Aszilvasy

Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) told reporters Thursday that for those who live in the west, the ideas in the Green New Deal “are tantamount to genocide,” according to a Friday Washington Post report.

“That may be an overstatement, but not by a whole lot,” he added.

Even when pushed afterward, Bishop stood by the word choice, which refers to the slaughter of a large group of people, usually of one ethnicity of nationality.

“I’m an ethnic,” Bishop, who is white, said. “I’m a westerner. If you actually implement everything they want to — killing would be positive if you implement everything the Green New Deal actually wants to.”

He blamed the proposed legislation on lawmakers who “judge distance not in miles but in subway stops,” an apparent reference to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). “The genesis of this concept is really coming from easterners who live in an urban setting and have no view of what it’s like in the rest of America.”

He later softened the comments in a statement to the Salt Lake Tribune.

“My comments were obviously not meant literally, and should not detract from the fact that the so-called Green New Deal is born of attitudes that show no respect for the lives and livelihoods of the American people,” he wrote.

Beto O’Rourke’s campaign is reporting that the former congressman raised $6.1 million in the first 24 hours after announcing his bid, surpassing the haul brought in by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the same window, who previously held the financial record.

Per CNN, the campaign said that the contributions came from every state and territory.

Other known notable early fundraisers include Sanders of course, with his $5.9 million in the first 24 hours, and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) with $1.5 million in her first day.

Beto out-raises other candidates in the first 24 hours after his announcement with $6.1M pic.twitter.com/OEvLQ94aGV

— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) March 18, 2019

Some Hollywood folks invited columnist Andrew Sullivan to an “inclusion” event. But when he started talking about the need to include the points of view of their own cultural Others … well, this is what happened:

During a Monday morning panel probing how Hollywood screenwriters and showrunners portray “the other side,” Sullivan criticized “Hollywood” for regularly painting non-coastal elites in unflattering terms, which has only exacerbated America’s cultural divide.

“These people who are already insecure about losing their job switch on the TV, look at the newspaper and hear that they are being described as bigots, racists,” said Sullivan, who was speaking to a packed audience of industry professionals, including some of the town’s biggest names, at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. “And they resent it, and the one thing I would urge you people who do this type of content is try and complete the idea of ‘the other’ being in the room because they can hear what you are saying.”

Moments later, the author and New York magazine columnist doubled down on his idea, saying: “Don’t tell them everything is good. That you deserve it and that you are all basically slaveholders under their skin blah, blah, blah, which is what Hollywood is saying to them every second of the day.” Those comments, which were met with audible gasps, set the stage for an immensely tense 20-minute panel which ended in Sullivan being shouted at by an audience member, prompting the moderator to step in and end the panel.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter during the daylong event’s lunch break, Sullivan, who is no stranger to controversy, was not surprised. “I said what I wanted to say,” he said. “When you’re a struggling, white working-class person in say, Kentucky, and a Yale student says, ‘You have white privilege,’ what do you think happens? [Donald] Trump gets elected — that’s what happens. And they don’t seem to understand any of the lessons from the last time and I don’t want [Trump] to be re-elected, but I don’t think the left is helping and I don’t think Hollywood is helping.”

Read the whole thing.

When they say inclusion, darling, they mean excluding those not like themselves. This is how you demonstrate how important it is to include those not like yourself. Please try to keep up.

Anyway, three cheers for Andrew Sullivan!

On the most recent episode of Last Week Tonight, an HBO show that often sounds as if The Daily Show and The Rachel Maddow Show had combined their writers’ rooms, John Oliver dedicated his monologue to public shaming.

After a brief survey of excesses culled from local television-news reports, the host said, “You may be expecting me to say that all public shaming is bad, but I don’t actually think that.” In his estimation, “misdirected internet pile-ons can completely destroy people’s lives.” But if public shaming is “well directed,” then “a lot of good can come out of it. If someone is caught doing something racist or a powerful person is behaving badly, it can increase accountability.”

The balance of the segment did not substantiate his thesis.

As an example of the phenomenon’s ostensible upside, he alighted on Tucker Carlson, shamed most recently for resurfaced remarks that he made while talking to a shock jock. “He publicly called Iraqis ‘semiliterate, primitive monkeys,’ compared women to dogs, and basically said that Warren Jeffs, who is serving a life sentence for the sexual assault of his underage brides, wasn’t that bad,” Oliver observed. “Tucker refused to apologize, and all week long there have been trending hashtags like #BoycottTuckerCarlson.”

The case is “a good example of an internet pile-on being merited,” Oliver continued, setting forth these standards: “He’s a public figure, he made his comments publicly, they are appalling, and he’s standing by them.” Those are relevant, defensible metrics. (My own assessments of Carlson are here, here, here, and here.)

But it does not follow that public shaming achieves “a lot of good” or “accountability.”

In The Stranger, Katie Herzog argued that Carlson’s public shaming “may have made the public shamers feel good,” but that it “accomplished precisely nothing.” He did not apologize. He’s still on the air. His ratings aren’t lower.

What was accomplished?

It’s possible that the shaming’s overall societal effects were negative. Offensive remarks that would’ve been lost to memory were resurfaced in a way that perhaps upset some Iraqis, women, or victims of statutory rape, among others. The fact that Carlson declined to apologize while suffering no consequences perhaps undermined anti-bigotry taboos and surely did not strengthen them.

Oliver next turned to the parents caught bribing their kids’ way into college. “I’ve got no problem making fun of the parents doing that or the guy who ran that service,” he said. I don’t have a problem with such jokes either—though some of the parents weren’t public figures and it isn’t clear if they’re standing by their actions, so the aforementioned standards weren’t all met.

“Where it gets more complicated is with the kids,” the host continued. “How much is it fair to make fun of them? Well, I would argue one of them, Olivia Jade, is a public figure. She has nearly one and a half million followers on Instagram and has worked with all these companies. She has actively made money off her brand as a fun, relatable college student.”

He proceeded to show a video in which Jade talks about her lack of interest in attending classes. “Even before what we learned this week, that was a little tone-deaf,” he said. “Though not quite as tone-deaf as this sponsored post that she made for Amazon, in which she’s decorated her dorm room at USC with the letters OJ. And if you don’t see the connection between the letters OJ and USC,” he concluded, “maybe it should cost half a million dollars to get you in there.”

OJ are her initials, and O. J. Simpson attended USC.

It isn’t clear that Jade knew about her parents’ objectionable actions or that she would stand by them. Oliver nonetheless thinks she’s a justifiable target, because she’s a “public figure,” based on Instagram followers, and because she’s “tone-deaf,” having put her initials in a USC dorm room without recognizing a second meaning to those letters, connected to an event that occurred years prior to her birth.

I’m not taking a position on whether Oliver’s jokes were out of bounds, only observing that he didn’t actually apply a consistent “shame-worthy” test. Calling a teenager dumb isn’t doing any good or adding any accountability to the world.

“Now, I’m comfortable making those jokes. Am I comfortable with the whole internet piling on her? Honestly, that kind of depends on how and for how long,” Oliver said. “If it’s death threats and vile comments, then of course not.”

But aren’t vile online comments, at the very least, inevitable when an HBO host marshals his writers’ room to heap scorn and contempt on a teenager for laughs?

“If it defines her forever, that seems unfair,” he said. “The window for making fun of her is probably closing.” But isn’t being mocked by a major television show a determinant of how long a scandal defines a person?

In any event, Oliver snuck in another shaming standard: a window for mockery that closes relatively quickly.

“That is the difficult thing here,” he continued. “When joining in a pile-on, there’s a lot to take into account. When millions of people all feel the need to weigh in and do it potentially for years, the punishment can be vastly disproportionate to the offense. And perhaps the best example of this is Monica Lewinsky.”

The host admitted that he participated in Lewinsky jokes that he now regrets. Then he resurfaced a series of old Jay Leno jokes about the sex scandal.

“Those jokes have not dated well in any sense of the word,” Oliver said. “And they’re pretty rough, especially coming from a guy who just this week complained about late-night TV, saying he’d ‘like to see a bit of civility come back.’”

At that point, the segment took a turn.

In the middle of a monologue acknowledging that he had engaged in unjustified shaming in the past and arguing that we all ought to do better now, Oliver proceeded to shame Jay Leno for hypocrisy.

“You know, like that time he did a bit with a fake book about Lewinsky titled The Slut in the Hat,” Oliver said, suddenly righteously indignant. “And if that’s what he means by civility, may I offer my new book, Oh the Places You Can Go Fuck Yourself, Jay Leno?! Look! Look how civil I’m being! Look how civil this is.”

One could argue that Oliver was holding Leno “accountable” for jokes he told in the 1990s that now seem cruel and unfunny. But Oliver could’ve criticized the old jokes while still treating Leno as he treats himself: as an imperfect but not malign comic who told jokes that are regrettable in hindsight.

Surely Leno ranks low on any list of evil forces in American society. He doesn’t warrant a “Go fuck yourself,” delivered here for the supposed hypocrisy of making uncivil jokes on a subject and then, a quarter century later, in a polarized moment, yearning for more civility.

And whether one feels love, disdain, or indifference toward The Tonight Show under Leno, it was arguably more civil on average than Last Week Tonight.

Indeed, Oliver regularly goes the “Go fuck yourself” route, and it isn’t because profane shaming does “a lot of good” for society—it’s because it’s popular. The conflict-hungry internet ate up the segment; it circulated with a telling headline that is often attached to viral Oliver clips: “John Oliver Destroys Jay Leno’s ‘Civility’ Plea With Clips of His Disgusting Monica Lewinsky Jokes.” Last Week Tonight depends on a formula that includes a villain, a punching bag, someone to “destroy,” so that audience members can feel that they’re part of a morally and cognitively superior in-group, perennially exasperated by malign idiots in the out-group. (The formula’s genius: Virtue-signal charmingly with mistake theory, then go viral with conflict theory.)

The show excels when a subject warrants anomalous opprobrium. But the show sometimes tries to shoehorn dubious material into the template of righteous, indignant, maximalist contempt.

Giving Leno the indignant treatment is no unforgivable sin. Comedians have thick skin, and maybe they’re owed some of what they dish out. But Last Week Tonight does an awful lot of segments that begin as a nuanced look at a complex matter, only to devolve into finger-pointing. The show indulges the fantasy that what ails us would be fixed … if only we could take that malign, hypocritical idiot and “destroy” him.

The same self-serving fantasy causes millions to dramatically overestimate the amount of good that public shaming can do.

David French defends one of the great crimes of the 21st century:

Today is the 16th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and Twitter is alive with condemnations of the conflict — countered by precious few defenses. Yet I believed the Iraq War was just and proper in 2003, and I still believe that today.

There is good reason that the Iraq war has “precious few defenders.” The Iraq war was a great crime and a massive blunder. Not only was it illegal under international law, but it was undeniably unjust according to any fair reading of just war theory. Our government did not have just cause to invade Iraq and overthrow its government. Iraq’s Preventive war can never be justified, because it can never be just to strike first against another country because you fear what their government might one day do to you. That is simply aggression committed out of irrational fear. To say that you still think 16 years later that invading Iraq is “just and proper” is to admit that you don’t know what those words mean.

French talks a lot about what he believes about the Iraq war, but he doesn’t say much that is true about the war. He repeatedly calls it a just cause, but he doesn’t back that up with anything. French’s fervent belief in the rightness of the cause is striking and more than a little disturbing, but it doesn’t make the war any less wrong and appalling.

The arguments that supporters of the Iraq war use to defend it are always risible. That was true in 2002-03, and it is still true today. In addition to reciting extremely weak Bush administration rationalizations for attacking Iraq verbatim, he asserts that “his WMD program wasn’t nearly as extensive as we thought, but it is fiction to believe his weapons were entirely gone.” It is pitiful how dead-ender supporters of the war cling to what I assume are the reports of some residual stocks of old mustard gas as if they have anything to do with the fraudulent and dishonest claims of active weapons programs that the Bush administration used to sell the war. The Bush administration didn’t base its case for war on some leftover chemical weapons from the 1980s. They repeatedly and knowingly asserted falsehoods about supposedly growing unconventional threats from Iraq when there was no evidence to support any of this.

French goes on to say:

But I truly believe the choice our nation faced was to fight Saddam then, on our terms, or later, when he had recovered more of his nation’s strength and lethality.

I don’t know what else to call this other than delusional. Iraq didn’t pose a threat to the United States in 2003, and it wasn’t ever likely to pose one later on. The U.S. didn’t have to fight Iraq when it did, and it wouldn’t have had to fight later. What French “truly believes” is neither here nor there. His beliefs are based on shoddy ideological assumptions that were discredited more than 15 years ago. The Bush administration chose to start a war against a state that could never have done anything to harm us. It was obvious to many of us that it was profoundly wrong when it happened, and now there is no doubt that it was a terrible crime that caused enormous suffering to millions of Iraqis and continues to have deleterious effects on Iraq and its region even now. The idea that a weak dictatorship on the other side of the world threatened the U.S. enough to warrant waging preventive war for regime change would have been a bad joke if that idea had not led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, the displacement of millions, and the destabilization of the region that is still with us today. It is telling and not surprising that French has virtually nothing to say about the costs of the war borne by the people of Iraq, and even when he does mention them in passing it is only to deny our responsibility for them.

It is bad enough that people fell for the administration’s lies in 2003, but to continue defending the debacle after everything that has happened is inexcusable.

Sometimes there’s a reason everyone makes the boring choice.

As Joe Biden gears up for a likely presidential run, CNN reports that he is considering “the early selection of a running mate, which one aide said would help keep the focus of the primary fight on the ultimate goal of unseating Trump.”

That makes some sense as a campaign gimmick, but on the merits, it makes very little sense.

The selection of a vice president is one of the most substantively important decisions a president makes. You want to draw from the broadest possible talent pool, and making the selection early is antithetical to that on a whole number of levels — most importantly because a lot of key talent won’t necessarily be willing to embrace your cause so early. (Including the rest of the field running for the nomination.)

Locking yourself into the relatively narrow category of “politicians who are willing to make an early Joe Biden endorsement” ends up excluding a huge number of people, could prove tactically disadvantageous during a general election, and would be a blown opportunity to improve governance if Biden won.

Joe Biden’s plan would have made his vice presidency impossible

One good way for Joe Biden to think about this would be to consider how it was that he came to be vice president.

Biden probably thinks his selection was a pretty shrewd decision on Barack Obama’s part. It brought to the table a contrasting campaign style that was better-calculated than Obama’s personal story to appeal to a crucial bloc of white working-class Northerners. But it also offered assurances to the party’s veteran congressional barons that Obama’s operation was legit. Last, Biden was a better-known figure than Obama to the international community — providing a reassuring signal to allies around the world.

The Biden pick was so strong, in fact, that both Paul Ryan’s selection in 2012 and Mike Pence’s in 2016 followed the same basic template — add a Midwesterner with strong ties to the congressional party for both electioneering and governance purposes.

And in an important sense, adding Biden to the ticket earlier could have helped Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary for many of the same reasons that he was a good general election pick. But Obama couldn’t have picked Biden early because Biden was running for president too. And even once Biden dropped out, he wasn’t prepared to immediately back Obama over Hillary Clinton for the nomination. And, indeed, the fact that Biden wasn’t squarely in Obama’s corner from day one was part of what made him a good pick, helping to expand his coalition beyond what it could have been at an earlier time.

Many of Biden’s best options are off the table for now

There are times when this kind of consideration might not be decisive.

Clinton had such overwhelming party support in 2016 that she could have chosen from essentially the entire field of people she was willing to consider early in the process.

But the supersize 2020 primary field is essentially the opposite of that. Someone like Beto O’Rourke, whose charisma and campaign skills are a key rationale for his candidacy, would be a very live possibility as a Biden VP choice were Biden to secure the nomination. So would Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who are currently running for the nomination themselves. Biden also might want to reconsider Clinton’s approach to the Bernie wing of the party and consider a unity pick like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who’s one of Sanders’s national campaign co-chairs. Other potentially appealing options like Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) likely won’t want to endorse anyone at all.

Generally, part of what presidents often try to accomplish with a VP selection is to get someone who isn’t a natural supporter of theirs in order to broaden the coalition — something that will be extremely hard for anyone to pull off in the current crowded primary field.

Taking the standard tack of deferring any running mate selection until Biden hypothetically wrapped up the nomination would, of course, be boring. And the desire to make a big splash is understandable especially because, as best we can tell, Biden’s policy agenda is not especially flashy. That said, sometimes standard boring conduct becomes standard and boring because it is the correct way to proceed.

Anatoly Vorobei has an amusing post:

Великий и могучий английский язык [The great and mighty English language]:

“You are shit” – оскорбление [an insult]
“You ain’t shit” – тоже оскорбление [also an insult]
но [BUT] “You are not shit” – подбадривание [reassurance/encouragement]
“You are not the shit” – опять оскорбление [an insult again]
“You are the shit” – похвала [praise]
“You don’t know shit” и “You know shit” означают одно и то же, и это оскорбление
но [BUT] “You KNOW shit” с акцентом на втором слове – опять похвала [“You don’t know shit” and “You know shit” mean the same thing, and it’s an insult… BUT “You KNOW shit” with stress on the second syllable is praise again]

As commenters there point out, a couple of these are not as commonly used, but “You are shit” is perfectly well formed and unquestionably an insult, and I can certainly imagine it being said.

I’m reading Toby Wilkinson’s excellent The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, and I was struck by this paragraph on the origin of Egyptian writing:

Among the great inventions of human history, writing has a special place. Its transformative power—in the transmission of knowledge, the exercise of power, and the recording of history itself—cannot be overstated. Today, it is virtually impossible to imagine a world without written communication. For ancient Egypt, it must have been a revelation. We are unlikely ever to know exactly how, when, and where hieroglyphics were first developed, but the evidence increasingly points toward a deliberate act of invention. The earliest Egyptian writing discovered to date is on bone labels from a predynastic tomb at Abdju, the burial of a ruler who lived around 150 years before Narmer. These short inscriptions already used fully formed signs, and the writing system itself showed the complexity that would characterize hieroglyphics for the next three and a half thousand years. Archaeologists dispute whether Egypt or Mesopotamia should take the credit for inventing the very idea of writing, but Mesopotamia, especially the southern city of Uruk (modern Warka), seems to have the better claim. It is likely that the idea of writing came to Egypt along with a raft of other Mesopotamian influences in the centuries before unification—the concept, but not the writing system itself. Hieroglyphics are so perfectly suited to the ancient Egyptian language, and the individual signs so obviously reflected the Egyptians’ particular environment, that they must represent an indigenous development. We may imagine an inspired genius at the court of one of Egypt’s predynastic rulers pondering the strange signs on imported objects from Mesopotamia—pondering them and their evident use as encoders of information, and devising a corresponding system for the Egyptian language. This may seem far-fetched, but the invention of the Korean script (by King Sejong and his advisers in A.D. 1443) provides a more recent parallel, and there are few other entirely convincing explanations for the sudden appearance of fully fledged hieroglyphic writing.

I like the image of the inspired genius “pondering the strange signs on imported objects”; does anybody know how widely accepted the sequence of events described here is?

People keep pointing me to this story (thanks, Bonnie, John, Frank, and anyone I’m forgetting!), so I’m posting it, despite my inherent skepticism. There’s a new Science article, “Human sound systems are shaped by post-Neolithic changes in bite configuration” by D. E. Blasi, S. Moran, S. R. Moisik, P. Widmer, D. Dediu, and B. Bickel, that supports an old conjecture of Hockett’s; here’s the abstract, which begins:

Linguistic diversity, now and in the past, is widely regarded to be independent of biological changes that took place after the emergence of Homo sapiens. We show converging evidence from paleoanthropology, speech biomechanics, ethnography, and historical linguistics that labiodental sounds (such as “f” and “v”) were innovated after the Neolithic. Changes in diet attributable to food-processing technologies modified the human bite from an edge-to-edge configuration to one that preserves adolescent overbite and overjet into adulthood. This change favored the emergence and maintenance of labiodentals. Our findings suggest that language is shaped not only by the contingencies of its history, but also by culturally induced changes in human biology.

It’s been written up in the Guardian and the NY Times (and doubtless elsewhere), and Mark Liberman has a sensible response at the Log:

I agree with Ray Jackendoff that the idea is “is interesting but not earthshaking” — the contribution is not so much a partial explanation for the distribution of labiodentals, because basically who cares, but rather some support for the general concept that physical population differences in principle might sometimes affect language structure. Which again is obviously true in principle, but it’s not clear how often it applies in practice. This result would move the needle from “maybe never” to “apparently once in a while”.

The usual line of reasoning is the opposite, that vocal tract anatomy has (co-)evolved over the eons to serve the needs of speech communication. (See e.g. the section on “Vocal tract changes in hominid evolution” in my lecture notes for ling001.) That seems pretty well supported, though as with functional-evolutionary explanations for anything, there are disagreements.

I have little interest in unprovable origin stories, but boy, people sure do like to speculate.

President Donald Trump’s letter firing then-FBI Director James Comey was initially sent to the wrong printer, according to a new book excerpted in Axios Wednesday morning.

Investigative reporter Vicky Ward’s new book “Kushner, Inc.” details the the moment Trump’s letter firing Comey “appeared to have been sent to the wrong printer”: 

[National Economic Council Director Gary] Cohn told his aide to take the letter straight to [then-White House counsel] Donald McGahn, who also had an office on the second floor of the White House (and whose printer it had clearly been meant for). Upon receiving it and realizing it had been printed in the wrong place, McGahn said, “Oh, f!@#!”

Read Trump’s letter firing Comey here.

Words broadcast via television and radio waves once drifted off into the ether, rendered harmless by fading human memory as they traversed the vacuum of space-time — though perhaps bound for aliens who’ll find cause in them to punish us. Today, humanity dutifully preserves most content and posts it online. We even archive the most unpleasant output of our most polarizing figures.

Take Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Prior to his current gig, there was a five- or six-year period when he occasionally called into The Bubba the Love Sponge Show, a radio program run by a Tampa, Florida, shock jock who will make it more difficult to blame the least merciful of those aforementioned aliens. On Monday, offense archaeologists working for the progressive group Media Matters for America resurfaced archival material from those decade-old appearances. They hope to force the highly rated cable-news commentator off the air.

Among the offensive remarks in question:

• “Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys—that’s why it wasn’t worth invading. But Canada’s a solid place with good-looking women and good fishing. We should invade.”

• “I hate the war. You know, I’m not defending the war in any way, but I just have zero sympathy for them or their culture. A culture where people just don’t use toilet paper or forks … They can just shut the fuck up and obey, is my view. And, you know, the second we leave, they’re going to be calling for us to return, because they can’t govern themselves.”
• “I was just reading a story trying to figure out how to get it into our show tonight, about the kid, the 13-year-old, who was, I guess, molested, they’re saying, by his teacher, who had sex with him 28 times in one week … Could you sleep with a 165-pound woman 28 times in one week? Are you physically capable of doing that, or do you take your hat off to this kid? … Look, my theory on this is, you know, 13-year-old boys have one goal, obviously, in life … So my point is that teachers like this, not necessarily this one in particular, but they are doing a service to all 13-year-old girls by taking the pressure off. They are a pressure-relief valve, like the kind you have on your furnace.”

The media critic Jack Shafer explains that a comedy show such as Bubba the Love Sponge chooses guests such as Tucker Carlson not because they are funny in their own right, but because they abase themselves in the role of “the upright, proper person who the host makes funny by getting him to break character with dirty and nasty comments,” as Donald Trump did for Howard Stern.

Says Shafer:

The Bubba Show transcripts provided by Media Matters show Bubba and his co-host leading Carlson toward outré topics … basically daring him to say something rascally.

Because Carlson wants to be judged funny and thinks such talk will win him that reward, he goes there … he called for the execution of quarterback Michael Vick, assessed Elena Kagan as “unattractive,” referred to Arianna Huffington as a “pig,” and called Martha Stewart’s daughter Alexis Stewart a name I’d rather not repeat here. Listening to Carlson on Bubba is a lot like listening to the 2-year-old a babysitter has taught to say the word shit. Although both might make you laugh, neither Carlson nor the toddler is funny.

They’re the joke.

It had never occurred to me before that Carlson’s affinity for Trump is partly rooted in their mutual willingness to compromise their dignity for more attention.

While the motives of the people who resurfaced these clips may be partisan, umbrage at Carlson’s remarks is not a case of absurdist or runaway political correctness. The longtime broadcaster’s words transgressed known, widely held, substantive, sound norms, such as Don’t endorse adult women having sex with young boys and Don’t describe foreigners as subhumans. Perhaps society would have been better off if the audio never resurfaced, sparing molestation victims, Iraqis, and others from seeing those taboos broken and leaving the rest of us to focus on matters more pressing than what was once said on a dumb broadcast.

Digging them up forces an unfortunate choice:

1. We can judge the remarks by applying our usual standards, upholding whatever substantive norms that we want to see in the world yet creating a perverse incentive for more people to resurface forgotten remarks.
2. Or we could try to strengthen a new norm against offense archaeology, treating it as inadmissible in the court of public opinion (like the fruit of the poisonous tree) at the risk of weakening broadly shared, desirable norms.

Media Matters wants the public to choose option one. But if Fox News keeps the host employed even as he declines to apologize for anything he said, the activist organization may wind up weakening the taboos that it sought to marshal.

National Review’s David French, a writer with a track record of denouncing populist-right racism, made the case for choosing option two after the first batch of resurfaced audio, but before Media Matters released the second batch.

I don’t like many of Tucker Carlson’s ideas. As I’ve written at length, I think his embrace of victimhood populism is bad for the nation and bad for the conservative movement,” he wrote. “I find his brand of right-wing outrage journalism tiresome and destructive in its own right. But we should respond to his arguments with arguments of our own. We should debate him on the air and in print. And if we don’t like his show, we can change the channel. Our nation cannot maintain its culture of free speech if we continue to reward those who seek to destroy careers rather than rebut ideas. And when you reward a Media Matters search-and-destroy fishing expedition with calls for boycotts or reprisals, then you are doing your part to destroy debate. It’s vengeful. It’s cowardly. And it’s exactly the online world that spiteful partisans want to build.

French is not alone in pushing back against “search-and-destroy” expeditions.

The leftist writer Freddie deBoer, who coined the phrase offense archaeology, once complained about the same phenomenon as it manifested in intra-left debates:

The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged.

Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad.”

The podcast Invisibilia produced a haunting episode on a deep-digging tactic used to destroy a private individual in a tiny subculture. And political observers with a long memory will remember Andrew Breitbart delighting in it, to the consternation of his critics, as when he bragged about obtaining old video of Barack Obama. “We are going to vet him from his college days,” he told CPAC in 2012. As it turned out, there was nothing to the video. But imagine, for the sake of argument, that this satirical Key & Peele sketch—in which Obama smokes pot and community-organizes an “inspirational” college party—was real. Would the country be well served by debating something so irrelevant, even if the subject of the material was a sitting president?

The question will become more germane with each election, until all our presidents will have come of age at a time when digital surveillance was everywhere. A return to monarchy might be preferable to parsing the Google histories of the major party nominees of the 2030s, especially if Kanye West is among them.

On the other hand, it is important to vet presidential candidates and many times when the bygone statements of public figures play a useful role in public discourse.

Where should the lines, however informal, be drawn?

As the court of public opinion considers all the factors in Media Matters for America v. Tucker Carlson, members of the jury will not reach unanimity on the verdict or the right sentence. But the subset of jurors who feel torn because they lament and disapprove of both offense archaeology and remarks of the sort that Carlson made ought to respect one another’s reactions to this controversy, even if they find themselves differing on the least bad trade-off to make.

As the high-court judge in this article, I’m inclined to avoid making bad law on a tough case, since no artifacts of offense from a decade ago need be admitted into evidence to find Carlson worthy of public opprobrium. The content of his Fox show is arguably worse than anything he told the shock jocks. It’s scripted for an audience of millions, he isn’t ostensibly joking, and he still indulges in rhetoric as irresponsible as maligning an entire ethnic group with xenophobic tropes.

Exhibit A:

I sentence him to the contempt of decent, intellectually honest people for segments like that, which are anything but buried. Merciful aliens, don’t judge us by him.

If you’re a longtime reader of FiveThirtyEight, you’ll know that the early stage of the presidential primary process is a tricky one for us to cover. It’s tempting to put a lot of emphasis on shiny objects with numbers attached — polls, endorsement counts, fundraising totals — especially given our reputation as a data-driven news site, but those numbers aren’t always so predictive. It’s perhaps equally tempting to lapse into punditry or theater criticism, on the theory that if the objective metrics aren’t especially reliable, you might as well go with your gut — but that can be equally if not more dangerous.

But on balance, I suspect that smart observers of the political process don’t give enough consideration to early polls, such as the CNN/Des Moines Register poll of Iowa caucus-goers (conducted by top-rated polling firm Selzer & Co.) that came out last weekend. As we documented in a three-part series back in 2011,²² the notion that early polling is meaningless or solely reflects name recognition — a popular view even among people we usually agree with — is wrong, full stop.

Other things held equal, for instance, a candidate polling at 25 percent in early polls is five or six times more likely to win the primary than one polling at 5 percent. It would be equally if not more wrong to say whoever leads in early polls is certain to win the nomination. (A candidate at 25 percent is still a sizable underdog relative to the field, for instance.) But I don’t hear anyone saying that. At least, I haven’t heard anyone saying it about the Democrats leading in the polls — Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders — so far this year.

It certainly is worthwhile to account for name recognition and to go beyond the topline numbers when looking at these polls, however. In particular, favorability ratings are useful indicators: Few voters have a firm first choice yet, so it’s helpful to know which candidates they’re considering, which ones they’ve ruled out, and which ones they don’t know enough about to have decided either way. When you look at those things, Biden’s numbers still look quite decent, even if he isn’t the sort of prohibitive front-runner that, say, Hillary Clinton was in 2016. Sanders’s numbers look a little weaker than Biden’s, but nonetheless pretty good. Both candidates have plenty of genuine support.

Let’s start with a simple exercise. In that 2011 series, I found that a decent heuristic for adjusting for name recognition is to divide the number of voters who have the candidate as their first choice by the number who recognize his or her name. For instance, a candidate with 20 percent first-choice support and 100 percent name recognition is roughly as likely to win the nomination as one with 10 percent first-choice support but just 50 percent name recognition.

When you do that with the Iowa poll, it … doesn’t really change much at all. The order of the candidates is exactly the same whether or not you account for name recognition, in fact. Candidates such as Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke do gain a little bit of ground relative to Biden and Sanders, but not much:

Accounting for name recognition doesn’t change much

Name recognition and first-choice support among 401 likely Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa, according to a March 3-6, 2019, Selzer & Co. poll

Candidate	First-choice support	Name recognition	Adjusted support*
Joe Biden	27%	96%	28%
Bernie Sanders	25	96	26
Elizabeth Warren	9	83	11
Kamala Harris	7	67	10
Beto O’Rourke	5	64	8
Amy Klobuchar	3	58	5
Cory Booker	3	66	5
Michael Bennet	1	25	4
Steve Bullock	1	26	4
Jay Inslee	1	26	4
Pete Buttigieg	1	28	4
Julian Castro	1	37	3
John Delaney	1	40	3

* First-choice support percentage divided by percentage of respondents who had heard of the candidate.

Candidates who got 0 percent support in the poll are not listed.

Source: Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll

Look at favorability ratings instead, and the story gets a bit more complicated. The Selzer & Co. poll asked voters to rate each candidate on a scale from “very favorable” to “very unfavorable”; voters were also allowed to say they didn’t know enough about the candidate to rate them. We can translate the candidate ratings into a favorability score from 0 (very unfavorable) to 100 (very favorable) by calculating the average rating, throwing out voters who didn’t know or didn’t rate the candidate. To get a sense for which candidates are wearing well with the electorate, we can also compare favorability scores and name recognition against the previous version of the Iowa poll in December.

Biden and Harris have the best favorability ratings in Iowa

Favorability ratings and name recognition in the December and March Selzer & Co. Iowa polls

	Name recognition		Favorability score*
Candidate	December	March	December	March
Biden	97%	96%	76.4	75.4
Harris	58	67	69.7	71.3
O’Rourke	64	64	73.5	68.4
Sanders	96	96	70.6	67.8
Warren	85	83	67.9	65.6
Booker	61	66	66.8	63.8
Castro	37	42	60.5	63.7
Brown	31	32	61.4	62.6
Klobuchar	46	58	70.4	62.2
Bennet		25		58.8
Swalwell	28	29	56.1	58.7
Inslee	18	26	55.6	57.8
Hickenlooper	33	36	60.7	56.6
Delaney	36	40	58.4	56
Gillibrand	44	50	62.3	55.5
Buttigieg		28		54.8
Gabbard		37		52.3
Bullock	19	21	50.9	47.6
de Blasio		50		43.3
Bloomberg	71	65	50.8	43.1
Yang	17	19	33.3	40.3
Schultz		58		24

* Favorability score = 100 points per “very favorable,” 67 points per “mostly favorable,” 33 points per “mostly unfavorable” and 0 points per “very unfavorable,” ignoring don’t knows and no opinions.

Source: Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Polls

Biden has easily the best favorability score in the March Iowa poll, at 75.4. Remember, we’re not counting voters who didn’t rate the candidate, so he’s not advantaged by his high name recognition. The second-best favorability score belongs to Harris, however, at 71.3, and both her favorability score and her name recognition are improved from December — more evidence she’s had a strong rollout period. The third-best favorability score belongs to O’Rourke — although his numbers are down from December — with Sanders in fourth.

It’s true that this is just one poll — and not one with a huge sample size (401 Democrats) — but it generally squares with other polls that also measure favorability. If you look at the ratio of favorable to unfavorable ratings in those polls, Biden generally rates first, and then Harris, Sanders and O’Rourke appear in some order behind him, occasionally also joined by Cory Booker.

So it probably helps to distinguish the cases of Biden and Sanders. Biden leads the field by every polling-based metric: first-choice support, whether adjusted for name recognition or not, as well as in favorability ratings. He may not survive scrutiny if and when he officially declares for the race — he wasn’t a very good candidate when he ran for president in 1988 and 2008 — but he starts out with deep loyalty from a fairly broad spectrum of the Democratic base.

Sanders, conversely, has a high floor of support and a lot of enthusiasm behind him, but that’s tempered by having some Democrats — 25 percent in the Iowa poll — who have an unfavorable view of him. If that number holds at 25 percent — and the other 75 percent of Democrats would consider voting for Sanders — he shouldn’t have a lot of problems. Still, 25 percent is high, compared with the scores for candidates such as Biden, Booker and Harris, and Sanders will face a new type of scrutiny for him as one of the front-runners who is taking fire from all sides, instead of being in a two-candidate race as the underdog against Clinton.

It will also be important to track whether Sanders can hold onto or further improve upon the bounce in first-choice support that he’s received since officially entering the race last month. Before then, Sanders was generally polling in the high teens or low 20s, but he’s since bounced into the mid-to-high 20s in first-choice support.

That happens to be near an inflection point where a candidate goes from a weak front-runner to a more formidable one. As you can see from our 2011 analysis — with a chart that is decidedly not up to current FiveThirtyEight design standards — candidates who are only polling at 20 percent despite high name recognition in the early stage of the race are often paper tigers. But get up to 30 percent, and your chances of winning the nomination improve quite a bit. That’s the point at which you may be able to win causes and primaries with a plurality; Trump won lots of states in the early going in 2016 with a vote share in the low-to-mid 30s, for example.

Biden is also fairly close to this inflection point. In general, he’s been on the happy side of it, with first-choice support in the high 20s or low 30s. But it’s possible to imagine him either gaining support (as he generates more excitement) or losing support (as he gets more scrutiny) if and when he declares for the race. There’s also a relative lack of comparatively moderate candidates in the field so far; if O’Rourke has a strong debut, it could come at Biden’s expense, for instance.

To be clear, I don’t think you should be going solely or necessarily even mostly by the polls at this stage of the primary. There are lots of other quantitative and qualitative ways to evaluate the candidates; we think a multifaceted approach is best. There’s still a lot to be said for tracking measures of insider support such as endorsements, for instance, which despite having been a useless indicator in the 2016 Republican primary still have a strong track record overall. Those insider metrics are middling for both Sanders and Biden. In Sanders’s case, he’s off to a much better start in endorsements than four years ago, but is nonetheless behind Harris, Booker and Amy Klobuchar. It’s harder to evaluate Biden because he hasn’t entered the race yet; he does have some endorsements, but the sheer number of candidates running suggests that he doesn’t have the field-clearing power that Clinton did in 2016.

But at the very least, the polls aren’t reason to be dismissive of Sanders and Biden. If you think of a mental scale that spans the categories “bad,” “meh,” “pretty good,” “good” and “great,” Biden’s polling qualifies as good²³ even if you do count for name recognition, and Sanders’s as pretty good (inching toward good in the most recent polls). Harris also belongs in the pretty good category on the basis of her strong favorability ratings, even though she doesn’t have as much first-choice support. Otherwise, the candidates’ polling is pretty underwhelming — O’Rourke is probably on the border of meh and pretty good, but the rest of the candidates are solidly into meh territory, or worse. Biden’s and Sanders’s positions aren’t spectacular, but most candidates would gladly give up their own path to the nomination for one of theirs.

CORRECTION (March 13, 2019, 2:45 p.m.): An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that 22 percent of Iowa Democrats had an unfavorable view of Bernie Sanders, according to a March Selzer poll. His unfavorable rating in that poll was 25 percent. It was 22 percent in a December version of the poll.

From ABC News:

---

My favorite part of Allegra Kirkland’s run-down (P) of the Ricketts family’s other problems hanging out with racists and white nationalists is when she notes that family patriarch Joe Ricketts has some very bigoted views on Muslims and Barack Obama, as revealed in some earlier leaked communications. Son Pete Rickets is the one who we found out yesterday had an anti-Semite and white supremacist on his campaign staff. But in fairness, she notes, when son Pete found out about father Joe’s backward and bigoted views he did send his dad a Snopes article debunking stereotypes about Muslims.

In a recent article, Robert Reich writes:

“Does Hillary Clinton understand that the biggest divide in American politics is no longer between the right and the left, but between the anti-establishment and the establishment?

“I worry she doesn’t – at least not yet.

“A Democratic operative I’ve known since the Bill Clinton administration told me, ‘Now that she’s won the nomination, Hillary is moving to the middle. She’s going after moderate swing voters.’

“Presumably that’s why she tapped Tim Kaine to be her vice president. Kaine is as vanilla middle as you can get.

“The most powerful force in American politics today is anti-establishment fury at a system rigged by big corporations, Wall Street, and the super-wealthy.

“In fairness, Hillary is only doing what she knows best. Moving to the putative center is what Bill Clinton did after the Democrats lost the House and Senate in 1994 …”

I often admire Reich’s advocacy on behalf of progressive causes, but I find his analysis here to be smug, superficial, and sexist.

To be fair, he doesn’t get everything wrong; Bill Clinton did move to the “putative center.” There is rising anger against “big corporations, Wall Street, and the super-wealthy.” And Tim Kaine is no radical.

Beyond that, however, I can’t find much to agree with here.

First: His observation that Clinton fails to understand that “the biggest divide in American politics is no longer between the right and the left, but between the anti-establishment and the establishment?” is wrong in a double sense. The biggest divide – and Hillary clearly understands this well – has never been between the right and left. And the main divide is not the clash between the “anti-establishment and the establishment.” Sure, the establishment/anti-establishment idea has increasingly fractured U.S. politics and shapes popular thinking. Bernie Sanders especially echoed this sentiment in his campaign. But it hasn’t replaced the main political division. And that division is between right-wing extremism on the one side and a broad, diverse, multi-class people’s movement on the other.

This divide between ultra-right extremism and the rest of us dates back to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and nearly 40 years later, shockingly, it remains our overarching reality, structuring politics, political possibilities, and the current elections.

Indeed, the main and immediate political challenge at the moment is to defeat Trump and the rest of the right wing down the ticket in a landslide. Such a rout would cause people here and worldwide to breathe a sigh of relief. But more: it would give a fresh impulse and a popular mandate to secure badly needed political, economic, and social reforms in the near term and over a longer horizon to vigorously challenge globalized production and financialization in their neoliberal form.

Second: Reich, who was Secretary of Labor in the Bill Clinton administration, complains that Hillary is “going after moderate voters.” But is there something wrong with reaching out to moderates? Should she ignore them? Dismiss them? Or cede them to Trump and the right wing? If there a pathway to a landslide victory in November that doesn’t include “moderate” as well as – this may sound heretical to some who are lost in pure and uncomplicated categories of class and social struggle – a chunk of traditional Republican voters, I’m not sure what that path is.

So the question isn’t why is Hillary reaching out to such voters, the question is why wouldn’t she? And the follow up question is: how can we help her? Of course, her campaign and the broad coalition that supports her should reach out to “first time” and “stay-at-home” voters – not to mention register new voters, too. In other words, employ, with some updating and on a broader scale, the playbook of President Obama’s two successful presidential runs.

Third: Reich – and he unfortunately has plenty of company on the left – locks Hillary into a tightly constructed political category from which he allows her no space to escape, when he writes, “Hillary is only doing what she knows best. Moving to the putative center is what Bill Clinton did after the Democrats lost the House and Senate in 1994 …”

Other than a conversation with a “Democratic operative,” Reich brings no evidence to bear on his claim that Hillary is tacking to the right. Perhaps, bowing to the Hillary-hating that is nearly a national pastime, that is all he thinks is necessary. Sorry Bob, it isn’t. Some facts have to be offered. But none are and a good part of the reason is that the facts strongly suggest otherwise. From the tenor of her primary campaign, to her search for common ground with Bernie Sanders, to her embrace of the unprecedentedly progressive convention platform, to her acceptance speech at the Democratic Party convention, and to her election campaigning so far, she has been breaking in a progressive direction on a broad range of class and democratic issues. (And the wall between “class and democratic issues” is very permeable; I use “interpenetrate” to capture their interaction and dynamic).

Despite this reality, Reich (and some others on the left) are stingy with their praise for Hillary and seldom if ever mention the significance of the glass ceiling that she will break if she is victorious. Instead, they are far more likely to critique – at times blast – her. I guess they think that to do otherwise might leave them open to criticism from others on the left, thereby tarnishing what is most precious to them – their progressive and radical credentials.

Moreover, Reich, without any qualification, assumes that what Bill did Hillary will do. In other words, she has to not only pay for the sins of her husband, but, as a dutiful woman and wife, she is programmed to repeat them, according to Reich. That kind of pigeon-holing insultingly dismisses HER and the possibility that HER thinking may have evolved in the face of the global economic crash, or sluggish recovery and persistent income stagnation, or the epidemic of shootings of young Black men and the challenges to the criminal justice system, or the upward climb of the planet’s temperature, or the growth and surge of popular movements, or policy failures of previous Democratic administrations, or even the narrowing limits of U.S. power projection in the global theater.

I’m sure Reich wouldn’t put himself into such an ideological iron cage, but he has no hesitation to dump Hilary there and turn her into a creature of the past destined to do what her husband did. It seems that in Reich’s world, once in the dog house, always in the dog house, especially if you are a smart woman who I’m guessing clashed with Reich on one thing or another in the past. This is a sexist and sloppy analysis. We should expect better from Robert Reich.

It has come to my attention that many laypeople, even Language Log readers, are using incorrect plurals for flower names. "Geraniums" indeed! "Crocuses", for heaven's sake! Please get these right. There follows a list of 30 count nouns naming flowers, together with their approved grammatically correct plurals. Don't use incorrect plurals any more. Shape up.

A SINGLE…	A BUNCH OF…
agapanthus	agapanthi
amaryllis	amarylles
antirrhinum	antirrhina
azalea	azaleae
begonia	begoniae
camellia	camelliae
carnation	carnatia
chrysanthemum	chrysanthema
cosmos	cosmoi
crocus	croci
daffodil	daffodilia
dahlia	dahliae
delphinium	delphinia
edelweiss	edelweisser
forget-me-not	forget-us-not
geranium	gerania
gladiolus	gladioli
hibiscus	hibisci
iris	ires
lilac	lilaces
lotus	loti
mimosa	mimosae
narcissus	narcissi
nasturtium	nasturtia
orchid	orchides
petunia	petuniae
rhododendron	rhododendra
snapdragon	snapdraga
statice	statistics
zinnia	zinniae

Oh, one other thing before you go: I'm kidding (though I bet until you were a few seconds into the list you thought I wasn't)! Nearly all the above are ridiculous. In certain cases it is completely clear that I simply made stuff up. (People nearly always get away with making stuff up about language; they assume no one will call them on what they say, and they are very largely right.)

Most flower names take ordinary regular native English plurals (camellias, crocuses, forget-me-nots, geraniums, snapdragons, …). For a few, the Latin plural may be common (as with gladioli, for example). A very few may be on the anglicization cusp, showing variation between ordinary regular plurals and irregular classical ones; non-flower nouns in this state include focus (focuses or foci), index (indexes or indices), etc. And some names of plants with small flowers (like maybe cosmos) may act like mass nouns rather than taking plural forms (We planted a whole lot of cosmos over there).

Don't be bullied by prescriptivist or purist nitwits who imagine that status can be achieved by learning the formation of Latin and Greek plurals, and that you're a bad person if you say The data is complex rather than The data are complex. (Once upon a time — say 50 years ago — data was widely regarded as simply the irregular plural of the Latin word datum "that which is given", so it took plural agreement; but now it is an English non-count noun meaning something like "information that could be subjected to scientific analysis" and generally takes singular agreement.)

Look at ordinary practice in order to decide what is probably correct English, and accept that there may be variation within Standard English morphology. (But do get phenomena right: it's the Greek plural of phenomenon. One must have some standards. You will not be invited to the right literary lunches if you say *It was a strange phenomena.)

Strange happenings in the Jinhua zoo, Zhejiang, China:

"Has a Chinese zoo called a gorilla Harambe McHarambeface? Claim that poll decided animal’s name sweeps the web" (Daily Mail, 9/13/16)

• Confusion over the naming of a gorilla at a zoo after a 'huge public vote'
• Newborn 'christened' at Jinhua zoo in China's central Zhejiang province
• Total of 73,345 votes were cast for Harambe McHarambeface 
• Name is reference to gorilla killed in US after boy fell into its enclosure

Has a gorilla been named Harambe McHarambeface at a Chinese zoo after asking the public what the newborn should be called?

The fate of the new arrival at Jinhua zoo in China's central Zhejiang province was reportedly left in the public's hands, who rushed to the polls to cast their vote.

It was reported a total of 73,345 people voted for Harambe McHarambeface – mimicking the infamous Boaty McBoatface – and with 93% of the vote the gorilla was said to have been given the new name.

The moniker is a reference to the 17-year-old gorilla shot dead at Cincinnati Zoo after a four-year-old boy fell into its enclosure.

But the site – Boston Leader – who broke the story is being questioned by internet users as to the validity of the story.

Initially, Heijin was the front-runner with several hundred votes, but once the ballot was shared on social media, new options were added and Harambe McHarambeface stormed into the lead, according the Boston Leader .

“We do hope it will attract more foreign visitors to Jinhua in future.” The official mentioned that the zoo accepts “Harambe McHarambeface” will be used as the gorilla’s English name, but ‘Heijin’ will be used as his Chinese name. “It is nearly impossible to render Harambe McHarambeface in Chinese language,” said the official, “so we hope those who voted will accept that we have decided to give him a different Chinese name.”

Matt Treyvaud wrote in to ask:

I'm sure I'm not the only Language Log reader who would enjoy a post about what people are saying about the name "Harambe McHarambeface" on the Chinese internet–not least how they actually plan to write it in Chinese characters!

So far as I have been able to ascertain, there has been dead silence about this on the Chinese internet.

Not surprising, since the whole Harambe McHarambeface story is a hoax, as Matt Novak tells us in Gizmodo (9/13/16), "No, a Chinese Zoo Did Not Name a Baby Gorilla Harambe McHarambeface":

Harambe McHarambeface is obviously a nod to the meme of the disaster that is crowdsourcing a name for things online. Remember Boaty McBoatface? This one just never happened in the first place.

"Story about zoo naming gorilla 'Harambe McHarambeface' appears to be a hoax" (USA Today, 9/13/16):

And while the Harambe-nod delighted people on social media, The Boston Leader doesn't appear to be a legitimate website. The website doesn't have any content other than the Harambe McHarambeface story. Clicking away from the story brings up a "service temporarily unavailable page."

According to Whols, the domain name was created four days ago, Buzzfeed reports.

There is a Jinhua Zoo (Jīnhuá dòngwùyuán 金华动物园), but, so far as I can tell, they do not have any gorillas among their animals.

As for how to say Harambe in Chinese, it is Hālāmǔbǐ 哈拉姆比.

[Thanks to Yixue Yang]

Jules Suzdaltsev (“a big fancy journalist, editor, and host from Los Angeles, California”) has a three-minute video purporting to explain what happened to Latin. I post it not because I expect anyone here to learn anything from it (summary: Latin split into what we call the Romance languages) but because it manages to say such odd, silly, irrelevant, or just plain wrong things in such a short stretch of time. “Part of the reason that Latin passed out of common usage is because, as a language, it’s incredibly complex”: no, actually people can go on speaking incredibly complex languages indefinitely; visit the Caucasus sometime. At the start he seems to be saying that Latin spread throughout the Empire because it was the chosen language of the Catholic Church. His map shows Romanian as not being spoken within the Empire. He says the meaning of something said in Latin “is always clear, although difficult to parse in a sentence.” He gives the Italian, Spanish, and French descendants of Latin tres ‘three’ and says they’re “all similar, but culturally distinct.” Wha? I watched it twice just to make sure I had heard what I thought I heard. Anyway, this guy may be a fine fellow but I wouldn’t advise going to him for linguistic history. (Thanks, Trevor!)

Because of a 2012 law to "protect Iceland's elfin heritage," the Iceland Road Administration is going to fix a situation in which a company that removed debris following a landslide accidentally covered up an enchanted rock.(What the hell did I just write?)

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has a brilliant plan for higher education. Video. That, he says, will free us from the "higher education cartel." By which he means college professors.

"We've got the internet—you have so much information available. Why do you have to keep paying different lecturers to teach the same course? You get one solid lecturer and put it up online and have everybody available to that knowledge for a whole lot cheaper? But that doesn't play very well to tenured professors in the higher education cartel. So again, we need destructive technology for our higher education system," he said.

Johnson added, "One of the examples I always used—if you want to teach the Civil War across the country, are you better off having, I don't know, tens of thousands of history teachers that kind of know the subject, or would you be better off popping in 14 hours of Ken Burns’s Civil War tape and then have those teachers proctor based on that excellent video production already done? You keep duplicating that over all these different subject areas."

Ron Johnson apparently missed the "critical thinking" components of his coursework toward a business degree. He also apparently isn't aware that online learning already exists, and that "education happens when teachers can listen to students and engage them to think for themselves," as Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, comments. "Leave it to someone from a party led by a reality TV star to confuse videotape with the learning experience of a classroom. […] But this is typical for a party with an education agenda as out-of-date as Johnson’s Blockbuster Video card."   Please give $3 to help Russ Feingold stand up for Wisconsin educators again.

Ben-Hur, the remake of the classic 1959 film about a merchant living in the time of Jesus, flopped over the weekend, raking in just $11 million (and an addition $10 million worldwide), a mere dent in its $100 million budget.

A small group of “White Lives Matter” activists held a protest outside the Houston NAACP office on Sunday, bearing assault rifles, Confederate flags, and signs referencing white supremacist slogans.

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Hillary Clinton moved into a clear polling lead over Donald Trump just after the Democratic convention, which ended on July 28. Pretty much ever since, the reporters and poll watchers that I follow have seemed eager to tell the next twist in the story. Would Trump’s numbers get even worse, possibly leading to the first double-digit victory for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964? Or would Trump mount a comeback? As of last Tuesday, there wasn’t much evidence of an overall shift in the race. Trump was gaining ground in some polls but losing ground in a roughly equal number of them.

Since then, Trump has gotten some slightly better results, with national polls suggesting a race more in line with a 5- or 6-percentage-point lead for Clinton instead of the 7- or 8-point lead she had earlier in August. But state polls haven’t really followed suit and continue to show Clinton with some of her largest leads of the campaign. Trump received some decent numbers in Iowa and Nevada, but his polls in other swing states have been bad.

Overall, Trump has gained slightly in our forecasts: He’s up to a 15 percent chance of winning the Electoral College in our polls-only model, up from a low of 11 percent a week ago. And he’s at 25 percent in polls-plus, up from a low of 21 percent. But the evidence is conflicting enough that I don’t think we can rule out a larger swing toward Trump or, alternatively, that his position hasn’t improved at all.

Let’s start with those national polls. In the table below, I’ve listed every national poll that we’ve added to our database since Tuesday and how it compared to the previous poll from the same pollster, if there was one.²⁰

Recent national polls show a slight shift toward Trump

		MARGIN
DATE	POLLSTER	NEW POLL	PREVIOUS	SHIFT
Aug. 18-20	Morning Consult	Clinton +3	Clinton +6	Trump +3
Aug. 14-20	USC Dornsife/LA Times	Trump +2	Clinton +5	Trump +7
Aug. 14-18	Ipsos	Clinton +7	Clinton +7	—
Aug. 11-17	CVOTER International	Clinton +4	Clinton +4	—
Aug 15-16	Rasmussen Reports	Clinton +2	Clinton +3	Trump +1
Aug. 14-16	YouGov	Clinton +6	Clinton +6	—
Aug. 9-16	Pew Research	Clinton +4	Clinton +9	Trump +5
Aug. 15	Gravis Marketing	Clinton +4	Clinton +5	Trump +1
Aug. 9-15	Normington Petts	Clinton +8
Aug. 8-14	SurveyMonkey	Clinton +6	Clinton +6	—
Aug. 12-13	Zogby Analytics	Clinton +2	Clinton +3	Trump +1
	Average			Trump +2

A number of these polls show no change. But where there have been shifts, they’ve been toward Trump, particularly in the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times tracking poll, which now shows a 2-point lead for Trump after having Clinton modestly ahead before, and in Pew Research’s most recent poll, which has Clinton with a 4-point lead as compared with the 9-point lead Pew showed her with before the conventions.

You can, of course, pick apart the individual polls if you like. The USC/Los Angeles Times poll makes some unorthodox methodological choices; I happen to like some of these choices and dislike others, but overall, they produce a poll that’s significantly more Trump-leaning than other pollsters. And I’m not sure anyone should be crowing about Zogby Analytics polls, which have been highly inaccurate historically. But there are ways to adjust for these things, and they don’t obscure the fact that the trend in national polls has mostly been toward Trump.

State polls tell another story, however. Here’s every state poll we’ve added since Tuesday:²¹

State polls continue to show Clinton gains

			MARGIN
STATE	DATE	POLLSTER	NEW POLL	PREVIOUS	SHIFT
Ohio	Aug. 17-19	YouGov	Clinton +6	Clinton +4	Clinton +2
Iowa	Aug. 17-19	YouGov	Tie	Trump +1	Clinton +1
Ga.	Aug. 17	Opinion Savvy	Tie	Trump +3	Clinton +3
Nev.	Aug. 15-17	Suffolk	Clinton +2
S.C.	Aug. 15-17	Gravis Marketing	Trump +4
N.C.	Aug. 15-17	Gravis Marketing	Trump +1
Ind.	Aug. 13-16	Monmouth	Trump +11
Colo.	Aug. 9-16	Quinnipiac	Clinton +8	Trump +11	Clinton +19
Va.	Aug. 9-16	Quinnipiac	Clinton +11
Iowa	Aug. 9-16	Quinnipiac	Clinton +2
Fla.	Aug. 12-15	Monmouth	Clinton +9
Texas	Aug. 12-14	PPP	Trump +6
Va.	Aug. 11-14	Washington Post	Clinton +7
Miss.	Aug. 11	Magellan	Trump +13
Mich.	Aug. 9-10	Mitchell Research	Clinton +11	Clinton +6	Clinton +5
Mo.	Aug. 8-9	PPP	Trump +3	Trump +10	Clinton +7
		Average			Clinton +6

As I wrote earlier, Iowa and Nevada have been relative bright spots for Trump, with Clinton leading only narrowly even in post-convention surveys. But those states have only 6 electoral votes each, and Trump’s numbers are bad pretty much everywhere else. Since Tuesday, for instance, he’s gotten polls showing him down 6 points in Ohio, 9 points in Florida and 11 points in Virginia — and only tied with Clinton in Georgia. I suppose you can count polls showing Trump ahead by double-digits in Indiana and Mississippi as good news for him, since they’re states that could conceivably have gone to Clinton in a landslide. Then again, other polls this week showed competitive races in Missouri and Texas. Our model thinks that these polls are consistent with Clinton continuing to hold a lead in the mid- to high single digits: You probably wouldn’t get a set of results like these if she was up by only 5 percentage points nationally.

Moreover, these state polls show highly favorable trend lines for Clinton, where they’re available. Among the six polls that had previously surveyed the same state, Clinton gained ground in every one, with an average swing of 6 percentage points toward her. A caution: The average shift is inflated by a Quinnipiac poll of Colorado which found Clinton up 8 points; Quinnipiac had implausibly showed an 11-point lead for Trump when it surveyed the race in November. Even without that poll, however, Clinton’s average gain is 4 percentage points, still pretty good.

There are a couple of further nuances that explain some of the differences. Most of the recent national polls are daily or weekly tracking polls conducted online or via automated surveys, and these tracking polls have generally been a relatively friendly group for Trump. He hasn’t fared well recently in traditional telephone surveys, by contrast, with one or two exceptions like his not-so-bad result in the Pew Research poll. Also, looking at the trend lines doesn’t quite make for an apples-to-apples comparison, because most of the national polls have surveyed the race multiple times since the conventions, while the state polls haven’t. It’s plausible that Clinton is polling slightly off her post-convention peak, as the national polls suggest, but ahead of where she was for most of the pre-convention period, as the state polls suggest.

Still, our model perceives an increasing conflict between state and national polls. Polls-only calculates a national polling average, which has Clinton up by 6.2 percentage points, down from a peak of 8.0 percentage points on Aug. 15. But it also infers an estimate of the popular vote from state polls, and that continues to have Clinton ahead by 7 to 8 points. The 1- or 2-point gap between these estimates doesn’t matter much for now, since Clinton is comfortably ahead either way. But it could become pertinent if the race tightens; it was pertinent in 2012, when state polls continuously (and correctly, it turned out) showed President Obama in better shape than national polls did.

I’m not going to get too much more into the weeds for now. The past week was pretty light for polling and sometimes these differences resolve themselves as you accumulate more data. Maybe this week, we’ll get a couple of national polls showing Clinton 11 points ahead, but others showing her only tied with Trump in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, or something.

In terms of interpreting our forecasts, though, you should know that our models mostly rely on state polls to estimate the level of the race, whereas they lean heavily on input from national polls to estimate the trend. Thus, polls-only has Clinton ahead of Trump by about 7 percentage points nationally, a result more in line with the most recent state polls than with the most recent national polls. But it also detects a modest trend toward Trump, something the national polls show but the state polls don’t yet.

Global Olympic gold medals per capita are at their lowest point since the first modern Olympics in 1896.

There are 306 events at the Olympics this summer, with one gold medal per event.²² There are more than 7.3 billion people worldwide. That’s fewer than 42 events for every billion people, and that ratio has been declining since the 2000 Sydney Games, when the Olympics grew to 300 events, up 11 percent from 1996 and 48 percent higher than in 1980.

In 2002, an International Olympic Committee report warned that the games were growing too big. “Today, the Olympic Movement must contend with the reality that more sports want to participate in the Olympic Games, more athletes want to compete in the Olympic Games, more people want to attend the Olympic Games, and more media want to cover the Olympic Games,” the report said. As a result, the cost of hosting the games was increasing and some countries were being left out of the running in bids to serve as host, according to the report.

The IOC has heeded the report’s warning and pressed pause on the Summer Olympics’ rapid growth rate.²³

Though events per capita were much higher in the first half of the 20th century, everything that surrounded those events has grown, including the number of security forces and members of the media. Also, many more athletes today compete per event, from far more countries, than did then. The number of events has not quite doubled since 1920, but the number of participating athletes is roughly four times higher today and the number of participating countries is about seven times higher.²⁴

The decrease in events per capita has meant more athletes are competing for a chance to win roughly the same number of medals. It also has meant that sports not yet in the Olympics have had a hard time breaking into the games, and when they have, it has usually come at the expense of others, such as baseball and softball. That will change in Tokyo, though, as yet another new Olympic philosophy on growth will bring five new sports into the fold.

A crowdsourcing blood donation app called Blood+ is receiving a lot of criticism today after tweeting out an emergency request for O+ donors in Hyderabad (India) in order to save the life of a three-year-old boy... that included the caveat that donors had to be from a specific caste.

Poemas del río Wang has a post on an interesting topic: “since when is Byzantium called Byzantium?”

The “Byzantine” Empire in reality never existed under this name, which put roots and is exclusively used in historiography. The term was coined about a century after the fall of the Roman Empire – as it was really called – by a German humanist historian, Hieronymus Wolf.

Wolf learned self-taught Greek. In 1549 he published the first translation of Demosthenes’ speeches. From 1551 he worked the Augsburg Fugger library, where he catalogued the medieval Greek manuscripts brought from Venice. In 1557 he published his main work, the Corpus Historiae Byzantinae, compiled from the Greek sources in the Augsburg library, with which he unintentionally rewrote world history. When in the early 17th century the compilation of a similar summary from the surviving Constantinople sources was encouraged by Louis XIV of France, it obviously had to be based on Wolf’s work, so that Philippe Labbé, the Jesuit scholar leading the project did not even try to find a new title for the 34-volume collection: it was also published as Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae. The scholars dealing with the late Roman Empire, centered on Constantinople, all adopted this terminology (e.g. Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, Bonn 1822-1897). The adjective “Byzantine”, which during the Enlightenment spread worldwide, especially due to the writings of Montesquieu, was impossible to be detached from the (late) Roman Empire. And the adjective was also associated with an explicitly negative connotation, which was deduced from the supposed qualities of state power: courtly intrigues, complicated bureaucracy, incomprehensible and over-decorated ceremoniality and fraudulent diplomacy.

It continues with fascinating historical details and the usual gorgeous images (I spent quite a while staring at the 1422 map of Constantinople: “This is the oldest surviving map of the city, and the only one made before the Turkish conquest”), and points out that the Rimini tomb of “one of the last great Greek Neoplatonic philosophers, Georgios Gemistus Plethon” has an inscription beginning:

IEMISTII•BIZANTII•PHILOSOPHOR[um]•SVA•TEMP[ore]•PRINCIPIS•RELIQVVM•
[The mortal remains of the Byzantine Gemistus Plethon, the greatest philosopher of his age]

[…] If we assume that the tomb inscription was not made after Wolf’s work of 1557 (and the tombstone-carver did not keep pace with the latest scientific research), then we must also assume that the term “Byzantine” already existed before 1557, as a typical Renaissance hyper-classicism (like Istropolis instead of Posonium), but it was only applied to the city, and not to the state. Wolf was probably aware of this use, and as he tried to draw a caesura between the ancient and medieval Greek literature and sources, he adopted the term “Byzantine”, which was later extended on the basis of his work to the Constantinople-centered Roman Empire.

I would quibble, however, with the post’s final sentence: “Nowadays, if anybody talks about the Roman Empire in connection with the period between the 6th and 15th century, he will shock his listeners just as much as if he used the term of Byzantine Empire in those very centuries.” For a long time now, serious scholars have talked about the Eastern Roman Empire and used the term “Byzantine” with restraint, mainly because it is so familiar; you’d have to have ignored the subject for decades to be shocked by such usage.

I sometimes get annoyed with John McWhorter, but when he’s good he’s very good, and his Aeon essay on euphemisms is probably the best thing I’ve read on this vexed topic. The core of his point is in this paragraph:

What the cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker has artfully termed ‘the euphemism treadmill’ is not a tic or a stunt. It is an inevitable and, more to the point, healthy process, necessary in view of the eternal gulf between language and opinion. We think of euphemisms as one-time events, where one prissily coins a way of saying something that detracts from something unpleasant about it. That serves perfectly well as a definition of what euphemism is, but misses the point that euphemism tends to require regular renewal. This is because thought changes more slowly than we can change the words for it, and has a way of catching up with our new coinages. Since that is likely eternal, we must accept that we’ll change our terms just like we change our underwear, as a part of linguistic life in a civilised society.

But he discusses many concrete examples, such as these:

Crippled began as a sympathetic term. However, a sad reality of human society is that there are negative associations and even dismissal harboured against those with disabilities. Thus crippled became accreted with those overtones, so to speak, to the point that handicapped was fashioned as a replacement term free from such baggage.

However, because humans stayed human, it was impossible that handicapped would not, over time, become accreted with similar gunk. Enter disabled, which is now long-lived enough that many process it, too, as harbouring shades of abuse, which conditions a replacement such as differently abled. Notably, the International Society for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled later changed its name again to Rehabilitation, International; today, the organisation prefers to be known simply as ‘RI’, bypassing the inconvenience of actual words altogether. The story has been similar for retarded being replaced by cognitively impaired; for welfare, which today is more often referred to as cash assistance; or by the faceless initials of programmes disbursing it, such as TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families).

The crucial thing is to be able to step back from our instinctive reactions to the way such words sound to us now — we can’t help but hear the superseded ones as sounding terrible and the new ones as clean and shiny — and to realize they’re steps on an escalator, moving slowly but inexorably, and the new ones will sound as bad to the next generation as the old ones do to us. It’s just one aspect of language change in action. (Thanks, Paul!)

Brian Dickerson, a writer for the Detroit Free Press, penned a column Wednesday mocking conservative activist James O'Keefe for his attempt to impersonate him in a failed effort to catch voter fraud on tape for one of his "sting" videos.

"I wish I could muster some righteous indignation over this outrage. But the thing is, O'Keefe didn't get very far," Dickerson wrote.

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In 2002, then-Congressman Mike Pence delivered a defense of Creationism on the House floor, proving that he doesn't understand evolution, much less what the word "theory" means in science. He also suggested that educating children about evolution has led to serious problems over the years.

Donald Trump may now be warning of a "rigged" election, where a voter can cast a ballot "like 10 times," but back in 2004, the real estate magnate struggled to vote even once, according to a video segment filmed with Access Hollywood.

In the video, Trump takes Access Hollywood's Billy Bush with him to a New York polling place, only to find that his name is not on the voter rolls. They travel to two other polling places and face the same issue. Trump eventually fills out a provisional ballot from his limo, but declines to tell Bush who he voted for.

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If you have ever wondered why so many elected officials support the privatization of public schools, there is a simple answer: Follow the money.

In state after state, hedge fund managers and other elites have decided that public schools must be privatized, and they have millions to back up their whims and hobbies.

Maurice Cunningham, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, has researched the dark money flowing into the school privatization movement in Massachusetts. It is an appalling story of a wealthy elite using their money to undermine democracy and to steal public Schools from the community that paid for them.

Millions of dollars have been funneled to Teach for America, Stand for Children, Education Reform Now (the political action arm of Democrats for Education Reform), Families for Excellent Schools, and other corporate reformers whose goal is privatization.

Watch the wealthy try to buy democracy. Watch to see if the public wakes up and fights back.