by JanieM
As I think about the fact that there are too many topics to choose from, and I don’t have time to put together something usefully focused on a single one of them, a phrase comes to mind. But it needs some background.
When I was an undergraduate at MIT, the head of the psychology department (now Brain and Cognitive Science) was one Hans-Lukas Teuber, one of those engaging and popular professors whose name was known to everyone. When I was there he taught the intro to psychology class, or 9.01 (“nine-oh-one”), psychology being “Course 9.”
It was a popular class, so the lectures were given in one of the biggest lecture halls on campus (Room 26-100….). I never took the class, but I attended a few lectures with friends who were taking it and thus got a taste of why Professor Teuber was so popular. He was engaging, challenging, funny, smart, and clear.
Watch the first minute of this video, and then imagine him walking to the front of the lecture hall, looking out and up at a few hundred students, and saying, “Who vants to know vat?”
A variation of that question, in Teuber’s accent, popped into my mind when I decided we were due for a new thread.
“Who vants to talk about vat?”
Two episodes into the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comic series, and so far it has been a fantastic transition from page to screen. Important because his (and Pratchett’s) Good Omens adaptation was fantastic, but the adaptation of his American Gods novel a few years back was uneven and seemed to miss a lot of what I loved about the novel.
I started reading The Sandman in 1991 and it had a profound influence on me. It was the first comic book that I could point to and say “this is quality literature.” It was also an early part of my wife’s and my courtship. I loaned all of my graphic novels to her even before we had started dating, and we spent a lot of time together discussing it in email.
Hoping this quality keeps up. It’s a fantastic story full of wonder and heartbreak, intertextual and full of thought provoking metanarrative tendencies.
Who vants to talk about vat? is an excellent starting point for an open thread.
I’ve never read a graphic novel; I bought Maus when it was first published, but then gave it away almost immediately to a visiting cousin whose mother was a holocaust survivor. In fact, I pretty much never read anything about the holocaust, because I’m scared that certain “images” would live in my head – this has actually happened when I have lunged too late for the radio and heard graphic things I can never forget. I managed Gitta Sereny’s book about Speer, because due to Speer’s actual role it contained almost no truly horrifying descriptions, but I never dared to read her book about Stangl, Into that Darkness despite my extreme admiration for her, because I knew I would not be able to stand it.
I liked the sound of Persepolis, but somehow never got round to reading it, and The Sandman seemed too big an enterprise by the time I actually heard about it. So I am going to come to The Sandman in innocence. But I am nervous, in case I don’t like it. I hope its distillation is not too complicated for someone who doesn’t know the series (which I have purposely not done any reading about). I did enjoy Good Omens, so that is at least encouraging.
Have you never then read Primo Levi, GFTNC ?
A formative experience for me.
Did not dare, Nigel.
The FBI have raided Mar-a-Lago!
More importantly, the Senate passed a climate change bill.
Severely compromised in some ways, thanks to Manchin/Sinema, but far better than nothing.
Yes, that is more important in the long run. But I reacted in the moment to what seemed fairly dramatic news. I only hope he hadn’t already destroyed what they were looking for.
Further on Primo Levi, Nigel, I do realise that this is a significant loss for me. I have read interviews with him, and realise that testimony from such a writer is priceless, and necessary. I just couldn’t risk it. And, while I visited Israel many times during my parents’ retirement there, I never went to Yad Vashem either. I was stronger in my youth – I can no longer (and have not been able to for some years) risk the indelible imprint of certain things on my mind. I am not proud of this. I think it is a weakness, or fault. But there it is.
The FBI have raided Mar-a-Lago!
I am contrite. I thought you were having us on. But it appears that you merely get more timely news than we do.
Considering what kind of case you have to make to even get a search warrant these days (for a rich old white guy, not a poor colored guy), I’d say things for Trump are going sideways at an increasing rate. In fact, I’d venture to predict that he makes his announcement about 2024 before the end of the week. In the (misguided) belief that this will somehow protect him from criminal charges.
I’ve read a lot of rough reading about war and interpersonal violence. I feel as if it’s a sort of personal duty to bear witness and to provide a window into it for those that I teach.
The Sandman does have its moments. He is the King of Dreams after all, and that includes nightmares and the things that continue to haunt us in our waking hours. But the story really does do an excellent job of balancing that with beauty and wonder. It will break your heart, but it never leaves you broken. It is ultimately quite humane in a way that could not be achieved without the darkness that runs through it.
– I can no longer (and have not been able to for some years) risk the indelible imprint of certain things on my mind. I am not proud of this. I think it is a weakness, or fault. But there it is.
*I* think it is pretty impressive, both that you know yourself well enough to know this about yourself. And that you have the courage to refuse to go and damage yourself. When, I’m sure, there is significant social pressure on you to go.
No, no, I wasn’t worried about that aspect of the Sandman! Only that it would be hard to follow for us virgins.
I know what you mean about having a duty, in my case obviously not as a teacher but as a human being, to bear witness to what humans are capable of, and for the victims. But I can no longer do my duty.
I took a class on forgiveness in the Peace Studies program at UMaine 20+ years ago. The first book we read was Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower. I also read Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table on my own.
But the book involving the Holocaust that made immeasurably the most impact on me was Sophie’s Choice. My own kids were little at the time, and that juxtaposition was the single thing that made me understand that the Holocaust wasn’t some kind of story from the mists of the past, it was a thing that had happened in everyday life to ordinary people just like me and my own kids.
The experience of reading that book changed my understanding of life profoundly.
I have neither avoided nor sought out other books about the Holocaust. What I can’t imagine is visiting one of the camps. I barely got through Harpers Ferry and Ellis Island in one piece….
I agree with nous that I think it’s important for me to bear witness when I can. But also think it’s important to give ourselves the grace not to try to do what we can’t. From Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time: “Person must not do what person cannot do.”
Plus, life goes on from one day to the next, and hatever we can or want to do for other people or the world, we are more capable the more in one piece we are.
***GftNC’s 8:34 has appeared while I’ve been writing this. Again, I don’t think you should beat yourself up like that. It is not your duty to harm yourself when you are as sure as you can be that no good will come of it to balance the harm. We all do what we can.
I’ve read Primo Levi, because one must. But otherwise I avoid holocaust literature: I don’t want to be entertained by it and I think I know enough of the facts.
My father’s parents came from the Pale of Settlement a hundred and twenty years ago. I have no living relatives there. That is the holocaust.
After his conviction, Franz Stangl spent six months in prison in 1971, where he was interviewed by Sereny, before he died. His deputy, Gustav Wagner was never imprisoned, and nor was Bishop Alois Hudal, who helped them escape to Brazil after the war. That is not justice.
Thank you, wj. It’s not social pressure, it’s self-imposed. I have a high standard for right action, and where I cannot meet it myself it is uncomfortable to say the least. But as I say, there it is.
Onward and upward: contemplating the prospect of incriminating documents in the broken-into safe at Mar-a-Lago will be a fine distraction!
I think the show is doing an admirable job of building an accessible world. If it follows the course laid out by the comic it will unfurl its long narrative arc a bit at a time while holding us with shorter, more intimate story arcs. Think this first season is covering two of the smaller arcs.
I read Maus in ‘91 or ‘92 as well, loaned to me as part of a different, earlier courtship.
Persepolis is also excellent, and the animated film adaptation is on par with the graphic novel if you want the story without as demanding a time commitment.
Aiy, for some reason Pro Bono’s comment made me remember that in my much earlier life I read The White Hotel. I have for the most part blocked out the memory of it as much as I can for reasons that GftNC has already articulated.
Thank you Janie, and my rational mind agrees with you.
Stangl died of a heart attack less than 24 hours after his last interview with Sereny, in which he had finally admitted guilt. And Speer finally admitted to her that he had known what was happening, which would have condemned him to death at Nuremberg. She was a remarkable interviewer and writer, her books on Mary Bell the child murderer were fascinating and illuminating.
I think when you’re younger, you have more psychic headroom for dark things. Mostly because, at least in most cases, you haven’t lived them, or at least haven’t fully absorbed and understood what their consequences can be. They are, relatively speaking, academic.
Nobody is obliged to expose themselves to darkness. It’s not good to hide from it, but I doubt that’s the case for GFTNC.
I read Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth” a year or so ago. That’ll hold me for a while.
The FBI have raided Mar-a-Lago!
The good news is that it shows that the Justice Department is willing to investigate Trump, and isn’t treating Trump as effectively above the law just because he is a former President.
The difficulty is that the Justice Department isn’t talking about the search, so essentially all of our information about it comes from Donald Trump. This is the type of story the right loves. There’s very little solid information about the raid, leaving lots of space to embellish the story with made up facts. At the same time, there is an undeniable fact at the center of the story–the FBI did search Trump’s residence–so that the story cannot be dismissed as a complete fabrication.
Alan Dershowitz, for example, went on Fox News and Newsmax saying that the search might not be justified, depending on the facts used to justify the search. Other right wing media reported on these appearances with headlines like, “Alan Dershowitz rips FBI raid on Trump, raises legal questions about how it was conducted.” Of course the judge who issued the search warrant knows the facts used to justify the warrant, and Dershowitz doesn’t, but that doesn’t stop the right wing media from turning baseless speculation into a cause for outrage.
Trump put out a press release about the search, presumably because he believed that the search would help him politically. And with much of the right wing media at his beck and call, he is probably right about that, at least in terms of helping him win the Republican primary if he runs again.
*I* think it is pretty impressive, both that you know yourself well enough to know this about yourself. And that you have the courage to refuse to go and damage yourself. When, I’m sure, there is significant social pressure on you to go.
Agreed.
If I gave the impression of adding to such pressure, I apologise.
Trump put out a press release about the search, presumably because he believed that the search would help him politically.
But his base really cares a lot about protecting classified information. Don’t remember how upset they were about Hillary Clinton’s email server?
No apology necessary, Nigel, I didn’t take it that way.
The difficulty is that the Justice Department isn’t talking about the search, so essentially all of our information about it comes from Donald Trump.
It’s a feature of the system. Police simply don’t make statements mid-investigation, except to the extend necessary to try to get witnesses, etc., to come forward. Mostly, that is to protect the potentially innocent targets of the investigation. There can, after all, be a lot of initial suspects who need to be investigated and cleared along the way.
And Grand Jury investigations, which this was part of, are even less public, until the indictments get handed down.
Trump, who seems to have a short enough attention span that he focuses mostly on the next news cycle, can milk this secrecy. But an attempt like this to “frame the story” isn’t a long term steategy. At least, not if there is any substance to the investigation. Which, from how frantically Trump has been reacting, there seems to be. (Yes, I know nobody here thought otherwise. But Trump’s reaction suggests that he thinks there might be enough to convince a jury, which is a whole different level of proof.)
The DOJ and FBI wouldn’t have entered into this fraught of a situation if they didn’t have him dead to rights. Everyone knew it was going to be a political sh*t show and not something take lightly in the slightest.
If we have to wait until the right can’t make a shit show about something we do, we might as well hand the keys over to them right now. People on BJ have been saying that Clickbait could release the warrant if he wanted to, so we’d have some actual factual information, and gee, apparently he doesn’t want to.
I wonder why!
And it’s not like Garland has been running the kind of DoJ-as-theater operation that Trump embraced. If he had been, something like this would have happened ling since.
Marina Hyde on the raid:
“These are dark times for our Nation,” began an overnight statement by the former president, talking like a Star Wars opening crawl. Trump went on to say his property was “under siege”, which feels a little histrionic. Surely this was just a harmless law enforcement rally that mildly got out of hand, though not in a way that saw five people end up dead, a gibbet erected on the croquet lawn and small-state golfers barricading themselves into executive restrooms in genuine and rational fear of their lives?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/09/fbi-raid-mar-a-lago-donald-trump-law-2024
Another excellent point in the Marina Hyde piece:
“Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President,” was the way he characterised the actions of an FBI whose lifelong Republican director he personally chose for the job.
whose lifelong Republican director he personally chose for the job.
But. But. So many of the people he appointed (from cabinet members to judges to his VP) turned out to be disloyal!
Hmmm. Could that say something about his competence, in selecting staff, for example…?
“Could that say something about his competence, in selecting staff, for example…?”
Yeah, every now and then a Trump appointee will turn out to be kinda-honest.
Broken clock, etc.
Plus “afraid of consequences” also, too.
Also worth reading, on the possible connection between the raid and the January 6th hearings:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/09/fbi-donald-trumps-florida-home-doj-republicans-january-6-hearings
After talking about the general toothlessness of the laws about handling of Presidential documents, it goes on to say this:
The DOJ is a risk-averse body by nature, and the attorney general, Merrick Garland, has been especially timid and squeamish even by the standards of his office. He didn’t want to pursue what could look like a politically motivated prosecution of a political opponent; he didn’t want to annoy the sizeable minority of the US that sees Trump as a beloved, almost messianic figure. It long looked as if the department would not have the stomach for a real investigation of Trump – that they would allow his crimes to go unanswered for fear of appearing too political. But the hearings surfaced new evidence, and brought new pressure to bear on the department – that of an outraged populace.
Even though a chunk of the country adores Trump, most Americans think he’s a corrupt crook. Nearly 60% said he should be prosecuted for the events of 6 January, according to a recent poll. Reports from the Justice Department’s own inquiry indicate that the investigation recently turned to Trump’s own role in the scheme to overturn the election by sending fake electors to Congress. It’s possible that, to Garland, the worry about what it would look like if he tried to hold Trump accountable has finally been eclipsed by the worry about what it would look like if he didn’t.
Learned a new word to-day from the Martina Hyde piece.
Be honest, who of you was acquainted with the term ‘etiolated’? At first glance I assumed that it meant drunk but then there would have been an h after the first t, I presume.
“If they can raid an ex-President, think what could they do to you!”
Well, yeah. If nobody is above the law, and you’ve been breaking 5he law and (so far) getting away with it because you are so rich and influential, I can see why you’d be both outraged and worried. But don’t expect sympathy here.
Hartmut, to change the subject completely (if briefly), I wanted to ask you something. In a recent thread I referred jokingly to The Glass Bead Game, which I read very many years ago in my hippy youth. That prompted me to read it again, although I wasn’t sure how the now-me would get on with it. I’m enjoying it, and about halfway through, but I checked today and saw it was first published in 1943. How well known is it in Germany, and what roughly speaking would you say is Herman Hesse’s place in the canon? I was going to do a bit of research later, and still will do, but the presence of a native speaker and member of the culture means I can’t resist picking your brain…
He didn’t want to pursue what could look like a politically motivated prosecution of a political opponent; he didn’t want to annoy the sizeable minority of the US that sees Trump as a beloved, almost messianic figure. It long looked as if the department would not have the stomach for a real investigation of Trump – that they would allow his crimes to go unanswered for fear of appearing too political.
I would love to see some evidence that the real Garland ever said these things (rather than the one created to feed the self-image of pundits who believe they’re smarter than everyone else, and could do everyone’s job better than everyone else), and also an analysis that takes into account the care with which such an investigation must be taken.
I prefer to go with this Garland, in one of my most favorite one-minute snips of video of all time. (Which we’ve seen here, I think, but which I enjoy watching again every day or two. 🙂 )
Great clip of Garland, Janie, thanks for the reminder.
The Republicans would claim that poor old Trump was the victim of a politically motivated prosecution if he was caught shooting someone to death on First Ave in NYC in front of one hundred witnesses.
By the way, Hartmut, I did know what etiolated means! I have even been known to use it, for example when (perhaps unfairly? you be the judge) describing the appearance of the unlamented Stephen Miller.
If we have to wait until the right can’t make a shit show about something we do, we might as well hand the keys over to them right now.
This.
Trump’s supporters are going to respond to any investigation or prosecution of Trump by screaming and crying and stamping their feet and threatening the rest of us with armed violence. Some of them are going to go beyond threats of armed violence.
So be it.
Etiolated…
Yes, I’m afraid I’ve used it before, too. From memory, in describing Jacob Rees Mogg.
I learnt the word “etiolated” in a biology class when I was about 14.
So be it.
Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.
If you’d asked me what “etiolated” means I would have said “weaken,” which seems close enough. I guess that’s not too bad, though I wouldn’t have remembered the botany meaning. Unlike the Brits, though, I don’t think I’ve ever used it out loud.
You’ve landed amongst word nerds, Hartmut. Underestimate us at your peril! 😉
One can go a “Jack the Ripper Tour” of the sites of the Whitechapel murders around 1890.
“Really fun, would recommend it!” says a Tripadvisor review.
I am appalled.
I fear that there may be an element of this in some holocaust tourism, and some holocaust literature.
Trump’s supporters are going to respond to any investigation or prosecution of Trump by screaming and crying and stamping their feet and threatening the rest of us with armed violence. Some of them are going to go beyond threats of armed violence.
They appear ready to do so even if neither of those happen. For example, if he merely loses the next election. So there’s no reason to hold back on this account.
GftNC, sorry can’t help you much there. I know that some of Hesse’s texts used to be required reading at school* and I believe Das Glasperlenspiel is somewhere on the family bookshelves. But I can’t remember to have actually read anything of him ever. We had a short piece from Unterm Rad (Beneath the wheel) as a dictation test once in school.
I know several book titles of his work but that’s about all. But I am quite a Philistine concerning 20th century German literature and in general more inclined toward(s) obscure authors and works. Same with literature from antiquity btw. A bit of a problem for a schoolteacher of Latin.
*that’s usually the death knell of any German author in Germany. It almost guarantees that people will never ever touch anything of that author again volontarily after finishing school.
By way of distraction, the New Yorker has got in a fight with its archivist, whom it seems to have treated rather badly.
Ill advised on their part.
https://twitter.com/erinoverbey/status/1556988744129019905
For nearly twenty-five years, David Remnick & the
@NewYorker have wielded a kind of ultimate power in the literary sphere. As editor-in-chief, he has the ability to make or break any reporter or writer’s career, and, with any review, to make or break any book’s success…
Pro Bono, a predilection for the macabre is not that uncommon. I had a Latin professor at university who loved to chose such texts for seminars; in particular, if they were really over the top.
In that context it is a predilection that I share.
E.g. I clearly prefer the Flavian epics and have a bit of an aversion to Vergil.
Black humor is one thing* but the Holocaust is of course something completely different, and to visit Auschwitz for the thrill of it is sick.
*I admit to have written numerous macabre song parodies myself.
Thanks anyway, Hartmut – it was very possibly a mainly counter-cultural burst of popularity, with Siddhartha of course, and then Steppenwolf after which the band named themselves.
If we have to wait until the right can’t make a shit show about something we do, we might as well hand the keys over to them right now.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean the people in charge of such things aren’t extremely wary of the political implications. That says to me that they have such a strong case that they have no choice but to pursue it. I, too, might prefer that they weren’t so wary, but I’m especially encouraged by the raid in light of that excessive wariness.
hsh — agreed. I didn’t mean to undercut that angle on it.
I’m especially encouraged by the raid in light of that excessive wariness.
Yup, me too. And on that excessive wariness, it was very understandable indeed, and does not reflect badly, IMO, on Garland or anybody else involved.
Me, three. Given how reluctant they have been, it seems likely that they were reasonably sure they had a slam dunk here.
But my superstitious nature says: very few things really turn out to be slam dunks. And although Trump is, I would say, intellectually challenged, he has a tremendous craftiness, and ability to slither out of things. Helped, of course, by his fanboys (and girls) in the media. Fingers majorly crossed, however.
I’m hoping they executed the warrant because of something irrefutably bad. OTOH, it also seems possible that there was a conversation like:
Agent: The Archivists are complaining about the missing stuff again.
Garland: What have we done since the last bunch of stuff was turned over?
Agent: Repeatedly talked to the lawyers, who keep coming up with excuses.
Garland: What’s the book say we should do next?
Agent: Get a search warrant and go get our stuff.
Garland: Follow the book.
Against some superrich guy (Bill Gates, Elon Musk, etc.), or most of Trump’s cronies, sure. Just folow the book.
But considering the (entirely predictable) sh*tstorm this caused, I think “something irrefutably bad” is the smart money bet in this case. And more likely than not, something not just bad but explosively bad — which National Archive stuff would only be if it was a matter of national security.. But unless Trump is dumb enough to publish the warrant, we’re stuck waiting for the indictment to find out what.
Hmmm, FWIW, this account in the WaPo seems to support Michael Cain’s second theory:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/09/trump-fbi-search-mar-a-lago/
In the months before the FBI’s dramatic move to execute a search warrant at former president Donald Trump’s Florida home — and open his safe to look for items — federal authorities grew increasingly concerned that Trump or his lawyers and aides had not, in fact, returned all the documents and other material that were government property, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Officials became suspicious that when Trump gave back items to the National Archives about seven months ago, either the former president or people close to him held on to key records — despite a Justice Department investigation into the handling of 15 boxes of material sent to the former president’s private club and residence in the waning days of his administration.
Over months of discussions on the subject, some officials also came to suspect Trump’s representatives were not truthful at times, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
On Tuesday, a lawyer for Trump said the agents who brought the court-approved warrant to Mar-a-Lago a day earlier took about 12 more boxes after conducting their search.
This interview by Chotnier, via LGM, is another take on the search warrant.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/what-the-fbis-raid-of-mar-a-lago-could-mean-for-trump
Good piece, lj. I was particularly interested in the difference between trying to get documents by subpoena, as opposed to search warrant, following this statement: You use a search warrant, and not a subpoena, when you don’t believe that the person is actually going to comply.
Then, a few sentences later:
When you say he wouldn’t comply, do you mean that he wouldn’t recognize the relevant legal authority? He would destroy documents? Both?
It could be both. But one way would simply be to lie and say that you produced everything. Another would be to assert the Fifth Amendment’s “act of production” privilege. That might be the most benign. It’s a part of the Fifth Amendment that says you don’t have to produce documents in your possession if the act of producing them would be incriminating. So, for instance, there is a lot of speculation that this is about whether the former President has classified documents in his possession that he should not have. If he produced those pursuant to a subpoena, that would be incriminating himself, because it would show that he had them and knew where they were. The search warrant avoids all that. The F.B.I. just takes the documents, not asking the recipient to do anything.
I had no idea about that application of the fifth amendment, but it makes sense. How interesting.
For example, if he merely loses the next election.
Or, for that matter, the last one.
I found this bit interesting in the piece lj linked:
But separate from that, I found the focus on Jan. 6 oddly unimaginative. I realize that people online can speculate about whatever they want, but Adam Silverman isn’t just any old BJ commenter. From a comment on his nightly Ukraine thread:
Clickbait had an entire four-year term of commit crimes in….
to commit crimes in….
Clickbait had an entire four-year term of commit crimes in….
But he’s also someone who ends up believing his own bullsh*t. So he was expecting to have 4 more years (or more?) to keep stealing and selling stuff. But then he lost. Between Election Day and Jan 6, he was still focused on how to snatch victory from the stomach (way past the jaws) of defeat. And then, there was limited time left to stockpile more stuff to sell.
Plus, at least for the moment, he’s no longer got access to yet more stuff to steal. So he’s gonna horde what he has in hand. That’s why it’s still at his place. (Or was, until the warrant appeared unexpectedly.) Waiting to see if he can get buyers into a bidding war, perhaps? But it may have come back to bite him. Deo volente
That’s what I meant, wj, so I don’t get where the “but” comes in. I was trying to say that there’s a lot more that could be in those boxes besides just Jan 6 stuff, and I found it surprising that the New Yorker piece didn’t seem to go beyond that.
Sorry, Janie. Not reading as clearly as I might.
Totally agree. The missing secret documents were (apparently) the justification for the raid. But if, while searching for those, they come across evidence involving other crimes…? Hey, sometimes you get lucky. And as long as you had a valid search warrant, that other stuff is admissible, too.
After sleeping on the search warrant question, I’ve decided I’ll just go with Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” Incompetent help at the White House threw something very sensitive into a box with other stuff and shipped it to Florida. Nuclear codes? List of deep moles in Moscow or Beijing? Somebody at Mar-A-Lago stumbled on it, put it in the safe, and notified the FBI. The judge agreed on the urgency to properly secure the material right now and issued the search warrant so the FBI could grab the stuff.
Michael Cain — I’ve heard that adage, but I didn’t know it had a name. Wikipedia says, “Known in several other forms, it is a philosophical razor that suggests a way of eliminating unlikely explanations for human behavior.”
I can’t imagine anything less unlikely than that Clickbait acted out of malice (or ill intent), but I also don’t see why that should eliminate stupidity. If ever there was a human being compounded of equal parts malice and stupidity, in colossal quantities, it’s Clickbait. (And yes, I know there are ways in which he is the opposite of stupid.)
tl;dnr: Why not both?
Somebody at Mar-A-Lago stumbled on it, put it in the safe, and notified the FBI.
If Michael Cain is right (and I had to look up Hanlon’s razor), the identity of the “somebody” mentioned in this sentence would be very interesting.
The understandable (amongst us, anyway) wish for something sufficiently terrible and incriminating that it would silence the MAGAts and the RWNJs entirely on this, seems to me like pie in the sky. But that’s my pessimmism talking. As a reasonably senior US diplomat once said to me, the secret to happiness is low expectations.
I must really need coffee. I had to read “I can’t imagine anything less unlikely than…” a few times to be sure I was getting it, even though it was easily guessed from the context.
[Somehow I see that formulation as evidence of your math background, Janie. ;^)]
The understandable (amongst us, anyway) wish for something sufficiently terrible and incriminating that it would silence the MAGAts and the RWNJs entirely on this, seems to me like pie in the sky.
My highest hope has been that enough people would stop listening to the MAGAts and RWNJs that the MAGAt/RWNJ narrative power would be significantly diminished. Nothing will silence them entirely. The best possible outcome is that they go back to the status of the crazy uncle whose rantings everyone ignores at Thanksgiving.
Nothing will silence them entirely. The best possible outcome is that they go back to the status of the crazy uncle whose rantings everyone ignores at Thanksgiving.
Totally agree with this. Something clear enough to silence them (much less convince them) cannot be our measuring stick. But I still (pollyanna-ishly?) think there are quite a few people who aren’t cultists who *will* get off the fence if something sufficiently clear is presented to them.
*****
[Somehow I see that formulation as evidence of your math background, Janie. ;^)]
When I was taking linguistics classes, semantics was essentially a class in formal logic. I had a lot of fun with it, not least because it was a lot like programming!
And yes, math belongs in there too. Only high school English teachers think there’s never a valid double negative. 😉 But they’re also the ones who think you should never split an infinitive or end a sentence with a preposition, so what do they know?
…the identity of the “somebody” mentioned in this sentence would be very interesting.
Since I’m just guessing… Some young junior lawyer, who got stuck in Florida while the big boys all went off to Bedminster for the summer and NYC for today’s deposition, decided “I’m not going to lose my law license over this.”
they go back to the status of the crazy uncle whose rantings everyone ignores at Thanksgiving.
FYLTGE.
On the subject of invalid double negatives, I can’t remember where I read the following (perhaps here?), but of the various versions I find, let’s go with the MIT one, in Janie’s honour:
An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn’t a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative.”
A voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah, right.”
Fun story, GftNC. 🙂
It reminds me of something similar, I think from Pinker’s The Language Instinct, the book that inspired me to take linguistics classes in the first place (in my mid-50s)
Pinker, always a know-it-all, but often very entertaining with it about language, took on the complainers who say that “I could care less” makes no sense.
IIRC it was something like a “Yeah, right” analysis — that the sarcasm with which the phrase was spoken completed the meaning: “I suppose I *could* care less, except that it’s not possible to care less than I do.” It’s a long time since I read the book, and that’s a paraphrase, but hopefully clear enough to make the point.
The point being: tone and context matter, not just the words.
(And now I’m imagining saying “Yeah, right” in a tone that conveys agreement … )
they’re also the ones who think you should never split an infinitive or end a sentence with a preposition, so what do they know?
You mean, it’s not OK to use a proposition to end a sentence with??? Who knew. (Always my favorite way to address a grammarian run amok.)
Well, thats what happens when ou try to force one language into the straitjacket og another language’s grammar.
What’s an example of a double positive, anyhow? I’m not sure what that would be, in order to be the equivalent of a double negative. And I’m thinking math/logic again…. Although lj might have a perspective from linguistics.
I do totally expect some examples from this crowd!
(And I’m tempted to go off thinking about multiplying various combinations of positive and negative numbers, or even delving into imaginary numbers, but hey, I’m babysitting. The 9-month-old isn’t quite ready for this yet. 🙂
(Okay: multiply two positives and you get a positive, multiply two negatives and you get a
negativepositive [corrected later]. Only if you mix one of each do you get a negative. Quite parallel, and makes the professor in the anecdote look blinkered. ??)hot take industry has moved with incredible speed from “is wimpy, hand-wringing DOJ helping Trump’s 2024 comeback?” to “is heavy-handed, bullying DOJ helping Trump’s 2024 comeback?”
From here.
This encapsulates the reason for my resistance to spending any time reading contemporary punditry.
JanieM, small slip there: multiplying two negatives nets a positive.
Plus a pedant would say that a sentence by definition can’t end with a preposition for then it would be a postposition (or the second half of a circumposition). 😉
Malice is a possibility, incompetence equally possible.
But my money is on “the law doesn’t apply to me”.
Hartmut, thanks, yes, of course multiplying two negatives yields a positive. Frustrating to be writing too fast to nail down my central point!
“A pedant would say”…. That would be a good name for a blog. Maybe even this blog!
Pinker, always a know-it-all, but often very entertaining with it about language, took on the complainers who say that “I could care less” makes no sense.
By the way, this raises something I have been conscious of for ages, about which I am 98% sure I’m right, but other Brits feel free to chime in.
I think that the following substitutions have occurred in recent years, from what used to be normal English usage to American usage (which I have assumed was assimilated via media – TV, movies etc):
“I couldn’t care less” to “I could care less”
“From the word go” to “From the get-go”
“Common or garden” to “garden variety”.
There may be others, but these are the ones I notice all the time. I haven’t seen or heard anybody else talking about this!
What russell said. (1:30)
A Bavarian (or Swiss) will use a triple negative so a pedantic Prussian cannot interpret/mistake a double negative as/for a positive.
Per GftNC, I obviously can’t comment on the changes she lists, but you can be sure that it’s working both ways. One of my colleagues, back when I had a job, had an 8-year-old son who spent a lot of time watching a British YouTuber called Stampy Longnose, who IIRC did videos about Minecraft. My friend’s kid’s speech was littered with British idioms and slang phrases as a result.
The first phrase transferring this way that I remember noticing was “At the end of the day.” There was a memorable (to me) Sports Illustrated article in which one of their best writers started an article by observing that the British had a phrase “At the end of the day” that meant the same as our “Bottom line” — and “Lord knows,” he said, “we need a replacement for that.”
(Paraphrasing throughout. I could probably find that article online but not right now. This was surely 30-40 years ago.)
“The understandable (amongst us, anyway) wish for something sufficiently terrible and incriminating that it would silence the MAGAs and the RWNJs entirely on this, seems to me like pie in the sky.”
It seems to me that the terrible thing has already happened. The MAGAs attacked Congress.
Republicans who think of themselves as better than the MAGA base have repeatedly underestimated the ability of MAGAs to justify absolutely anything. WHen the news broke about Trump’s pussygrabbing, Republican leaders thought that he’d cooked his goose, but the MAGAs didn’t care. When Trump supporters attacked Congress, for a few minutes Congressional Republicans thought that he’d gone too far. Then they realized that no, Trump worshipers are still worshipping, so they quickly changed their rhetoric to either supporting the attack or downplaying it.
There is no low too low for Trump supporters to go. THere is no low too low for the majority of elected Republicans to go.
There will be violence at polling places this fall. The only way Democrats are going to be able to win elections is if we post people to film the polling places, have lawyers on hand, get the vote out at overwhelming levels, and prepare to sue, sue, sue, sue. And be prepared to be shot by some MAGA asshole. Small town rural Democrats will either be prevented from voting or election offices run by MAGAs will toss their votes.
I still wonder if a significant percentage of people who say “I could care less” are aware of the literal meaning and are saying it with sarcastic intent versus simply messing up “I couldn’t care less” or mindlessly repeating the sarcastic version unaware of the sarcasm.
With “like I could care less” or “as if I could care less” you can be reasonably sure of the sarcasm.
Sometime around when my kids were in junior high, “by accident” became “on accident”.
It’s definitely being a really, really bad week for Trump. Tuesday, a federal appeals court panel ruled that House Democrats are entitled to review Donald Trump’s tax returns for 2015 to 2020. It rejected all four of the legal arguments by the former president’s lawyers:
If getting three out of three is a trifecta, what’s the term for four out of four?
More trouble. Trump, specifically his business practices, have been under investigation in New York. Today, Trump said he will take the Fifth when questioned. But here’s the thing, if you take the 5th in a criminal investigation or trial, that refusal to testify cannot be used against you. And the judge will explicitly instruct the jury not to draw any conclusions from it.
But this is a civil case. And there, the law is different. The jury is allowed to infer that, if you declined to answer a question, that you have some guilty reason for doing so. As Judge Engoron put it, Trump (and his children) “will have the right to refuse to answer any questions that they claim might incriminate them, and that refusal may not be commented on or used against them in a criminal prosecution. However, there is no unfairness in allowing the jurors in a civil case to know these refusals and to draw their own conclusions.”
Or, as the Supreme Court put it in Baxter v. Palmigiano (1976): “the Fifth Amendment does not forbid adverse inferences against parties to civil actions when they refuse to testify in response to probative evidence offered against them.” (Of course, Trump’s political hacks on the Supreme Court could reverse that, too….)
It’s definitely being a really, really bad week for Trump.
Not bad enough. I read an analysis of that appeals court ruling, and the conclusion was that it would still be some years before those tax returns would be handed over, if at all.
wonkie: of course you’re right, that the MAGAts attacking congress was an incredible, unprecedentedly terrible thing. But I’m sure you knew what I meant in the context of the Mar-a-Lago raid: that we here hoped that the raid turned up proof of something so clearly criminal and iniquitous that even the MAGAts and RWNJs would be rendered (even if only temporarily) speechless and excuseless. But again, my actual expectation is that nothing so unarguable is likely to be found. Unarguable enough to get through to those MAGAts and RWNJs, that is.
What with all the petards and hoistings!
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-made-felony-mishandle-classified-172104317.html
Sometime around when my kids were in junior high, “by accident” became “on accident”.
That was a little kid thing for me when I was a little kid – something that got eliminated over time through repetitive parental correction. It’s the evil twin of “on purpose.”
Related to “standing on line” vs “standing in line”? (Which I think is partly a regional usage difference.)
Or graduating high school (ugh) vs graduating from high school?
Or …
When my son was teaching English in China, we spent quite a bit of time trying to find a pattern to explain when to use “the” and when not. Every pattern we hypothesized had too many exceptions to really be reliable, and that was without even looking at American vs British usage. (He was in hospital vs He was in the hospital.)
More later, gotta feed the kid.
I think that the following substitutions have occurred in recent years, from what used to be normal English usage to American usage…
“Fill in a form” seems to have become “fill out a form” for almost everyone younger than me.
Tucked into a bill Trump signed into law in January 2018 was a provision increasing the punishment for knowingly removing classified materials with the intent to retain them at an “unauthorized location.”
This is what happens when you can’t be bothered to read the stuff you are signing.
The “valley girl” use of the word “like” has become so embedded in conversational English that well-educated word smiths who talk and write for a living use it. Sort of like the boomer use of the phrase “you know.”
“Could I have the bill, please” to “Can I get the check, please”. (I don’t think this one has made very substantial inroads. YET.)
Standing on line – not here yet. We say “queuing”.
I don’t stand on line either, I stand *in* line. 😉
Another: at the weekend vs on the weekend.
I don’t think “the year dot” has made it over here at all…. And I don’t know why it’s called “dot,” either. Can any of you Brits explain?
Standing on line is a metro-NYC thing. I’m very aware of it because I live outside the metro-NYC area but very close to it and hear it when I venture in to metro-NYC or when metro-NYC natives venture out to my native region. Also, too, I went to college in the outer ring of metro-NYC, so there was a lot of mixing between natives and non-natives with the attendant “you talk funny” …um, talk.
Standing in line, occasionally used here. On line: never! “On accident” – never heard of it. Hope I never have to again!
The year dot: beats me…
“Fill in a form” seems to have become “fill out a form” for almost everyone younger than me.
Maybe just me, but I fill out a form and fill in the individual lines/boxes on the form. As far back as I can remember that’s how I’ve done it.
Me, too, Michael.
Me three on that one.
Although I wonder if the usage isn’t getting a little slithery with online forms.
These people really are extraordinary. Do the FBI wear bodycams to disprove this kind of nonsense? Whatever kinds of precautions are taken, they will always be at least a step behind the crazy…
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fabricated-claim-fbi-planted-evidence-mar-lago-taking-right-storm
As usual I have not read the whole thing, but this newsweek article is an goofy mixture of serious information (if it’s actually accurate) and “I’m smarter than everyone else” framing. (In this case, “I’m smarter than the FBI about how to do their jobs.”)
It implies that there could or should have been a way for the FBI to do execute the search warrant without getting a sensationalist reaction from every direction, and I think that’s utter nonsense. There was no way they were going to do this without a Niagara Falls of blowback. Seriously?!?
Other than that, it sounds like Clickbait is the traitorous criminal asshole we all thought he was, and I hope he’s in big trouble. But I’ll believe that part when I see it.
russell: I’m not even waiting for the commercial break – I’m watching the first of a four part series on Sky Arts called The Art of Drumming. Lots and lots of great drummers, talking about all sorts of stuff. Seems like the kind of thing you might be interested in, if you can find a way to get it..
I think that’s utter nonsense.
I’m a lot more tolerant of punditry than you are, but I completely agree. And with your final paragraph too, Janie.
On Janie’s link, the author says a “30 year Justice official” said both that the raid was timed for when Trump was away to avoid giving him a photo op. And that same official (supposedly) said it was a “spectacular backfire.” One would hope that anyone who’s been paying attention would have a clue about how much worse it would have been with Trump there. Then again, perhaps “not totally successful” was merely improved to “spectacular backfire.”
(And now I’m imagining saying “Yeah, right” in a tone that conveys agreement … )
Once upon a time in a galaxy called North Carolina, there was a saying, “Yeah it is” meant to convey agreement:
“This pulled pork is amazing!”
“Yeah it is.”
Because of its similarity to “Yeah, right” it was often confusing to outsiders who couldn’t figure if it was sincere or sarcastic, myself included. But it eventually got stuck in the lexicon and I still catch myself saying it when I see that confused look.
What’s an example of a double positive, anyhow?
Doubleplusgood?
I imagine “in line” will prevail as “on line” has taken on a meaning of its own.
I fill in a form but fill out a questionnaire. And I never once thought about this until reading this comment thread.
The new usage that I cannot stand at all under any circumstances is “gifted” instead of “gave” or “given” as in “That was gifted to me” or “SHe gifted me that.”
Doubleplusgood
I’ve encountered doubleplusungood many times. But not this one.
russell: gosh I’m used to being behind the times, but this is ridiculous. I’ve just discovered that The Art of Drumming came out in 2018, so I’m sure you’ve seen it. Completely new to me, and I now know: a) the actual details, theory etc are Greek to me, b) you have to be something of a genius to do it, and c) it’s amazing, and the people who do it seem almost uniformly cool. Huh. Who knew? (to quote wj)
I’m with you about “gifted,” wonkie. It’s barbaric. 😉
Also, “yeah, right?” with the voice going up conveys agreement whereas the flat “yeah, right” is the sarcastic one.
I dunno. I ain’t no linguistics-talkin-guy. Know what I’m sayin’?
I’ve encountered doubleplusungood many times. But not this one.
pessimist. 😉
I’m with you about “gifted,” wonkie. It’s barbaric. 😉
Where I’m familiar with it is in legalese, and think it goes back hundreds of years in that setting. “Gifted” implies all of the necessary legal niceties have been taken care of to transfer ownership; “gave” not so much.
One of my wife’s former employers is reorganizing the firm and will be “gifting” her with stock shares to replace the old ownership warrants that she has. There will be forms to fill out — not in — and papers to sign and all sorts of legal bits.
Say, rather, that I have friends who are pessimists. (Gotta maintain my optimist cred.)**
** And where did “cred” for “reputation” come from?
I’m with you about “gifted,” wonkie. It’s barbaric. 😉
I was going to enthusiastically agree until Michael Cain threw a spanner in the works. But even if he’s right, most people these days just use it instead of given or gave. So they are still barbarians. Like people who use utilise for use, and transportation for transport, which I think Janie has scorned before. Huh. This really is the Pedants’ Revolt.
** And where did “cred” for “reputation” come from
I thought it was short for “street credit”.
GFTNC: never saw The Art Of Drumming, but now I need to go check it out. Thanks for the tip!!
My favorite quote about it all, from a guy on a drumming blog, and which kinda rings true to me:
“Playing drums is not that hard, it just takes a lifetime to be good at it”.
Applies to oh so many things…
Also – if I’m not mistaken “cred” -> “credibility”.
But I still say “cool” and “right on” and “solid”, so I may not be the authority.
@russell — i thought it was credibility too, and then street cred means street credibility
Also – if I’m not mistaken “cred” -> “credibility”.
With, AIUI, a connotation of a non-negative value. A reputation can go either way, good or bad, positive or negative. Cred, you either have it or you don’t.
Any ideas on the origin of “do me a solid” with “solid” sort of meaning “big favor”? I’ve only been hearing it in the last 5-8 years at most, but certainly could have missed it if it started in social contexts outside my range and then usage expanded.
Priest — a quick google search suggests that no one seems to know. I didn’t find it on language log at all, and people just gave anecdata on Urban Dictionary (but someone said they used to use it in London in the 60s).
A reputation can go either way, good or bad, positive or negative. Cred, you either have it or you don’t.
With the caveat that, while cred is positive for the target audience, it can be something that the rest of the world considers negative. For example, you can get street cred with your fellow gang members (or fellow militia members) by being willing to throw a punch at any police officer who comes within reach. Not really a major plus, as far as the general populace is concerned.
“Solid” started showing up in the usus loquendi of my youth somewhere around 1971 or 1972. It can be either a noun (“do me a solid”) or an adjective, usually as a single word (“solid!!”).
Ahh, trying to draw me in.
I am happy, in a way, to hear that the know-it-all that comes thru in Pinker’s books is not something I’m adding on cause I disagree with him. What’s interesting to me is that there is markedly less tolerance for that sort of personality in the past half decade or so, though I don’t know if that is from people being more skeptical about arguments from authority or if it is cause we have so many people who think a quick dive in the internet can catch out people who have spent their life researching about a subject. Probably a little of both.
Janie, if you are still thinking of explaining how we add the definite article (and don’t mind me dropping into know-it-all mode, cause we generally get most upset by the things our own personal traits seen in others), I personally think it is explained by deixis. With the way Japanese students are learning English, I’m having more and more students who never really grok it, so they write Sakura says I like… This is partly an overuse/misuse of quotes and covering more material superficially. (one would think that starting to teach English in elementary school would be a good thing, but what has happened is that assumptions are made about what students learn as then move, which then has teachers skip things because they are sure that students have learned it earlier) It’s not ironclad, but it’s more to explain why it is rather than producing it.
So how does deixis explain definite articles? Well, any time you drop the definite article, it means that it is something like a location where there is a shared understanding. I went home, where we know that everyone has their own home. I went to school where we know that there is a system where most people my age went to an educational institution. Hospital is interesting, I think it reflects the cultural divide between US health systems and the NHS. Anyway, that’s how I explain it to the tiny handful of students who reach a point where they are wrestling with that.
A different question about usage, my facebook has an entry from a Japanese friend who is a very proficient user of English and he was a bit pissed off that he got an email reply that opened with ‘well noted’. A number of Brits said that it was becoming quite common. Thoughts?
For those like me (or am I the only one?) who never previously heard of “deixis”:
https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/elor/lo/deixis/index.html
Obsidian Wings — your source for English words that nobody you know will recognize.
The FBI warrant went as well as could ever be expected, and probably avoided some delays and monkey wrenching by happening in Trump’s absence.
There was never any way that this would not be spun as persecution. The aggrieved right cannot conceive the world in any other terms and will always scramble to find the framing that allows for it. There is no such thing as good faith with them.
Given that, just act, and worry for nothing more than that the process is followed faithfully within the letter of the law. There is nothing to be gained by worrying about appearances, just about expediency.
What nous said. (And how often do I say that?)
lj, my son was last in China in 2016, so this discussion happened a long time ago. Deixis sounds like it could be the explanation, but I have to say I’m skeptical that the NHS has anything to do with it. 🙂
I’ll think about it when I’m less tired, though, because I’m not 100% convinced it’s that simple.
Meanwhile, the discussion of double negatives reminded me of a juicy item from a discussion I had with a friend a week or two ago. He mentioned a phrase that was used in his work context: “more likely than not.” We agreed that it means something like “probability is > 50%,” and that is indeed how it’s used at his workplace.
Someone at the workplace tried to use “less likely than not” as its opposite.
Heh….
At least it wasn’t “fewer likely than not.”
wj, check out fillmore’s lectures on Deixis
http://websites.umich.edu/~jlawler/FillmoreDeixisLectures.pdf
It has been done as a paperback, but you can almost smell the freshly mimeoed paper with the link I gave you.
Janie, one of my grad school teachers, Talmy Givon, was big on biological explanations of language, arguing that if you get something that covers 80% of what is happening, it would be crap for physics, but pretty good for biology (my restatement) I’ve kind of borrowed that for my philosphy of explaining things to students, if the explanation covers the bulk of examples, I’m pretty happy with that.
nous….lol
lj, that makes sense from a practical standpoint. That won’t stop me from thinking about it some more for my own entertainment, though. 🙂
“more likely than not.” We agreed that it means something like “probability is > 50%”
I admit to a fondness for “the way the smart money bets” for high probability alternatives. It occurs to me that this odd for someone who never visits casinos (or race tracks) and has never even bought a lottery ticket.** But there it is.
** I figure the odds of buying a winning lottery ticket are essentially the same as the odds of picking it up off the sidewalk.
wj — my son often says, “What’s the over under on…such and such.” I have to have him explain it every time; i had never heard of that kind of bet until a few years ago and I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to it.
The “valley girl” use of the word “like”
actually, much earlier
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/the-evolution-of-like/507614/
I had never heard of deixis, but I’m glad to know about it now (although I doubt I’ll ever be quite confident enough to use it). I did like that Thom Gunn poem at the bottom of wj’s link though.
I haven’t much encountered “well noted”, although it doesn’t ring strangely to me. It seems to be an (at least implicit) riposte and acknowledgement to NB – nota bene.
someone said they used to use it in London in the 60s
I’m pretty familiar with London slang from that period (even including cockney rhyming slang), through having older siblings who were on the scene. I don’t remember “do me a solid”, or even the use of “solid” in that sense, but (and I have no idea where this is coming from) I have a nagging and fugitive sense that it may have a (not necessarily English) military origin. I only recently became aware of the expression “three hots and a cot” to signify a situation in which you were guaranteed three hot meals a day and a bed – I similarly have a hard-to-pin-down sense that this may be a) military and b) American, but I’m perfectly happy to be contradicted or otherwise enlightened.
This is the page where someone says this:
Seinfeld, schmeinfeld, we were using the expression “Do me a solid” mid-sixties in London. But I don’t know where it started.
A random anonymous internet commenter, so who knows. But several people felt the need to swat down the commenter who so said so confidently that the phrase was first uttered in a Seinfeld episode.
I use “Do me a liquid” for more minor favors.
hsh — admit it, this is your revenge for my double negative.
Laughing out loud, partly at the joke itself and partly at the beat it took me to get that it was a joke.
But several people felt the need to swat down the commenter who so said so confidently that the phrase was first uttered in a Seinfeld episode.
That’s the internet for you! I don’t doubt that commenter is telling the truth, but I only have some doubt about whether it was any kind of widespread usage, or rather the patois of a particular small clique. It would be interesting to know, and to know whether it was a transplant from the US. For example, it was common in hip London in the 60s to refer to black men (I don’t recall it being used of women) as “spades”, with no derogatory undertone. Did that come from the US, I wonder? There was so much cross-fertilisation happening with the music etc that it is an interesting trail to try to follow.
I use “Do me a liquid” for more minor favors.
This made me laugh, too. Probably because it is one of the more common requests that one might make of a friend, at least at their place!
hsh — admit it, this is your revenge for my double negative.
I won’t not admit it.
Just don’t say
“do me a gas”
or the results might be … unfortunate.
Just don’t say
“do me a gas”
or the results might be … unfortunate.
Not as unfortunate as “do me a plasma”
I really don’t want to distract from this fun thread. But this example of incredible pettiness was irresistible.
Objection to someone’s kid’s date! What a great basis for a political decision like this.
H/T https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/11/wisconsin-governors-race/
Merrick Garland scheduled to make a statement at 2:30 — he’s late.
The anti-climax of all anti-climaxes…….
Depends on what is in the warrant. Assuming the judge unseals it, which seems likely since Trump already knows what’s in it. (Unsealing the affidavit which convinced the judge to approve the warrant would be a different story.)
Figure the warrant merely says where they can search, when they can search, and what they can seize. (Don’t know if they can seize or otherwise act on something else blatantly illegal which is in plain sight.) So, other than a clue (depending on how specific the description is) about what they expect to find, probably not too dramatic. But we shall see.
wj — yes indeed. And Garland is very understated and reserved, but you could see how pissed he is about the attacks on FBI and DOJ people. It’s good to have him saying that.
I got in too late last night for serious news trawling, but saw the substance of Garland’s statement, and the general feeling that he had (since we are talking national idioms) shot the GOP’s fox.
shoot (one’s) fox. To undermine or thwart someone’s plans, efforts, or ambitions by taking action that pre-empts them or makes them redundant.
(Predicated, one presumes, on the absolute assumption that the only normal, permissable way to kill a fox is after pursuing it for some time on horseback, with hounds.)
The situation today still seems ambiguous – as I understand it, Trump released a statement demanding the release of the warrant, but seems not to have taken the step necessary to actually, legally give his permission. I await input and comment from those better informed than I.
And, in further news from the UK, here’s Marina Hyde on the ongoing leadership struggle:
Given the crises raging outside, the contest resembles a Dickensian reality show, in which two grotesques compete to run the workhouse, simply refusing to be thrown off course by the increasingly desperate entreaties of their paupers. Who, as a mark of lavishly sarcastic respect, are these days referred to as “clients”.
The hustings now take place at a pitch only 75-year-old sociopaths can hear, so I’m afraid I don’t know whether bubbly detention centre redcoat Liz Truss last night promised to “look again” at bringing back the poor laws, though I am enjoying the doomed efforts of the Sunak campaign to insist that their guy gets it. “For too long, water hasn’t had the attention it deserves”, burbled Rishi, on the same day the Northern Echo ran an aerial photo of the huge swimming pool complex Sunak is building at his constituency home in Yorkshire, under an authority that this morning announced a hosepipe ban. Sunak’s really done everything to show us his struggle is real, short of running under the slogan “Kim, there’s people that are dying!”.
Not being an afficiado of the Kardashians (I’ve never watched any of their shows), that final catchphrase meant nothing to me. But now it does.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/12/warring-tories-radical-change-mythical-liz-truss-rishi-sunak
Meanwhile, in a reminder that once we were led by serious people, or even (as a true-blue Tory not that long ago described Blair and Brown to me) giants:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/10/tax-profits-freeze-energy-prices-bring-suppliers-into-public-sector-gordon-brown
I thought the phrase “do a solid” was prison/ criminal/law enforcement slang. I don’t think I have ever heard that expression used in real life.
Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to justify/minimize/lie about/defend Trump, thereby proving that there literally is no low too low for them to go. None. The party is a bottomless pit of moral degeneracy.
I’ll admit that I have a bit of paranoia about the claims that Pres. Pussygrabber had secret documents pertaining to nuclear weapons. It would be a good play on the part of Faux or Congressional Republicans to limit the damage of whatever Garland has found by first leaking that the materials were the worst possible, only to have Garland reveal later that the materials were bad but not nuclear bad. That’s the kind of thing Karl Rove would have done.
On the other hand, Republican leaders don’t have to think of any excuses for Trump. Republican base voters have shown repeatedly that their loyalty lies with their egotism, and that nothing will shake their conviction in their own superiority over all other Americans. They cannot admit to error. They will continue to confabulate excuses for Trump no matter what he does.
It is painful to realize that neighbors and acquaintances are the same kind of people who supported Hitler or Mussolini or Franco.
as I understand it, Trump released a statement demanding the release of the warrant, but seems not to have taken the step necessary to actually, legally give his permission.
A district attorney (or, in this case, the Department of Justice) cannot unseal (make public) the warrant without the agreement of the judge who approved it. And the target has an opportunity to oppose unsealing — which Trump has announced he will not do.
But the target, in this case Trump, can make it public without anyone else’s agreement. The instant it was served, he could have put out a press release with the entire text.
So if he hasn’t, that’s entirely on him.
He’s preying on ignorance by acting as though he’s allowing the authorities to release the warrant because he’s a stand-up guy that way. Reality TV, dontcha know?
The instant it was served, he could have put out a press release with the entire text… So if he hasn’t, that’s entirely on him.
I suspect he’s getting a lot of push back from his legal team — or perhaps former legal team by this point — over releasing the warrant. If the warrant is suggestive of some of the worst things people are speculating about, those lawyers are in a bad position. They knew, or should have known, about the documents that were seized on Monday, and failure to include them under previous subpoena could cost them dearly. If Trump tells the judge he doesn’t want the warrant released, there’s an interval, I believe of two weeks, before Trump’s team has to present the case for why it shouldn’t be released. That’s two weeks for the lawyers to try to get their situation sorted out.
I would take this tack, of course. My own speculation on why the warrant was issued now is that some young junior lawyer who was stuck in Florida while the big guys partied in Bedminster and New York knew of or found pretty bad stuff, decided he wasn’t going to risk losing his law license over it, and called the FBI.
Good points, Michael Cain, esp. the first paragraph. Can you imagine being his lawyer? Well, unless you’re Rudy Giuliano or Sydney Powell, I guess, and you’re as crazy as he is.
Well, in a bit over an hour we’ll know who’s representing Trump at the hearing. I’m almost as interested in that as I am in the hearing proper.
If the warrant is suggestive of some of the worst things people are speculating about, those lawyers are in a bad position. They knew, or should have known, about the documents that were seized on Monday, and failure to include them under previous subpoena could cost them dearly.
One of a lawyer’s worst fears is a client who lies to him. First, because it makes putting together a strong case difficult — if testimony/evidence presented in court directly contradicts the client’s statements to you, you have no chance to prepare a response. Second, the judge may decide that you knew what you were saying was false. And lying to a judge in court is professional suicide — which is why all those lawyers who stood on courthouse steps proclaiming “electoral fraud” were all so careful, in court, to say “Oh no, your honor, we are not alleging fraud.”
lj, thanks for the John McWhorter – The Atlantic article. I still find the contemporary usage of “like” grating. For example, in conversation, Matthew Yglesias, a talented wordsmith, really hammers this usage.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/12/search-warrant-shows-trump-under-investigation-for-potential-obstruction-of-justice-espionage-act-violations-00051507
In the list of documents seized is one set listed as “Various classified TS/SCI documents,” a reference to top secret/sensitive compartmented information — that’s well abvoe merely Top Secret.
First, it will be fascinating to hear (if we ever do) Trump’s excuse for why he should have taken such a document with him. I mean, normal Trumpian incompetence could account for why it wasn’t turned over initially. Just because the FBI found it easily enough doesn’t prove that the incompetents working for Trump (including his lawyers) could reasonably be expected to do so. But why take in the first place? Because,
Second, it boggles the mind that compartmentalized information could possibly have been accidentally taken along. (Not that, to the best of my knowledge, anyone has tried that claim. Except, in jest, Alexandra Petri.) That stuff is tracked with incredible care. It’s not something that just gets dropped in a drawer labeled “Miscellaneous”.
Thanks for the Alexadra Petri link, wj. I don’t automatically go read her columns, but I should.
Her stuff varies from good to brilliant IMHO More of the latter of late. (Perhaps maternity agrees with her.)
Apparently apart from everything else, there was stuff on Macron. Apart from possibly keeping info to sell, maybe he was keeping stuff for blackmail purposes? So many fun possibilities! And nary a one that will bother most of the GOP or Fox.
I have wondered almost from the beginning whether a big reason for the lock-step of so many people in Clickbait’s wake is because of blackmail.
Who among us doesn’t have some skeletons in our closet? 😉
Who among us doesn’t have some skeletons in our closet?
Mine are pretty small beer. Certainly not enough to motivate me to embrace Trump.** But I suppose getting close to Trump gains you access to bigger and better skeletons.
** Besides, when I joined the US Air Force I took an oath to “support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” It was many years ago, but it didn’t come with an expiration date.
I have wondered almost from the beginning whether a big reason for the lock-step of so many people in Clickbait’s wake is because of blackmail.
The older I have become, the more convinced I am that the rich, famous, and/or powerful are all guilty of behavior that’s useful for blackmail. I worry about me. So many men in my age/race/sexual orientation cohort seem to become fixated on having sex with teen-aged women. Am I doomed to that? What do you talk about afterwards? How Alex is angry that Johnny won’t ask her to the prom? OMG, I’m failing Algebra II?
Wait, what, you’re supposed to talk afterwards? 😉
(You made me laugh, Michael.)
(You made me laugh, Michael.)
Any day I can make someone laugh is a good day.
You both made me laugh!
Who among us doesn’t have some skeletons in our closet?
I wonder about the utility of it anymore. So many have been caught (at least figuratively) pants/ankles with no repercussions.
Clutching your pearls, Sen. Graham.
Pete — I’ve been wondering for a long time how, in the age of cell phones and the internet, anything will be secret enough to cause a stir when it’s revealed.
Well, it’s hard to argue with this, by Dana Millbank (about whom I know nothing):
Headlined Liz Cheney’s demise was set in motion by her father
It has all the makings of a Greek tragedy.
The tragic hero, a statesman of great ability, is driven by hubris to abuse power. The forces he unleashes spread uncontrollably — and eventually destroy his own daughter. He comes to her aid, but it is too late.
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Citizens, I give you the tragedy of Dick and Liz Cheney.
Closing the last hearing of the House Jan. 6 select committee, the younger Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, delivered a powerful indictment of Donald Trump’s abuse of his followers. “He is preying on their patriotism,” she said, turning “their love of country into a weapon.” A moment later, she added: “We must remember that we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.”
She’s right. And Cheney deserves the lionization she is getting as she courageously fights the authoritarianism that has taken over the GOP. For this, she lost her party leadership position, and on Tuesday will likely lose her primary to a Trump acolyte.
There is a bitter irony in Cheney’s fall: She is being undone by the very politics her father championed. Weaponizing patriotism? Abandoning the truth? Vice President Dick Cheney was a pioneer.
In my new book, “The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party,” I traced the actions of GOP leaders who essentially created the Trump era by removing the guardrails of our political system. Dick Cheney was one such leader.
As you can imagine, many examples follow.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/12/dick-cheney-liz-demise-deception-iraq/
Obviously, the following sentence should have been deleted:
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For those not following the other thread, this is worth reading:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/inside-the-war-between-trump-and-his-generals
Not to be confused with a war between a president and his privates…
Zing! Good one, Charles
As an aside, the first known joke told online that got someone canceled. Though it was in the ’90s before the Internet. Short form:
A Scotsman and a Jew go to an expensive restaurant to eat a meal together. When they had finished and the waitress brought the check, the Scotsman said, “I’ll pay for it.”
The headline in the newspaper the next day, “Found murdered in an alleyway, Jewish ventriloquist.
More correctly, in the ’90s before the worldwide web.
They didn’t agree before dinner to go Dutch?
“in the ’90s before the worldwide web.”
That’s a pretty narrow time window, considering that info.cern.ch went live in 1993 (maybe before that, in limited release)
This first-person account has it happening earlier than I had remembered reading.
“It all started in late 1988. rec.humor.funny had been running for around 17 months, and was doing very well. I had set up a system so that I could deposit accepted jokes into a queue directory, and once or twice a day, the computer would automatically select a random joke from the directory and post it to the net.
On November 9, 1988, the computer picked the following joke to post
…
The bad news was that November 9, 1988 was the 50th anniversary of Krystallnacht, the horrible night when the Nazis burned and smashed the property and temples of German Jews, considered by some to be the start of the worst of the holocaust.”
The Rec.humor.funny Ban
An account of the incident by The New Yorker.”
“On January 30, 1989, an article appeared in the student-run Stanford Daily under the headline “Racial slurs cause University to shut down bulletin board.” The bulletin board in question, rec.humor.funny, was one of hundreds of so-called newsgroups—glorified mass e-mails organized around specific interests—that streamed onto the school’s computer terminals via Usenet, an early precursor to today’s Internet forums.”
The Origin of Silicon Valley’s Dysfunctional Attitude Toward Hate Speech
Sigh… Another day, another flash flood warning for the mountains a few miles to our west. West Central Texas must be uninhabitable by now. The only time the monsoon blows this strong and this long is when West Central Texas is bone dry with temperatures pushing 100 °F most days.
This is the view out our north window. The Cheyenne Ridge about 20 miles north of us is a natural trigger for thunderstorms when the monsoon blows from the proper direction.
Technical note: The image will fail to load if your browser is set to disallow links to non-secure hosts that are embedded in secure pages.
Re: the Scotsman and the Jew:
I find it hard to bemoan a university cutting off access to a newsgroup that features jokes about how cheap Jews are. Or lazy blacks are, or stupid blond women are, or what have you. I’m sure anyone interested in that can find ample opportunities to participate, I don’t know why a university is obliged to make it available.
There are so many truly important things to get out into the “marketplace of ideas”. Why somebody would pick stuff like that as the hill to die on escapes me.
“But it’s a slippery slope!”. There are many slippery slopes in life. Some of them lead to progroms.
I look forward to the day when advocates for freedom of speech use their advocacy to champion something other than somebody somewhere being a jerk.
I look forward to the day when advocates for freedom of speech use their advocacy to champion something other than somebody somewhere being a jerk.
Why do I think that this will be the same day as the one when there are no more jerks?
Another day, another flash flood warning for the mountains a few miles to our west.
It will be no news that the Southwest, including all the way up to Oregon, is in the midst of a prolonged drought. But apparently our area has historically been subject, every couple of centuries, to “megafloods” — more than 100 inches of rain in 30 days.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/California-flood-17368353.php
The last one was some 160 years ago, so it might seem we are OK. But apparently, thanks to climate change we might be looking at 2-3 per century. Feast or famine can apply to drinks as well as eats.
I find it hard to bemoan a university cutting off access to a newsgroup that features jokes about how cheap Jews are.
The joke seems to imply that Scotsmen are homicidally stingy and Jews are sneaky tricksters.
Well, somewhat connected, I wonder what the commentariat think of this (I think the 2nd and 3rd paras are a direct quote):
Writing in the Guardian, Margaret Atwood said Rushdie had never missed an opportunity to speak out on behalf of the principles he had embodied in all his writing life.
Freedom of expression was foremost among these. Once a yawn-making liberal platitude, this concept has now become a hot-button issue, since the extreme right has attempted to kidnap it in the service of libel, lies, and hatred, and the extreme left has tried to toss it out the window in the service of their version of earthly perfection. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to foresee many panel discussions on the subject, should we reach a moment in which rational debate is possible. But whatever it is, the right to freedom of expression does not include the right to defame, to lie maliciously and damagingly about provable facts, to issue death threats, or to advocate murder. These should be punishable by law.
As for those who are saying “Yes, but …” about Rushdie – some version of “He should have known better,” as in “Yes, too bad about the rape, but why was she wearing that revealing skirt” – I can only remark that there are no perfect victims. In fact, there are no artists, nor is there any perfect art. Anti-censorship folks often find themselves having to defend work they would otherwise review scathingly, but such defences are necessary, unless we are all to have our vocal cords removed.
1. But whatever it is, the right to freedom of expression does not include the right to … advocate murder.
Quoted without comment.
2. But the sentence that I quoted part of in #1 seems to be the pith of it, and I’m glad she included it, because otherwise….
I mistrust anyone who says, at this moment in history, “the … right” and balances it with “the … left,” as if they’re both equally bad and especially equally influential.
If there’s an extreme left that can be characterized as Atwood characterizes it, it’s damned funny because they must be very good at hiding in the shadows, while the extreme right takes over the airwaves, women’s bodies, and indeed the world (in aspiration).
(Of course I’m still stuck in thinking of left and right mostly in terms of economics. If she means that advocating for having LGBT+ people visible in the world–just for example–is “extreme left,” then she is lost to me. Not that she has ever been very found to me in the first place.)
The last paragraph is good. I find this especially apt: “In fact, there are no artists, nor is there any perfect art.” I have been thinking about art as I get more serious about photography. I find it almost impossible to think of myself as an “artist.” I take pictures. That’s enough for me.
If there’s an extreme left that can be characterized as Atwood characterizes it, it’s damned funny because they must be very good at hiding in the shadows, while the extreme right takes over the airwaves, women’s bodies, and indeed the world (in aspiration).
There’s definitely a (relatively) extreme left. It’s just that these days (for some decades, actually) they are nowhere near as extreme as the extreme right. Or, for completeness, the extreme libertarians.
wj, I was thinking of influence more than degree of extremity, but I’m just another armchair dweller with opinions, so….
I think part of the reason I react to Atwood’s use of “extreme left” and “extreme right” is that she frames the usage as if those phrases mean something coherent. I don’t really think they do anymore, any more than “socialism” means something clearly definable.
They’re terms that get used mostly as blanket references to people, trends, and viewpoints we don’t like. If I say “right” or “R” I mean the whole R party enterprise for a number of decades (since FDR?), culminating in its current cult-like lunacy centering around Clickbait. Other people (at least one of who pops in here to berate us from a position of condescending superiority now and then) use “left” or “socialist” in the same way: people I don’t like and views I don’t agree with.
So if Atwood thinks she’s saying something coherent, I don’t know what it is. I wish she would just specify it.
Just thinking aloud here, I think that characterising it primarily in terms of right and left is wrong, for starters. I do not really recognise the enemies of Rushdie, for example, as rightwing in any normal political sense. Although it is certainly true that the urge to privilege religious belief above everything else, in America and some other countries, is pretty much exclusively one of the political right. But the urge to privilege certain other beliefs, such as for example the belief that gender identification is more important than biological sex in allocating rights, is generally held more by those on the left.
But please believe me when I say I definitely am not trying to wrench this into a discussion of trans activism, or trans rights. I just cannot, off the top of my head, think of another good example on the left, and the right to challenge this belief, and hold the contrary belief, has recently been adjudged to be a protected belief in English law.
However, having said all that, you’d have to be nuts to argue with this:
the extreme right takes over the airwaves, women’s bodies, and indeed the world (in aspiration)
However, the part of the Atwood comment that interested me, was:
But whatever it is, the right to freedom of expression does not include the right to defame, to lie maliciously and damagingly about provable facts, to issue death threats, or to advocate murder. These should be punishable by law.
I cannot see how someone lying damagingly about provable facts in America would be open to be punishable by law. It is an absolute staple of the media and the political right (not really the left, as far as I know). Dominion is suing Fox, but they can prove loss and damage to Dominion. Who would you sue on the grounds that Sean Spicer lied about the size of the crowd. Lies like that damage America alright, and laid the groundwork for the Big Lie, but who has standing to sue?
Cross-posted with Janie. I agree, on the left and right issue!
It’s just that these days (for some decades, actually) they are nowhere near as extreme as the extreme right. Or, for completeness, the extreme libertarians.
Go back and read the original Green New Deal resolution, the one that passed in the House (and lost 0-57 in the Senate). One chamber of the US Congress passed a resolution that called for a radical restructuring of the US economy and a radical change in the power relationship between federal and state governments. And depending on how you read between the lines, perhaps a radical change in the US’s relationship with the rest of the world. There’s simply no other way to read it.
OK, with that understanding I can see it. The nutcase fanatics on the right** have definitely got far more influence at the moment. They are far outnumbered by their useful idiots, but they are driving much of what the right** is doing.
** I keep saying “the right”. But technically a big piece of the group (exclusive of the useful idiots) is libertarian rather than reactionary. If, God forbid, their alliance of convenience actually got control, they would likely be fighting it out with even more fury within a decade. Because, at base, their core principles are utterly antithetical. The reactionaries want control, so they can force everybody else to do things their way. Whereas the libertarians only want control so they can make it impossible for anyone else (including the reactionaries) to limit their license to do whatever they with.
Dang, too slow. I was responding to Janie’s 6:10 comment.
One chamber of the US Congress passed a resolution that called for a radical restructuring of the US economy and a radical change in the power relationship between federal and state governments.
Yup. But, although I may have missed it, I haven’t seen any sign of threats of violence if they don’t get their way.
Nor their own TV station that gets fees from cable subscriptions even in households where they are anathema. Nor their own pet ex-president. Nor this, nor that….
Nor their own Proud Boys, or Oath Keepers, or Three Percenters…..
Nary a Supreme Court justice in sight who would rule consistently, if at all, in their territory.
Mind you, not being an officer of the grammar police, unlike Janie, I have just noticed that according to Atwood’s formulation you would have to lie maliciously AND damagingly, not just damagingly. The “or” in “or to advocate murder” bamboozled me. What follows the apostrophes are alternative charges, but that particular offense requires both elements. I still don’t know who would have standing in cases without financial damage, though.
Ah ObWi, the site that caters not only to the politically but also the grammatically obsessed!
Cross-posted again, and have now lost the plot. What do all your “nor”s and your nary follow, Janie?
Yup. But, although I may have missed it, I haven’t seen any sign of threats of violence if they don’t get their way.
Anyone who has read about how the US economy was radically changed for WWII — and I assert the Green New Deal was on that scale — knows how much of it happened because of the implicit threat, “Do it, or the Army will enforce it.”
GftNC: my “nor” and “nary” follow wj’s directly previous comment.
wj: “I haven’t seen any sign of threats of violence if they don’t get their way.”
me: Nor [have I seen any] TV station, militia, etc.
Commas, not apostrophes! I am obviously going mad….
Thanks, Janie. Got it (at least I’ve got something) now!
Commas, not apostrophes! I am obviously going mad….
I am forever having to remind myself (because I never seem to internalize it):
Less haste, more speed.
Put another way,
“We do it nice, bacause we do it twice” Already coined by someone else, but I definitely feel it.
At least from a European perspective I am well aware of an intolerant part of the Left that indeed tries to censor freedom of expression and to enforce a certain way of expression in public. The difference from the Right is that the Left as I know it does not usually threaten violence to achieve that goal.
One particularly annoying part involves the demand that all genders* have to be constantly expressed in writing orthographically. Not a problem in English were most terms for persons are gender neutral. E.g. a teacher can be male or female. In German there is Lehrer (male) and Lehrerin (female). These days in all public/official correspondence we have to** use a marker as LehrerIn, Lehrer:in or Lehrer*in and public employees/officials are expected to express this by making a short pause and emphasizing the ‘i’. The oldfashioned way of splitting ‘Lehrerinnen und Lehrer’ is treated as a cop-out and almost reactionary. [Not limited to ‘teacher’ of course, it affects all words where in German the female form is expressed by the suffix -in]. Imagine you would have to add -ress to all male words referring to persons, make a pause before that syllable and then give it extra stress. It looks ugly in writing, it sounds dreadful and does little to nothing to actually fight existing real inequalities. The tolerated alternative is to use the gender neutral participle e.g.’Lehrende’ (teaching [persons]) which is very in-elegant in German. The goal of inclusion itself is praiseworthy but this is not the way to achieve that and imo often has the opposite effect.
The ‘they’ as a way to avoid (s)he is not an option in German since ‘she’ and ‘they’ are expressed by the same word ‘sie’. There are attempts to invent new pronouns but I have yet to experience anyone actually using those in public. (and girls are grammatically neutral in German anyway, a fact already popularized to English speakers by Mark Twain).
Again, this is a movement from the Left but it does not use or threaten violence (as opposed to the Right). The low number of actually violent leftists do not take part in this (and probably find it as annoying as the majority of citizens).
*no way to express more than male/female at the moment though. But it’s just a matter of time before someone comes up with an idea how to achive that and tried to make that use mandatory.
**in some areas we are talking binding guidelines here. In some parts of Germany it’s already mandatory in public schools and some universities have adopted it too, although for now just as a ‘strong suggestion’. I think I have heard of cases were students got worse grades for refusing to follow these suggestions.
wj: Yup. But, although I may have missed it, I haven’t seen any sign of threats of violence if they don’t get their way.
Michael Cain: Anyone who has read about how the US economy was radically changed for WWII — and I assert the Green New Deal was on that scale — knows how much of it happened because of the implicit threat, “Do it, or the Army will enforce it.”
Enforcement of the law isn’t the same thing as rebellion against the law.
The threat of violence always stands behind duly passed laws. You can argue the “rightness” of any given armed rebellion, but that’s a separate issue.
Oh, and the law didn’t pass, going back to my point about influence.
I think it is important that Atwood qualified ‘lie’ with ‘maliciously and damagingly’. Such lies can be legally liable [pun not intended].
Thanks, Hartmut, I had wondered how languages where nouns universally have genders (English being quite unusual among European languages on that) would cope with thr “gender neutral required” worldview.
The thought that leapt to mind was to restructure all nouns to use neuter articles. Which would, however, be far more radical than just changing words which apply to people. And does a table rwally care that it is, technically, female? 🙂
By the Green New Deal manifesto, I assume Michael Cain means this:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text
Apologies for the URL, links don’t seem to work on my tablet.
In any case, read for yourself, and decide for yourself if the resolution matches Michael Cain’s description of it. I will happily concede that there is a “let’s fix everything all at once, right now!” aspect to it that is arguably unrealistic, but I don’t think that’s Michael Cain’s objection.
And for context, consider how the effects of climate change that we are already experiencing – now, today, let alone 10 or 25 or 50 years from now – are going to radically restructure the economy of the US and other nations, as well as the relationship of national and state governments, as well as the relationship of the US to other nations.
It was a call for mobilization, in the face of a crisis of unprecedented scale. You tell me if that’s a good idea, or not.
Stuff like this certainly makes an economic dent, and is likely to restructure all kinds of things:
https://newmobility.news/2022/08/11/german-industry-risks-stranding-as-rhine-gets-unnavigable/
Seems to me, anyway. At least the Greens were trying to do something constructive.
wj, there were/are proposals to drop the female suffix completely and to use the neutral article where the gender is not specified (generic use) or all are to be included. Der Lehrer (m), die Lehrer (f, instead of die Lehrerin), das Lehrer (n, generic). That would be something to get used to but at least it would be consistent with standard grammar rules (and would avoid the orthographical abomination that is the ‘gender asterisk’. It would be an improvement over the generic masculine that is the current standard. On the other hand the actual female forms would disappear which could be seen (and abused) as an exclusion.
The one advantage is that people have to think a bit more before opening their mouth but I doubt that it would lead to a real change of mind concerning inclusion by itself. And of course there will always be people who go out of their way to deliberately speak and write ‘non-inclusive’.
Btw, originally (proto-indogermanic) the ‘gender’ of a noun seems to have had nothing to to with the sex of the ‘object’ it referred to, so the terms masculine/feminine/neutral are actually misnomers based on a misconception by later grammarians.
re: gender and grammar
IF ONLY such issues could be considered to be “silly archaic stuff of no great importance”.
Maybe in another few centuries, when the Pharma-Bros come up with the “randomly change your gender” pill, sold as a recreational drug.
The Holy Ghost/Spirit famously did a sex change from female (Hebrew Old Testament) to neutral (Greek New Testament) to male (Vulgate Latin Bible).
One has to speculate whether that was the true reason Mary had to be involved in the whole Jesus Christ affair.
Anyone wondering what a more gender agnostic German language would look like should check out Swedish. And Swedish is a relative breeze to learn.
For completeness’s sake, this is the article in today’s Guardian from which that Margaret Atwood extract I linked yesterday comes:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/15/salman-rushdie-free-speech-tyranny-satanic-verses
And, again from today’s Guardian, a welcome piece on McConnell and his plotting to wrench the US judiciary to the right:
The January 6 committee has now revealed how far Donald Trump was willing to go to prevent the peaceful and lawful transfer of power from his presidency to that of Joe Biden. Yet, his deadly serious attempt to upend American democracy also had a slapdash quality to it, reflecting Trump’s own impulsive nature and his reliance on a group of schemers – Rudy Giuliani, Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, Roger Stone and John Eastman among them – of limited ability. It is not entirely surprising that Trump’s coup failed.
Another brazen GOP action, however, has succeeded – this one engineered by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, whose chess-like skills of political strategizing put to shame Trump’s powerful but limited game of bluster and bullying. The act to which I refer is McConnell’s theft of Barack Obama’s 2016 appointment to the supreme court, a radical deed that has dimmed somewhat in public consciousness even as it proved crucial to fashioning a rightwing supreme court willing to overturn Roe v Wade and to destabilize American politics and American democracy in the process.
McConnell is widely considered to be a cynic about politics, more interested in maintaining and holding power than in advancing a particular agenda. This is true up to a point. But it is equally true that McConnell has believed, for decades, that the federal government had grown too large and too strong, that power had to be returned to private enterprise on the one hand and the individual states on the other, and that the legislative process in Washington could not be trusted to accomplish those aims. Hence the critical role of the federal courts: the federal judiciary, if sufficiently populated by conservative jurists, could constrain and dismantle the power of the federal government in ways in which Congress never would. It was fine, in McConnell’s eyes, for Congress to be paralyzed and ineffectual on most domestic issues, as long as the GOP, when in power, stacked the federal judiciary and the supreme court with conservative judges and justices. Thus, across Trump’s presidency, McConnell pushed 175 district court appointments and 54 court of appeals appointments through the congressional confirmation process, far exceeding in numbers what Obama had managed during the second term of his presidency.
It then goes into a lot more detail on the SCOTUS manoeuvrings:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/15/us-supreme-court-mitch-mcconell-conservative-judges-democracy
It’s not that I think anyone here is likely to forget any of this, but I’m pleased that pieces like this continue to appear, and particularly in the lead-up to the midterms.
And for context, consider how the effects of climate change that we are already experiencing – now, today, let alone 10 or 25 or 50 years from now – are going to radically restructure the economy of the US and other nations, as well as the relationship of national and state governments, as well as the relationship of the US to other nations.
It was a call for mobilization, in the face of a crisis of unprecedented scale. You tell me if that’s a good idea, or not.
This. Our political system, like our infrastructure, was built to deal with a particular set of contingencies that were considered to be the normal set of operating parameters at the time. And like that infrastructure, our political systems need maintenance if it is to continue to function and a certain degree of retrofitting if those conditions change in ways that put pressure on the safeguards.
But when you look at the effects of warming in excess of 1.5 degrees on human systems, there is no scenario in which we can avoid a radical restructuring of economies and governments, neither of which are built for the conditions that result from these new parameters.
I wonder how Atwood’s notions of free speech and government fare in the world of Oryx and Crake? And it looks like we are headed for a mashup of that world with The Handmaid’s Tale.
Lucky fucking us.
Lucky fucking us.
Yes.
On another subject, who thinks it likely that Rudi Giuliani will quite soon be trying to claim mental incapacity, like Ron Jeremy? It seems to me that there may be plenty of evidence – do any lurking lawyers have any idea what level of proof one would need to produce (brain scans showing degeneration etc)?
“Mental incapacity”, aka an insanity defense, basically requires the defense to show that the defendant was incapable to telling right from wrong. There are a couple of instances under Georgia law (which I assume is what we are talking about here):
Basically, in Georgia (different states have laws which differ in the details) the burden is on the defense to make the case. With the prosecution entitled to refute it. In other words, the mirror image of the situation of the trial itself.
The first one would be challenging to prove, given the caveat. And the second can be refuted by his having had the capacity, since the “developmental period”, to get a law degree and pass the bar. So he can try, but it’s unlikely to work.
I was thinking early to mid-stage dementia (which, frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if he has). Would that be called “insanity”?
It might be called insanity. Even by a psychiatrist. But not by a lawyer — unless he could make a case for a resulting inability to tell the difference between right and wrong. And proving that seems likely to be a challenge.
More likely, IMHO, Rudy goes for a plea deal. He was a United States Attorney (i.e. a prosecutor), so he knows the drill. Which kicks Trump’s world of hurt up to another level, because Rudy was right in the center of all the plotting and planning to overturn the election results.
He was a United States Attorney (i.e. a prosecutor), so he knows the drill.
You’d think so. But, astonishingly, so much of his behaviour since the election has given the impression that he’s pretty clueless, legally speaking (which is why I’m speculating about dementia). However, I hope you’re right, wj, because anything which kicks Trump’s world of hurt up to another level is fine by me. And is presumably made more likely by the fact that Trump apparently stiffed him on fees. Although, if Trump had any sense he might have reversed course on that, given how much trouble Giuliani could cause him.
if Trump had any sense he might have reversed course on that, given how much trouble Giuliani could cause him.
But that would be long term thinking. Or at least medium term. And Trump mostly does short term.
Saving money by stiffing Rudy today would outweigh trouble a couple of months away. Not to mention merely possible trouble — especially since he’s been getting away with that sort of behavior all his life.
More likely, IMHO, Rudy goes for a plea deal.
According to Michael Cohen, Trump speaks in his mafioso-wannabe “code” and leaves no paper trail*. So unless someone’s been keeping a concrete kompromat dossier all along, I gotta wonder what’s provable in court (if not already privileged). Given his behavior, from Borat to the Four Seasons debacle, is there even a scenario where Giuliani’s testimony is worth anything?
My hot take is Giuliani concocts some kinda temporary-insanity-Stockholm-Syndrome-meets-Narcissist’s-Prayer kitchen sink defense. Nothing is out of bounds for these people.
*Where there is a paper trail is where he’s played fast and loose with value claims on his assets and I think Letitia James has a lot of it at this point. While Mazars seems unlikely to take a hit for him, who-knows-what is in the Weisselberg plea deal, so maybe Trump slimes his way out of that one as well.
My hot take is Giuliani concocts some kinda temporary-insanity-Stockholm-Syndrome-meets-Narcissist’s-Prayer kitchen sink defense.
No doubt he’d like to. But I’d guess he gets laughed out of court if he tries. Most likely, he knows that, so he may not even bother.
Trump speaks in his mafioso-wannabe “code” and leaves no paper trail*. So unless someone’s been keeping a concrete kompromat dossier all along, I gotta wonder what’s provable in court
Giuliani would basically be confirmation on Trump’s intentions. Very helpful, no doubt, but not actually critical. Because they already have a recording of Trump’s solicitation of election fraud. Better than paper or an email, either of which can be forged.
The underlying problem, for both of them, is that these are state charges, not Federal. So even if Trump wins in 2024, he can’t grant a pardon. After November, the Governor of Georgia will either be Kemp, who would probably love some payback, or Abrams, a Democrat unlikely in the extreme to do Trump any favors. So no state pardon in prospect either.
But I’d guess he gets laughed out of court if he tries. Most likely, he knows that, so he may not even bother.
Are we talking about the same Rudy Giuliani?
😉
Are we talking about the same Rudy Giuliani?
Notice I said “may not even bother.” Certainly I’d expect his lawyers to recommend it, even if he doesn’t take their advice. Just like I’d expect them to recommend he turn state’s, even if he doesn’t take that advice either. Because that’s really his only play.
Although senile decay may have advanced to the point that he hasn’t noticed that Trump never bothers to return favors.
Trump and Giuliani belong together, locked in a dementia ward, arguing over checkers.
arguing over checkers
Double Cranko, or Calvinball.
How does one cheat at checkers? I suppose Trump would find a way, however inept and implausible the execution …
Watch the series of looks on Biden’s face. Twelve seconds of great and satisfying entertainment.
Priceless!
And, further to that Giuliani question:
Former Giuliani spokesperson Ken Frydman predicted that his old boss was feeling “nervous” right about now.
“He knows the truth,” Frydman said on CNN on Tuesday. “He knows he lied to legislators. He knows that he concocted this false electors scheme. He knows he lied for his client. And he knows we all know. It’s clear.”
Frydman said Giuliani had just one move left.
“Delay, delay, delay. Kick the can down the road,” Frydman said. “At this point in his life, his goal is to die a free man.”
I hope that this makes Trump a bit more nervous
Plea deals upended for pair accused of peddling nuclear sub secrets
(The judge thought the plea deal sentences were too short.)
Especially after this
Trump is rushing to hire seasoned lawyers — but he keeps hearing ‘No’
I think it’s time to bring the tone down around here. Probably as part of the zeitgeist around Salman Rushdie and the right to offend, a famously controversial and offensive comedian called Jerry Sadowitz got his show cancelled after one night at the Edinburgh festival (I have no idea what he said), and various people have been commenting on it (the whole issue of cancelling comedians for offensiveness), pro and con. A friend told me about the time Sadowitz got punched at the Montreal comedy festival in 1991, and that this was how he had opened his set:
Hello Moose-fuckers! I tell you why I hate Canada: half of you speak French and the other half let them.
Now, colours to the mast and all that, this made me laugh. I have nothing against either Canadians or French speakers, but I thought it was very funny and I don’t want to live in a world where somebody couldn’t say this, particularly in a comedy setting. Anybody else care to chime in with an opinion?
Here is a YouTube podcast by two British comedians who often comment on the difficulties and risks of being comedians in Britain. They were at the Edinburgh festival too.
“Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy, and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians.”
Triggernometry
You can make ethnic (or, someday, racial) joke about stuff nobody cares all that much about. Bad mouth Canadians for tolerating French speakers? Canadians may (will, probably, but too polite to say so) think you’re an idiot. But they won’t be outraged, let alone furious. French speakers there will take it a little more badly. But not much — they already won the battle, and nobody is worked up about changing back. (Note that the joke got told in Montreal, i.e. among the French speakers.)
Things in the US are a bit more complex, due to bigger population providing more regional variation. Thus places building up a Hispanic population for the first time freak out over it. Californians, since Hispanics have been here forever, not so much. Calling somebody here a “wetback”** is obnoxious, impolite etc. but not really fighting words.
Ditto New Maxico, and much of Texas. Arizona used to be similar, but all the immigration from elsewhere in the US has changed things some. One way to tell the folks who grew up there from the newbies by whether they get worked up on the subject.
** For those from elsewhere, it’s been a slur for decades. The implication is that the target immigrated (illegally) by swimming the Rio Grande. Of course, what with the drought these days, you’d barely have to wade.
Konstantin Kisin comments on British comedy and the Jerry Sadowitz cancellation.
“The attempted and, mercifully, failed silencing of Salman Rushdie last week was a stark reminder that our ability to mock, criticise and satirise ideas, beliefs and ideologies is always at risk. As I argued in my last Substack, it also shows that the situation is getting worse, not better.
In our conversation with Joe Rogan, my TRIGGERnometry co-host, Francis Foster and I explained that British comedy is going through a similar, precipitous decline in freedom, and therefore quality. In particular, we singled out the Edinburgh Fringe, the biggest comedy festival in the world, for leading from the front in the woke crusade against comedy.”
The Truth About the Jerry Sadowitz Cancellation
I must say, Charles, although I usually know nothing about the history of US journalists or pundits, I am aware of Joe Rogan, and the sort of “experts” he gets on to “inform” him. On the whole, I’d be a lot happier to get a take from someone who is not a Joe Rogan participant – not because I want to “cancel” Joe Rogan, but because I have good reason to be suspicious about the actual expertise or bias of the people who appear with him. There are comics defending Sadowitz here whom I respect, and I would far rather get their take (or that of similar people in the US) than go by anything said in conversation with Joe Rogan.
Rogan allows all kinds of people to have their say and lets his listeners make up their minds about the validity of what is said. He’s interviewed people you would likely agree with. It seems to be guilt by association if you question someone’s credibility just because they were on a particular podcast.
Quick check-in from Gettysburg – I’ve determined that there’s a law requiring a jerky store and a hot sauce store in every historic, at-all-touristy town in Pennsylvania.
I think we need to be clear about what we mean by ‘being cancelled’.
Some people make a point of being offensive. Unsurprisingly, some folks are offended by this. Sometimes this will result in their being denied access to a particular platform or venue.
This is not the same thing as having your freedom of speech curtailed, let alone having it curtailed by the government. It’s not the same thing as being denied access to any and all platforms, venues, or channels.
Being told that your particular version of offensive speech is not welcome at a particular festival, or social media platform, or streaming channel, or whatever, just means that venue doesn’t want to be associated with you. For whatever reason. And their judgement about what they want to host is an exercise of their rights of speech and association.
There is a place for controversial and provocative speech. That place is not every place, and the person doing the provocative speaking doesn’t get to demand that other folks provide them with a platform.
You know, this argument on Rogan was also made to me by a very dear but very foolish young friend of mine. My reply is that allowing “all kinds of people to have their say” and letting “his listeners make up their minds about the validity of what is said” is not a meritorious act, when you allow on people who make factually inaccurate and dangerous arguments. Like the Ivermectin case my young friend spoke about, before all the facts became obvious even to him. It reminds me of a John Oliver skit where he dramatised what would be the true fair depiction of the debate on anthropogenic climate change, by showing one scientist arguing against it, and a crowd of ninety nine scientists arguing for (with proof!). Some issues are not suitable for “evenhanded” presentation, and relying on the public “to make up their minds” is a recipe for the kind of post-fact post-truth society both you, and to a lesser extent we, are living in.
On the Sadowitz case at the Pleasance, I prefer the comment of Victoria Coren Mitchell, whom I admire and like, when she tweets:
Aug 15
The problem with the Pleasance saying they “will not associate with content which attacks people’s dignity” is that the very concept of having dignity is *hilarious*. You just cannot have these absolutes in comedy. Try to pin it down and it springs, giggling, away.
Aug 15
And the second problem is that disapproval is also a very, very ticklish concept. As soon as you sternly pronounce that something mustn’t be laughed at, you immediately make it funny.
Here’s some freedom of speech: F**k Joe Rogan.
In particular, we singled out the Edinburgh Fringe, the biggest comedy festival in the world, for leading from the front in the woke crusade against comedy.
It seems to be guilt by association if you question someone’s credibility just because they were on a particular podcast.
Okay, I’ll question their credibility because they used the phrase “woke crusade against comedy.”
I’m babysitting, so can’t delve into it, but luckily I can just say: what GftNC and russell and hsh said.
Rogan has the world’s most listened-to podcast with about ten million listeners. He’s had on people with ironclad credentials to famous for being famous charlatans. I’ve gritted my teeth when he wouldn’t push back on what was to me obvious BS. I think he is often too open-minded and uncritical.
I don’t listen to him often. Generally only when he has on someone or a subject I’m interested in. The podcast with Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster was one of his best to me. Partly because I was already familiar with them having listened to their podcast for some time.
I think he is often too open-minded and uncritical.
Being “open-minded” about blatantly false statements isn’t open-minded at all. It’s merely intellectually lazy. Unless it’s about deliberately working to bring expertise per se into disrepute. The latter being something we have seen all too much of of late.
The Know Nothings differed from today’s MAGA political movement in only one way: truth in advertising.
I am told he is amusing, but if the ten million listeners are anything like my darling young friend they are listening not only for entertainment, but also for information. And that is dangerous, given the people he gives a soapbox to. It seems to me that if one is interested in a subject, one can actually seek out experts who (gasp) have real expertise. And if those ten million are mainly ill-informed enough not to know how to do that, then it is a damn shame that their chosen source is so very unfit.
I haven’t heard of Kisin or Foster, but then I am sure there are many young comedians of whom I am unaware. But I’m with Janie – “the woke crusade against comedy” rather prejudices me against them.
It’s interesting to hear what comedians like e.g. Baddiel and Skinner say about the evolution of their sensibility, how in the past they may have considered it acceptable to black up, but how they now regard those decisions, and the time in which they were made. Mores do change, and good, clever comedians change along with them.
Comedian Zelenskyy had an attempted cancellation by Putin.
Makes one put all the whining about “cancel culture” in perspective.
I hate Rogan and his schtick. I hate Musk and his schtick just as much. Ditto Maher. Ditto Stern. And if anyone still cared about Milo, I’d hate on him too, but that little asshole has managed to provoke his way back into obscurity again, so he doesn’t have the heft to merit hate.
Rogan, Musk, Stern, and Maher are lazy opportunists who profiteer off of controversy and don’t give a fuck about educating themselves or their audiences. They don’t bother looking for the best answer or trying to create a critical framework from which to understand the topic in ways that empower the public.
Rushdie provoked with a very specific purpose in order to combat religious fundamentalism. His speech was used for the sake of secular pluralism, and otherwise he did not seem prone to being an edgelord attention whore.
I support free speech, but think that if offense and controversy are your primary goal, you are just a shit stirring asshole. Insults, like punches, should serve a larger purpose.
And, like punches, when you offend you should not bully and punch down.
If comics feel that their jobs are too hard in this moment, that doesn’t seem to me to be due to people having become oversensitive. It seems due to politics having put those people at greater risk of violence. The gap between the secure and the at-risk, the empowered and the disempowered, is growing while the future goes to shit. Every one of those assholes I’ve named above are coasting on their privilege and can’t be bothered to try to understand what it’s like to be in the shoes of the people they are offending.
Pay whiny edgelords no heed. Ignore them. They add no signal or perspective, they just boost noise.
Thanks, nous.
There’s a younger person in my life who likes rogan and maher. I have made it clear, not in exactly these words, that i think maher is a sneering self-aggrandizing jerk. But it’s a delicate situation in terms of who I’m dealing with and how far I can sensibly go in being critical. i haven’t gone after rogan, esp. since i haven’t seen as much of him as i have of maher, which is very little. What i have tried to say is that Maher talks in a seemingly smart and clever way, but it’s all about his smartness and cleverness, he isn’t helping. He doesn’t care about helping, he only cares about himself.
“Edgelord attention whore” is a much more efficient way to say it. 😉
I support free speech, but think that if offense and controversy are your primary goal, you are just a shit stirring asshole. Insults, like punches, should serve a larger purpose.
I agree with this, and pretty much everything else nous says as well. I don’t know as much about Maher as the others, and Stern seems to have reformed himself somewhat, but the main point holds.
(By the way, on the Jerry Sadowitz Canadian joke, not only did I find it very funny but it seemed to me that it would be pretty weird to take offense. But then, I’m neither Canadian nor a native French speaker, so I’m probably not qualified to judge.)
And as far as Rushdie is concerned, before the fatwah I was kind of wondering about porn and the various deleterious effects it has (particularly the spillover on women outside that world), but the fatwah stiffened my spine right up on the free speech issue, and it’s stayed stiffened. Thank God he survived, and looks likely to be more or less OK.
On a separate issue, I have just watched the second part of The Art of Drumming, and I am in total awe of the people who do it. It seems superhuman to me, unlike any other instrument with which I am familiar. And of course, as some of them said, it is not just one instrument, it is a small orchestra. The access they have had to the best and most innovative drummers in the world is amazing – I read that they narrowed it down from 80 to 40 they wanted to talk to, started approaching them, and almost immediately 38 said they were in. They’ve also got some amazing footage; in a section showing how many drummers started as youths in e.g. the Sea Cadets or the Boys’ Brigades, they have a brief sequence of Keith Moon (!) marching with a band. Cripes.
By the way, on the Jerry Sadowitz Canadian joke, not only did I find it very funny but it seemed to me that it would be pretty weird to take offense.
I feel like there is a telescoping here. Start of the set, what an innocent joke and I got punched in the face for that! This seems to elide whatever the rest of the jokes were and also assumes that whoever punched Sadowitz was upset with that joke and that joke only.
My wife and I have just finished watching Better Call Saul, and this LGM post by Abigail Nussbaum seems related to this. Sadowitz is who he is and he likes playing with fire. I’m sure that I could direct the Sadowitz episode as ‘brave comic stays true to his vision’ or ‘shit stirrer gets his just desserts’. The choices I make would tell more about me than about Sadowitz, I’m afraid.
Looking around, I found this, which might give a hint of my directorial choices, but I pass it on to ask a question. What is the word that is censored in the article?
https://www.newstatesman.com/quickfire/2022/08/jerry-sadowitz-defenders-white-men
Sadowitz is reported by an audience member to have used the word P*** to describe the UK’s ex-chancellor (and no, that doesn’t stand for “posh”). His supporters say that if I only saw Sadowitz perform, I would understand that he’s an “equal opportunities offender” – that he makes fun of white people too. I recall the same argument being used in defence of the racist comic Bernard Manning. And I’m baffled as to why Sadowitz is the only non-Asian comic allowed to use a slur I remember being shouted at my beloved Indian grandad by a gang of white youths when I was five years old.
lj, are you asking because you don’t know, or is this a quiz?
Anyhow, I would assume it’s this.
I feel like there is a telescoping here. Start of the set, what an innocent joke and I got punched in the face for that! This seems to elide whatever the rest of the jokes were and also assumes that whoever punched Sadowitz was upset with that joke and that joke only.
FWIW, I’m not doing any telescoping. When the joke was told to me, the person telling it didn’t tell me about the punch, it was purely told as an example of a Jerry Sadowitz joke in the context of the current controversy. I only saw it when I looked for the quote to post here, and thought it a good idea to include for contemporary context. And as for what an innocent joke and I got punched in the face for that, this seems like exactly the opposite of any approach the Jerry Sadowitz I have read about would take.
Like the writer of that New Statesman article, I have never seen a Jerry Sadowitz set, and actually I have almost no opinion about him. That is the only joke of his I’ve ever heard, and I thought it very funny. Anybody else’s mileage may vary. And as for what was said at the Pleasance, I don’t know about that, so have no real view either. But the tweets I included from Victoria Coren Mitchell a) were obviously not the comments of a man and b) seemed, in a meta sense, relevant to the general subject and to the comment made by the Pleasance. For the record, not only do I not use racial slurs, I have never heard them used in a way I am comfortable with.
Connie Schulz, wife of Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. She grew up in my home town, in fact right around the corner from where I grew up. I didn’t know her; she’s 7 or 8 years younger, and we lived in different worlds.
She wrote a novel a couple of years ago that was set in a fictional version of our home town. There are people of various ethnic groups in the story, including a couple of Black people. Schulz never uses the N word, but she does use “mick” (for the Irish-American dad at the center of the story) and “dago” for Italians.
I thought about writing to ask her who drew that line, but I couldn’t figure out how to write a brief enough letter about it. I find “dago” to be fairly offensive, not sure about “mick.” But that may be for obvious self-absorbed reasons.
Just a side note to lj’s comment.
Cross posted with Janie. Of course that is the word, which is why I said what I did about racial slurs.
Let me clarify that the explicit non-use of the full N word occurs in the novel, whereas the other ethnic “nicknames” are used without comment or framing, as if they are perfectly acceptable.
I thought it was weird.
Let me clarify that the explicit non-use of the full N word occurs in the novel, whereas the other ethnic “nicknames” are used without comment or framing, as if they are perfectly acceptable.
I thought it was weird.
See my note above (1:38).
In the 19th century, the Irish, and later the Italians, were “the criminal foreigners who are destroying America!”. But now, nobody gets excited if your ancestors came from Ireland or Italy. So what were once offensive ethnic slurs (“mick”, “dago”) are now casually used without any offense intended or perceived.
Just another example of the culture and the language evolving. We will know that blacks have finally been accepted across the vast majority of Americans when “the N word” can be used without intended offense. Of course, the social change necessarily must come first.
Went looking for more on Jerry Sadowitz, and thought this (by Andrew Doyle, who writes for Jonathan Pie) was interesting. I didn’t know anything about him, but looking on Wikipedia, he’s complicated. This is what his entry says under his politics Doyle considers himself to be left-wing and criticises political correctness and identity politics. He is a Brexit supporter. Doyle supported Jeremy Corbyn during the 2017 United Kingdom general election Lots of stuff there I’d disagree with, but his comment below seemed worthwhile:
“Jerry Sadowitz is a nasty piece of work. His venomous tirade is relentless, consisting of unabashed racism, homophobia, misogyny, antisemitism, xenophobia, and every other kind of prejudice known to humankind. If it exists, he hates it. The man is a monster. He’s also one of the best showmen on the Edinburgh Fringe.”
This was how I opened my review of Jerry Sadowitz’s show for ScotsGay magazine in 2008. I described his performance as “an explosion of hate on stage”, but noted that the effect was both prurient and deliriously funny. That Sadowitz’s unending bile is often interspersed with adroitly executed magic tricks makes his routines all the more compelling. When critics quote his jokes out of context, it’s easy to see why so many are offended — but when it comes to Sadowitz, context is everything.
And interestingly, for apparently the first time ever, Sadowitz has actually commented (and for non UK people, the Roy “Chubby” Brown mentioned is in a similar category to the Bernard Manning used as an example in the New Statesman piece that lj linked):
Up until now, Sadowitz has been able to evade the accusatory finger-pointing of culture warriors — those who are determined to see racists and fascists in every shadow — by dint of his status as a luminary among comedians. Stand-ups who have admired Sadowitz for years will baulk at the suggestion that there is no distinction between his act and that of Roy “Chubby” Brown. But for those who have succumbed to the new puritanism, words have a contaminative power. Racist epithets are always racist; context be damned.
In a statement released yesterday, Sadowitz wrote: “I don’t want to humiliate the Pleasance but they are doubling down on their position and I don’t want to be made the victim of that… My act is now being cheapened and simplified as unsafe, homophobic, misogynistic and racist… A lot of thought goes into my shows and while I don’t always get it right… I am offended by those who, having never seen me before, hear words being shouted in the first five minutes before storming out without listening to the material which I am stupid enough to believe is funny”.
Sadowitz’s frustration is palpable, and rightly so. It is similarly frustrating to see him forced to break character publicly — possibly for the first time in his career — simply because a few know-nothings with too much power cannot comprehend the notion of an onstage persona and its function in stand-up.
Now, again, I don’t know. But I still think that this is a complicated story, and you don’t have to be a Joe Rogan to be interested in the phenomenon and its cultural relevance.
wj, first of all, I’m not at all sure i agree with you l — that’s all too easy. But I don’t have time to work out why at the moment.
Secondly, the novel was set in the 1960s or so, so our current standards were being applied to the N word (ie. that treatment was in fact ahistorical) but not to the others. When I was growing up, “dago” was like N is now: okay if Italian people called themselves that, but other people used it only as a slur.
Janie, I guess it was different in California in the 1960s. (Possibly because of all those Italians running vineyards in the Napa Valley.) But here “dago” may not have been flattering, but not really insulting either.
Still, if he was setting near where you grew up, I suppose the standards there and then should apply.
I didn’t know, or I knew but the word didn’t come to mind. A further usage question, you can use that with anyone who looks it or could someone say ‘hey, I’m from x, not pakistan!’?
Gftnc, Apologies for thinking you were connecting the joke and the assault. On my phone now, so haven’t really dug into this, but not sure if I’ll bother.
Haven’t read the novel JanieM references or anything else by the author. I will say, though, that amongst Lit Critters (at least the historicist types), there would be a lot of discussion in such a case about the differences between the moment of representation, the moment of production, and the moment(s) of reception.
For a realist novel there is an expectation that the writer tries to make the setting feel authentic, and that often means trying to build around the ways in which that moment differs from the writer’s own. Racism and discrimination can be part of that realism effect. When I teach a novel from, or set in, the past, I try to make my students aware of the difference and to make them think about the purpose of the writer’s choices in-context.
When the text was written in a time other than the one being represented, it adds another layer to the mystery. Now we have to examine the choices to see what things get foregrounded as historical difference and what gets treated as if it is entirely contemporary. Any particular choice one way or another becomes grounds for analysis trying to create a unified system of meaning for the text.
Add a third level of unknowing to be sorted through if the moment of production is intermediate to the moments of representation and of reception. Now we have two moments to historicize before coming at it with our own analysis and worldview.
A good piece of historicist criticism takes all of this into account, and takes the time to think about how the analysis will be taken by future readers as well as contemporary ones.
Which is all really too much for a writer to consider when crafting a story. From what I have seen, they mostly avoid the battles that they think are most worth avoiding and then get on with the story, and leave readers and critics to work out the rest for themselves.
I’ve never heard (or read) “paki” used in the US. My impression is that it’s a UK thing.
I’d guess that someone of Pakistani ancestry would get upset. But not as much as someone of Indian ancestry, given the state of things between the two countries. 🙂
nous — Connie Schulz is a journalist first and foremost (and a teacher of journalism at Kent State IIRC) and is somewhat well known for it. (All aside from who she’s married to.)
She wrote the one novel just a couple of years ago (she’d have been in her early sixties I think). IMO it’s an okay novel, though not great by any means. I was intrigued to read it because of the setting. Your 10:10 gives me something interesting to think about — i suspect Connie just got on with the story, but also that both she and her publishers made some specific decisions about lines to be drawn with slurs.
Anyhow, one of my most major reactions had to do with Lake Erie. The town in both reality and the novel is on “the lake” (as it’s called locally), which in my family was one of the most dominating forces in our sense of our lives and the world in general.
My dad sailed on “the lakes” before going into the Navy in WWII; he operated heavy machinery at one of the docks when I was growing up — that was his second job; the opening of the St. L Seaway was one of the great memorable events of my childhood. We hung out at the town’s public beach almost every day in the summers of my adolescence, my cousins water-skiied, we had picnics at the other public park on the lake, etc. etc.
And Connie Schulz’s novel barely mentions the lake at all. We all live in both the same and different worlds…..
Rambling, need to stop.
We all live in both the same and different worlds…..
Puts me in mind of a recent (mass) email from my high school class president. (About the next reunion, IIRC.) He was talking about the things which loomed large and we all remember from high school. Of which I remember exactly zero, that’s how large they (didn’t) loom in my life at the time. This, mind you, in a little country town with a 250 graduating class. And not even the difference-in-age factor.
“Paki” in British use refers to anyone from the Indian subcontinent. It’s not a word anyone with any sensitivity would use in conversation, but…
“Paki shop” is used quite affectionately, of corner shops with long opening hours. In my unreliable recollection, the term arose in the early seventies, many such shops having been opened by Ugandan Asian immigrants (usually of Indian origin) expelled by Idi Amin.
(“Indian restaurants” in the East End of London are usually operated by Bangladeshi immigrants, or their descendents. The English are not particular about overseas geography.)
Ugandan Asian?
Ugandan Asian?
Yes
It’s not a word anyone with any sensitivity would use in conversation, but…
Yes. But within living memory it could be used affectionately in other ways, albeit by insensitive idiots, for example when Prince Harry was talking about his platoon mates in 2009 (or 2006):
The footage released by the newspaper and published on its website shows the prince three years ago as a 21-year-old officer cadet during a military exercise in Cyprus. In one extract his camera pans round his colleagues, sleeping in the RAF departure lounge while waiting for their flight. Homing in on one fellow cadet, the prince is heard to say, quietly: “Ah, our little Paki friend Ahmed.”
This turned out to be Ahmed Raza Khan, now a captain in the Pakistani army, who was awarded the best overseas cadet prize at Sandhurst. If he heard the remark at the time, he did not react to it.
By then it was already well understood in polite circles that this (paki) was a racial slur, but I must also add that when I first started going up to the North Country around the same time, when I met my husband, I was astounded by the ubiquity of its use (albeit not exactly in polite circles), and had to ask that it not be used around me.
In other news,
Allen Weisselberg, longtime Trump Organization CFO, pleads guilty to tax scheme
That’s over a dozen tax fraud charges. And his plea deal includes agreeing to testify against the Trump Organization if called as a witness.
Which doubtless means against Trump himself. Gotta believe that, at some point over all those years, Trump failed to keep to mob boss speak and explicitly told Weisselberg to cook the books on something.
By then it was already well understood in polite circles that this (paki) was a racial slur,
From which we deduce that Prince Harry (and perhaps the Royal Family generally?) do not qualify as members of “polite circles.” 🙂
Which doubtless means against Trump himself.
This not in fact doubtless. Yesterday’s articles, which I don’t have time to find, said explicitly that he would testify against the company but not against the family. Today’s article on nbcnews dot com says:
There also has not been any indication that Weisselberg will cooperate in any investigation into Trump personally.
His testimony against the company is still a great development.
From which we deduce that Prince Harry (and perhaps the Royal Family generally?) do not qualify as members of “polite circles.” 🙂
Prince Harry, at any rate. Describing himself somewhat ruefully later (I think after the naked Vegas billiards pictures) as “too much army, not enough prince”.
Yesterday’s articles, which I don’t have time to find, said explicitly that he would testify against the company but not against the family.
One could make a case, I think, that testifying against the organization’s CEO position is not the same as testifying against Trump personally. Then again, he might decide to void his plea deal and take a whole lot more prison time.
The plea deal does not require Mr. Weisselberg to cooperate with the district attorney’s broader criminal investigation of Mr. Trump, and his admissions will not implicate the former president. His willingness to accept jail time rather than turn on Mr. Trump underscores the extent of his loyalty to a family he has served for nearly a half-century, and it helped stymie the larger effort to indict Mr. Trump.
New York Times.
Typically, white collar criminals get directed to some (relatively) resort-like lockup. I wonder if some time, prior to being called to testify, in GenPop (i.e. with the general prison population) might concentrate his mind. Just a thought.
That has already been hashed out as part of the deal. IIRC (and I am done looking things up 🙂 he was doing to get longer at Rikers and that threat got him to agree to more on his side.
Weisselberg, 75, is likely to receive a sentence of five months in jail, to be served at New York City’s notorious Rikers Island complex, and he could be required to pay about $2 million in restitution, including taxes, penalties and interest, the people said. If that punishment holds, Weisselberg would be eligible for release after about 100 days.
PBS
DJT’s sister was a Federal judge. She doesn’t seem to care much for her brother so I dunno where that fits in, but she probably has some connections if she cares to use them.
Two quick thoughts:
Re: the Prince Harry story, militaries are closed societies and the military identity is, in large part, built off of rejecting the standards of “polite” society. And Harry has always chafed at the ways that his own identity was constrained by the overlapping identities of the closed groups that he belonged to, especially those assigned to him by birth rather than chosen.
His use of a racial slur in the recorded conversation is perfectly in line with the sort of cohesion building, us vs. them of many militaries. Comrades first, civvy identities a distant second. Fraught and often problematic, but understandable for those whose lives depend on being a collective.
Re: suffering in prison, I’d rather we made conditions better for everyone who is incarcerated. I’m all for stripping the powerful of their privilege, but it rubs me the wrong way to endorse conditions that no one should be subject to, just because I think the person in question has been too insulated from the suffering that they have caused others.
Not trying to shame anyone else with that thought, just articulating my discomfort.
Re: suffering in prison, I’d rather we made conditions better for everyone who is incarcerated.
Completely agree.
But I’ve long had a problem with providing white collar criminals separate, and notably more comfortable, facilities. Not least because I think that doing so contributes to the lack of motivation to improve the general prison conditions. If this case makes a start at leveling the playing field on that, all to the good.
One other thought occurs to me. This has been a trial about state tax fraud. I don’t know about anybody else, but my state tax returns generally start with my Federal return. Which, depending on exactly where the fraud was, suggests that Mr. Weisselberg might also be looking at Federal tax fraud charges, too. And a different plea agreement might be done there.
Thanks, nous, you’re right to bring it up.
Something I’ve been mad about for, apparently, a generation has been rectified, and I hadn’t even heard about it!
Good News! Now get rid of DeJoy. Yesterday.
I recall hearing about that. One of the biggest defeats the radical libertarians have suffered in decades. (Let’s hear it for non-filibusterable reconcilliation bills!) Obviously I screwed up by failing to write a post about it.
Now what the Post Office needs most is to get rid of DeJoy. Then there will be a chance to get it functioning smoothly again.
Obviously Pete and I crossposted. (Something about two great minds with but a single thought….)
i just read somewhere in the past couple of days that Biden’s appointees to the board (or whatever it is) are in place now and though DeJoy isn’t gone, he has been sidelined. They’ve canceled his order for gas-guzzlers and replaced it with electric or hybrid, i forget which. More cheering!
Something about two great minds with but a single thought….
Beware the company you keep. 😉
Beware the company you keep. 😉
Right back atcha!