result.
I think somebody needs to tell me how the Canadian parties relate to the Canadian Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve, because that would be on topic.
Did not mean to call myself any sort of PM in the previous comment: sorry!
Yes, I agree winning 34% of the vote as opposed to 33% counts for very little. It's like the FPTP mentality taken to a deliberately absurd extreme.
110: Sorry, Mobes, but that's top-secret information; and as a Canadian, I am of course sworn to absolute secrecy as to the who/what/where/when/how of our maple syrup reserves...
I even attempted to hide my unfogged handle, so delicate and high-stakes is this maple syrup situation...well, okay it was just me, and I only inadvertently posted without my usual handle...
I am hippie horrified by the news that there are bad peanut butters. You roast some peanuts, maybe you salt them, and then you grind them up. How can you make it *weak*? You may or may not sugar it in the jar, but do you actually have bad peanuts, or what?
112: The Cons winning 34%, when 33% voted Liberal, 16% voted NDP, and 7% voted Green (when 56% voted NOT Conservative, or against the Conservatives) is not exactly a resounding victory. They're trying to spin it as a Con victory, using an American (two-party) model, in a highly misleading manner.
(I've left out the Bloc in my calculations, because Quebec really is a bit different, and not representative of national, or other regional, trends).
102: In 36 I was talking about peanut butter in Israel in the 1970s. I'm pretty sure that there are many more kinds of peanut butter available now.
Maybe they got confused and added a bit of tahini and/or olive oil?
Thanks everyone such erudite reptiles you are. Now what does it all mean in terms of policy and the decline of western civilization and so forth. (Especially FTAs and defense please, because I don't live in Canada.)
118: All kinds of odd stuff being added to hummus in the U.S.
Late to the party, but I too have found the enneagram to be useful, and MB not at all so.
When I lived in Poland ages ago, I used to go to a fancy restaurant that served pancakes with a side of peanut butter as a special treat. These days I'm sure peanut butter is easier to find.
I think the British should call it "ground nut butter."
112: The Cons winning 34%, when 33% voted Liberal, 16% voted NDP, and 7% voted Green (when 56% voted NOT Conservative, or against the Conservatives) is not exactly a resounding victory. They're trying to spin it as a Con victory, using an American (two-party) model, in a highly misleading manner.
62.6% voted for Liberal/NDP/Green last time though.
Liberal and NDP went down from last time. The other four parties went up (including the hard right party that didn't exist last time).
So everyone won.
Further to 121, for the enneagram-curious, the work I've found most helpful has been by Riso and Hudson, including Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery, and The Wisdom of the Enneagram. As "woo" as it sounds, it was actually a helpful tool for me in therapy for a while. Typically they suggest you take a test with someone who knows you well, think about your reactions dating back to childhood, read the two or three most likely categories in the the results, and then you'll recognize your type (and subtype/wing). What makes it actually helpful is that the types have distinctive patterns and habitual ways that people grow and regress by type, and that's useful information for realistic self inventories and goal setting,
I feel like this is all far too earnest, but Ivr had these books for years.
I think I had it confused with Scientology.
Don't forget: The New York Times is on the other side.
I'm actually confused about what HRC did or did not say implying Tulsi Gabbard being a useful idiot.
35: I've seen this done with crepes, like so.
Which kind of person has crepes brains?
127: She said the Republicans will try to persuade Gabbard run as a third party candidate, and it got spun out (by poorly quoting different parts of the interview) like Clinton was backing some kind of conspiracy theory ("Russian asset-grooming") so they could do another "both sides."
HRC has basically been proved right about EVERYTHING since 2016. Just saying.
122: Moby has enlightened me, in the strangest way. Only reading his comment did I realise that the "ground" in ground nuts means "earth", as in "Ground Zero", as opposed to "minced" as in "ground beef". For as far back as I can remember, I have associated "ground nuts" with the gritty bits in chunky peanut butter.
This would be less strange if I don't know that peanuts are "earth nuts" in both Swedish and German.
I think it illustrates a strange rigidity in the translation faculty -- the way in which words in one language take only some of the possible meanings of their apparently literal equivalents in another. This is necessary, of course, to keep the chains of punning or figurative uses disentangled. Otherwise, Germans would make their hamburgers with earth beef.
But it does mean that when the association between jord or erde and "earth" has been made, it becomes much stronger than the association between "earth" and "ground".
Also, why does anyone believe you can't get proper peanut butter in the for-the-moment-still-UK? Isn't Whole Earth an American brand?
I know there is or used to be a British brand called SunPat, which was made of rape oil and the boiled bones of child labourers or something like that. But that was before the factory acts.
Real Foods in the UK do your oily Israeli type peanut butter by the huge tub. We went through it like an Abrams goes through kerosene when I was a kid largely due to my father's habit of eating it by the tablespoon (and not gaining weight).
133: It's like you don't remember the Groundnut Scheme.
In the post-imperial imaginary African-sourced foods are necessarily gritty.
Only reading his comment did I realise that the "ground" in ground nuts means "earth", as in "Ground Zero", as opposed to "minced" as in "ground beef".
Doesn't "ground" as in "minced" come from the fact that you're reducing something to dust, like back to earth?
Not that there wouldn't be two distinct versions of ground nuts. You could have whole peanuts, as well as ground hazelnuts, and we'd all know which is the unground ground nuts and which one is ground unground nuts.
51 seemed very weird until I figured out that MB was Myers Briggs and not Muslim Brotherhood.
If your ground beef is dusty you're doing it wrong.
Likewise if your dust is beefy.
Those gosh-darned cattle will keep wandering into the quarry when no-one's looking.
After reading for a few years, I just now noticed the time stamps on the blog are PDT. I never manage to comment at all synchronously anyway.
The one true peanut butter, the idos of the form, is Teddy's Super Chunky. It is all natural, and so of course it is "oily," which means that you have to stir it (a lot) to mix the oil (and the chunky peanut bits) back in. It is available in New England, but probably not Olde England. I don't know if other heathenish lands have it. Probably not, being heathenish and all.
The one true peanut butter, the idos of the form, is Black Cat. Only weird chemical-tasting American bastardizations are to be found here.
126: Here's the passage with HRC's remarks.
You know, I'm going to say that while it's certainly not clear that she *meant* Tulsi Gabbard was a witting collaborator, or even that she was someone who passed information to the Russians unwittingly, the combination of "grooming" and "asset" were lazily phrased (by a former SoS who should certainly be aware that "asset" is a term of art) and I can't see how the circled portions of the Tim Wu column are misrepresenting her remarks. I can't read the whole Wu op-ed. I guess it seems to me that maximum journalistic responsibility would be to email her and ask her to clarify before jumping into this endless "hot take" cycle, and if I were going to complain about something it would be that, not that he made a claim about something she never said.
124: I know! I love the bits about growth and regression. It's all 100% right about me. Honestly, I dither about what my deal is in therapy but in a very real sense I learned my deal when I figured out my Enneagram type when I was 15, and some of the details have been filled out, but the core outline is the same. Maybe I should bring the Enneagram stuff into my therapist; I don't think I've ever talked about it. Incidentally, my Enneagram type (4 with a 5 wing) matches well to a lot of things about what I do for work, and 4 with a 5 wing is precisely an emotional-and-analytical type.
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The Kemalist worldview presents contemporary Turkey much like its late Ottoman predecessor -- beset by predatory Great Powers intent on weakening it from within and without and ultimately partitioning it. This worldview has been inculcated in Turkish citizens through school, military service, and the media for over seven decades. It is very much hard-wired into Turkish memory.How true?
149: It's been a while since I read Kinross on Atatürk (I never managed Mango) and Kinzer on then-contemporary Turkey, and longer still since I've been there, but it sounds weird. More likely, the mainline Kemalist view is that Turks themselves are an unruly, barely disciplined lot, liable to fall back into superstition and obscurantism without stern adherence to secularism and republicanism, with the military as the last guardians of both.
I guess there are strands of conservative thought in many countries that a given country's rivals/neighbors would like nothing better than to weaken it and carve it up, probably with examples from history when they did just that. You can certainly see that line of thinking in Russia; Poland was in fact removed from the map by its neighbors for more than a century; weird bits of rightist Hungary are still bitter about Trianon; and so forth.
Part of what makes that quote weird is saying Kemalists equate the republic with the empire, which not even Palpatine could convince them to do is just very strange because the defining act of Atatürk was replacing empire and caliph with republic and secular president. Abolishing the fez, setting aside the veil, adopting the Latin alphabet, and on and on -- all of these actions are about breaking the link between the Ottoman past and the Turkish present and future.
150.3: But the foundation of the republic is tied up with the unification of Anatolia in defiance of the Treaty of Sèvres, and Ataturk's personal schtick is tied up with Gallipoli.
Doesn't "ground" as in "minced" come from the fact that you're reducing something to dust, like back to earth?
Just looked it up, and interestingly, "ground", n., meaning "earth", seems to only coincidentally resemble "ground", the participle of the verb "to grind". Wiktionary and OED both trace the verb to Old English grindan and the noun to grund, with different Proto-Germanic roots (OED: *ghrendh- and *ghrn̥tú-s respectively; Wiktionary ventures to go further back to PIE).
Quite possible they influenced each other along the way, though.
Belated Canadian election analysis from one of your Canadian lurkers:
The BQ won a lot of seats, but I don't think that means that Québec separatism is coming back in any real way. The PQ (the provincial separatist party) has been reduced to 3rd place and looks to be dying. The current provincial governing party (the CAQ) is nationalist, but not in a way that has any interest in a sovereignty referendum. By and large even quite nationalist Québecois are happy to pursue increased autonomy within the federation. Votes for the BQ are an expression of this, rather than of strong support for sovereignty.
Alberta and Saskatchewan voted Conservative in overwhelming numbers mostly because they always do, but in particular because everyone there hates the federal carbon tax with a passion. The Cons had promised to repeal it. (The official Con term for it is the "job killing carbon tax.")
Alberta and Saskatchewan have oil and gas economies. They're also (by far) the richest provinces, and have been for a while. Average wages in those provinces are waaay higher than anywhere else in the country. But because global oil market changes (and pipeline capacity issues) have cooled off the economy in the West so that the unemployment rate is now marginally higher than the national average, people in the West complain incessantly about how the rest of the county doesn't understand how hard it is for them.
Their complaint amounts to "it's not fair that in order to do our part to avert catastrophic climate change, we can only be slightly wealthier than everyone else, instead of way richer than everyone else."
I guess Alberta had an NDP premier for a term (a certain cartoonist's sister) primarily because the right-wing party there split for some reasons or other, and they've patched it up?
151: No disagreement with that.
The Texas article that the quote in 149 comes from gets at the contradictions for Turkey of cozying up to Russia. On the one hand, it's a means of thumbing their nose at the West (sort of a freebie/bonus for Erdogan, since his AKP is rooted in opposition to Kemalist secularism, and Atatürk is the great westernizer), but on the other Russian leaders can't quite kick the habit of yearning for Tsargrad.
But this -- "American policies, and the Turkish sensitivities and fears that they arouse, are the primary drivers." -- from a couple of paragraphs after the quote in 149 is not only a symptom of Potomac fever, it also contradicts the classical realist case that the author had just been laying out for Turkey's choices; namely, that Turkish leaders aspired to total independence, were suspicious of all other powers, and wanted maximal maneuvering room for themselves.
So the question is, how deeply rooted among Turks is that classic realist approach?
@154: exactly. There were 2 right-wing parties. The PCs won 11 straight majorities between 1971 and 2012. In that context, there could be a 'protest party' (Wildrose) for even further right-wing types to vote for, safe in the knowledge that no one to the left of the PCs could ever win.
Then the PCs elected a woman as leader, the PCs and Wildrose split the vote 28-24, and so the NDP managed to win a majority. It was a perfect storm, never to be repeated. Wildrose and the PCs immediately merged, and the new party won a huge majority earlier this year.
Re: decline of Western civ-- well, we're keeping the carbon tax, and may well make some more progress on climate stuff. We're still going to be building new pipelines, though, since the Liberals actually spent billions to buy one.
The anti-immigrant populist party didn't win a single seat, so that's nice. On the other hand, it was led by an elegant-looking French guy with an accent and a penchant for sharp suits, flashy pocket squares, and cuff-links. Not exactly the kind of person designed to appeal to the kind of person who wants to vote for an anti-immigrant party. A similar party might do quite well led by someone who came from central casting (and from Central Canada).
On trade deals, who knows. The government is always happy to sign them, but nothing they do will matter much until Trump leaves. We're too small to move the needle.
I know a couple of people who are now very anti-Canadian because of the pipelines, but they don't want war over it. Anyway, it's the state and national Republicans they should be blaming.
We're too small to move the needle.
10 new states would get 20 senators. Just sayin.
OT: On the opening sequence here, were they flying drones around or something? There's no way anybody flew a helicopter that low. Anyway, it's a very good view of the neighborhood. I don't know the bartender they interview because she's only there when I'm at work.
150.3: I mean, it isn't altogether unknown for a revolution to start off by distancing itself from every aspect of the empire it displaces, and later circle round to embrace quite a few of them. Look at Russia. Took only 20 years from killing the Tsar to making epic films about how awesome Imperial Russia was.
Wasn't that partial (entirely?) because the Tsar beat the Germans once or twice?
150.2. Certainly there are a lot of ethnic Hungarians in Romania (more specifically Transylvania), and there is also a lot of semi-forced Romanianization going on. All the towns have a Magyar name and a Romanian name, but if you ask a Romanian where a town is using its Magyar name, the typical answer is "there is no such town." Even if the town is majority-Hungarian.
There's a nice bit in "Paris, 1919" (about the post-WW1 treaty negotiations) where it is remarked that each small country's delegation invariably appeared with a map that showed their boundaries at the time, no matter how brief or how long ago, when they controlled the maximum of territory.
165: also because they realised that no one but a complete bellend is going to die for the triumph of Communism, but Holy Russia is a different matter...
165: also because they realised that no one but a complete bellend is going to die for the triumph of Communism, but Holy Russia is a different matter...
Western Canada was for a long time considered (by itself and the rest of Canada) to be pretty purely a resource extraction economy. Diversification has been slow and not very well planned, which politically wasn't helped by the number of "good jobs" with low entry requirements available in these sectors. Alberta is a particularly extreme version of this, because they have consistently failed to do any long term planning for the cyclic nature of oil (and similar economies) and done a sort of anti-Norway approach where instead of building up funds for infrastructure or value-add capacity they've basically thrown a party whenever the oil business is doing well. Then when the hangover comes they yell at the rest of the country and complain how nobody listens to their problems, etc.
Re: decline of civilization... I think a lot of Canadians consider the recent re-negotiation of NAFTA a pointless Trump vanity project. Lot's of noise but the eventual changes were very minor it seems, and it's not clear if US will ratify it anyway. That's probably reduced the appetite for more trade negotiations for a year or two. I suspect a lot of Canadians would like to diversify trading partners a bit (i.e. less coupled with US) but the US has pretty successfully driven a wedge between China and Canada (I suspect intentionally, for this reason), and the EU and Britain are distracted, so doubt much will happen there.
Militarily Canada is of course small these days. I don't thing most of the country is particularly proud of or happy with the outcomes from following USA into recent adventurism in the middle east, and some miss the days when UN peacekeeping was the thing to do and Canada punched above it's weight there. With the US seemingly undermining/abandoning it's role in international affairs and things getting stickier all over the place, I suspect a lot of Canadians would rather stay shut of as much as possible. There is a small but committed voice up there that thinks too much dependence on US strategically is a bad idea, and Canada needs to rebuild in some areas, but I can't see the economics of it being accepted readily unless forced.
Trudeau has too many issues at home to deal with now to have any serious stab at foreign diplomacy that isn't absolutely necessary (e.g. China). I suspect he'll be pretty quiet on the international front for a while - he also hasn't been to effective in that.
Most of the country thinks the US has collectively lost it's mind politically, and is waiting to see how that shakes out. There is a small cohort of Trump fans though, which is mostly confusing. Ontario is running a provincial level experiment with similar populism, but so fare that is going badly for the populists.
162: Not sure Texas could live with becoming the 8th or 10th largest state. They might have to secede.
8th or 10th approximate, I didn't actually work it out.
Most of the country thinks the US has collectively lost it's mind politically...
Same in this county.
I suspect a lot of Canadians would like to diversify trading partners a bit (i.e. less coupled with US) but the US has pretty successfully driven a wedge between China and Canada (I suspect intentionally, for this reason)
Is this going to be a wedge between British Columbia and the rest of Canada?
174 is an interesting issue but I dont' think so, at least not quickly. I think most Canadians fairly or otherwise blame the US for current China relations. BC has also had psychological difficulty in weaning itself from the resource extraction economy trap (fishing, forestry, mining) - but not as badly as Alberta. In some ways, it would make a very natural gateway to North America for a larger SE Asia trade. And you see overatures to this. There are two things in the way, really. US resistance exists but I don't know how deeply effective it is. Probably more of an issue is an identity crisis the province is working through. 5th generation central BC farmers & foresters look at it differently then 5th generation Vancouverites, and both of them differently than 1st gen Chinese and South Asian immigrants. The province as a whole is politically shattered (progressive coast, very conservative northern interior, conservative suburbs and lower/central interior). Overall people who live there feel taken for granted by the rest of the country to some degree, politically, but I suspect the economics of it all will eventually drive closer ties to Asia through pacific shipping. And more stupidy-bazillion dollar houses in Vancouver to go with.
re: Canada another factor is that Canada is undergoing an even more rapid demographic shift than the US, and more recent. Between 1996 and 2016 the percentage of visible minority population went from about 11% to 22%, doubling in 20 years. That rate seems to be continuing and nobody is really sure what will come of it, but it's clearly the source of some anti-immigrant and racist sentiment politically. That, along with "alt-right" type anti establishment stuff exists in Canada but doesn't seem to have much traction yet.
146: I believe that Teddy's might be available only in MA. I actually prefer the Trader Joe's or Smuckers Natural. Teddy's is dry roasted whereas I think the others use nuts roasted in oil. All very good though.
bringing the thread together: if you can find "fatso" peanut butter (sort-of) in Whole Foods, it's pretty good. And Canadian. Sort of part way between peanut-butter and other nut-butters.
171 I'm pretty sure TFA show me suggesting that giving Texas back to Mexico would be an improvement for both the US and Mexico.
Hey, maybe Putin can get Trump to back out of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo!
We'd need a wall on the northern border of Colorado.
That would be a very Trumpian way to solve a misstatement made in public, at any rate.
I actually prefer the Trader Joe's
This reminds me that TJ's has Cookie Butter, which is superior to all of your nut butters.
People have said that to me before, but I'm too afraid of their parking lot to try it.
Anyway, my one cousin (retired cop) just put up a Facebook post about how he's offended by Trump, who he voted for in 2016. I'm not saying he's a bell weather cousin, but he is someone who holds offices in the local chapter of the Republican Party.
I'm not sure which cousin is my bell weather cousin. I have so many cousins.
None of you folks have seen fit to point out that under the Adams-Onís Treaty, the Colorado part boundary between the US and New Spain wasn't where the southern boundary of Wyoming now is, but a north-south line along 106°20′38″W from the source of the Arkansas River to the 42nd parallel inside what is now Wyoming, northwest of Laramie.
I'm sure that's what Trump meant about building a wall in Colorado.
The problem is that under this treaty, a part of present day Kansas was included in Mexico (everything west of Dodge City, and south of the Arkansas River) and he explicitly said that he was not building a wall in Kansas.
So, gosh, we're left wondering what 117th dimensional move he's contemplating here.
Honestly, that's not a very nice part of Kansas.
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Anyone getting too much sleep? Enjoy this 1-minute video of the Kincade Fire igniting.
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Not to be flippant, stay safe, best wishes to everyone up there or thinking of people up there etc. But holy shit that's fast. Gallows flippancy, I guess, is how I deal with it.
fires can move a lot faster than you think they should be able to.
Each second of that video is one minute of real time.
Their complaint amounts to "it's not fair that in order to do our part to avert catastrophic climate change, we can only be slightly wealthier than everyone else, instead of way richer than everyone else."
Yes, this.
And also this (on, for example, Alberta's stubborn refusal to implement a provincial sales tax):
The fact is Alberta politicians have created much of the mess the province is in - not oil prices, not Quebec, not Ottawa, not B.C. For years, they relied on oil revenues to keep taxes low and spending high - the highest per capita spending in the country. The province spent like the good times would never end, with no plan for the day the music stopped or at least slowed down.
"Alberta's deficit is a choice and not due to broad economic factors," University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe told me this week. "We could have a balanced budget tomorrow and still have the lowest taxes in the country."
It was a transmission tower: https://www.sfchronicle.com/california-wildfires/article/PG-E-says-high-voltage-lines-were-still-on-when-14560113.php
which was made of rape oil and the boiled bones of child labourers or something like that
Well, I guess I never thought that UK PB was quite that bad, but this made me laugh out loud. And if UK PB is now equal in quality to Amercian PB, I stand corrected. The American version still sets the standard, though, imo.
On regional/national differences in food quality:
The best pizza I have ever had was from the Star Tavern in Orange, NJ. I first learned of this pizza from an NJ cab driver who could have had a walk-on part in The Sopranos: "The pie is tremendous," he informed me. And he was exactly right. I'm pretty sure I will never, ever encounter such a pizza in Canada, where we add cheddar to the mozzarella, which is just plain wrong.
But speaking of cheddar (which doesn't belong on a pizza, of course), in Canada, you can buy a generic, no-name cheddar at your local supermarket which is at least as good as, if not better than, the pricey Vermont artisanal offerings at your upscale grocery. Canada doesn't quite "get" pizza, but it does get cheddar...
177. I think you are right; Teddy's is made in Everett, MA. I've never seen it in NH or ME, for example. (You wouldn't expect it in VT, CT or RI, since they are part of NY.)
198: there's a good, local cheddar near my in-laws in Canada. It's not exactly artisanal but it's not in the supermarket.
When I was in Victoria - which was bound to have more expensive groceries because it's on an island - I was kind of appalled by what they were charging for mediocre cheese. Wegman's which is based out of Rochester, NY but spread to MA has really raised the bar on what I expect out of a supermarket cheese.
184. I'm afraid of my local TJ's parking lot. A woman was run over (and died) by an inattentive driver in it. It is very cramped. Maybe this is a "feature"?
186. That may not be a bellwether. Every Trump supporter I've ever talked to thinks he's an ass, but supports him because "all the Democrats are worse."
198.4 In regard to pizza only, Jersey pizza counts as New York pizza.
Putting cheddar on a pizza and voting for Trump are the kinds of things a Nebraskan would do.
156: I don't know, but if someone will tap the Unfogged Trust Fund for me, I am willing to go to Istanbul and other Turkish places to find out.
Canada even exports cheddar to the UK (I don't know if it's sold in Cheddar). Some of it is fit to eat.
also because they realised that no one but a complete bellend is going to die for the triumph of Communism, but Holy Russia is a different matter...
Indeed, my understanding is that it was Polish occupation of parts of Ukraine that made many of the Czarist officer corps, including Tukhachevsky, sign on with Trotsky during the civil war.
Russians will support any asshole to get back parts of the Ukraine.
206: Well, the Poles hadn't occupied Moscow in about 300 years at that point, whereas the Russians had occupied Warsaw for more than 100 so they figured it was worth trying a little turnabout.
206: that really didn't end up well for Tukachevsky. If he hadn't been such a devotee of Russian imperialism he could have gone to Canada and become a dairy farmer instead of being tortured to death in a cellar by a demented paranoiac.
That way of thinking about it really gives Canadian cheddar a harder edge.
209:
that really didn't end up well for Tukachevsky. If he hadn't been such a devotee of Russian imperialism he could have gone toYours for 50% of royalties.CanadaFrance, become adairy farmermechanized cavalry officer and swept in 1940 to the most crushing victory of modern history, instead of being tortured to death in a cellar by a demented paranoiac.
200 BG, when next out that way, try the island cheeses. And, while upisland, some dessert.
Dammit: https://hotchocolates.ca/
@212: the Natural Pastures Aged Farmhouse is one of the best cheeses I have ever had.
211: dammit I need to do more writing. Maybe next week if Brexit is postponed I'll have more spare time...
Though given his head Tukachevsky presumably would've attacked in 1939, setting up a second, different, Miracle on the Vistula.
he could have gone to Canada and become a dairy farmer instead of being tortured to death in a cellar by a demented paranoiac
Have never felt the slightest urge to become a Canadian dairy farmer. But when you put it that way....
212: That was a one time trip to visit Tim's nonagenarian great aunt who lives in the suburbs of Victoria. We didn't get too far out of the city, though we used her car quite a bit. She doesn't drive long distances but she still drives, and even though she's lived in BC for thirty years she still drives
like someone who spent much of her adult life in Montreal.
216. Unfortunately his head had probably been separated from the rest of him some time before that. But yes, it's interesting to speculate.
I'd come across the GK Chesterton thing about the importance of tradition before - you know, the line about how you shouldn't take down a fence because you couldn't see what good it was doing, you should go and find out why someone put it up first, and only then take it down. Good line.
But I have only just discovered that it came from a longer essay in 1929 called "The Thing" and now of course I am frantically writing a story in which Father Brown has to work out whether or not Kurt Russell and Wilford Brimley have been assimilated by a shape shifting alien, using only the power of Catholic theology. (No flamethrower, but, of course, Flambeau.)
Father Brown to be played by Keith David
Keith David is Flambeau. Father Brown is played by James Earl Jones. (You can't have a Father Brown who is six foot four!!)
Keith David plays the President on Rick and Morty. I hope they just keep him forever, rather than try to acknowledge Trump in some way.
Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the shapeshifting spiderthing.
There is something of a miracle in anything which stands out. Children, who are of course far wiser than their elders, realise this : they are drawn to climb the single boulder on the beach or the single tree in the meadow, simply because it exists and is different from its surroundings. Adults divert the same impulse into, variously, hagiography, gold panning or stamp collecting.
On the vast and wind-planed field of the Ross Ice Shelf, one such miracle was occurring. Or, to be more accurate, two; for, standing apart from their horizontal and inert surroundings, two human figures challenged with their verticality the insensate consensus of the snowfield. One was tall and swaddled in a parka until he was bulkier even than nature had made him; the other had been turned by polar clothing and driven snow from a stumpy priest into a sort of spheroidal bolus of ice....
(You can't have a Father Brown who is six foot four!!)
How tall is Mark Williams? Because Father Brown is meant to look like the English actor Mark Williams, of course.