September, 2016 archive
Trumpling Dis Coarse Discourse 0
Reg Henry remembers Monday’s debate and reaches a disquieting conclusion. A snippet:
That may seem contrary, but debates occur in the culture of their times. In a sane world, Ms. Clinton would be judged the winner, but that is the very world willfully abandoned by many Americans. They may suppose a debate is just a shouting match; it’s all just words and the important thing is to steamroll your opponent with them. This he did.
He was helped by a culture that has become fact-free and in thrall of the Big Lie as practiced by the Nazis, the idea that if you tell a lie big enough and often enough, people eventually will come to believe it, no matter how absurd.
Stray Question 0
Did anyone really believe that “the five second rule” was indeed a “rule”?
Geeking Out 0
A week ago, one of my UPS’s died. It was getting on to 10 years old, so I can’t complain, though it maliciously chose to beep its way out of existence in the wee hours, sending me crawling about in the dark to find from whence comes that )*#)*##a$&% beeping. . . .
One of the computers attached to it survived without incident. On the other, a Lenovo graphics tablet configured to dual-boot Windows 7 and Mageia 5, it took out Mageia, which was the running operating system at the time. I decided to throw Debian on the machine, as I quite like Debian and had mastered Mageia; plus I wasn’t in the mood to troubleshoot the system (it would boot, but only to the emergency repair terminal).
I installed Debian with MATE and KDE (I’m not a big fan of the KDE desktop interface–too many flashing lights and sounding cymbals–but I generally prefer KDE applications over their Gnome equivalents. Yesterday, I did some basic configuration. Today, I installed and fine-tuned E17, which will be my primary desktop interface on this machine.
The View from Afar 0
Leonard Pitts, Jr., wonders how they do it.
