So Kevin McCarthy has been ousted from his position as Speaker of the House. Meanwhile, Trump, on trial for massive fraud, has been hit with a gag order because he won’t stop running his mouth. Discuss, if you are so moved.
Oh, and on an unrelated note, I’m now a WRITING COACH! Get in touch with me if you’re facing writer’s block or any other writing malady. I can help get you unstuck!
IIRC, slander and libel are MUCH harder to prove in England than across the pond. Thus super-injunctions when footballers and their WAGs behave badly, even though they’re useless in these days of the internet. Those are separate from defamation, I think?
@Alan: Capybarrister shows up better in this video! I still want to put a very small, dim light on him — a warm color — so his robe shows up better. I’ve one of those clip on book lights in black that has an orange setting which would be perfect. Also, am I the only one who thought “Plantagenets, of course”? Bloody Normans, making barristers speak extremely poor French for a millennium…
Used to know a chap who needed some cash to keep the ancestral pile up, so he put a chunk of outlying scenic land up for sale. Major uproar, claiming it was public land and what if he sold it to (horrors) an American or even more unsavory foreigner? Lawsuits ho! However, he had an actual old crumbly parchment dating back to the 1700s plus legal records and legends/songs going back farther proving he’d inherited it directly from his (many) great-grandfather, who was granted it from the king in whatever medieval century that was. Through an unmistakably legitimate line. The Law Lords or whoever said, “fair enough, it’s his”. Eventually the Crown bought it. Which I suspect was his intent all along. The playing fields of Eton had done the proverbial for him.
@ drip dyke
I think these are the relevant cases…
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/google-v-vidal-hall-judgment.pdf
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Sicri-v-Associated-judgment-1.pdf
Interestingly he was up against Antony White in both of them.
@ gss ex-noob
Yeah. Prior to 2013 E&W was considered a very Claimant friendly jurisdiction; here all the libel tourism. That’s very much changed. Defamation cases are much easier to defend now.
Data protection and privacy claims usually involve information that is true. In fact you used to have to accept it was true before applying for any sort of remedy. Otherwise you had to bring in defamation. But a case called McKennitt v Ash changed that; so now ‘mixed’ allegations (i.e. some true, some false) can form a privacy claim.
On the subject of Pagan holidays co-opted by the Church, be aware that that idea might not be entirely true. Evidently there’s very little actual evidence that assorted old / ancient Pagan religions really did have, say, fertility rites that involved worshiping rabbits and colored chicken eggs and a good bit of evidence that the early / Medieval Church worshipers developed their own customs using rabbits and eggs (amongst other holiday things).
https://historyforatheists.com/2021/10/is-halloween-pagan/
https://historyforatheists.com/2020/12/pagan-christmas/
https://historyforatheists.com/2017/04/easter-ishtar-eostre-and-eggs/
Two takeaways (of several) from those links: 1. the whole ‘Catholics / the Church stole their major religious holidays from the Pagans!’ line of thought evidently came from an 18th century equivalent of an anti-Catholic Chick Tract, and 2. English is one of the few (only?) major languages spoken today where the entomology ‘Ishtar is the real source of Easter!,’ and/or ‘Eostre is the real source of Easter!’ can work. Other languages use a version of the word ‘Pesach‘, which is…related to the holiday Passover? (I’m not Jewish nor have I studied closely how those words/ideas relate to each other. Just what a quick Google search tells me about it.)
And if someone prefers YouTube videos discussing those subjects, there’s some at the following link:
https://historyforatheists.com/tag/paganism/
(tw: some ableist language)
https://www.salon.com/2023/10/21/what-if-theyre-not-crazy-belief-in-conspiracy-theories-may-be-normal/
It’s long, but important as it has concrete suggestions for better combating disinformation.
Meanwhile, I am getting alarmed by the growing norm-violations of our own Tory party here in Canada. It’s not anywhere near Trumpian levels of norm-violation — at least, not yet — but nonetheless, it is there. The most notable is that the (Canadian) norm of not campaigning except between the writ dropping and the subsequent election is being blatantly ignored now: I typically hear four or five political ads a day on the TV now, all of them from the federal Tory party, with no federal election expected anytime soon, let alone a writ already dropped.
On the one hand, I can understand why the other parties don’t want to stoop to their level by breaking the same norm, but on the other, I worry what the effect will be of years of incessant political advertising that is 100% tilted in favor of the Tories. I also worry that more norms will soon be broken by the Tories.
@RSP: However, there’s no denying that people kept on following some customs from the old days, just transferred to the new. Like Yule logs. And of course Halloween is Celtic.
Plus the various obscure local saints, which are obviously Christianized rebranding of local minor deities, their worship sites, and all the assorted customs/stories/what they’re good for.
Lots of churches here have foundation myths that they were going to build in one place, but at night the devil moved the building stones to a previously sacred spot.
That has been interpreted as the locals accepting christianity but only on their own terms.
So that would suggest less that the church tried to christianise existing sites but rather they were willing to compromise. So the locals became christians but kept worshipping at the sites that were special to them.
There are writings from the ‘dark ages’ where the church leaders decry people venerating old sites like wells and performing rituals there. So it seems there was a fair bit of cultural intertia.
I love this stone (Dry Tree Menhir) because of the juxtaposition with the radio telescope. (That particular dish is a scaled down version of the one at Jodrell Bank).
But it’s just how it represents 4,000 years of continuity of our pondering about the heavens. It’s all very Nigel Kneale.
Although now all those dishes are used by GCHQ.
I’m not sure how “OK, you only have to give up half your traditional spiritual practices because we newcomers say so and we have swords” is a legitimate compromise …
Plowshares into swords, eh?
I don’t know about you guys, but I keep hearing growls of thunder in the distance that sound suspiciously like an approaching World War 3. Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine.
Well, you can scratch Counterpunch off my reading list. They’ve apparently changed their site design and the new design demands Javashit be turned on. None of the usual circumvention methods work (save looking at a who-knows-how-stale cached copy via Google): turning off CSS is useless and even view source doesn’t reveal the page text anywhere, just some script snippets with what might be fragments of URLs. It must load the page content dynamically from somewhere else instead of encoding it statically, unlike e.g. Bustle’s sorry JS-based mess.
Sorry, Counterpunch. It’s been nice knowing you, but I’m not compromising the security of my machine just so you can use some new fancy layout engine or whatever. Tell your asshole web designer to go look up a thing called “graceful degradation” sometime. It’s what your old design had and your new one does not and you’ll need it if you want me to come back.
And won’t you think of the poor children? Kids these days don’t have actual computers and do everything on mobile. Which means they (or their parents) end up paying by the gigabyte for all those huge bloated scripts being downloaded in lieu of the simple, few-KB block of plain old ordinary HTML and the smattering of 20, 30ish KB JPEGs that God and Tim Berners-Lee intended (and that used to be an option with you).
(I wonder how many bytes of scripts and other cruft Counterpunch now wants to serve per single byte of actual article text now? :/)
Paging GSS Ex-Noob
Gave Lord Luvaduck and Capybarrister a day in the limelight…
@Alan: That’s me told! đŸ™‚
sarky bastid
Redsilkphoenix:
(etymology, not entomology)
According to Wikipedia, German Ostern is related to Easter. These names are thought to be associated with dawn, and possibly some ancient Germanic deity, but not Ishtar who was a Middle Eastern deity.
I’ve also understood that Pesach is the Hebrew name of the Jewish holiday that’s commonly called Passover in English and sometimes “Jewish Easter” in other languages. Names for Easter derived from Pesach, via Latin Pascha, are used in Romance languages and several Germanic and Slavic languages. These names, as well as the English name, have been adopted into various non-European languages that learned about Christianity from the Europeans.
Most East European and many non-European languages seem to have variable, locally coined names for Easter. Just within Finnic languages, there is “Day of Release” in Finnish, “Day of Resurrection” in Estonian and “Great Day” in Karelian and Vepsian. The Finnish name can have Christian or Jewish interpretations, or it could historically often mean simply release from Lent.
So perfectly Alan! I love this ending.
I find it interesting that both of those observances celebrate a messianic figure and founding father of the religion escaping, in one manner or another, a plot by the state to assassinate him, and in both mythologies this event was followed by a period of trials — the Exodus, in one case, and systematic state persecution by Rome prior to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, in the other.
It is certainly also noteworthy that many of the names in Germanic languages seem to be cognate to the direction name “east”, wherefrom dawn comes. I wouldn’t bet the farm against an Ishtar connection just yet.