Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, March 27, 2024
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105 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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The headline of the day- South Carolina has $1.8 billion but doesn’t know where the money came from or where it should go
The Florida headline of the day- Dog digs up piece of antique bomb in Florida backyard
After agreeing to pay $300,000 in restitution to victims, complete 100 hours of community service, and attend 15 hours of legal ethics education, Embattled Texas AG Ken Paxton made this statement:
That is a lot of punishment for an innocent man.
@Bill Jempty: Off hand that looks like a BDU-33, a dummy practice bomb used by the AF and Navy.
It is about 25 lbs and has a small spotting charge in its nose. Probably fell off a Navy jet while training there in Jacksonville.
When I was stationed in Misawa, Japan in the 80s, we had occasion to search for wayward bomblets in the rice fields around the base.
Just a request from all of the writers out there: if you are going to be bad, be consistently bad, and frontload your badness so we know right away. I was literally 18 hours plus into a 2o hour audiobook, a huge investment in time, and I was still debating whether it was too painful to finish. Really interesting ideas and world building and some interesting characters, but then all kinds of hackneyed tripe mixed in:
– Person in a significant leadership position chooses letting the homicidal maniac who will kill literally 100 million people get away because they are (essentially) holding a gun to a coworker and (of course) they can’t let that coworker get shot.
– Opportunistic advanced technology, meaning that in one scene someone can literally conjure a chair (or anything else) out of the floor, but then in the next they are left in the dark because their flashlight batteries die.
– Supposedly sophisticated and moral government who are incapable of operating when the head of government is incapacitated
– Endless, endless occasions when one of the most senior leadership goes into “But we cannot sacrifice this smaller number of individuals in order to save hundreds of times their number, even though I have no other solution and that smaller number will die anyway, in addition to everyone else”. The people making this type of argument and the ones that advocate the stronger course seems to trade places randomly from scene to scene.
I will stop now, because I’m getting mad just thinking about it.
My pocket is open for business.
@Bill Jempty: This is an ongoing story. It’s obvious the state government here in South Cackalacky has a basic competence problem.
More on our terrifying lacks of a shared reality:
https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/maga-isolationist-own-words-ukraine-truth-social
@Kingdaddy: Your link is a terrific (root word “terror”) follow up on yesterday’s Bulward profiles of a number of “J6 patriots.”
The red wave continues apace.
@MarkedMan:
My best seller and one of the two properties I sold the rights to, has a couple of sexual escapades* in the opening pages of the book before settling into a 400 page drama** with just one more escapade.
Some of my books have adult sexual activity I don’t write that stuff very well at all but in my niche genre it is almost always expected. Otherwise you get comments like “Where’s the sex?” “This isn’t erotica” or someone complaining there is no red hot action.
That best seller of mine, I consider to be middling to mediocre*** of the things I have written. Another ebook of my mine, number 10 of 29 business wise for me, I consider absolute dreck but people want to read or buy it and rating/review wise at Amazon and Goodreads it averages over 4 stars.
There is this prize winning book I read some years back and I think its absolutely horrific. For some of the reasons you list up top.
*- The sexual escapades are the cause of the ebook’s plot.
**- It is going to be the basis for a sitcom would you believe.
***- One of my two editors, but one that didn’t work on this book but just read it, has a very low opinion of it.
@MarkedMan:
Title?
One thing I hate is when there’s a dramatic plot point revelation that needs to be taken care of right away, and then it’s several chapters until it even gets mentioned again. Not if the novel cuts to other story threads, but when the characters involved really need to follow up on it, but inexplicably they go do something else, and just let the plot point hang.
I suppose they mean to build suspense. But, usually, by the time they finally get back to it, developments tend to be underwhelming.
BTW, I’m waiting to see all 8 eps of 3 Body Problem before I discuss it here. There are a couple of things that struck me as massively stupid.
I came across this article today and wanted to share, I think its good, depressing as hell, but interesting.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/01/what-have-fourteen-years-of-conservative-rule-done-to-britain?_gl=1*u282a0*_up*MQ..&gclid=CjwKCAjwh4-wBhB3EiwAeJsppEsGLh1ESKZYNBh1ui-MLGz-z3abvdwvFg5z4Apusjn_iVXiupZoDRoC2UsQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
The impression I get from it is that England (specifically England) writ large followed the same pattern my English father did, failed to deal with any of their problems, blamed other people for it, then disappeared up their own asses. If JohnSF is real lucky, he’ll get in on the ground floor of the next step, start a cult.
I wonder if the US and UK will ever fully recover from Reagan and Thatcher.
@Kingdaddy: It looks like Russian propaganda has had considerable success. Those quotes of anti-Ukraine MAGA all strongly echo themes in Russian propaganda. The fascist references echo what Tim Snyder calls schizofascism, actual fascists calling their opponents fascist. The nonsense about Jewish Zelensky being a fascist is straight out of Russian propaganda, as is the stuff about killing Christians. (In the U. S. there’s also a certain amount of fascists calling anti-fascist the real fascists.) Once upon a time we mostly read the same papers and watched the same three TV networks. Now, gawd knows what those people are being exposed to in the darker reaches of Xitter and Trump’s Pravda Social. Even here at OTB we occasionally get a comment that smells of Russian troll farm. They seem to pop up regularly at, say, WAPO.
Not a cult, you said?
From the FAQ:
Some real Christian shit going on there, that the Word of God is even better now that it has received the official endorsement of DJT.
@Kingdaddy:
None of that has anything to do with reality, shared or peculiar.
The former Fox News producer, self described “shameless gadfly”, claiming that there is no footage. The replies on that X post linked in the Bulwark article is a doozy.
Who knew that the most paranoid behavior described by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas would seem quaint half a century later–no ingestion of chemicals necessary.
@Joe:
Here’s a link to the J6 “patriots” piece if anyone needs it:
plus.thebulwark.com/p/just-who-are-trump-january-6th-heroes
@drj:
The idiot missed a golden opportunity to rewrite it, too.
Lately some in the wingnut wing have been complaining about “woke stuff” in church sermons. Mostly this concerns straight quotes from this guy named Jesús, who apparently is a character of some relevance in their holy book.
Lardass could have “hired” someone to rewrite the offending parts and make the book less woke. Imagine, he could have had his own version, like King James, and I bet the thought never crossed what passes for his mind, assuming thoughts ever cross there.
@drj: trump endorsing the Bible is a desecration of it.
@MarkedMan:
Since I am not really able to enjoy entertainment in anything other than writer mode (which ruins a lot of things) I have a pretty good instinct for shit going off the rails. For example I knew by early season five of GoT that it was flailing. (I’m resisting Three Body Problem because I don’t trust Benioff and Weiss.) The TV show Lost took about a season before I knew they couldn’t pull it together, even as the showrunners were lying about having it all worked out. Same with Wheel of Time and Witcher, and Foundation. It’s easiest, for me at least with fantasy and sci fi. Rings of Power didn’t take an episode, a few scenes in it was obviously shit.
Books are tougher, because by their nature they’re a bigger time suck, and to be fair to the book you have to give it a minute to get itself up and running. It’s a matter of feel. Daniel Kraus has been very helpful to me in his role as book reviewer for Booklist, and I’m listening to his new book Whalefall. From the jump you know you’re dealing with a confident, talented writer, even when the premise is odd. That’s a big thing for me, I need to know that the writer isn’t wasting my time, that they have the skills and the imagination and discipline to pull it off. Guys like Herron, LeCarré, Miéville, Mosley, Elmore Leonard, Tana French, it’s hard to explain what it is that makes you relax and think, OK, I can commit, I’m in good hands.
I look for hand-waving, for lame world building, for tropes, and above all for ‘convenience,’ – your chair and flashlight example. ‘Oh, look, it’s exactly the thing I needed to make the scene work, quel surprise!‘ McGuffins, generally, objects or characters who exist solely (to steal Ryan George’s phrase) ‘so the movie can happen.’ Plot armor. And bad dialog – which is endemic in speculative fiction, especially in exposition dumps. ‘So, as you see, here in the 25th century, we have robots who perform etcetera.’
I have a personal irritation which many would disagree with: I don’t like overbearing descriptions. I don’t want you to describe every flower in a garden, you can just tell me it’s a somewhat chaotic English garden. I’ll figure it out from there. Get on with the story. I don’t agree with all of Elmore Leonard’s ten rules, but in my own writing I do go with his number ten: ‘Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.’
@Michael Reynolds:
Normally, I’m able to let a lot of bad or confusing crap just wash over me so that I can just enjoy the ride. Hell, I’m a die hard Star Wars fangirl. I can put up with a LOT. I watched the first two episodes and I would have turned off the second one if my partner hadn’t fallen asleep on my arm. I couldn’t figure a damn thing out and I don’t understand why (to my knowledge/understanding) a Chinese story is dominated by the most annoying westerners.
Contrast that with The Gentlemen, which objectively wasn’t all that good, but we couldn’t turn away. We were constantly staying this isn’t good, but WTF just happened and we can’t stop. As an aside, watching Kaya Scodelario as Susie Glass I was confronted with the Bisexual dilema of “Do I want to have sex with her or do I want to be her”. I answered that question with “be her” a couple of days later when I impulsively got bangs.
In the olden days of like say, 2009, my partner sent me to the library with a list of books to get her. My partner and I have what she describes as “serial killer handwriting”. I came home flustered after getting into a heated argument with the librarian because he couldn’t find “The Whores” by Tuna French. To this day, we still occasionally shout “The WHORES!” at each other.
@Beth:
My new name is John Muad’Dib
my story will be chronicled in the forthcoming epic: “Bog”
(Muad’Dib means “muddy pool jumper” in the old tongue. And Usul means “soggy”)
🙂
I’ll try to read the article and get back.
@Kathy: “The Prefect” by Alastair Reynolds. It’s part of a trilogy but I don’t know if I’ll read any more, for the reasons outlined above. His character types seemed to come from macho ’70s TV show police detectives, but when he wasn’t trying to make the main characters conform to those ideas and just let them be, they were actually interesting. But… there was just a lot of forced and simplistic action. And physics! There were some glaring errors. Like a plot point dependent on how long it would take radio transmissions to go from the equivalent of the earth to the moon and back, and he put it at milliseconds rather than seconds.
Have you read anything by him? Does it get better?
@Beth: Nowadays, I differentiate between “conservatism” and “Conservatism”, and have come to the conclusion that they really don’t have anything in common. I think of small c conservatism as the tail on a kite – it holds back movement but is essential to keeping the kite from spiraling out of control and whipping into the ground. It’s all about what weight tail works for the current winds.
Capital C Conservatism, on the other hand, is solely about the already powerful coopting government, academia and even the arts to ensure the status quo is maintained, or skewed even more towards themselves.
@Kathy:
My bad. Double posting.
I decided to put this in a separate post. It’s probably better for my mental health that the original X thread is gone.
In the X post referenced in The Bulwark piece, the putative shameless gadfly did not merely challenge whether the war is real by asking why there is no footage. The rest of it is:
I’m aware that toward the start of the invasion, MTG used Twitter to conflate US soldiers serving in Ukraine in a advisory role with boots on the ground. But it didn’t seem to get traction. I mean, is anybody advocating deploying US forces to the front lines?
There is a woman claiming, and this is a direct quote I copied and pasted, “I’ve see. More footage of WW11 than this so called war”. Maybe she is from the future? Maybe she is clairvoyant? Maybe she meant WW1, but Mr. Gadfly seemed to read it as “II” as well. But may she is really from the future and she has seen a bunch of footage from World War XI.
Anyway, response to a question about what the impact on Americans would be if the footage was played daily, Mr. Gadfly replies:
Rich for a dude who wrote and produced for a network that runs with some questionable, unverified stories. It’s not as if that’s limited to the evening performance artists, either.
I mean, he sort of says that in replies elsewhere, but he certainly didn’t say it in his original post. And naturally, he ignores the question about the second part of his tweet.
I’m guessing he deleted his tweet out of shame. Probably because someone pointed him toward footage and photos from reputable news outlets. Of course, deleting the post undercuts his credibility if he is going to imply he has strict journalistic standards. And he ain’t living up to his self-description.
But I guess we can give him minimal credit for not pivoting to the claim that all the footage is faked.
FWIW, I don’t necessarily think this guy is a grifter. More likely, he is just a mediocre dude whose self-regard is out of control.
We have a couple of commenters who see themselves as sensible center-left and are always eager to blame the Dirty Fwcking Hippies on the woke left for any lack of Dem popularity. Atrios today has a succinct comment.
He goes on to talk about the lady who lost a run for AL state House in 2020 by seven points, ran again in a special election, talked about her own abortion many years ago, and just won by 24 points.
Atrios point is, I think, well taken. There are people who love GOP talk about individual responsibility and law and order and hate talk about gun control. We can’t get them. But there is a large, low-information, mushy middle who like individual responsibility, law and order, AND gun control. Them we could get.
What Atrios didn’t say in this piece is turnout. Promising to stick it to those filthy immigrants fires people up to vote. We too wish to harden the border, but nicer, doesn’t.
@Michael Reynolds:
I have mixed feelings about this. If you read older stuff, say, before WWII, Tolkien, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott – there is just a lot of describing. Pages and pages of it. I found it tedious. And then I spent two years living in a dirt poor Ghanaian village (meaning the roads were dirt, the people were scrupulously clean) and it all clicked. Most of the children in my village had never travelled more than a dozen miles, it that. They had textbooks with simply drawn illustrations. And nothing else. No movies (except for the very rare Indian Kung Fu Film projected from the back of a truck), no TV, no pictures in magazines. When they read “sprawling English garden” there was no frame of reference whatsoever. The only thing book they were likely to be exposed to outside of school was the bible, and even with that, things were different. I was told by a western missionary that he was startled at how much people wanted to discuss the old testament book, I forget the name, which is basically, “X begat Y, who begat Z” on and on. Relationships between people were of great interest to them, while I considered such exacting detail unimportant once you got away from the nuclear family.
One of the ways TV and other media has changed the world is that everyone has exposure to orders of magnitudes more stuff than their ancestors did, and we can assume much more in common.
@drj:
Eh, it’s just the KJV repackaged. I am sure DJT has never read it considering the importance of the golden calf and his taste in decor and toilets. Oh, who am I kidding?He has never had a shred of self awareness anyway.
They aren’t even using the translation Andrew Schlafly commissioned to remove the liberal bias in the KJV.
@Michael Reynolds:
My reviewers have complained from time to time that my descriptions are basic or that my stories are long winded. Detailed descriptions aren’t seen too often in my books.
I did however once describe a man picking his nose while being interrogated by police.
@JohnSF:
I’ve been wondering where you’ve been, but kept forgetting to ask the question. But I do remember my wife’s name..
What gets me about people who position themselves against Ukraine, whether on the right or the left (they’re relatively marginalized on the left, but do exist), is their incoherence. It usually (though not always) begins with a bare acknowledgment that Putin is a brutal dictator and that the invasion was unjust. This is then followed by minutes of blather about Western provocation, Russia’s fear of NATO encroachment, conspiratorial nonsense about US and EU having orchestrated the 2014 ousting of Yanukovych, and the inevitability of Ukrainian defeat to Russia. There’s no step-by-step case being made, it’s just a vague attempt to eat away at the narrative of Ukraine as the good guys and Russia as the bad guys, by people too cowardly to come out and say Putin is awesome and was right to invade.
Internet commenters don’t have the same restraints.
I’ve long had the sense that American attitudes toward foreign affairs work like a pendulum historically, based on past successes and failures. The isolationist movement during WWII was in many ways rooted in a desire to avoid another WWI. After WWII ended, the triumph of the US over the Nazis became deeply stitched into our cultural consciousness, and it’s since been the go-to example for anyone wanting to justify US involvement in a foreign conflict. You just say the country you’re opposing is the modern-day Nazi Germany, the leader is the modern-day Hitler, and anyone with any reservations about behaving as aggressively as you want is the modern-day Neville Chamberlain. We saw this constantly during the Cold War, and later during the War on Terror.
But after the failure in Iraq (with memories of Vietnam a contributing factor), the pendulum has swung back toward isolationism. Many Americans have become cynical about moral posturing against brutal dictatorships, and pessimistic about the US’s ability to improve the situation even with the best of intentions.
Of course American involvement in Iraq vs. the Russia-Ukraine war is a totally apples-to-oranges comparison. If anything, someone who claims to be “anti-war” should be squarely on Ukraine’s side and on the side of anyone willing to provide assistance against the invading force. But for a lot of people these days, “anti-war” is just a vague slogan for resisting anything America does in the name of promoting democracy and fighting tyranny–goals they’ve been programmed to view with automatic suspicion. Once resonant phrases like “military-industrial complex” and “forever war” have turned into empty cliches that work on these people like Pavlov’s dog. And it doesn’t take much to make them vulnerable to accepting “facts” in the service of leaving Ukraine out to dry while thinking they’re the ones standing against tyranny.
@CSK:
Where is Ray Epps?
@MarkedMan: I’ve commented regularly that “conservative” has become largely useless as a description. Corey Robin did a whole book, The Reactionary Mind; Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. Well researched long story short, it’s Cleek’s Law, “Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily.” And what do liberals want today, and back to Burke? Per Robin, to extend the full rights and privileges of citizenship to whoever doesn’t currently have them. And right now it’s Democrats who are tail of the kite, asking, with Burke, why there’s a wall before tearing it down.
To this I would add gVOR’s corollary,
One might counter that MAGA is populist and anti-establishment. But this is a facade. Trump briefly mentioned cutting SS and Medicare, didn’t get any appluase, and came back to saying he’d protect them. But we all know Trump doesn’t believe a word he says. Who’s paying for all this populism? Chuckles Koch and people like him. The inmates may yet seize control of the asylum, but that isn’t the plan of the wealthy keepers.
@Paul L.: currently suing the shit out of Fox News for feeding you smooth brains falsehoods. Any other questions, trash bag?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/former-trump-supporter-sues-fox-news-over-jan-6-conspiracy-theory
@MarkedMan:
I’d never heard of the guy until you mentioned him. I do appreciate the warning.
I had a big issue with Turtledove’s AH novels. There’s one series that’s WWI in North America, United States vs Confederate States, and also US vs UK and Canada. That one was pretty good. Next came American Empire, which is what happens in the decades after WWI. Not bad, but extremely repetitive.
The last one was WWII, again USA vs CSA. It was almost a step by step retelling of WWII, transplanted to North America. this includes a siege of a major city (maybe Pittsburgh? It’s been a while), a holocaust (of the black population), V-2 rockets… And way too many nukes used near the end.
The other thing is Turtledove is extremely repetitive.
@drj:
I’m not sure why Trump didn’t replace Jesus’s name with his own.
@Paul L.:
If you’re replying to my comment, I have no idea what you’re talking about.
@Kathy:
I really liked that series, but man, sooooo repetitive. Oh, this character we’ve been following for 5 novels is described as X oh, big shock since every single time the character comes up we’re told X. I think by the end it was like a copy past job.
@drj:
Yes, like that.
@Michael Reynolds:
Hell, yes. Descriptions often get in the way of the story. I suppose the word count always needs padding, but, seriously, don’t take three pages describing a setting that won’t ever be seen again in the story.
@Kathy:
There’s Guns of the South, in which, IIRC, Robert E. Lee gets help from 20th century South Africans.
I just read Marginal Revolution on the bridge disaster. I’d like to take the occasion to compliment the OTB commentariat. There was a lot of comment in yesterday’s Forum on the bridge, all of it pretty reasonable. MR’s comment thread is a steady stream of it’s all the {captain’s, navigator’s, pilot’s} fault, or the bridge engineers’, and the terrorists are going to start doing this all over the country. You guys are a pleasure to work with.
@CSK:
@Thomm:
Interested to see the falsehoods. That Epps didn’t work for the Feds?
The DOJ disclaimer
Nothing about being a asset or informant.
@Kathy: I dug into his Wikipedia page and learned that The Prefect series takes place in the same universe as Revelation Space series but before that one. That probably explains all the backstory that I seemed to be missing. I’m torn. He had written a half dozen novels before the one I read, so he should have gotten his chops already if he was ever going to get them. On the other hand, the characters were interesting at least sometimes and the ideas were cool. And I realized I had read another, somewhat newer book by him, “Blue Remembered Earth”. I remember liking that one better than this one.
@Beth:
Yeah, the series where inept aliens interrupt WWII is as repetitive and derivative. I’m pretty much done with him.
About the only of his works I’d recommend is Agent of Byzantium. It’s a series of short stories centered on Basil Argyros, a Byzantine operative in a timeline where Islam never existed.
@CSK:
That one was good, if you can get past the whitewashing of Lee, one of the worst real people in actual American history.
@MarkedMan:
Many writers get hackish after a few published works.
I’d go with the Wil Wheaton Principle: it’s only a movie/book/TV show. Whether it’s the greatest or the worst ever, your life will go on as it did before.
@Sleeping Dog:
Been unusually busy at work and at home.
A pattern that looks likely to continue, so less time to futz about on the interwebs.
Nice to be missed, I must say.
@MarkedMan:
When I was a lector at my neighborhood church I had an opportunity to read one of those X begat Y who begat Q who begat R who begat S who begat T…and so on and so forth.
The priest chose the reading as he thought it would be fun to read the long version of the reading for both the church goers and folks like myself who would do the readings during the mass. My reading went on for a very long time and it was awesome, I almost smiled inappropriately like a huge fool at the end of the reading as it is not everyday that you get to read something like that.
@Kathy:
If a book does well, there’s a strong incentive is to do it again, and again, until you’re finally told to fuck off. When we were just starting Animorphs we pushed back against anything repetitive until a wise editor pointed out that a degree of comfort is expected in a series, people expect certain elements. Very much like a sitcom in that way – familiar characters who are not allowed to evolve much, some repeated tropes – Kramer bursting through Jerry’s door. The trick is to make it work within those restrictions. Restrictions are not always or even usually bad. Bugs Bunny did a lot in ~seven minutes.
A lot of writers stick to one thing, one genre, and I’ve not been willing to do that, which frankly costs me in sales. But I’d lose my mind if I couldn’t dabble, so I’ve done sci fi, fantasy, adventure/comedy, alt history, horror, mystery, etc, albeit usually though not always in the middle grade to YA demo. I’m working on two books at the moment, one a very dark adult comedy, the other a memoir/writing book. There are 8 or 10 ideas that have been floating around that I may or may not get to.
I’m resisting the impulse to write something ‘meaningful’ before I die. If I want to preach, I come here. Otherwise my remit is to entertain. I set as my goal keeping kids up reading all night so they go to school exhausted and flunk out.
@MarkedMan:
Battery life on our small personal devices will always be a problem.
I’m sure it was written terribly, and was painfully convenient for the plot, but if the character was using the flashlight on their smart phone, or a pocket-sized 30,000 lumen monstrosity (there’s a whole world of ridiculously overpowered flashlights) then battery life seems like a reasonable concern, even in the future where there are floor chairs.
But, you should stop reading this book. Just put it down. Don’t worry about how it ends, it ends now as the world they live in vanishes suddenly.
It’s not a defeat to not finish a book, it’s a defeat to let an author make you finish a bad book.
@gVOR10:
If you ask me, she didn’t do that because of ideology or by calibrating something on some left-to-right scale. She won it with integrity and forthrightness. And also on fears that the religious right will soon outlaw in vitro in Alabama, which they clearly want to do.
I personally don’t mind forthrightness on the left or the right. What I don’t like out of the left is the scolding. Some love to take a “one-up” position and play a guilt trip. I don’t think that bears fruit in the long term.
@gVOR10:
Oh, boy. I read “MR” as our guy. I was thinking, “damn”. How did I miss all this? I thought it was weird. He’s got strong opinions, but it’s not like him to blame everyone and worry about terrorism. But Michael has surprised me a time or two.
And if MR is saying that here, and you appreciate it, what the hell is going on at Cowen’s blog that would warrant a post from you the nex–whoa, whoa.
Ohhhh, Marginal Revolution. I see.
Sorry I even entertained it for eight seconds, Michael.
@Michael Reynolds:
There’s milking series past a decent stopping point, and there’s writing bad or mediocre novels because someone will publish them (not referring to you).
@Kurtz: I had spelled out Marginal Revolution earlier. The possible confusion with Reynolds didn’t occur to me, but apologies for any harm, your spit-take or anyone else’s. Here I was, trying to compliment all and sundry. No good deed ….
@Paul L.:
It’s so cute when conservatives learn new words and phrases.
A couple days ago there was some conversation about campus polarization and activism which Dr. T indicated he’s not seeing. Today Robert Farley at LGM references an Atlantic article about Israel/Gaza at Stanford and notes:
I subscribed to Atlantic for a year or two, mostly because it didn’t look like New Yorker would survive COVID. I found little of interest and dropped Atlantic, so I haven’t read the article in question. Farley attributes the difference between the articles description of the situation at Stanford and what he sees at UK as an elite v next tier thing. I can’t help but wonder of it isn’t that protest at Stanford and the Ivies is being badly overblown by the supposedly liberal MSM. I can’t help but be suspicious that Righties are having way too much fun taking the opportunity to pretend anti-semitism isn’t mostly a RW thing. I’d appreciate comment from anyone with an informed opinion.
@anjin-san:
Matt B. accused me of using Gish gallop.
@CSK: That’s OK, nobody else does either. If you did have an idea, I’d be worried about you.
Initials
While you’re gnipping, he’s gnopping!
Daniel Kahneman has died.
This man has had an enormous impact on me — as a person and as a scholar. He was deeply curious, open, and collaborative. He will be missed.
@Steven L. Taylor: You have too much time on your hands. 😉
@Paul L.:
It must be terrible living with persecution as you do…
When Trump is finally out of the picture, there are some words and phrases I never again want to hear or read:
Rally
Witch hunt
Fake news
Election interference
Bigly
Like you wouldn’t believe
Yuge
Believe me
Loser
From Josh Marshall (no subscription necessary) I agree 100% with this:
@CSK: Here are some words and phrases that I would like to hear more of:
Porcupine proletariat
Knob gobbler
Beseech
Mule’s honeymoon (as a unit of time)
Doggerel
Gibbers and squeaks
Unbeknownst
I’m wondering if Marjorie Taylor Greene and her note to Speaker Johnson may mark the end of the GOP’s Gingrich revolution, i.e. changing from having “the politics of personal destruction” as just one club in the bag, brought out for special situations, to having it be the only club in the bag, utilized on every swing? (The other Gingrich revolution, the one about policy or philosophy or some such? That was never real. He outsourced all that to corporations and billionaires and went happily on his way.)
I’m betting that if Johnson has to rely on the Dems to survive just this once, it will begin to spread. Remember that as recently as the first Obama term, marshalling members from across the aisle on tough votes was the norm. The fact that we view it as an impossibility now is the aberration.
@Gustopher: I’d like to see some of my favorite words used more – my favorites, just because they exist. A couple of examples:
– glaire – meaning a viscid substance resembling an egg white. I fell in love with this incredibly narrow word when I had to look it up after reading about someone’s sick horror upon waking up in bed and reaching for something on the bedside table only to find his hand in a puddle of glaire.
– defenestration – to murder someone by pushing them out a window. I have to weirdly admire the Medici era Italians, if only because they became incredibly precise about how they murder people. I’ve heard they have distinct words for a dozen or more ways to poison someone.
@Gustopher:
Alas, the meanings of “porcupine proletariat” and “mule’s honeymoon” are
unbeknownst to me. I beseech you to define them.
@MarkedMan:
Putin’s favored method of eliminating opponents appears to be defenestration.
@Kylopod:
Because Russia is so scared of the NATO encroachment they themselves greenlighted, that Putin’s druthers are to annex Ukraine, which would…immediately increase Russia’s NATO borders by thousands of miles. Derp.
It irritates me to no end that people who fancy themselves intelligent do not see how irrational Putin’s excuses are.
Putin attacked Ukraine for the same reason Russian leaders spent the previous 500 years attacking its neighbors, long before NATO or the US existed: it’s an imperalistic, militaristic, warmongering culture that wants to swallow its neighbors.
That’s it. That’s the tweet. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
@DK: Actually, and I may have forgotten something, it strikes me that Putin hasn’t talked much about NATO expansion. He seems to have been more worried about the seductive appeal of the EU. The EU insists on rule of law, which is incompatible with President for Life. The NATO talk seems to come mostly from western apologists.
IIRC a big part of George Kennan and the “Long Telegram” at the start of the cold war revolved around whether Russia was being aggressive because they were commies or because they were Russian. Seems to me events have settled that.
@DK:
Even Tucker said Putin’s “denazification” goal was stupid. But that’s only because one of Tucker’s long-time claims is that Nazis don’t exist.
@gVOR10:
He doesn’t talk much about it now, because judged by that metric the war has been a miserable failure.
@Michael Reynolds:
For some strange reason I have recently become a fan of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and there’s an awesome example of providing a complete and compelling description of a person in a single paragraph which a lessor writer could easily find themselves spending several pages on. It was the description of an old Russian army officer in the mess hall by Ivan Denisovich, who captured the man’s very soul with how the man placed his bowl of gruel and piece of bread on the table and how he handled his spoon. From just that the reader knows this man to a T. Re-read it three times, I did, just for fun. Not a word wasted.
Brevity is an art.
How about that? New NFL kick off rules, meant to make the play more than a formality, will eliminate onside kicks.
The piece doesn’t say what the status of the ball will be after kick off in the new rules. Under the old rules, the ball was free after it traveled ten yards, meaning either team could take possession of it (and I assume either team can advance it).
This mattered the most in onside kicks, naturally, but now and then, very rarely, you saw a kicking team take the ball if they got to it before the receiving team could touch it.
One thing, radical changes to the rules give one a reason to watch preseason games.
Joe Lieberman has passed away at 82, complications from a fall.
@MarkedMan and CSK:
“Defenestration” more generally refers to leaving out of window and can refer to someone suddenly leaving a gathering or someone be kicked out of a gathering or a company or (as you mention) being thrown out of a window to their death.
Relatedly, “fenestration” means having windows just as “fenster” is the German word for window. I once had a realtor announce we had good fenestration in our house. If I didn’t speak some German, I might have taken offense.
@Joe:
There’s also an obsolete English word fenester meaning window.
Seen this?
The Defenestration of Prague
@Jen: I guess he has taken himself out of consideration for the No Labels presidential nomination.
@MarkedMan:
One of my favorite words is “denouement”. Mostly because I’ve known my whole life that I can’t pronounce it correctly. I’ve always chalked it up to a Southside thing. My grandpa was a master of malapropism. My daughter and myself are pretty close seconds, if I’m being honest. The reality is that in all likelihood, the three of us have some form of expressive dyslexia.
Anyway, the world fell in on me a couple months ago when my partner said it correctly and I mistakenly said, “oh, that’s how you say it.” She braced herself and asked how I said it and I proudly let rip, “De-now-Ment!”
I got to watch in real time as my beloved had a stroke. Quote the Tiger King, “I’m never gonna… recover from this.”
@Gustopher:
I love you.
@MarkedMan:
I quite liked The prefect, though not as much as some other of Reynolds’ stuff.
IIRC (some ten years since i read it) part of the premise was that Prefects were supposed avoid causing deaths by their actions if at all possible. Hence their not being allowed to carry guns, only “stun sticks” or something like that.
And the workability of technology varied due to constant hacker/nanophage attack.
Though it has to be said, if you look at some of the social dynamics of Reynolds’ stories and think them through, they are often a bit iffy.
Not sure about that. Tolkein seems to me, in LOTR, quite restrained on description a lot of the time, at least compared to say Dickens or Scott, unless needed for atmosphere.
IMO you need a certain amount just because it’s not an immediately familiar environment.
You can’t catch a bus from Hobbiton to Rivendell.
🙂
@CSK:
May I still use “witch hunt” to refer to my dating strategy? =3
@Michael Reynolds:
I begin to wonder, is there a Hollywood conspiracy to f@ck up every fantasy/sf series whose originals I like?
And WHY?
The originals are there: just get them to screen with minimal screwing about with context and character, and it’s likely to work.
@Beth:
It wasn’t until college that I found out it wasn’t pronounced “duh-NYOO-mint.” I had never heard it said aloud by anyone up to that point.
@Kylopod: “There’s also an obsolete English word fenester meaning window.”
Which is the same as the French “fenetre,” which has a circumflex over the second “e,” which generally marks where an “s” used to be…
@Stormy Dragon:
Of course you may.
@JohnSF: “And WHY?”
Haven’t seen The Witcher or some of the others, but one problem adapting The Wheel of Time is that it’s fourteen books, each of which is roughly as long as The Lord of the Rings…
@Beth:
@Kylopod:
I spent an embarrassingly long time in the Ohsies calling quinoa “kwi-no-uh” because I’d only seen the word on signs and never said out loud.
@Gustopher: I *almost* went there, but decided not to. I figured someone would. 😉
@JohnSF:
“I respect the original, but it needs to be updated for today’s audiences*, and I will of course add my own spin.”**
*Without bothering to do any heavy lifting on character or backstory, just switch all the male characters to female and also make them weak and stupid. Also every character, no matter what epoch they’re from, will talk like a Brown University liberal arts grad.
**”My own spin,” being the brilliant insights of a 30 year-old writer whose career involved writing episodes of a show that lasted one season. Because that’s who can improve on Tolkien or Bardugo or GRRM, someone who has literally never created a character or a done any world building.
Well, there’s a lot of WoT you could red-pencil, tbf.
So, cut it down to, what, some 48 hour long episodes max?
That’s, say, a 4 year story arc in Dr Who?
It’s been done.
Editing out what you must is fair enough; what niggles me is buggering about with basic plotlines and characters when there is zero need, from story telling in time available grounds, to do so.
Just sheer arrogance on the part of the script/direction folks: “my version is so much BETTER than that boring author”
For starters, Denethor should sue.
I mean, if you really want to tell a completely different narrative, with different characters, in a different world, stop being a lazy bastard and go write something yourself, instead of trying to hollow out the original and nail its name onto a pastiche.
@Michael Reynolds:
Asimov’s original Foundation stories didn’t end. They went on to around 1/3 of the predicted 1,000 year interregnum between the 1st and 2nd Empires. these were written as separate but sequential stories.
By the 80s, when editorial and reader pressure grew unbearable, he went and changed things with Foundation’s Edge*, then unified the series with the Robot Novels in Foundation and Earth. Given the TV show hasn’t quite been following Asimov’s plot, such as it is, not to mention keeping characters around for centuries, I except something different.
@Beth:
What I read is the show runners wanted a more Western oriented cast and story(so woke!). Not having read the original books, I don’t much care. FWIW, the books’ author gave them the go ahead.
*I never liked that title. The original one, Foundations at Bay, was much better.
All these smartalecks not knowing how to pronounce denouement is sending me.
That said, I’m not gonna announce how old I was when I learned how to pronounce Les Misérables. Big yikes.
@Michael Reynolds:
The thing about Rings of Power, which I shall only ever watch under threat of immediate violence, is that they plainly missed out so many good plot lines JRRT had already sketched out, and were open to a bit of creative infilling.
Like:
Why does Galadriel really tell the Valar to take their amnesty and shove it?
The nature of elven immortality and the “why” of the Rings.
etc etc
Above all, they screw up Ar Pharazon, the only man evil-minded, determined, and powerful enough to make Sauron and all his Nazgul soil their robes.
@gVOR10:
Not your fault. I was scanning–so my fault No harm done. Hope at least one or two got a chuckle out of it. I sure did. He uses his pic for his avatar. So I imagined just the lips moving, blaming everyone for the bridge. Including Poseidon.
@JohnSF:
“The sea is always right!” All together, now.
@Kathy: Unless the rules changed while I wasn’t looking, the ball is live on the kickoff. A player signaling a fair catch is doing so to avoid being tackled in return for not advancing the ball. Eventually, that rule evolved into signaling the fair catch without needing to catch the ball. There may have been further evolutions that I’ve not noticed in the past 30 years during which I almost never watched football.
@Kylopod: Probably from the Norman Conquest time given that window in French is fenetre with an accent circumflex over the bolded “e” signaling an elided “s” just before the “t.”
ETA: And I should have read further before I overly verbosely said what wr had already noted.
Nose first landing at Madeira.
I never got used to the rule change wherein the would-be returner would let the ball land in the end zone, take a knee, and trot to the sideline with the ball sitting untouched in the end zone. I had to remind myself that it’s not a live ball.
However a red flag concerning the new rules is that they “were pioneered by the XFL.” Isn’t that the league that was based in part on giving players more latitude for physical play without calling penalties? I assumed that would result in less offense and a more boring game, which is one reason I never watched it (the other is that the NFL season had more than enough annual drama for me).
@just nutha: I like the way you said it better!
All this discussion of long-winded descriptions reminds me of one of my favorite novels – Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy.
It is so full of descriptions that they consume almost the entire book – but somehow it works because if you don’t understand every detail of the appearance of The Reddleman, then you don’t understand Diggory Venn’s motivations and actions. Oh, and what a great name!
The other thing Hardy does in this book is he makes the Heath itself a character in the novel. The book opens with a description of the fires all around the heath because it’s Guy Fawkes day and the fires have changed the look of the heath that day. Again, you have to understand the shadowy, green, wet nature of the heath to understand what life is like there.
Anyway, great novel that counters the idea that excessive descriptions ruin a book – not always!