Cranky armchair wonk and word nerd.
@UnderpantsWeevil Indeed. I wish more people recognized that he is, indeed, a “notorious hack”. Apparently not notorious enough for NPR to stop asking his opinions, though, and they should obviously know better by now - and a long time ago, too. It makes THEM look disrespectable to talk to him.
@UnderpantsWeevil What people should remember is that rich and famous people all kind of know each other, and run into each other a lot at social events. Most of these photos come from things like NYC soirees where bigs rubbed shoulders with each other, and by themselves they prove nothing. But if you’re in a photo with some skeeve, you need to do a lot better than, “It ain’t no big thang”. No, Davey, it IS a big thang, and you need to be able to explain it, or STFU.
@UnderpantsWeevil Yeah, I think his career is over at this point. I don’t personally believe he’s guilty of the kinds of crimes Epstein was and Taco probably is, but fair or not, we are all judged by the company we keep. If he was truly innocent, he could make a much better case than this; or, methinks the lady doth protest too much. I think he’s probably not guilty, but embarrassed, and reacting in a way that makes him look guilty. That will obviously backfire on him, as it should.
@toynbee The thing about HSI is, they always try to walk it in.
@AA5B This is a point I’ve made many times about a ‘liberal’ education (as in ‘liberal arts’). It’s not just vocational. It’s to prepare people to be fully engaged citizens in a democratic republic, to understand history, geography, cultures, religions, and more. All the job training in the world does nothing to prepare someone for political issues like gender identity. If you’ve never been exposed to ideas beyond your own life, you’re severely limited in your ability to synthesize knowledge.
@return2ozma More than a few people in this thread either don’t get that Dunce is joking, or are pretending they don’t know. I get it, conservatives are not funny, and that can make it hard to tell when when they’re trying to be. But he really is joking. Or, well, trying to.
@Fondots I don’t know if they were first with it, but one source I found claims that Chicago PD still uses a 10-code system, in which -67 does mean ‘report of death’. I would not consider that source good, but a better one gives the same for Winston-Salem (NC) PD.
So it appears to be out there for some PD’s, but who knows how it started.
@Fondots Looking at the recommended APCO codeset, 10-67 is a net-messaging signal, of little or no use to police. My guess is that it got repurposed by some dept, and others picked it up. In the Project 2 (1967) version, though, -96 did mean ‘mental subject’, and has not been changed.
As you said, variant use and expanding and gradually over-lapping use has led to them being abandoned in favour of plain language. This is enabled also by clearer-sounding radio than what was around 50 ya.
@Lost_My_Mind It’s a police code that was used in some rap song (I’ve heard it, but forget the details because don’t care), and kids just picked up on it somehow. They don’t really know what it means, either. It doesn’t actually make sense to them, either. But a lot of kid stuff is like that. I’m sure I yelled stupid, senseless shit when I was a kid, too, and it also annoyed adults. More than I do now, I mean. I hope.
@Ensign_Crab You’re going to realize some day that just whining a lot might make you feel better for a few minutes, but it won’t make anything better, for you or anyone else.
Good luck.
@sbrodolino21 Her big mistake here seems to me to be that she expressed a perspective in language too nuanced for a huge number of rage-filled online readers to be willing or able to sit down and parse.
The beauty of online ‘discourse’ is that for most of us, being entirely wrong or embarrassingly mistaken, yet being self-righteously arrogant about it, is entire free, with no potential meaningful consequences. It’s like being in grade school forever. It’s certainly much easier adulthood.
@Ensign_Crab Well, thanks for offering your useful ideas for… oh. Sorry, never mind.
@ivanafterall The Founders believed that, too, and they were wrong about it. It turns out, religion is an instinct most people have, and they will be religious if they are not inoculated against it by a level of reason that frankly most people just don’t have, and never will. Talk to ordinary people, and you’ll see that most people have the forensics of children. That against human instinct is all but hopeless.
Religion will decline, and we will reach some equilibrium, but it’s not going away.
@skisnow In the US, states are historically the basic governmental unit. Municipalities within them CONTROL local budgets, but the majority of the money spent comes from higher up. So it depends on what you mean by ‘pay’ here.
@railway692 ‘More likely than not’ is part of the operant doctrine of a grand jury. An indictment is brought if the grand jury believes that a conviction is possible. In fact, even the grand jury won’t happen unless a prosecutor and DA also believe that.
The standard of evidence for that is less than that required for a conviction, but greater than mere suspicion.
You are trying to argue a case ahead of trial. Your dispute is based on the discrepancy between different standards of evidence.
@njm1314 Knowing Watters – and performative conservatives in general – whatever he rails against most vocally is probably what he’s most into.
I don’t care about anyone’s fetishes, though. What I care about is whether anyone’s harmed by them. I would be on his preferences – together with his self-discipline – to likely pose at least potential harm to some people.
Since he’s such a dick, though, I confess I don’t really care if it harms HIM. He’s already hurt a lot of people, just speaking.
@railway692 Put another way, it’s about different registers of forensics. What you and I and Snopes can directly verify about this would not be sufficient for conviction, by itself. But a reasonable person would conclude from secondary evidence that it’s LIKELY to be true, and that would be sufficient to indict, for a trial that might produce much more solid evidence than WE’VE seen so far. A grand jury would almost certainly indict based on what we all DO know so far.
@railway692 Not at all. This is about rules of evidence, and I used the OED comparison very deliberately, because they work the same way. OED is scrupulous about verifiable examples in print, and is a very reliable source for that. But it’s much less useful for what many people consult it for: etymology. OED doesn’t do that, but many people think they do, and misinterpret what they read there.
Snopes is solidly driven by verifiable facts. But the full truth is often beyond verifiable facts.
@ParadoxSeahorse This part is actually pretty clever. Vacuum-sealed coffee is good for more than a year, and this is practically a give-away price. They’re definitely losing money on it, in the short term. But the purpose is obvious to most coffee drinkers: Developing TASTE. Most coffee drinkers are not connoisseurs, but they are very habitual, and will develop a taste for whatever they’re in the habit of drinking most. This is basically drug-pushing, heh. And it will probably work.
@UnderpantsWeevil I’m really kind of done with this kind of corrosive cynicism for one lifetime. Bye.