Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 30,233]

How MAGA Went Mainstream | Joshua Citarella meets Richard Hames

In 2016, the alt-right seemed to come from the internet and infest politics. In 2024, the internet and politics have become identical. Are we swimming in the world the alt-right built for us?

Perhaps no one knows the world of online politics better than Joshua Citarella an artist and political theorist whose 2018 book Politigram and the Post-Left kickstarted a flurry of investigations into new political cultures. His Doomscroll (‪https://www.youtube.com/@doomscrollpodcast‬ ) looks at the development of online politics now.

As the results of the US election were still coming in, he spoke to Richard Hames about the disasters of vibes-based liberal politics, how the Trump campaign spoke to a bloodlust in the American people, and where the American left goes from here.

[KEVINAA 129]

BREAKING: BRITISH LAWMAKERS APPROVE ASSISTED DYING BILL IN HISTORIC VOTE

 

In a landmark decision, British MPs voted 330 to 275 in favor of an assisted dying bill, allowing terminally ill adults in England and Wales to seek help ending their lives.

 

 

[Vesper 30,233]

Climate Change Is the Real National Security Threat

In the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, it’s clear we’re defending against the wrong perils.

https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/helene-milton-and-national-security/

At the beginning of each year, the director of National Intelligence provides Congress with a report on “worldwide threats to the national security of the United States.” And over a dozen years or so, the DNI’s report has consistently identified the same four nations as constituting the “most direct, serious threats” to US security: China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. The ranking of these antagonists has varied over time, with China receiving top billing in the 2024 edition, but all four are routinely singled out for extensive discussion in the DNI’s annual report. Only after many pages of such analysis, in a section on “transnational issues,” are we told that climate change also poses a risk to US security, by triggering mass migrations and unrest overseas. Missing from the DNI’s warning, however, is the threat that climate change poses to our country—to our lives, communities, and vital infrastructure. Now, in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, this oversight should be recognized as one of the nation’s greatest intelligence failures ever.

Climate change is not, of course, a nation-state with a powerful military and weapons stockpiles. Yet it constitutes an aggressive force no less powerful than China and the other potential adversaries mentioned in the DNI assessment—one that has shown itself capable of flooding our cities, inundating our coastlines, burning our forests, and decimating our farmlands. And while we’ve spent trillions of dollars on the ostensible effort to defend our country and our allies from hostile nations, we’ve done pitifully little to protect ourselves or others from the destructive forces of climate change.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton will long be remembered for the human misery they inflicted on the residents of Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas. At least 234 people died from the effects of Helene, another two dozen from Milton, and as of October 15, 100 people were still missing. Many thousands more lost their homes or livelihoods—or both. While it is still too early to calculate the monetary value of property and infrastructure losses from the two megastorms, estimates of $200 billion or more do not appear to be exaggerated. It will be a long time before some affected areas fully recover, if ever.

The destructive powers of Helene and Milton were vastly amplified by the effects of climate change. As we dump our carbon and methane waste into the atmosphere, feeding the greenhouse effect that is responsible for rising global temperatures, an estimated 90 percent of the excess heat produced in this manner has been absorbed by the world’s oceans—raising water temperatures and thereby generating the energy that transforms ordinary hurricanes into superstorms like Helene and Milton. Waters in the mid-Atlantic and the Caribbean—the birthplace of most hurricanes that make landfall in the US—were hotter this spring than in any previous spring on record, “with over 90% of the area’s sea surface engulfed in record or near-record warmth,” Yale Climate Connections reported in May. The fact that the two massive storms occurred within two weeks of each other, multiplying the damage in some coastal areas of Florida that were exposed to both, is another consequence of a warming and increasingly chaotic climate system.

Domestic disaster: US Army personnel lead a search-and-rescue operation flying over a flooded New Orleans.(David Howells / Corbis via Getty Images)

The harsh impacts of Helene and Milton have been well covered by the media and so are familiar to most Americans. But the national security implications of the two storms have received far less attention, even though the long-term consequences for our national security are no less severe. These include:

Mobilization of military support.

As storms become more severe on a warming planet, local authorities (including police, medical facilities, and emergency services) will become increasingly overburdened and in some cases overwhelmed and unable to perform their essential functions. This, in turn, will require the mobilization of the National Guard and active-duty military forces to assist with search and rescue (SAR), food and water distribution, recovery operations, and the basic tasks of government. The Pentagon calls operations that involve active-duty troops “defense support of civilian authorities” (DSCA, pronounced “disca”).

As of October 13, more than 11,000 National Guard soldiers and airmen from some 19 states were deployed in relief missions in the southeastern US in the wake of Helene and Milton. “Using helicopters, boats and high-water vehicles, they rescued people stranded by flooding and high and swift water,” the Army reported. But even this vast mobilization of Guard forces was not deemed sufficient to address the hurricanes’ impacts. On October 2, President Joe Biden ordered the immediate deployment of 1,000 active-duty troops to hard-hit areas of Tennessee and North Carolina to assist in SAR, food delivery, and road clearance. Four days later, after touring areas affected by Helene, Biden ordered another 500 troops to assist in the efforts.

“These active-duty troops,” the White House said in an official statement, “are focusing their efforts on moving valuable commodities—like food and water—to distribution sites, getting those commodities to survivors in areas that are hard to reach.”

The Army and Navy personnel that were mobilized for this purpose represented only a small fraction of the nation’s active-duty force, so other troops were available to address any conventional threats that might arise, such as a war in the Middle East or a conflict with China over Taiwan. But as climate-change-fueled superstorms become more frequent and damaging, the Defense Department will be forced to provide an ever-increasing number of troops, ships, planes, and helicopters for DSCA operations. At some point, top officials fear, these missions could overtake conventional combat preparedness as the Pentagon’s top operational obligation. 

The immobilization of military forces and assets.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton forced the evacuation not only of civilians from their communities but also of military personnel and equipment from key bases in the Southeast, further diminishing US military preparedness.

On September 26, as Helene bore down on the Florida Panhandle, the Air Force issued evacuation orders to nonessential personnel at the MacDill and Tyndall Air Force bases in the state and at Moody AFB in Georgia and redeployed aircraft from other facilities further inland. Tyndall, which had suffered catastrophic destruction from Hurricane Michael in 2018, largely escaped serious damage this time around, but MacDill and Moody were flooded and lost electrical power. Fort Eisenhower, a major Army installation near Augusta, Georgia, was also placed under evacuation orders as floodwaters surged onto the base, knocking out power. Some buildings at all three installations were destroyed or damaged, including housing for military personnel and their families.

The approach of Hurricane Milton just over a week later prompted similar evacuations in the Southeast. MacDill, which sits just above sea level on a peninsula in Tampa Bay, ordered nonessential personnel to evacuate once again. Essential personnel at the headquarters of the US Central Command and the US Special Forces Command—both located at MacDill—remained on duty, but some facilities were damaged by the storm.

Other bases in the Southeast also were evacuated, including Homestead Air Reserve Base near Miami and Naval Station Mayport in Jacksonville. In anticipation of the storm, the 482nd Fighter Wing at Homestead redeployed some of its F-16s to a base near San Antonio, Texas, and officials at Mayport sent three of the destroyers stationed there out to sea to escape damage in port.

These evacuations and dispersals of equipment caused only a minimal reduction in overall US military preparedness, as was true of the DSCA operations in North Carolina. But taken together, the two undertakings represent a significant disruption to US military capabilities in the nation’s Southeast, the home to a vast network of bases and facilities. If the United States were at war, this would be considered a major strategic setback. Disruptions like these, moreover, are sure to become more frequent and severe as global temperatures rise, a prospect that is forcing the Pentagon to rethink its plans for future troop deployments—including by retaining more forces at home to cope with domestic climate disasters.

Leadership distraction.

On October 8, with Hurricane Milton about to make landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast, Biden postponed critical trips to Germany and Angola so that he could oversee the federal response to the storm damage. “I just don’t think I can be out of the country at this time,” he declared. But while the White House considered it politically necessary to demonstrate concern for US citizens during the run-up to a presidential election, the cancellations represented a major geopolitical setback.

In Germany, Biden was scheduled to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and representatives of 50 other nations to expedite the delivery of arms and other vital equipment to Ukrainian forces. The New York Times described the cancellation as a “blow” to Zelensky, who was trying to rally Western leaders to support his nation’s overstretched forces before the US election, which many European officials feared would result in the return of Donald Trump to the White House and a cutoff of US aid to Ukraine. In the meantime, Biden’s ability to rally international support for Ukraine is evaporating.

Similarly, Biden’s visit to Angola, which would have been his first to any African nation as president, was intended to energize US efforts to compete with China and Russia in the pursuit of Africa-wide geopolitical advantage. Again, the administration says Biden will reschedule the meeting, but doubts have arisen over the feasibility of the trip in the few months remaining of his tenure.

As climate change accelerates, major strategic quandaries like these will occur ever more frequently, as leaders are forced to concentrate on recovery efforts at home. This means that future presidents will have to be far less ambitious in the sphere of geopolitical competition, including the pursuit of foreign alliances. Such a retreat from international ambitions will, of course, be welcomed by many in the United States—but it will also constitute a major shift in the country’s approach to national and international security, and must be viewed as such.

Empty coffers: Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warns that FEMA doesn’t have enough funding.(Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Infrastructure damage and overstretched resources.

Finally, it is essential to consider the effects of climate change on the nation’s water, power, and transportation infrastructure, and our capacity to overcome the consequent damage and disruptions.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton did not inflict as much damage to critical infrastructure as did Katrina in 2005 and Sandy in 2012, but they did exhibit, once again, the capacity of severe storms to disrupt vital systems. Helene is reported to have knocked out power for 5.5 million customers in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Virginia, and Milton disrupted service for at least 3 million customers in Florida (of which some 450,000 still lacked power as late as October 14).

Water facilities were also affected by the monster storms. In Asheville, North Carolina, a thriving municipality of 94,000 people, the flooding caused by Helene destroyed much of the city’s water supply system. “The system was catastrophically damaged, and we do have a long road ahead,” said Ben Woody, Asheville’s assistant city manager. Damage to transportation infrastructure in the area was also severe: Parts of two major highways, Interstates 26 and 40, were washed away by the floods, and repairs are expected to take many months and cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Biden administration has promised vast dispersals of federal aid to repair critical infrastructure and help displaced families return to their homes (or find new ones). As of October 12, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had approved $441 million in assistance for individuals affected by Helene and over $349 million in public assistance funds to help rebuild communities. That’s more than three-quarters of a billion dollars, before factoring in the assistance for victims of Hurricane Milton.

These are impressive figures and demonstrate the nation’s capacity to respond to major disasters. But the number of such calamities will grow as climate change accelerates, and FEMA’s budget and resources are not limitless. On October 2, between Helene and Milton, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that FEMA lacked sufficient funding to provide emergency relief if more superstorms hit the country. “We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have,” Mayorkas told reporters as he traveled to storm-ravaged areas to meet with local officials. “We do not have the funds, FEMA does not have the funds, to make it through the season.”

Congress is expected to pass a supplemental appropriation to refill FEMA’s coffers when it reconvenes after the November election, but the 2024 funding crisis provides a preview of a time in the not-too-distant future when the federal government will be hard-pressed to finance recovery efforts in every storm- or fire-ravaged region. The result will be mass migrations of US “climate refugees” (think of the “Okies” from the 1930s Dust Bowl phenomenon) and possible internal unrest.

Rain and ruin: Community members try to clear debris in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Marshall, North Carolina.(Go Nakamura / Getty Images)

For more than a century, we have been taught that national security—widely considered the most sacred duty of our top officials—entails the defense of our allies and overseas interests against hostile powers. This outlook has proved fabulously beneficial to US arms manufacturers, who have received trillions of dollars in Pentagon contracts for weapons designed to overpower those so-called hostile regimes. It has also smoothed the rise of many opportunistic politicians, who have chided their opponents for failing to adequately promote national security. As this assessment of Helene and Milton’s impacts has demonstrated, however, this conventional notion of national security is woefully obsolete: It fails to account for the most immediate and potent threats to the country.

From now on, any assessment of the threats to US national security that professes to be based on observable fact must portray climate change as posing as great a peril as do conventional military threats—and the threat from climate change is growing faster than any of those other dangers. A failure to acknowledge this will leave the nation unprepared for the deaths, disasters, and dislocations to come. At the same time, recognition of global warming as a major threat to US security will require major changes in policy, including a substantial shift in funding and resource allocation from war fighting to climate-change mitigation and adaptation.

Once the exclusive preserve of Republicans and defense hawks, the vocabulary of national security should now be appropriated by those of us who can foresee the impending consequences of climate change and seek an all-out national drive to halt its advance. If there is one thing that we can be certain of, it is that the climate crisis will invade our borders again and again, with ever-increasing fury—and we are not prepared for its onslaught.

[KEVINAA 129]

 

[cosmicway 1,333]

3 hours ago, Vesper said:

Anglophones do NOT use the Greek alphabet when writing in English only.

The transliteration (transliterated from the Greek alphabet into the standard English alphabet) of the word into standard English is solecism.

You do not get to claim a faulty spelling of the English form is (in violation of all major English dictionaries' spelling) the correct form just because you are Greek.

Pro-tip:

Transliteration is the process of representing or intending to represent a word, phrase, or text in a different script or writing system.

The English probably pronounce it sol(i)cism.
But the others ?
The Italians would say sol(e)cismo - wrong.
Therefore the Latinization-Anglicization of the word is wrong.
And as I am a Greek scholar and not any old Greek my spelling is correct.

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

Army US veteran unhappy with Israel lobby in the US

 

[Vesper 30,233]

13 hours ago, cosmicway said:

The English probably pronounce it sol(i)cism.
But the others ?
The Italians would say sol(e)cismo - wrong.
Therefore the Latinization-Anglicization of the word is wrong.
And as I am a Greek scholar and not any old Greek my spelling is correct.

Again you play games.

The pronounciation was not the subject, the SPELLING was.

It is spelt solecism in the language we are conversing in, that being English.

In Italian it is il solecismo and in Spanish it is el solecismo.

There is no more debate on this.

YOU are the one who was always in error, not me.

You are an archetypal example of a shitposter and a WUM.

 

[Vesper 30,233]

13 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Army US veteran unhappy with Israel lobby in the US

 

Edited November 30, 2024 by Vesper

[IMissEden 21]

Now even Starmer saying get to fuck with the idealism. You see things wrong vs how they are. 

Edited November 30, 2024 by IMissEden

[IMissEden 21]

So that’s another, erm, lefty central have had it wrong, we admit that now. From probably the most trusted leader in the west for some in here. Well hand it over as you hand over all your other willingness to inherit others views —- the view is now that immigration is bad. Get up to speed with what the most educated countries and positions of most educated and informed people are saying. You’re wrong to be on the wrong side of idealism. 

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

1 hour ago, Vesper said:

Amazing how controlled he was and Morgan didnt know what to say

[Vesper 30,233]

26 minutes ago, IMissEden said:

So that’s another, erm, lefty central have had it wrong, we admit that now. From probably the most trusted leader in the west for some in here. Well hand it over as you hand over all your other willingness to inherit others views —- the view is now that immigration is bad. Get up to speed with what the most educated countries and positions of most educated and informed people are saying. You’re wrong to be on the wrong side of idealism. 

What are you maundering on about?

A large percentage of what you type is disjointed gibberish, plus it is often just randomly tossed out, with no clear reference point as to what you are even addressing.

Between you and the Greek bigot-troll, simply trying to engage with, or even comprehend, most of what you two post is a mind-numbing slog.

Plus, to top it off, both of you far too often start off many replies you post with lazy and/or oblique ad hominem.

 

[KEVINAA 129]

 

Police in Moscow raided multiple bars early Saturday and arrested the director of a gay travel agency under laws criminalising "LGBT propaganda", state media reported. 

[Vesper 30,233]

The deep historical forces that explain Trump’s win

Our research shows that political breakdown, from the Roman Empire to the Russian revolution, follows a clear pattern: workers’ wages stagnate, while elites multiply

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/30/the-deep-historical-forces-that-explain-trumps-win

In the days since the sweeping Republican victory in the US election, which gave the party control of the presidency, the Senate and the House, commentators have analysed and dissected the relative merits of the main protagonists – Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – in minute detail. Much has been said about their personalities and the words they have spoken; little about the impersonal social forces that push complex human societies to the brink of collapse – and sometimes beyond. That’s a mistake: in order to understand the roots of our current crisis, and possible ways out of it, it’s precisely these tectonic forces we need to focus on.

The research team I lead studies cycles of political integration and disintegration over the past 5,000 years. We have found that societies, organised as states, can experience significant periods of peace and stability lasting, roughly, a century or so. Inevitably, though, they then enter periods of social unrest and political breakdown. Think of the end of the Roman empire, the English civil war or the Russian Revolution. To date, we have amassed data on hundreds of historical states as they slid into crisis, and then emerged from it.

So we’re in a good position to identify just those impersonal social forces that foment unrest and fragmentation, and we’ve found three common factors: popular immiseration, elite overproduction and state breakdown.

To get a better understanding of these concepts and how they are influencing American politics in 2024, we need to travel back in time to the 1930s, when an unwritten social contract came into being in the form of Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal. This contract balanced the interests of workers, businesses and the state in a way similar to the more formal agreements we see in Nordic countries. For two generations, this implicit pact delivered an unprecedented growth in wellbeing across a broad swath of the country. At the same time, a “Great Compression” of incomes and wealth dramatically reduced economic inequality. For roughly 50 years the interests of workers and the interests of owners were kept in balance, and overall income inequality remained remarkably low.

That social contract began to break down in the late 1970s. The power of unions was undermined, and taxes on the wealthy cut back. Typical workers’ wages, which had previously increased in tandem with overall economic growth, started to lag behind. Inflation-adjusted wages stagnated and at times decreased. The result was a decline in many aspects of quality of life for the majority of Americans. One shocking way this became evident was in changes to the average life expectancy, which stalled and even went into reverse (and this started well before the Covid pandemic). That’s what we term “popular immiseration”.

With the incomes of workers effectively stuck, the fruits of economic growth were reaped by the elites instead. A perverse “wealth pump” came into being, siphoning money from the poor and channelling it to the rich. The Great Compression reversed itself. In many ways, the last four decades call to mind what happened in the United States between 1870 and 1900 – the time of railroad fortunes and robber barons. If the postwar period was a golden age of broad-based prosperity, after 1980 we could be said to have entered a Second Gilded Age.

Welcome as the extra wealth might seem for its recipients, it ends up causing problems for them as a class. The uber-wealthy (those with fortunes greater than $10m) increased tenfold between 1980 and 2020, adjusted for inflation. A certain proportion of these people have political ambitions: some run for political office themselves (like Trump), others fund political candidates (like Peter Thiel). The more members of this elite class there are, the more aspirants for political power a society contains.

By the 2010s the social pyramid in the US had grown exceptionally top-heavy: there were too many wannabe leaders and moguls competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business. In our model, this state of affairs has a name: elite overproduction.

Elite overproduction can be likened to a game of musical chairs – except the number of chairs stays constant, while the number of players is allowed to increase. As the game progresses, it creates more and more angry losers. Some of those turn into “counter-elites”: those willing to challenge the established order; rebels and revolutionaries such as Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads in the English civil war, or Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia. In the contemporary US we might think of media disruptors such as Tucker Carlson, or maverick entrepreneurs seeking political influence such as Elon Musk alongside countless less-prominent examples at lower levels in the system. As battles between the ruling elites and counter-elites heat up, the norms governing public discourse unravel and trust in institutions declines. The result is a loss of civic cohesiveness and sense of national cooperation – without which states quickly rot from within.

One result of all this political dysfunction is an inability to agree on how the federal budget should be balanced. Together with the loss of trust and legitimacy, that accelerates the breakdown of state capacity. It’s notable that a collapse in state finances is often the triggering event for a revolution: this is what happened in France before 1789 and in the runup to the English civil war.

How does this landscape translate to party politics? The American ruling class, as it has evolved since the end of the civil war in 1865, is basically a coalition of the top wealth holders (the proverbial 1%) and a highly educated or “credentialed” class of professionals and graduates (whom we might call the 10%). A decade ago, the Republicans were the party of the 1%, while the Democrats were the party of the 10%. Since then, they have both changed out of all recognition.

The recasting of the Republican party began with the unexpected victory of Donald Trump in 2016. He was typical of political entrepreneurs in history who have channelled popular discontent to propel themselves to power (one example is Tiberius Gracchus, who founded the populist party in late Republican Rome). Not all of his initiatives went against the interests of the ruling class – for example, he succeeded in making the tax code more regressive. But many did, including his policies on immigration (economic elites tend to favour open immigration as it suppresses wages); a rejection of traditional Republican free-market orthodoxy in favour of industrial policy; a scepticism of Nato and a professed unwillingness to start new conflicts abroad.

It seemed to some as though the revolution had been squashed when a quintessentially establishment figure, Joe Biden, defeated Trump in 2020. By 2024 the Democrats had essentially become the party of the ruling class – of the 10% and of the 1%, having tamed its own populist wing (led by the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders). This realignment was signalled by Kamala Harris massively outspending Trump this election cycle, as well as mainstream Republicans, such as Liz and Dick Cheney, or neocons such as Bill Kristol, supporting the Harris ticket.

The GOP, in the meantime, has transformed itself into a truly revolutionary party: one that represents working people (according to its leaders) or a radical rightwing agenda (according to its detractors). In the process, it has largely purged itself of traditional Republicans.

Trump was clearly the chief agent of this change. But while the mainstream media and politicians obsess over him, it is important to recognise that he is now merely the tip of the iceberg: a diverse group of counter-elites has coalesced around the Trump ticket. Some of them, such as JD Vance, had meteoric rises through the Republican ranks. Some, such as Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard, defected from the Democrats. Others include tycoons such as Musk, or media figures, such as Joe Rogan, perhaps the most influential American podcaster. The latter was once a supporter of the populist wing of the Democratic party (and Bernie Sanders in particular).

The main point here is that in 2024, the Democrats, having morphed into the party of the ruling class, had to contend not only with the tide of popular discontent but also a revolt of the counter-elites. As such, it finds itself in a predicament that has recurred thousands of times in human history, and there are two ways things play out from here.

One is with the overthrow of established elites, as happened in the French and Russian Revolutions. The other is with the ruling elites backing a rebalancing of the social system – most importantly, shutting down the wealth pump and reversing popular immiseration and elite overproduction. It happened about a century ago with the New Deal. There’s also a parallel in the Chartist period (1838–1857), when Great Britain was the only European great power to avoid the wave of revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, via major reform. But the US has so far failed to learn the historical lessons.

What comes next? The electoral defeat on 5 November represents one battle in an ongoing revolutionary war. The triumphant counter-elites want to replace their counterparts – what they sometimes call the “deep state” – entirely. But history shows that success in achieving such goals is far from assured. Their opponents are pretty well entrenched in the bureaucracy and can effectively resist change. Ideological and personal tensions in the winning coalition may result in it breaking apart (as they say, revolutions devour their children). Most importantly, the challenges facing the new Trump administration are of the particularly intractable kind. What is their plan for tackling the exploding federal budget deficit? How are they going to shut down the wealth pump? And what will the Democrats’ response be? Will their platform for 2028 include a new New Deal, a commitment to major social reform?

One thing is clear: whatever the choices and actions of the contending parties, they will not lead to an immediate resolution. Popular discontent in the US has been building up for more than four decades. Many years of real prosperity would be needed to persuade the public that the country is back on the right track. So, for now, we can expect a lasting age of discord. Let’s hope that it won’t spill over into a hot civil war.

[cosmicway 1,333]

8 hours ago, Vesper said:

Again you play games.

The pronounciation was not the subject, the SPELLING was.

It is spelt solecism in the language we are conversing in, that being English.

In Italian it is il solecismo and in Spanish it is el solecismo.

There is no more debate on this.

YOU are the one who was always in error, not me.

You are an archetypal example of a shitposter and a WUM.

 

You can't even explain how is spelled in English !
e like T-e-rry Thomas or e like P-e-ter o' Tool ?
In any case it's an error like many others.
It's not "dos mo-i pa sto ka-i tan gan k-ai-nato". It is "dos mi pa so ke tan gan keenato".
It's not "andra mo-i enepe mo-i-sa polytropon os mala polla". It is "andra mi enepe mousa polytropon os mala polla".
Boris Johnson speaks pidgin ancient Greek like that and we know Boris Johnson is a fool.

 

 

Edited November 30, 2024 by cosmicway

[Vesper 30,233]

2 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

You can't even explain how is spelled in English !
e like T-e-rry Thomas or e like P-e-ter o' Tool ?
In any case it's an error like many others.
It's not "dos mo-i pa sto ka-i tan gan k-ai-nato". It is "dos mi pa so ke tan gan keenato".
It's not "andra mo-i enepe mo-i-sa polytropon os mala polla". It is "andra mi enepe mousa polytropon os mala polla".
Boris Johnson speaks pidgin ancient Greek like that and we know Boris Johnson is a fool.

 

 

Yours replies on this subject may well be the most foolish since I joined the board almost 7 years ago.

You are literally claiming that you alone are correct, whilst the entire weight of documented English linguistic transliteration (as shown by major English dictionaries) is in error.

It is like you saying 1 + 2 = 4 because of............... 'Greek'.

You cannot just decide to unilaterally change the way we Anglophones spell words in our language (plus other languages' transliterations as well).

Do you even realise how utterly ridiculous that looks?

 

[cosmicway 1,333]

Just now, Vesper said:

Yours replies on this subject may well be the most foolish since I joined the board almost 7 years ago.

You are literally claiming that you alone are correct, whilst the entire weight of documented English linguistic transliteration (as shown by major English dictionaries) is in error.

It is like you saying 1 + 2 = 4 because of............... 'Greek'.

You cannot just decide to unilaterally change the way we Anglophones spell words in our language (plus other languages' transliterations as well).

Do you even realise how utterly ridiculous that looks?

 

It's not about changing words/placenames to make them easy to pronounce in English.
That is a more or less acceptable practice in everyone's language.
It's mistakes and it does n't matter if uncle Tom Cobley himself made the translations.
So in English they pronounce this with "e" I saw in google - error.

[Vesper 30,233]

31 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

It's not about changing words/placenames to make them easy to pronounce in English.
That is a more or less acceptable practice in everyone's language.
It's mistakes and it does n't matter if uncle Tom Cobley himself made the translations.
So in English they pronounce this with "e" I saw in google - error.

Stop trying to subject slide via the employ of sophistry.

This was not a discussion of pronunciation.

You are trying to inject that in an attempt to obfuscate and muddy the water.

The genesis of this all was when you (incorrectly) claimed the word's spelling was 'solicism', when it is 'solecism'.

Edited November 30, 2024 by Vesper

[cosmicway 1,333]

11 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Stop trying to subject slide via the employ of sophistry.

This was not a discussion of pronunciation.

You are trying to inject that in an attempt to obfuscate and muddy the water.

The genesis of this all was when you (incorrectly) claimed the word's spelling was 'solicism', when it is 'solecism'.

It has to be solicism.
But as solecism it is also pronounced the wrong way.

[Vesper 30,233]

4 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

It has to be solicism.

Only in your brain, which is not a place I recommend anyone journey into.

🤪