I was cooking this afternoon, and I had to be vigilant to ensure the butter and sugar did not burn. I had my bandana and hanging rope so I was all ready.
The real tragedy is my wife does not recognize my claim to the kitchen and is beginning eviction proceedings. Hopefully this will not get too violent, but if it comes to me having to uphold my ideals, I want you all to know I fought the good fight, used the Oxford comma, and died cursing the MLA style guide with my last breath.
I found Coryâs opinion on this evolving story, in the context of the past years of both the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the Anti-Bureau of Land Management, to be highly Intersectional. Itâs not just skewed to race, it covers poaching, application of anti-terror laws, gun rights, civil rights, more.
Rather than discuss whether this is- or is not - terrorism, can we discussed whether this is treason?
https://twitter.com/IanKullgren/status/683524884484390912
When #BlackLivesMatter activists invoke the 1st Amendment to air their grievances with the government, The ACLU is all over it.
Now, The Al Bundy Gang is invoking the 2nd Amendment to air their grievances with the government. Whither the NRA to guide the public on what is - and is not - Constitutionally protected activity? Because it looks and sounds like an armed insurrection to me. And, that does terrify me.
Be strong Cowboy!
Wives can be problematic at times, by refusing to recognize sovereignty when minions attempt to exercise same. Best to fall back to a defensive position and avoid serious conflict.
Different, yes - but this is what I meant by the distinction of literal versus connotative difference. For instance, âvigilanteâ still literally means âone who is vigilantâ, which can easily be deduced from the parts of the word. That one might connote something about who holds the vigil or what it says about them is separate from this literal layer, and exists in more specific cultural assumptions. Those who use the word share its structure, but not necessarily all of its possible meanings.
I agree. But the paradox is that when self-professed descriptivists complain about my historically-valid usage, they are being unwitting prescriptivists. New meanings can be fine, but they do not invalidate older meanings.
In the case of Waco, considering the child brides and all, the feds did have a legitimate reason for arresting Koresh and shutting down his operation. I canât really say for sure whether it turned into a massacre of innocents due to incompetence or malice, but I suspect it was some of both. At the very least, everyone up to and including Janet Reno who signed off on the way they went about things should have had their career in government cut unceremoniously short, and procedures put in place to make sure it didnât happen again. The fact that that didnât happen earned them a fair amount of bad PR.
In the case of Ruby Ridge, the only charge they had on Randy Weaver was due to entrapment, and they targeted him for entrapment so they could threaten him to get him to spy on his confederates. He wasnât occupying anything except his cabin, and even though his wife had never been charged with a crime and wasnât armed, they made a conscious decision to assassinate her, and then did it. The people who made that decision and the one who murdered her should have fucking hanged. There was no way in which the federal agents involved in any part of that process were acting as anything other than a death squad serving a police state. As much as I personally detest people like the Weavers, the government deserved every ounce of backlash they got from that, a hundred times over.
In this case, unlike Ruby Ridge, the feds actually have a legitimate reason to do something about it, and unlike Waco, there arenât a lot of innocent hostages who will wind up dead if they botch the raid.
That said, I actually donât have a problem with law enforcement not defaulting to immediate and overwhelming violence, I just wish they would employ that sensibility across the board.
Definitions are determined by usage, not etymology or word stems.
You mean the garage/basement/shop/shed?
Word history note: âvigilanteâ originally meant someone who was a member of a vigilance committee. The San Francisco Committee of Vigilance was one of the more famous groups of vigilantes.
Unless they were smart, and brought solar panels, theyâll run out of gas
There are at least two problems with this.
Determined by whom? There are billions of people, and it might seem to be an astonishing coincidence if they were all assumed to create and recognize meanings in the same way as each other. When you generalize this, you seem to be speaking for everybody, but you certainly arenât speaking for me.
Itâs an infinite regress. If definition is determined by use, and my use has historical basis, then this also constitutes a usage which builds upon the words definition. It is by nature an inclusive rather than exclusive process.
Solar panels are unAmericanâŚdonât you know anything? 
I canât speak for everyone, but my use of the term in this thread is solely to highlight what I see as a glaring double-standard.
Personally, I feel a mental twitch whenever I see or hear the word âterroristâ or âterrorismâ earnestly invoked outside the context of legal proceedings.
âVanilla ISISâ (stolen from twitter)
Oh, no you didnât! XD
You know what that situation reminds me of?
The time that dumbass tried to rob a bank with a meat cleaver by threatening the bank teller thatâs behind bullet and knife proof glass. The militia folks realize the federal government has been training alot in counter-terrorism the past decade or so and they wonât let them get away with this? Right? Itâll easily take the authorities less than 10 minutes to clear out an basically empty building like that.
Bullshit times infinity.
Are lighthouse keepers vigilantes? Taking matters of marine safety into their own hands?
Well said. It is most definitely treason.
A definition is an description of the meaning of a word by how itâs used. Thereâs no official committee on that (ignoring France), so in English we just let meanings shift around over time and let the dictionaries catch up. They are intersubjective, so there actually is a lot of regress and the reality of dialects with distinct vocabularies.
The reason that I think this account works is that if you really tried the etymology/word-stem approach as how to determine meanings of words youâd have a lot of trouble figuring out why the cool band wasnât cold and speak complete gibberish. Youâd also have a way easier time developing a reliable automated parser to do linguistic analysis since youâd have nice neat rules that donât really exist in the real world. The way we work out meanings when reading does sometimes involve looking at word stems/etymology if we arenât familiar with a word, but that route will often fail unless youâre looking at technical terms (those tend to be more careful to follow conventions).
