Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, November 14, 2023
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89 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Trump Jr hails ‘sexiness’ of father’s properties at New York fraud trial
Maybe if one is into syphilitic meth mouthed whores.
I was today years old when I learned I was a contumacious individual.
@OzarkHillbilly:
And are you fractious and contrary as well?
@OzarkHillbilly:
That’s how I’ve described you to everyone who’s asked.
I’m surprised this hasn’t gotten more play, or perhaps I’ve just missed it. It’s a 2001 video of Benjamin Netanyahu holding court in a living room where he brags that he never intended to abide by the Oslo accords, that America is easily manipulated, and that Israel doesn’t have to care what an American President wants because 80% of the population supports them.
It’s a very popular dodge amongst those demanding blind support for Israel to say “I’m no fan of Netanyahu, but…”. The reality is that Israeli policy has been set by Netanyahu and his allies for a quarter century and he still heads the country. Blind support has only made the situation worse.
It’s moot anyway. Public support is shifting away from Israel which will change the political calculus.
Maybe some of the political science professionals (or talented amateurs) could answer this. I was in a boozy “discussion” with some old mates last night and it was my recollection that Trump has brought in a not insignificant number of new voters into the republican party.
I was trying to find a credible study that would confirm if my recollection was right and how big this group in relation to the existing GOP base.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Link goes to Pole sci piece showing that about 13% of Trump voters voted for Obama. (4% of Clinton voters voted for Romney.)
https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/just-how-many-obama-2012-trump-2016-voters-were-there/
Steve
@Rick DeMent: Here’s a poll of party affiliation. This is self reporting and not based on actual registration. I find it so noisy as to be almost useless to see trends.
After various business and lack of internet connectivity yesterday, I missed communicating this years (decades?) most hilarious UK political news:
HE’S BAACKKK:
David Cameron is appointed Foreign Secretary.
He also get a peerage, which he needs for the job as he’s not a MP.
Dave fails upward most impressively.
Whole thing came about because the egregious Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, was playing politics with calls to ban pro-Palestinian marches in London last Saturday.
As Home Sec she had the power to do so, but only if the Met Police Commissioner requested such; he quite rightly, refused to make such a request, despite Braverman angling for that.
Cue a narked Suella raging at the Met in a newspaper article. Leading to a lot of Conservative ministers and MP’s being very unhappy with Braveraman playing politics with public order to dog-whistle the right and round up the headbangers MP posse in an increasingly overt bid to become candidate of the right to replace Sunak.
Crucially, she did not clear the article No. 10.
As that was obviously insubordinate, and the march in fact went of reasonably peacefully, and the majority of related arrests were of far-right loons of whom not a few chanted their support for Suella, Sunak moved.
Braverman sacked, replaced by Foreign Secretary James Cleverly
Cleverly is replaced by Cameron, who is a man mercifully free of ambition, but an rally the centrists to support Sunak.
A few other right wingers also booted from more junior positions.
The message from Sunak: “come at the King, you best not miss”
Effectively challenging the right to fight or back off; seems they’ve decided to back off, for now. Next test will be if the courts reject the Rwanda deportation plan tomorrow.
Another possible angle: Cameron remains a degree of personal appeal to the liberal upper-middle class, home counties membership/support: the “Blue Wall”
The right wing and “Boris boosters” (two rather separate groups) have pushed a policy of appealing to ex-Labour voters in the “Red Wall seats” the Tories took in 2019, which they need to be dominant, and the “swing seats” (needed to be competitive).
But both “culture war” and Boris style spending pledges don’t appeal to the Blue Wall, who are socially liberal but like low taxes and fiscal discipline as well: and that vote the Conservatives need to survive.
The cannot afford for the Liberal Democrats to scalp that vote, if they want to keep a defeat next year containable enough for a comeback 5 to 10 years down the line.
Just rewatched the 4 seasons of Star Trek Enterprise.
I highly recommend s04e19 and s04e20. “In a Mirror, Darkly”.
ST:TOS came up with the “Mirror Universe” idea as a plot line for s02e04 “Mirror, Mirror“.
But “In a Mirror, Darkly” shows a damaged-ego clawing power-hungry Archer ultimately getting WAY too far beyond his capabilities.
If curious, here are all the various mirror universe episodes.
I really feel that they could do a complete serious about the Terran Empire’s conquest of space. Optimism is so passe.
@CSK: Absolutely.
@Neil Hudelson: My reputation precedes me. 🙂
@Rick DeMent:
I recall reading a piece–and I don’t recall if it was based on a scientific study–about how men and women in their 40s and 50s in Alabama and Louisiana had voted for the first time in 2016, for Trump.
I want to thank everyone for all the very kind responses yesterday, even if it did make me worry a coworker was gonna see me tearing up for no apparent reason ;3
For those of us with little people in our lives:
US health officials warn of fruit pouches tainted with lead after 22 toddlers fall ill
@JohnSF:
Has he proposed a referendum to screw up Britain even more?
Scenes from the growing lines in the Democratic Party civil war that’s brewing.
The Progressive Left Is a Paper Tiger
Time to call their bluff.
RUY TEIXEIRA NOV 2, 2023
Hispanics are a far larger voting bloc than the Islamist loving Democratic far Left
And as Joel Kotkin observes:
@Kathy:
Current British joke is “Cameron presents Middle East peace plan to UN: it involves a referendum …”
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah, I saw that earlier and forwarded it to my son and DIL. Fortunately, they’re clear.
Jesus, I just realized the Democratic convention is in Chicago. Because of course it is. History is about to rhyme.
In 1968 the Left, having annoyed much of the country despite providing excellent music, decided to stage a major demonstration against Hubert Humphrey at the convention. It being Chicago, the demonstration soon became riots, which doomed Humphrey and helped elect Nixon. The proximate cause of the demonstrations was the Vietnam war which, thanks in part to the anti-war movement as seen in Chicago, ended just a mere seven years and tens of thousands of dead Americans and god only knows how many dead Vietnamese, Laotians and of course, Cambodians, later.
Were the yutes wrong to object to the war? No, they were right. Did they accomplish their goal? Well, yes, if the goal was to elect Nixon and prolong the war.
Will the anti-Israel progressives show up this time in Chicago? Of course they will. Will it all go to shit? Of course it will. Will they manage to elect a much, much worse Nixon? If I had to put money on it I’d say yes.
@Rick DeMent: @steve: @CSK: One indirect piece of data involves the many counties that flipped from Obama to Trump. Some of those shifted back to the Dems in 2020, but most stuck with him (which means, among other things, that it can’t just be attributed to the low turnout in 2016).
There’s one important caveat. To some extent it was the continuance of trends that predate Trump’s rise to power. For example, we’ve all heard the endless discussions about how Trump improved on Romney among white voters without college degrees. But what’s often overlooked is that Romney did historically well among that bloc for a Republican up to that point. There’s been a gradual, decades-long realignment in which less-educated voters have drifted to the GOP, and instead of trying to bring those voters back, Dems have increasingly developed a new coalition of younger voters, minority voters, and college-educated whites. Trump’s rise exacerbated this realignment, but it didn’t create it.
Now, this is somewhat separate from the question of nonvoters or infrequent voters who went on to back Trump. I’m not familiar with the data on this, and my sense of it comes mostly from anecdote, including my own personal experience. (I’ve met people who told me Trump was their first politician they cast a vote for in years, and who seemed to show little interest in electing Republicans in general.) I have no doubt it’s only a small group of voters at best. But it still could matter around the edges the next time there’s a GOP presidential nominee who isn’t Donald Trump.
@Michael Reynolds:
The big difference is no one is sending any American yutes to die pointlessly in Gaza.
@Kathy:
Precisely. That’s the ray of hope. Maybe there’ll be some other outrage to occupy them by then. Or maybe they’re smarter than we were in 1968. Their music’s still mostly shit, though.
@Kylopod: @CSK: @MarkedMan:
Yes thank you to all who responded, I think my recollection was a mirage, or at least not as well developed as I recalled. I had thought it was pretty well established that new voters for Trump (either those who had never voted, or had not voted in a long time) was around the 1 to 2%. Based on the feedback don’t think that notion has any real concrete evidence to support it.
@Michael Reynolds: I agree that if “the left” riots in Chicago over Israel it will be counterproductive and perhaps catastrophic. I think it unlikely, though, for the reason Kathy points out – Israel is an abstraction while in 1968 half the rioters were in danger of being shipped off to die in the jungles of Viet Nam.
But let’s say that there is a riot over Israel. It seems to me that the short shortsightedness and self defeating virtue signalling of the young is almost a given. Shouldn’t at least some of the blame for feeding that fire go to a quarter century of American politicians who were so afraid of rocking the boat that they agreed to play pretend and look the other way while Israel and Hamas destroyed all hope for a two-state solution, or really any solution at all?
I guess today we’ll find out whether a bad continuing resolution is better than no CR at all.
What I wonder is what happens between the shutdown being averted, hopefully, and the next deadline. One thinks a CR is just putting things off for a few weeks, so a deal can be negotiated for a longer term budget. The GQP, however, seems to prefer to wait for the deadline, then demand all their poison pills be added to the next resolution, or else shut down the government.
The draft was still in effect in 1968. That affected every 18 y/o male directly and females indirectly. It affected a very large number of families. I dont see this affecting as many people and generating as much heat. That said, there probably will be protestors and it will be played up by the media. It will still look bad. If there is violence it will be worse.
Steve
.
@Michael Reynolds: No Mayor Richard Daley so there’s hope.
@MarkedMan:
Obviously. Of course lots of contributing factors with one thing in common: they are all in the past. It’s a bit like saying, ‘Gosh, I think we may have overreacted a bit to that whole Archduke Ferdinand thing,’ in 1917. In Vietnam the refrain was that the Tonkin Gulf incident was a bullshit pretext and it was. It was also in the past and irrelevant to the active war.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Only Trump (and Lauren Boebert) can take the ‘sex’ out of ‘sexiness.’
@steve:.. That affected every 18 y/o male…
Don’t forget that 18 year old males could not vote the bastards out of office who were drafting them to fight for democracy. American citizens had to be 21 years old to cast a ballot in 1968.
@Michael Reynolds: It’s relevant to the active war in that our whole supposed rationale for aiding Israel is that they are “the only democracy in the area and they are seeking peace.” The reality is that Israel is a de facto apartheid state and the people that have held power for a quarter of a century there actively destroy any chance for a solution. Our blind assistance to Israel is making the situation worse (if that is still possible).
@Mister Bluster: There’s also the fact that it was part of the process by which the modern nomination system was born. Humphrey skipped all the primaries and was selected as the nominee by Democratic elites at the convention. That wasn’t considered an illegitimate means of choosing a nominee at the time. But given the great resistance to the Johnson Admin within the party which pushed Johnson himself out of the race, their sticking with the vp was considered a slap in the face of those voters. It’s the main reason why the modern system, where the nominee is based strictly on who collects enough delegates from primaries and caucuses, with the convention becoming a TV infomercial for a nominee effectively chosen months earlier, was created in the first place. Whether it was the amendment granting the right to vote to 18-year-olds, or the reforms that birthed the modern nomination system, the 1968 convention provoked a desire for more popular representation.
@a country lawyer:
And an (ever so slightly) different Chicago PD.
@JKB: Yes, please do tell us all about “Dems in Disarray”:
Burchett accuses McCarthy of elbowing him, chases him down Capitol hallway
See also: MTG v. ding-a-ling Boebert, the Matt Gaetz sideshow, and all of the Freedumb Caucus nonsense currently aimed at the new speaker.
Every statement is a projection with this crew. Every. Single. One.
Republicans–including a former Speaker of the House!!–are getting into shoving matches in the halls of Congress, but JKB wants us to know that the guy famous for completely failing his one big prediction is predicting that the real intraparty civil war will be because young progressives don’t understand that the Jews control all the money. Do I have that right? I might not have that right but I really don’t have the energy to parse out just wtf he’s trying to say.
@Jen:
Damn, beat me by 60 seconds.
@Neil Hudelson: JKB’s ramblings about Jewish money aren’t coming out of nowhere. Here is Charlie Kirk a few weeks ago:
In plain English, Kirk is pledging to protect Israel from the international cabal of wealthy Jews controlling world affairs.
I don’t deny that anti-Semitism often comes cloaked in anti-Israel rhetoric. But there’s also the countervailing reality of right-wing anti-Semitism that uses its alliance with the right-wing government in Israel as a sort of get-out-of-anti-Semitism-accusations-free card.
Okay, I’m having a Berenstain Bears moment: since when has the word been spelled “dysfunctional” and not “disfunctional”?!
@Neil Hudelson: But wait! There’s more:
GOP senator challenges Teamsters president to fight during hearing
GOP is going through some things, apparently.
@Kylopod:
The MAGAts support Israel as good evangelical Christians must, if they hope to see the world destroyed by fire, after which they can ascend to heaven, sit at the right hand of Jesus, and laugh at Jews burning in hell. That’s the crowd Bibi Netanyahu has mortgaged Israel to.
Meanwhile on the Left we have idiot college kids demanding America stop selling ice cream in Israel, and now actively campaigning for Hamas.
For a long time the Left was very excited about liberating Tibet from China. Small problem: most of China’s rivers flow out of Tibet, so, no, the PRC was never, ever going to give up Tibet. Simply not happening. They’d give up on Taiwan before they’d let Tibet go.
Very similar problem in Israel. Israel has no strategic depth, so it has no choice but to dominate the high ground in the Golan Heights and West Bank. They will never, ever, ever give that up. They’ll keep the high ground and they’ll make sure they have corridors of access to those locations, so any two-state solution will have to start from there.
To put this in a familiar American context: the Cuban missile crisis in which we calmly, rationally, and in keeping with the LOAC and international law, threatened to start a war that might have exterminated most of the human race.
@MarkedMan: From something called “Stack Exchange” comes…
And for a counterargument…
And finally, a boring answer (which got no upvotes, BTW, despite being the definitive response…)
Pick the one you want. (For what it’s worth, Word Press’s spelling function is marking all “disfunctional”
referencesusages as misspelled.)@JKB:
Can Republicans nominate a generic Republican?
Not just for President, where the answer is clearly no, but for any significant job? I think the primary system weeds them out, and pushes MAGA Republicans for everything.
Where are the wealthy sons of political families that just want to go into the family business and not really do anything other than be a white male and gently stroke the reigns of power? Where is this generation’s George Herbert Walker Bush or Dan Quayle?
@MarkedMan:
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Had a similar issue many long years ago when I was a library grunt at a law firm in DC over the word “judgment.” Which I insisted should be spelled, “judgement,” which would be correct only if I were British.
@Gustopher: We need to be careful to avoid inserting our own biases about what a “generic Republican” would look like. To me at least, it doesn’t necessarily suggest some old guard, Bush-Senior type. It might just as easily be a MAGA guy or gal. The bottom line is that it doesn’t suggest anything in particular other than party affiliation.
It’s been true for a long time–well before Trump–that “generic Republican” and “generic Democrat” usually poll better than any specific candidate of said party. But that’s probably simply because people tend to come with more baggage than parties, to the general public.
@MarkedMan: I have never seen “disfunctional” used. Dystopia, not distopia; dysentery not disentery. Same root.
@Michael Reynolds:
The United States has gotten much, much better at sidelining demonstrations in the past 55 years. We have free speech zones and the like. And online activism!
It takes a lot of passion to get something big going in meatspace, and BLM had it (along with the sense that the world was ending because of Covid), but I don’t think the kids really feel Israel in their bones. There’s not going to be a takeover of Chicago.
There’s a lot of good music coming out now, you’re just not paying attention. Lots of fun, indie shit that is almost novelty songs. Carpetgarden “Yr The Best”, Alec Benjamin “Devil Doesn’t Bargain”, Cavetown “Lemonboy”, etc.
@MarkedMan:
You’re right of course. But this would require the olds to take responsibility for their critical role in electing and enabling the failures — like Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu — who’ve worsened the world’s problems. Much easier to deflect by complaining about the young, a tedious and tired pastime for some of our elders but one that never goes away.
If Boomers and Xers spent half as much time and energy 1) holding clowns like Netanyahu accountable and 2) demanding their peers stop giving a majority of its votes to rightwing dirt bags, as they do whining about the kids, we might actually save this planet.
@Michael Reynolds:Yes, in MR’s world, it’s those damn progressives who are entirely responsible for all our problems. Even though the official investigation of the Chicago riots found “unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions, particularly at night. That violence was made all the more shocking by the fact that it was often inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat. These included peaceful demonstrators, onlookers, and large numbers of residents who were simply passing through, or happened to live in, the areas where confrontations were occurring.”
But still, if all those pesky kids hadn’t been exercising their constitutional rights to protest peacefully, the Chicago PD wouldn’t have been in a position where ‘Individual policemen, and lots of them, committed violent acts far in excess of the requisite force for crowd dispersal or arrest. To read dispassionately the hundreds of statements describing at firsthand the events of Sunday and Monday nights is to become convinced of the presence of what can only be called a police riot.'”
Darn those progressives!
@wr: So the police attacked protesters, created a drama for tv, and hurt a candidate they likely opposed.
Even without assigning blame to the lefties, it’s pretty clear they basically walked into a trap and that it worked.
Much like bin Laden wanting to trigger a US response with 9/11, and the recent reporting that Hamas was hoping to provoke a ground invasion with 10/6.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Thanks!
@DK: Okay, happy to oblige. “Hey Peers! Stop giving your votes to right wing dirt bags!”
Not sure what that’s going to accomplish though…
😉
@wr: It’s called channeling Bill Maher. Those damn progressives/ college kids/ liberals are just so foolish!
@MarkedMan: don’t believe him, he’s spreading dysinformation.
@MarkedMan:
It’s been “dysfunctional” for as long as I can remember.
@JohnSF:
My brain is damaged; this phrase triggered 101 Dalmatians associations.
@MarkedMan: Saracastic, lazy, self-masturbatory comments here won’t accomplish anything — what we need is sustained, collective, real-life pressure.
Maybe some olds don’t know the difference. Maybe that’s why as a group they can’t get it together, politically.
😉
@DK:
My Gen X peers vote straight blue, with the exception of one who doesn’t vote, and my brothers who live in a very blue part of New York State and might as well not vote.
I’ve done my part. I encouraged a brother to not take a job in Pennsylvania. “You will be so far away from your … I don’t know what the fuck you value… your favorite pizza shop? Your idiot friends? Assuming you have friends…”
Anyway, I’m an old, so the planet just has to last a few more decades. We don’t need to save it, just delay the doom. Kick the can down the road. The kids just have to kick that can harder, but they have stronger knees, so that makes sense.
@DrDaveT: A naked Cruella DeVille with a Dalmatian coat?
I had the same thought.
@DrDaveT:
@Gustopher:
“Suella deVille” is not an uncommon Brit witticism.
Naturally enough.
@DK: We inherited pollution so bad there was a major river that literally caught fire. There was an assumption that the question of nuclear war was “when, not if”. Over population was so pressing it was assumed mass starvation would be the norm by now. Lot’s of other stuff. We did some fixin’, had a few things go our way, but we failed to deal with a whole lot more and that leaves you youngs with as much a mess as our parents left us.
You have every right to complain. My generation is only justified in one complaint: We’ll be long dead before we get to enjoy the schadenfreude of watching the kids being born right now grow up and blame your generation for the mess you are leaving them. 😉
@Gustopher: Even as weak as they are, I think the parties themselves weed out people who might go to higher office as “generic X”s. By the time anyone’s running for higher state-level offices, the system already knows who’s the ‘ho they want.
@MarkedMan:
Oh you need not worry about us. Having learned from some Boomers exactly what not to do, we will try take responsibility, apologize for our collective screwups, and get out of the way — rather than stubbornly clinging to power while boring everybody with rants about youth politics and music.
I’m already ready let Zoomers have a crack at it; millennials will gladly go to brunch instead.
@Michael Reynolds: My mom WAS British–and my high school senior English teacher warned me that I would never be successful in life if I kept speaking and writing “like a Canadian.” I defer to spellchek (sic) for a lot of issues.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: To us Americans, a Canadian is someone who talks like us and writes like a Brit.
@Gustopher:
@DrDaveT:
Aha, just realised.
“Narked” is likely not a term in the US.
It means annoyed, with the implication of being frustrated, and unable to remove the source of aggravation.
Therefore passing on to even greater levels of exasperation and rage.
Has nothing to do with states of undress, LOL.
(At least, I sincerely hope not, in the current situation.)
@Jen: The most interesting thing about the entomological discussion I called up was the observation that disfunctional would simply indicate that something doesn’t work whereas dysfunctional would indicate function in a manner contrary to intent. Same as with “dystopia” and “dysentery.”
@MarkedMan:
@Michael Reynolds:
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Just remember, lads: it’s OUR language.
We just let you borrow it. 😉
@Gustopher:
Anyone who has ever listened to White Rabbit while they weren’t stoned has no room to complain about the music of other generations being “shit.”
@DK: Well yeah. But that’s why when I talk about my high school and college days to young people, I always note about our aspirations that “we failed–spectacularly.”
@JohnSF:
It is, or rather “narced” is and it means to turn someone in for a crime. (Narc is short for Narcotics Officer). But I got your meaning from context.
I’m glad you Brits take responsibility for the English language, now where do I go to register some complaints?
@Kylopod: I have to assume you’re from a different part of “us” than I am. But I grew up a half-day’s drive from Vancouver BC and could get CBUT and CHEK “over the air” in some of the places I’d lived. My English teacher criticized both my oral and written language as nonstandard and dysfunctional.
@MarkedMan:
The Académie Française will probably be happy to listen, and support your plea for recompense. 🙂
I believe all grievances addressed to the British government are dealt with by Rouge Dragon Pursuivant at the College of Heralds, who forwards them to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Who in turn pass them on a puzzled clerk in the Irish Republic’s Ministry of Culture, on the not unreasonable basis that it’s all James Joyce’s fault. 😉
@JohnSF: “Narked” means ratted out or complained about to the authorities where I’m from. People get annoyed from being narked out, but your right; it’s not the same at all.
ETA: @ MarkedMan: I tried writing it as “narced,” but got the misspelled marking again and couldn’t escape reading it as “narsed” or “nar-ched.”
@JohnSF:
You are correct, it is not — but I do the Guardian cryptic most days, and have thus had to become aware of all sorts of bizarre slang, cricket terminology and abbreviations, archaic plurals and past tenses, and wyrd spelyngs.
(Why do Brits spell Yiddish terms differently!? I’ve recently been stumped by both SHMUCK and HUTZPAH, neither of which is spelled that way this side of the pond…)
FWIW, I’ve been an avid music fan since my teens and I have purposely avoided the “my generation’s music is the only good stuff” trap. I never, ever listen to oldies station, and am constantly trying to find new (to me) stuff. It can be from a month ago or a hundred years, but if it takes me someplace new I’m happy. I have a surefire way to keep track of pieces I’ve heard that I really like – if I hear something worth it I go to iTunes and buy it, despite having an Apple Music subscription and being able to stream it for free. I find that having to kick in the buck and go through the purchase process means that everything on my “Recently Added” list is golden. Here’s my most recent purchases:
– Oh! Sweet Nuthin’- 1970 Velvet Underground (never heard it until it was on “Loki”)
– Oh! Sweet Nuthin’ – 1998 Phish (Because I was curious what they would do)
– I Dream of You – 2023 Sam Roberts Band (Canadian Indie)
– Saba’s Journey – 2022 Alune Wade (Sort of a combo of raspy acoustic middle eastern music overlaid on type of a 1960’s Henry Mancini vibe with some rap darting in and out)
– Vampire Empire – 2023 Big Thief (About as hipster faux bluegrass/folk that you will ever find in NYC’s five boroughs. “Simulation Swarm” is also a favorite, albeit quite different.)
– Irish Eyes – 2023 Rose Betts (Not much like her other stuff. Very Irish, very fun)
– Bee Hives (the whole album) – 2004 Broken Social Scene (Canadian Indie – I rarely buy a whole album)
– Cannibal Resource – 2008 Dirty Projectors (Pop – but weird. The opposite of Beyonce. Very hard to describe)
– Smokeshow – 2021 Cory Wong (Killer guitarist, but upbeat and absolutely zero affectations)
@wr:
Yeah, dude, I was alive and very aware and watching it play out nightly. I am well aware that the Chicago PD were thugs – hence my snide comments about Chicago. Then and now. See, I had skin in the game – my father was career Army just off his first Vietnam deployment and getting ready for his second. My first demo was an anti-war event in Des Moines of all places. Later I marched in DC. And marched for Nixon’s impeachment.
I don’t have a lot of patience for people doing the right thing stupidly. I assume the other side will be assholes, so in order to get what I want out of life I need the people on my side not to be incompetent. If you want to enjoy the feels of being ever so righteous, cool, but that’s not my thing. I actually want the real world that I live in to be better, and when pudding-brained amateurs on my side fuck things up, it annoys me. Don’t tell me, “I’m not a doctor but I’d seen appendectomies on YouTube, and I had my wine opener, so…”
Your tolerance of self-destructive imbecility I’m sure says nice things about your sweet nature. I’m not so easy-going. When I started seeing Vietcong flags at anti-war demos I knew, at age 14, it was a mistake. I’m sure you’d have fist-pumped and yelled a hearty, ‘Right on!’ but I do not GAF about motive, I want results. Specifically, I wanted the war to end so my Dad wouldn’t die, (and leave me with my mother) and I wanted it done before I came up for the draft. I just caught the start of the volunteer Army and drew a high lottery number, but my father, the warrant officer, was busy trying to find a way to keep me the fuck out of Nam, including offering to send me to Canada or worse, get me into West Point.
And now I’ve got skin of a different nature in the game. I have a trans daughter, and a Chinese daughter, and a Salvadoran son-in-law in all but name. So I need them to be able to live their lives, despite gender, despite race, despite ethnicity. So once again, when my people, the good guys, fuck things up I am annoyed and wish they would stop.
@DrDaveT:
Aha! I know this one: it’s because both are alternative transliterations of the Yiddish original in the Hebrew alphabet.
The original was apparently sort of guttural “ch”, and the “c” became silent in most positions. Hence pronounciation in both became more or less just “h”; but transliteration varied between UK and US.
@MarkedMan:
It was a snark, dude. My recently added list includes Amyl and the Sniffers (stripped-down Aussie punk, videos made for 10 dollars), The Warning (Mexican sister trio, hard rock*), Extreme (they’ve been around for a while, Nuno Bettancourt has a wee bit of skill with a guitar). But I also added some new Rolling Stones.
It makes me irrationally happy that at age 80, Mick can still turn the word ‘you’ into four syllables of brattiness.
*The drummer looks like a kid til she throws her head back and howls.
Well, those Democrats in Disarray are at it again. First Schumer and Biden, and then the House Democratic leadership announced they’d back Johnson’s continuing resolution(s).
I never thought chaos would look so orderly.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I was being snarky, not literal. I know there’s a wide range in how both Canadians and USA folks speak. But I’ve known many Canadians where I could not tell they weren’t from the states until they asked me to proofread something they wrote and it was all colour, honour, centre, etc.
@DrDaveT:
For some reason it seems Americans default to the German spelling of the sh-sound when transcribing Yiddish words: schmuck, schlemiel, schmegegge, and so on. But there’s no reason to since Yiddish doesn’t use the Roman alphabet, so it ought to be spelled phonetically, especially when you want to make clear it is Yiddish rather than German. When William Steig called his ogre character Shrek, the spelling indicated the name was definitely Yiddish.
As for Hutzpah, I think that’s a better spelling since so many Americans get confused by that “ch” and start pronouncing it like the first consonant in chocolate.
Even in America, certain words use that convention: I see Hasid a lot more than Chasid, for example.
Maybe the Brits need it more because they’re a lot likelier than Americans not to know shit about Jews.
@DrDaveT: JohnSF would be likely to know for sure, but my guess would be that British English doesn’t have as much velar fricative sound available in the common vocabulary and so may not spell to signal the phoneme. My ex-wife and I sponsored a “best velar fricative story” contest based on stories about the word durchbruch for a party we threw while in grad school. Many of our party goers could not do the /-ch/ phoneme as anything other than ch as in “chair.”
On more news today, Speaker Johnson passed his first major piece of legislation largely with Democratic support.
I expect a motion to vacate in 5, 4, 3…
Meanwhile David DePape, the man who brutally assaulted Paul Pelosi, revealed a few things in court testimony:
And:
My question: why did he not plead insanity?
@Kathy: The Tom Hanks thing is pure QAnon.
@Kathy:
It’s very hard to successfully pursue an insanity defense. It didn’t work for the guy who shot Gabby Giffords, even though he was clearly schizophrenic.
The criteria for legal insanity was greatly narrowed following the controversial John Hinckley verdict.
@Michael Reynolds: I assumed it was snark, but it got me thinking about my playlist and whether I could discern a pattern in my recent purchases. (I could not)
@MarkedMan: This one cracks me up every time I listen to it. 😛
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN3wEdK_vxw
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Depends on the variant; certainly common enough in Scots and Irish versions, but not in southern English. The problem is perhaps having no easy way to tell whether “ch” should be as in church or as in loch.
Using “kh” spelling instead would probably make life easier, but apparently “ch” was adopted when Old English used the “loch” pronunciation as default; it “softened” to the “church” form in Medieval times.
By which time the conventional spelling had got stuck in both English and Scots variants.