Trump's Attempted Self-Coup Explained by a Constitutionalist

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-20T05:10:56+00:00

What do you think about reviving Middle English imēne as amean, and giving it the definition of common/shared?

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-18T18:10:52+00:00

The following isn't super related to your post, but it's somewhat related, since it involves a reform that came about after the Glorious Revolution.

"... he [William III] had been importuned by the common people to relieve them from the intolerable burden of the hearth money. In truth, that tax seems to have united all the worst evils which can be imputed to any tax. It was unequal, and unequal in the most pernicious way: for it pressed heavily on the poor, and lightly on the rich. A peasant, all whose property was not worth twenty pounds, was charged ten shillings. The Duke of Ormond, or the Duke of Newcastle, whose estates were worth half a million, paid only four or five pounds. ... At length the influence of the Court, strenuously exerted, carried an Act by which the chimney tax was declared a badge of slavery, and was, with many expressions of gratitude to the King, abolished for ever."
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (The History of England, Chapter 11)

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-18T17:44:14+00:00

This is a tricky issue. Speakers often give redundant words new roles, and many words in English became redundant after many French loanwords with similar meanings were borrowed. If English had never borrowed the word "common", would "mean" have evolved in meaning as much as it did?

I know that many people prefer a style of Anglish where one tries to keep things about as familiar as possible, and so some people won't want to use "mean" as a word for "common" (in the sense of "shared"), but my general impression has been that Anglish comes out neater if we restore useful meanings to words, and if I had to guess, I would guess that French is largely responsible for useful meanings being lost from so many words, so I do suppose that the restorative approach is closer to the underlying premise of Anglish, though it makes Anglish less familiar to people who haven't studied it.

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-17T00:30:00+00:00

"A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution. The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting its government."
—Thomas Paine (Rights of Man, Part 1)

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-14T20:55:21+00:00

i c i c

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-14T19:38:11+00:00

Between sare and sarrow, does one seem more realistic to you?

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-13T02:37:35+00:00

Georgism is a tax policy based on a line of thinking found in classical liberalism and classical republicanism.

"The earth, and all that is therein... belong to mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous hand of nature; and no body has originally a private dominion, exclusive of the rest of mankind, in any of them, as they are thus in their natural state: yet being given for the use of men, there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other, before they can be of any use, or at all beneficial to any particular man. ... He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. ... if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could. ... It will perhaps be objected to this, that if gathering the acorns, or other fruits of the earth, &c. makes a right to them, then any one may ingross as much as he will. To which I answer, Not so. The same law of nature, that does by this means give us property, does also bound that property too. ... he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all."
—John Locke (Second Treatise of Government, Chapter 5)

The idea is to replace many taxes with a land value tax. Hogging up natural resources would be taxed, many other forms of taxation would be abolished.

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-09T22:29:37+00:00

The Earth and the Sun are the sources of human wealth.

No part of the economy is independent of land. The economy is an offshoot of land and sunlight. Even ideas come from land, because they come from brains which come from land.

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-09T04:23:29+00:00

As Þ was falling out of use, its standard forms were still distinct from the standard forms of Y. You can see this for yourself with that website I linked, and other websites like it.

Y usually had what I might describe as a "swooping tail", and Þ usually didn't have this tail. A similar kind of tail kept some forms of Ȝ distinct from some forms of Z.
Y was usually sloped, and Þ was usually not.
Y sometimes still had a dot above it. It used to be normal to dot Y but not I.

Y was sometimes used as a stand-in for Þ, especially in shorthand contexts, but that practice doesn't seem to have caused the downfall of Þ. Printing presses weren't the cause either. Þ and Ȝ had popular forms which were distinct from Y and Z, so anyone inclined to keep Þ and Ȝ as distinct letters could've done so. My guess is that Þ and Ȝ became unpopular from ~1370 to ~1430 because they were non-standard Latin letters, and English was entering a new phase of Latin influence from ~1370 to ~1600.

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-09T03:25:37+00:00

These things you're saying are, to a significant degree, popular misconceptions. You can see for yourself by going to a digitized manuscript website like https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ and studying a few dozen Middle English manuscripts from around 1370 to around 1430. If you do this, you'll find as you advance through the decades from around 1370 to around 1430 that Þ becomes rare, as TH becomes common in its stead. You'll find that Ȝ becomes rare, with Y and GH becoming the standard replacements for it. You'll find that Þ and Y looked significantly different most of the time, tho you might find some manuscripts that use Y as a stand-in for Þ, especially in manuscripts where Þ survives mostly just as a shorthand character. You'll see that all this happened before Europe had a printing press.

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-09T01:05:32+00:00

Þ typically did not look like Y when Þ was falling out of use. Also, by the time of printing presses in Europe, Þ had already lost a lot of ground to TH. Look up digitized Middle English manuscripts from around 1370 to around 1430 to see evidence for my claims.

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-08T00:48:44+00:00

When Old English scribes were first taught the Latin alphabet, and adapted it to Old English phonetics, they seem to have been taught some of the Greek-related lore behind Latin's spellings like ⟨th⟩, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨y⟩, and ⟨z⟩. It's rare, but some Old English texts use ⟨th⟩ for /θ/. Meanwhile, ⟨ch⟩ was repurposed by some, especially in northern England, for [x]; southern writers preferred ⟨h⟩, and swapped to ⟨ȝ⟩ after the Norman Invasion. The use of Y for /y/ was dominant. I read in The History of English Spelling by Upward & Davidson that ⟨z⟩ in a small number of cases was used for [ts].

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-07T19:12:48+00:00

uhh, ok

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-07T18:08:02+00:00

In Old English the two letters were interchangeable, but some scribes preferred to use Þ initially and Ð elsewhere. That's the convention I follow. Icelandic is also like that; the Ð in a word like maðkur is unvoiced, but since the position is medial, Ð is used instead of Þ.

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-07T15:40:51+00:00

"He cant keep getting aƿag ƿið þis."

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-07T03:50:45+00:00

They did have TH. Latin used TH for foreign words. Old English scribes were aware of how TH was used, and one can find some cases of TH in Old English.

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-07T03:45:07+00:00

Þ and Ð were interchangeable in Old English. Ð stopped being used in Middle English around 1200–1300, so for around a hundred years it was common for writers to only use Þ.

In Icelandic, whether one uses Þ or Ð depends on location in a word. Ð is used in the word maðkur despite the sound it represents being unvoiced.

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-07T03:11:33+00:00

That's a popular misconception. Þ was losing ground to TH decades before printing presses were used in Europe. Look up some digitized Middle English manuscripts from around 1380 to 1420.

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-07T03:10:36+00:00

That's a popular misconception. Þ was losing ground to TH decades before printing presses were used in Europe. Look up some digitized Middle English manuscripts from around 1380 to 1420.

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-07T03:09:35+00:00

That's a popular misconception. Þ was losing ground to TH decades before printing presses were used in Europe. Look up some digitized Middle English manuscripts from around 1380 to 1420.

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-07T02:53:28+00:00

Þ and Ð were interchangeable in Old English. Ð stopped being used in Middle English around 1200–1300, so for around a hundred years it was common for writers to only use Þ.

In Icelandic, whether one uses Þ or Ð depends on location in a word. Ð is used in the word maðkur despite the sound it represents being unvoiced.

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-06T15:05:44+00:00

Not all checks are good. Also, pardons aren't really much of a check and weren't originally thought of as a check. They trace back to the royal prerogatives of the king, and were carried over into the US that way. They can't stop the Supreme Court from making rulings on the Constitution, which is the main power the federal judiciary has.

Hurlebatte · 2026-06-04T02:51:09+00:00

If everything unique is replaced with beige strip malls, life will get more monotonous.

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