The District of Columbia bans holding your phone while driving. I haven't been downtown in a bit, but it used to be my impression that if you walked half a dozen blocks and didn't notice a few drivers with phones in their hands, you weren't paying attention.
According to a bit in one of Arthur Haley's potboilers, American manufacturers would ensure that VIPs got "mid-week cars", with the notion that the last weekend's drinking would have lost its effect by Tuesday, and that the next weekend' drinking wouldn't start until Thursday night.
Assuming that this is so, I wonder what effect Monday Night Football had on Tuesday quality.
I am an angry old not-quite suburban white male. My household employs no servants. We mow our own lawn, we rake our own leaves.
I know a fair number of people who are US born and have what appears to be a Central American complexion. I imagine much of the HN readership can get by without income for the time it can take a citizen, or someone with perfectly legitimate immigration status, to establish his or her bona fides to ICE. Not everybody who is getting in can.
And have you looked into the big employers, not Harriet Homeowner, but the meat packing plants, to see how carefully they examine documents?
Hell, have you examined the Trump organization's record?
> "Woke" is currently an euphemism for the N-word. Replace it in every right-winger speech or text, and the message won't change at all :)
No it isn't, and to say so is some hyper-polarized bullshit. For instance: if you were to call someone "woke" I'd be far more likely to picture a white person than anyone from a minority group.
You and me are both correct. In a singular case so called wOkE would be a white person most of the time. But I was talking about word usage, and rightwingers are very often using it as a catch-all term for everything they are afraid of, kinda like N-word a few decades back. And saying wOkE is socially acceptable, so they can do it openly on TV and radio. And since it is catch-all term, these xenophobes also include in it all other non-white groups, non-straight sexual orientations, women, disabled persons and so on. The usual xenophobe list of enemies.
That's not true at all. The term indicates adherence to progressive-leftist ideology no matter what one's skin color or ethnicity. The vast majority of woke people are actually white people who often exhibit suicidal empathy (a common European genetic trait).
The issue is that progressive-leftist ideology itself is rapidly changing as its adherents purity-spiral, but that's separate from what woke means.
Well, if sixty years was in the 1960s, yeah, I wouldn't have felt put-upon either. Forty, fifty years? Yeah. Absolutely put-upon, depending upon where it was.
When arranging seating for a dinner (not that often), we tend to separate couples. And when at someone's house when there is not pre-arranged seating, my wife and I tend to sit apart.
Stendhal thought that the 19th Century French custom that married couples should attend the same gatherings had harmed the quality of conversation. I think he said this of the Empire.
I wonder about the biographer's practical judgment, though:
> I got very ill at that altitude. A doctor, when I got back, told me I had the symptoms of pulmonary edema. But it was worth it. I’d do it all again.
[Edit] Frank Kermode's memoir Not Entitled includes some interesting pages about the CIA funding of Encounter becoming publicly known.