Supreme Court nightmare: Open thread

@Silver and Grey

If you can articulate your point like an adult, without all the sneering, hypocrisy, and stale playground insults, it might be worth responding to.

…oh wait, that IS your entire point, isn’t it?

@Full Metal Ox – I couldn’t tell, either. There was too much shrieking and I got bored with it about halfway through. I had a hazy impression that we were being scolded for not having the memory of a goldfish when it comes to Republican wrongdoing.

I did find it funny that they were berating liberals for being unhappy about a suspiciously timed event that had disastrously cascading consequences still being felt today (and yes, James Comey’s decision to reopen the investigation was enough to cost Hillary the election), when Republicans spent a quarter of a century rehashing the same tired, debunked talking points about HRC. And how long have they been obsessing about Hunter Biden’s laptop?

So yeah, I don’t understand the problem. Is it preferable to lurch from one moral panic to another every week, as the Republicans are doing? How can anyone take any of their complaints seriously, when five minutes later they’re on to the next outrage du jour? If Democrats appear to be focused on the same issues over time, it’s because they’re real, they’re intractable, they affect a lot of people, and nothing ever gets done about them.

@Alan – Agreed, Comey was definitely caught between a rock and a hard place. Prior to the announcement, someone within the FBI had quietly started leaking information about the emails on the Weiner laptop to Giuliani and Nunes. It was only a matter of time before the information became public, and he made the call that he needed to get ahead of the leaks to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Republicans and Democrats alike were screaming for his head. (My cousin, who worked with Comey in Ashcroft’s AG office during the Bush administration, confirmed that Comey is generally a stand-up guy who wants to do the right thing and he was trying to be as impartial as possible). It can’t have been an easy decision.

Even so, the letter did do damage to Hillary with the electorate, especially with key swing voters in MI, WI, and PA who broke strongly for Trump in the two weeks leading up to the elections. It wasn’t the only thing that mattered, and might not have been the most important, but it had a large and measurable impact. It’s reasonable for Democrats to be upset about it even if it wasn’t a partisan act. For want of a nail, Roe was lost, etc. etc.

Off topic, but since I mentioned languages on the internet earlier:

Most people already know this, but the top 3 languages worldwide are English, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish. Chinese has the most native speakers, but English has the most total speakers; Spanish is generally #3 in both, though occasional estimates put it slightly above English in native speakers. Though if you’re curious as to what’s further down the line… (all unnumbered lists below are alphabetical, numbered lists are general estimates which might be a little off)

The remaining languages with significant international reach are Arabic, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian. The exact order depends on how you estimate the number of speakers, but generally, Hindi has the most native speakers and Arabic the most total – unless you count Urdu as a separate language rather than a dialect of Hindi (there’s some controversy there) in which case it’s a little further down the list – making Arabic being #4 in both native/total and Russian being a very close #5 in native only, in that case. French is, surprisingly to some, at the bottom of this list in both respects; French no longer has as much reach as it did in the 19th-20th Centuries.

This isn’t necessarily reflected the same way in *online* use of language, however – while the top 3 are the same (#1 English, #2 Chinese, #3 Spanish) the next ones appear to be #4 German, #5 Japanese, and #6 French, instead of the expected Arabic/Hindi/Russian. That probably says something, maybe general levels of internet access and/or willingness to use other languages which are already common online, but any possible causes are presently speculative.

(Side note – internet scrapers detect Chinese as much further down the list, very inconsistently as somewhere in the #8-#14 range; however, given that it appears that the vast majority of Chinese websites are private access and/or cut off from international access, it’s only due to indirect estimation that we’re reasonably sure it’s #2.)

To further note, Bengali has more speakers than French, Indonesian, and Japanese, but they’re almost entirely limited to native speakers in Bangladesh and eastern India, and that language also sees virtually no use online. Other languages with a very large number of speakers (at least 20 million native and at least 25 million total) but no real international reach and trivial online presence: Javanese, Pashto, Shanghainese, Swahili, and Yue (Cantonese is generally considered a dialect of Yue), plus Urdu if it counts as a separate language.

Even more oddly, further down the list in internet usage we get #7 Turkish, #8 Portuguese, #9 Persian, #10 Italian, #11 Dutch, and #12 Vietnamese, despite none of those save Portuguese are spoken much worldwide. Only after that do we see Arabic, Indonesian, and Russian, but only as part of long list of languages with a very minor online presence, and not even the top ones on that list; the rest of the list is Czech, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Thai, and Ukrainian. (For reference, Polish most often tops this list.) Hindi doesn’t even make *this* list, being even further down among the languages that have a trivial online presence, despite it being commonly spoken internationally.

TL;DR Online language usage doesn’t always match up with IRL spoken language.

@Snowberry:

And then you have sign languages—whose evolutionary lines are completely independent of their spoken counterparts(1) and which require videorecording to be widely disseminated.

(1) At least those that deaf people invent among themselves, rather than being imposed to conform to hearing convenience. American Sign Language, for example, has more in common with French Sign Language than with British Sign Language—and Nicaraguan Sign Language is a creole whose evolution has been followed from its origin, as the first generation of deaf Nicaraguans to be educated in a school for the deaf pooled their family sign vocabularies, to be streamlined by subsequent generations.