Zompist Bboard Again

What's the chance that someone introduces a motion of no confidence at some time in the near future? I mean in the Commons, not in the Parliamentary Conservative Party.

Who is Steve Barclay, and what, if anything, qualifies him to be Brexit Minister?

??? indeed.

My Mom for some reason has a habit of pronouncing the "M" in "MB" (as in, short for "megabyte") the French way. How is that different from the way you'd expect her to pronounce it? I thought the name of M was pronounced /ɛm/ in all of French, English and German (I'm no...

My Mom for some reason has a habit of pronouncing the "M" in "MB" (as in, short for "megabyte") the French way.

Ah, thank you, that's interesting to know!

Not-really-charted waters. Traditionally, when the Chancellor has been from the CDU, that person was also CDU chairperson - or at least as far as I know; I might be wrong. I don't know if there's any experience with someone from the CDU staying Chancellor for years without being CDU chairperson.

I learned embarassingly late that final -e is supposed to be pronounced in words like adobe, catastrophe, hyperbole... This just reminded me of the Dutch pronunciaton of "Nike" /naik/ (which is a wrong English spelling pronunciation, in Dutch it would be /ˈnikə/). JAL A long time ago, whe...

I can't really say much because I suck at remembering my dreams, but last night I dreamed that I got fairly drunk, which is interesting because I usually never drink in my dreams. I think it involved me ordering a Four Horsemen. Also, for some reason I had a cute small dog I've never seen before wit...

In other news, Angela Merkel has announced that she wants to give up being chairperson of her party in December, and then stay Chancellor until 2021. We'll see if that works out.

dhok wrote: ↑Mon Oct 29, 2018 2:49 am I wouldn't be so sure the military wouldn't want to take over given they're already going after academics.

I've seen that tweet, too, but I'm a bit sceptical about it - would be more reliable if it was corroborated by some other source.

Of course, in a loose sense 'libertarian' can be used for anyone non-authoritarian, anyone right-wing, both, or neither. In this sense, Bastiat was certainly a 'libertarian'. I don't know enough to know whether he was genuinely libertarian or merely neoliberal - although his rhetoric appears libert...

I just realized that, if the USA should somehow get a Democratic president again at some time in the near future, we might partially get an inverse version of the scenario from The Fire Shall Try.

Haven't you had them for a while? Like, say, Frédéric Bastiat? I'm not sure Bastiat counts as a libertarian. He was way too sensible for that :) Wasn't he in favour of letting every property owner decide for himself which government should govern his property, or something like that? Sounds like a ...

And the Irish ended the constitutional ban on blasphemy, too.

Where did you get this idea? Well, nobody's heard of her in France indeed. There have been earlier translations - though as far as I know, there hadn't been reprinted for years. Now things are a little different -- people have a greater exposure to American culture, and we even have a handful of li...

Interlude: the polls have just closed in the state legislative election in the German state of Hesse, and the exit-poll-based prognosis says: CDU 28 percent; SPD 20 percent; Greens 19.5 percent; AfD 12 percent; FDP 7.5 percent; The Left 6.5 percent You can now return to your regularly scheduled desc...

Yay, donuts!

Has anyone ever thought about contesting these super- and hyperinjunctions in the European Court of Human Rights? (In case anyone is wondering, no, that shouldn't be affected by Brexit, since the European Convention on Human Rights is separate from the EU (or at least it was the last time I checked)...

In the case of a new election, there might also be a hung Parliament. In which case, if the Lib Dems end up being good negotiators, there might... ... ... ...wait, did I just write the words "if the Lib Dems end up being good negotiators"? Ok, wait, there might be a small problem with what...