So this little notebook laptop I got for emergencies and travel turns out to be deathly afraid of the internet; it either freezes in panic or faints dead away whenever I ask it to do anything. Therefore I have to proceed with caution, so posting will be mostly link-free for a few days.
I see where Rush Limbaugh called a college student who testified to Congress about the need for insurance to cover contraception a “slut” and a “prostitute.” I think it’s bad that he did that.
I don’t think much of Hemant Mehta’s post yesterday on how Chris Stedman is just misunderstood, but Rieux (in comments there) and Crommunist (on a post at his place) have said good things about that.
The sun will soon be setting here in Florida.
Orlando is very flat. The view from here is of flatness all around with a few tallish buildings visible on the edge of the frame, spaced widely apart (like, two due north, one northwest, none due west, etc – it looks quite random). It’s interesting. I’m not accustomed to flat. Where I live is very lumpy.
Orlando IS flat. But it smells like oranges, or used to. There are worse places to go, my dear. I haven’t been there in 20 years, but it was a lovely place then.
Do not miss Gatorland. It’s up the Orange Blossom Trail near Kissimmee. Aside from various members of my family, it’s the best thing in Orlando, and predates Disney by some decades.
All else aside, it’s a birding hotspot: woodstorks up close and personal, eleventeen species of heron and egret, and a boardwalk through a nice little piece of cypress swamp. (I’m talking about wild birds here, not chickens.)
Limbaugh is the guy who had viagra removed from his luggage upon return from the Dominican Republic, a country notorious for its thriving sex trade. He probably knows how to identify prostitutes.
It doesn’t smell like orange blossoms until later in the month when the trees bloom. Even then, Orlando is so built up that there virtually no orange trees left in Orange County. The Citrus Tower in neighboring Lake County now sits in the middle of housing developments, not orange groves.
I’m looking forward to the conference. It’s my first.
The college student may not see it that way, but to me, being called such names by Rush Limbaugh would be a badge of honor. By just about anybody else, not so much.
There seems to be a movement afoot among some progressives (loud ones, I guess) to convince the college student to sue Limbaugh for slander. In the U.S. (unlike the U.K., alas) generally it makes no sense to sue people for defamation, because (as Stuart Pivar learned) the vast majority of things that piss people off, such as generic insults, are not actionable. As a result, my knee-jerk reflex reaction to the “You should sue him for saying that!” idea is that it’d never work.
But: falsely accusing someone of being a prostitute is one of the classic, archetypal kinds of defamation. (Which, come to think of it, might be something that sex workers would take understandable offense at.) As a result, Limbaugh’s target really would have a stronger case for defamation here than a million other plaintiffs do. And given the level of publicity Limbaugh has brought to the accusation, she might well be entitled to a big damage award.
I’d still advise her not to do it. First, Limbaugh would surely argue (and maybe he even deserves to win on it) that any reasonable listener would recognize that he was drawing an analogy for the purpose of political advocacy, not leveling an actual allegation of sex work. Second, Limbaugh’s power to polarize people means that all it would take is a right-wing judge or a few right-wing jurors to end her chances at a positive outcome. Finally, and possibly most importantly, Limbaugh and his radio network are not just bastards but filthy rich bastards, so they’d have the money to hire more than enough lawyers to make the case utter hell for the plaintiff—depositions that pry into every corner of her personal life, crazy levels of publicity, all kinds of attacks in public and private—even if she eventually wins. I can’t imagine that it’d be worth it.
In my fantasy in which the victim succeeds (and painlessly) in hitting Limbaugh up for a cool several million bucks in damages, though, a slander suit still feels like a terrific idea.
Marta – oh I wasn’t complaining! Just describing.
Ron, I wish I could go see birds and wetlands, but I don’t think it’s going to be possible.
I’m not surprised that an unhealthy slob would need some viagra to be able to perform. Not limbaugh’s first drug problem though – he was arrested and tried for forging prescriptions for oxycontin a few years back but the judge, a conservative, dismissed the charges despite the uncontested evidence.
Don’t worry about Rush too much. He’s one of our American chimpanzees who likes to throw feces. Like so many of his breed h suffers insufficient and premature cerebration.
When in that area of Florida, keep an eye out for two things:
1) Burmese pythons, introduced by accident some 25 years ago, are now all over the place; so much so that small mammals ( racoons for example) have almost disappeared from the wetlands.
2) Anita Bryant.
Enjoy the view while you can. In another 30 years it’ll probably all be under water.
Ophelia, what kind of netbook (brand and specific model) do you have? I’d be happy to look into whether the problems you’re experiencing are known issues with relatively-simple (or any) solutions, and post said solutions here if they exist. I imagine trying to troubleshoot internet connection problems using the problematic internet connection in question is rather difficult, irrespective of one’s level of technical expertise (I don’t have a good sense of how tech-savvy you are, and I certainly don’t want to make any assumptions).
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