In a fascinating video that walks through human history before Creationists believe the universe even came into existence, we learn how much progress we've really made and how lucky we are to be living today:
Given Mr. Trump's role in pushing the envelope of American political insults, many will consider this to be karmic justice. It's getting picked up on the backstreets of the internet, and may have some of the same impact on his future that "lyin' Ted" and "liddle Marco" had on the careers of his previous opponents.
There were also apparently some more subtle forms of communication associated with his trip:
Donald Trump surrounded with red golf balls with swastikas on them in Scotland pic.twitter.com/QPHfFoEcpd
This is the problem with pure democracy, at the bottom, and why large referenda like the Brexit vote was stupid.
Right as polls were closing in the United Kingdom last night, Google Trends reported a massive spike in British people asking "what happens if we leave the EU?"
This is the kind of question one might think people would want to look up before voting on whether or not to leave the EU, since the answer is pretty relevant.
By the same token, it was only after referendum results were in that UK Googlers got obsessed with asking what the EU actually is:
This is a reminder, I think, that while political democracy is the best system of government, it is normally implemented through the idea of accountable representatives.
The idea is that people elect some people who they trust to represent their interests. Those representatives are supposed to do the difficult work of understanding policy issues and making choices about them. If the representatives are seen as doing a bad job, they can be turned out in favor of other people who will also be focused on understanding political and policy issues as a full-time job.
What we got in the UK was something else — directly asking everyday people to weigh in on a complicated and technical question that they probably hadn’t studied much and where, even though the collective stakes are high, there is no clear incentive to personally get the answer right.
“If the pound goes down, more people are coming to Turnberry, frankly,” he said, referring to the location of his resort. “For traveling and for other things, I think it very well could turn out to be positive.”
When a reporter pointed out that “the country is not a golf course,” Trump’s response was a staggering “no, it’s not, but you’d be amazed how similar it is.” That’s a statement that should give American voters pause, since Trump has driven his Scottish golf courses into the ground, financially speaking.
It may be no wonder that Trump’s response to Brexit is so astonishingly tone-deaf, given that just a couple weeks ago he didn’t know what Brexit was. But as Britain’s exit from the EU has risen to the top of the headlines, and is now one of the highest-profile stories in the world, Trump’s understanding of what’s going on doesn’t seem to have progressed beyond the tweet level. And even his tweets show that he doesn’t understand what he’s seeing, despite his claims to having foreseen the outcome of the vote.
One aspect of the UK Leave campaign Trump might want to know about (while hoping American voters don’t hear about it) is that one of the promises made if the UK left the EU was that money would be diverted to the National Health Service—only to have the leader of the UK Independence Party say immediately after the vote that that pledge was a “mistake.” That seems like a perfectly Trump way to campaign: “We’ll dedicate lots of money to something that benefits the vast majority of people. Ha ha ha no we totally won’t, either.”
Okay, not this, but the Supreme Court case from yesterday or so. How big a deal was the ruling on the Fourth Amendment. Sotomayor was really upset, and I don't love it, but people are in hysterics and I wonder if I'm missing something badly.
It's Wednesday, June 22 and Day 130 since Justice Antonin Scalia died and Mitch McConnell laid down his Supreme Court blockade: No meetings, no hearings, no votes on his replacement. It's also Day 97 since President Obama named Merrick Garland to be Scalia's replacement. What's the Senate doing today instead of considering the Supreme Court nominee?
They voted on legislation from Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain to chip just a little bit more of the Fourth Amendment away by allowing the FBI to skip that whole judicial review process when collecting electronic records of suspects. This is their answer to Orlando, even though it's not an answer at all. The FBI director, in fact, said it wouldn't have made a difference because the FBI had the shooter's electronic records, obtained with a judge's consent. Oh well.
And yes, this is the same Republican party that argued keeping people on the terrorist watch list from getting guns was a problem because there wasn't judicial process. No, it doesn't make any sense. But they almost won, anyway. It fell just 58-38, too close. Too close because too many Democrats have not been paying enough attention.
At least dozens of those Democrats did the right thing in joining fellow Democrats in the House to force a vote on gun safety. So that's a good reason for the Senate not to be getting much done in their own chamber.
This is a stunning, and yet completely predictable, story: The state of Massachusetts took charge of four schools with very low test scores (so-called “failing schools”).
It handed them over to turn-around corporations. So far, turmoil, disruption, and failure. Will anyone be held accountable? Has any state ever taken over a low-scoring school and “turned it around” successfully?
The Dever Elementary School in Dorchester has cycled through five principals over the past two school years and is seeking another one. Discipline is a constant problem. Some teachers are fleeing, and many students don’t show up. Most who do perform poorly.
This is not what was supposed to unfold when the state stepped in and took over the school in 2014. Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester had spoken boldly about the need for aggressive change, calling the Dever’s low performance “an injustice” while adding, “I know we can do better.’’
The promised turnaround has not happened — at least not yet — and the troubling picture raises questions about whether state education agencies can do a better job than local districts in lifting up schools stubbornly stuck at the bottom. In the Dever’s case, the state recruited as a receiver a local nonprofit, the Blueprint Schools Network, that had never run a school….
Imagine that! Giving a struggling school to a company that had never run a school. That makes sense (not).
The state education department has paid $1.3 million so far to Blueprint in management fees. In addition, the Boston school system funds Dever’s operating budget, which was $4.6 million this year. The school also received $585,000 in state and federal grants this year.
Blueprint took on a big job two years ago when it stepped inside the Dever, tucked between the University of Massachusetts Boston and a mixed-income housing development. The school had been struggling for more than a decade with low MCAS scores. Nearly 70 percent of students live in homes receiving welfare benefits and almost half lack fluency in English.
Blueprint immediately made waves by asking teachers and staff to reapply for their jobs and dismantling a popular dual-language program, prompting many middle-class families to leave. Only two teachers out of 47 stuck around….
Blueprint’s philosophy is based on five principles that Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. identified in researching New York charter school success: excellence in leadership and instruction; daily tutoring; increased instructional time; setting high expectations; and using data to improve instruction.
Fryer served as Blueprint’s president for a short time when it was founded in 2010, and last year Governor Charlie Baker appointed him to the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education….
The current principal–the fifth–lives in Florida. The company pays for her housing and for travel.
Connie Helton, who lives in Florida, is serving as interim principal. In an unusual move, Blueprint is paying her rent at a nearby apartment, totalling $10,000 so far, even though the principal’s job pays $140,000 annually. No other principal in the Boston Public Schools receives a housing allowance.
Blueprint also paid for two trips that Helton made to Florida to visit her family, costing less than $1,000.
Spengler said Helton was best suited to step in because she had been working with the Dever for Blueprint. He said a new leader should be selected soon.
“We know finding a leader is critical to long-term success,” said Spengler, adding, “I can’t say enough about the teachers who have taken this on every day. They are incredibly mission driven, and they are incredibly committed to those students.’’
But many of the teachers Blueprint brought in are leaving, too. Last year, 16 teachers departed, including four let go for performance issues and another four whose positions were cut. More plan to leave this year. Blueprint said it won’t have final numbers until this summer.
Several teachers, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak, described a school skidding off course. Although Blueprint has adopted an online platform to track student behavior, discipline continues to be a problem.
Castro seems like the Palin pick. Sounds like an insult--and in a real way it obviously is--but he's more intelligent and accomplished than her. That doesn't mean that he's ready to be president, though; it just speaks to the wide gap between Palin and president instead.
Hillary Clinton’s choice for a running mate has entered a new and more intense phase, according to Julie Pace and Lisa Lerer of the AP, who say Elizabeth Warren, Tim Kaine, and Julián Castro have been asked for "for reams of personal information" and are scheduling interviews with Clinton’s vetting team.
The case for and against Warren has been well-covered in the media, and Kaine seems like a safe, unremarkable pick. Castro is not ideologically controversial in the same way that Warren is, but would nonetheless be a choice with more upsides and downsides than Kaine. He’s been marked as a rising star in Democratic Party circles for years, underscored by his selection as a keynote speaker at the 2012 Democratic Convention when he was a young, fairly obscure San Antonio mayor.
Were Texas not such a rock-ribbed conservative state, the next logical move would have been a run for statewide office. Were his twin brother not already occupying the House district that contains his San Antonio base, a career in Congress could have been a fallback.
But neither of those were options, which left a Cabinet gig as his best chance to move up. And so when the post of Housing and Urban Development secretary opened and the Obama administration offered it to him he gladly accepted. The move to Washington only increased the buzz around Castro, and things like his speechwriter going to work for the Clinton campaign further intensify it.
And Castro really does seem like he’d do the job of vice president — attack dog on the stump, glad-hander in office — very well. But the questions about Castro center on the "maybe the president will die and then he’ll be president" aspects of the job rather than the day-to-day work of vice presidenting.
Who is this guy?
Julián Castro’s mother, Rosie Castro, was a Chicana activist in the city of San Antonio who was involved in the founding of the short-lived Raza Unida party. The party had support throughout the Mexican-American communities of the Southwestern United States and saw its greatest institutional success in the heavily Latino Rio Grande Valley areas of Texas before fizzing out amidst the general decline of radical politics in the late 1970s and growing Democratic Party courtship of the Hispanic vote.
Castro and his twin brother Joaquin (who is now a Congress member) were born in 1974, and Julián has recounted that his mother’s continued political activism was an enormous influence on his decision to enter politics.
Julián and Joaquin both attended Stanford in the early 1990s, both graduated from Harvard Law School in 2000, both took jobs at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld after graduation, and left together to form their own law firm in 2005.
They also both made the relatively unusual decision to follow up their elite legal education by moving back to San Antonio rather than a bigger commercial center. In 2001, Julián won election to a city council seat, and the following year Joaquin won a seat in the state legislature. In 2009, Julián won election as mayor — a relatively weak office in a city with a council-manager system — and in 2012 Joaquin won a seat in Congress.
San Antonio is a heavily Latino, safely Democratic city located in the very conservative state of Texas. Both Castros chose to hew close to the national party mainstream, in ideological terms, rather than try to tack right to win statewide office. This left Julián’s path to upward mobility after the mayorship unclear, and he accepted an offer to become HUD secretary in 2014.
The pros of vice presidential nominee Julián Castro
Castro would bring a lot of useful thematic and demographic balance to the Democratic ticket — a young Hispanic man to complement an older white woman.
Clinton, Castro, and Obama would in many ways form a perfect three-headed dragon to attack Donald Trump, represent the modern Democratic Party, and advance a policy agenda that’s distinctly progressive without adding any ideological innovations that would alarm Trump-skeptical white college graduates.
Castro also has a good eye for skating where the puck is going, politically speaking, and staying in the ideological mainstream of Democratic Party politics. This is a little boring, but it’s very vice presidential and also reflects Clinton’s own approach. His signature initiative as San Antonio’s mayor was starting a preschool program, and under his leadership the city also launched a bicycle sharing system that, though wildly inappropriate to the city’s actual urban form, put him in line with a fashionable cause in coastal urbanism.
The cons of vice presidential nominee Julián Castro
Well, he’s the secretary of Housing and Urban development and the former mayor of San Antonio — and that’s it.
Clinton does not particularly need to add gravitas or experience to her ticket, but she does need to be able to say with a straight face that her VP is well-qualified to take over in the Oval Office in the event of her death and incapacitation. Dan Quayle served four years in the US House of Representatives and eight years in the US Senate and was still considered a bit of a lightweight VP choice for George H. W. Bush.
Former HUD Secretary Jack Kemp was Bob Dole’s VP pick in 1996, but Kemp had 18 years of experience in the House under his belt, during which time he emerged as a major factional leader. Castro isn’t just young, his nose for the ideological sweet spot means he hasn’t really distinguished himself in any particular way.
Last but by no means least, Castro hasn’t used his time in Washington to particularly wow anyone with his grasp of policy. Even though he’s in a second-tier cabinet post, he’s not an obscure figure. You could imagine a world in which journalists’ Castro profiles were full of lines about how his resume’s not great but if you talk to the guy for 30 minutes you’ll come away so impressed with his intelligence and integrity that you hope his inexperience will be overlooked. It hasn’t really happened so far, and he’s arguably running out of time to make it happen.
Castro also gets needled for his apparently poor command of the Spanish language, a reflection of the fact that his family’s roots in San Antonio date back to 1920. As someone who does not speak Spanish and whose family also immigrated to the United States from Latin America in the 1920s, I don’t personally find this odd. But there is certainly a sense that a Spanish-speaker could be a more effective campaigner among Hispanic voters.
The bottom line
Vice presidents have often been selected with an eye toward complementing the existing strengths of the presidential candidate.
Clinton’s resume is more extensive and impressive than that of any president since the founding generation, so in that sense she might be able to get away with a running mate whose resume is unusually thin. Barack Obama and George W. Bush had very thin resumes, so they picked older VPs with much more extensive experience. Clinton could be tempted by a younger VP with much less experience. And Castro’s experience is concentrated in the one main area of American public policy — municipal government — where Clinton has never worked.
He’s also a candidate who’s mostly done things liberals like, but who the business community doesn’t have any particular problem with — an asset as Clinton tries to assemble a landslide coalition rather than a minimum winning one. He’s good at speeches, he’s reasonably charismatic, and he could help Clinton build bridges with younger voters while pressing the attack against Trump on the stump.
But could he be president? By putting him forward, Clinton would be asking America to trust her judgment on a person who is not qualified by conventional standards. A sense that Sarah Palin — an actual governor of a state, albeit a small and weird one — wasn’t up to the job seems to have hurt John McCain badly in 2008.
And Castro not only lacks experience at the highest levels of government, he lacks the kind of experience with national media appearances that would ensure he’ll be able to put doubts about his experience to rest.
A new report by the Urban Institute analyzing government projections in U.S. health care spending shows that it is growing at even slower rates than what was originally projected with the passage of Affordable Care Act. The study predicts that the U.S. will spend $2.6 trillion less on health care between 2014-2019 than what was initially anticipated when Obamacare was passed in 2010.
“Health care costs have had several years of really historic low spending during the period, so overall, public programs, private spending is all less than we thought it would be,” said Gary Claxton, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Each year we see spending going up 3 percent, 2 percent, whatever, and not 5 percent, and because that stuff compounds, when it continues to go up more slowly ... it starts to really add up.”
Following the recent viral photo (above) that takes a look at what the cast of Marvel's Captain America: Civil War would be if it came out in the 1990s, Reddit user Thamonsta goes even further and imagines what the movie's superhero cast would be if it came out a few decades before that.
The biggest political news in recent days has been Donald Trump’s abysmal performance in the polls. Most every national survey of voters has him losing the election.
His unfavorable rating has reached 70 percent.
His numbers are “at a low that no one, Republican or Democrat, has seen in the past three election cycles,” Phillip Bump explained in the Washington Post. “Looking at the window of time between 200 and 100 days before each of those elections, you can see that Trump has consistently polled worse than George W. Bush in 2004, John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012...The margin by which he trails Hillary Clinton now mirrors McCain's deficit to Barack Obama in 2008.”
Perhaps the polls will change. At this early date, I’d certainly caution Democrats and other Trump opponents against overconfidence. Many underestimated the candidate before. Future swing-state polls may tell a different story than recent national polls. And Democrats chose a nominee with many vulnerabilities to exploit.
Still, Trump’s numbers are awful right now. So I wondered how Rush Limbaugh was explaining that. Back in 2008, when Sarah Palin was the unqualified populist on the Republican ticket, there was a whole epistemically closed universe of conservative media sites that totally failed to grapple with her flaws or Barack Obama’s strengths. In 2012, many in the conservative media were convinced right up until election day that Americans would choose Mitt Romney rather than reelect Obama, never mind the polls.
This year, things are different.
Given how divided the right is about Trump, many conservative sites can’t help but be forums for debate. As Jonathan Chait points out, even some prominent apologists for the Palin phenomenon have come out swinging against candidate Trump.
But Limbaugh still operates in a closed bubble. He seldom has guests. His calls are all screened. He has an enormous audience of fans who call themselves “Dittoheads.”
Meanwhile, he’s long been more anti-left than conservative. He hates political correctness. And he cynically stokes white racial anxieties. Little wonder that he’s always been friendlier to Trump than to his short-sighted enablers in movement conservatism. There is no perfect way to see inside the bubble of Trump voters, but checking up on that radio show is as good a start as any.
And for conservatives who’ve been blind to Limbaugh’s flaws but see Trump’s clearly, the program is instructive too. Here’s the talk-radio host on Trump’s poll numbers:
We had two stories about the Trumpster yesterday. The poll that shows... This is a big deal, too, if this is correct, because this may... We're all sitting here wondering, "Have we lost the country?" You know, are...? Let me just be blunt. We all ask ourselves, "Are those of us who think the way we do in the minority? Are people who don't think and believe the way we do now in the majority?" We're asking ourselves this and we're waiting for elections to kind of tell us. And we had the poll yesterday.
I think this was a CBS poll. I get 'em confused. One was Reuters; one was CBS. And I'm doing it from memory. I don't have it in front of me. (And please don't anybody send it to me. I've got enough paper today. I don't need to be weighed down with more data. Everything I need's in my head.) The question was, approve or disapprove of Trump's comments after the Orlando event. Remember 25% of the people surveyed agreed with Trump and 51% opposed Trump, and thus agreed with Obama's take after the Orlando thing.
And people are saying, "How can that be, 25%?" So now people are asking, "Has Trump been that damaged?"
At this point, a person of Limbaugh’s intelligence who earnestly wanted to inform his audience might reflect on some of the reasons that Trump might be doing so poorly.
For example:
If you constantly insult women, who are about half of the population, and Hispanics, who are about 17 percent of the population, causing many people to think you’re a bigot, your poll numbers in a general election will tend to suffer.
If you respond to a major terrorist attack with a tweet that congratulates yourself for “being right,” then darkly insinuate that a twice-elected president with an approval rating greater than 50 percent might have somehow been involved, your poll numbers in a general election will likely suffer.
Here is how Limbaugh chose to discuss Trump’s bad poll numbers instead:
Trump hasn't got ads running. Trump's relying on free media that he's getting. Trump think's he's gonna be able to counter all the Hillary ads and all the expensive attacks they're are gonna make with free TV appearances, like it worked in the primaries. Karl Rove and other experts say, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. In the general election, you can't rely on free media. You can't control it." You've gotta have ads. You've gotta go out and fundraise and all this. See, look: 25% versus 51%!"
You have to ask yourself, if you assume the poll's accurate -- and that's a dangerous road to go down. "Well, we don't believe that poll. It could be made up!" But it's risky to start reacting that way rather than facing what may be the truth. So 25% disagree, and what was Trump's response? Trump's response to me was perfectly reasonable. This is getting out of hand. Nobody's doing anything to stop this. What we're doing or not doing is insane.
We were gonna have to put a moratorium here on immigration to find out what's going on and deal with it. It makes perfect sense to me. Twenty-five percent agree. Fifty-one percent disagree. And by disagreeing, that 51% sides with Obama. And, if you look, Obama's approval numbers are plus 50, 52, 53. Gee whiz, does that make any sense to anybody?
But then, folks, if you find out how... If you dig deep and find out how young people have been educated in this country, essentially the textbook's written by a guy named Howard Zinn. I'll explain in detail as the program unfolds. You might not have as much on trouble understanding. We've gotten to the point that 2-1/2 generations alive today having been raised having been taught what a rotten place this country is, how it was founded in a totally unjust and immoral way, and that it was not about liberty and freedom. It's not about any of the things that people think this country is about. That's just a myth that the propagandists pushed.
This is what young people have been taught for two generations in grade school, junior high.
Howard Zinn. Z-I-N-N. Look it up.
Confronted with the most flagrantly unqualified presidential candidate in living memory, a boorish, undisciplined, transparently polarizing nominee, a man reviled by principled movement conservatives whose explicit reasoning Limbaugh well knows, the talk-radio host tells his audience that a left-wing activist historian is responsible for Trump’s low poll numbers, because he poisoned the minds of America’s youth.
A major ideological movement long treated Limbaugh as one of its leading intellectuals. This cycle, that movement got exactly the result that it should have expected.
The "Trump Syllabus" listed is an interesting one.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has posted a mock syllabus for a course on the Trump phenomenon. Based on suggestions from a fair and balanced panel of faculty advisors,the reading list is pretty good (if too long for an actual course).
I was pleased to see Christopher Lasch included with classics of political philosophy and seminal works in American history. But the most helpful selections are probably those that deal with the collapse of urban liberalism a few generations ago. As the historian and TAC contributor Philip Jenkins puts it, “If you want to understand Trump, understand New York City in the era of Big Hair.”
Jenkins’s point is too often neglected. Academics and journalists have made strenuous efforts to uncover Trump’s links to the conservative movement or the populist tradition. But the most relevant context for his persona and political style is the combination of ethnic rivalry and media sensationalism that defined 1980s New York. The political theorist Nancy Rosenblum recommends Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Menas a fictional depiction of Trumpian politics. What about The Bonfire of the Vanities?
If I were teaching Trump 101, I might also deal with the European right differently. Instead of The Concept of the Political, I would have students read Schmitt’s Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Trump’s appeal doesn’t reflect Schmitt’s quasi-existentialist argument that liberalism doesn’t take life seriously enough. Trump simply claims that our institutions are run by dummies and weaklings who aren’t getting the job done.
Is this “authoritarianism”? The psychologist Dan McAdams would have students read The Authoritarian Personalitystudies conducted by a team led by the critical theorist Theodor Adorno. These studies have been criticized (by me among many others) for reducing politics to personality traits. But perhaps Adorno actually meant to challenge the assumption that there is an autonomous psychological sphere that exists prior to social influences. Getting to the bottom of that might have to wait for the graduate program in Trump Studies.
The Chronicle presents the syllabus in a spirit of fun, but it raises an important question. How should professors address students’ hopes and fears about this unusual election? If you were teaching politics in the fall semester, what would you assign? If you were a student, what would you want to read?
Samuel Goldman is assistant professor of political science and director of the Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom at George Washington University.
As you can see, the news of the day is Donald Trump's firing of war-time campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. Lewandowski never actually functioned as a campaign manager - more like what the modern campaign calls a body man or traveling press secretary. In recent months, Paul Manafort has, supposedly, been filling that role. So it's not clear what effect his dismissal will have other than signaling to worried Republicans some desire for change and steadying Trump himself with an act of demonstrative dominance.
My real interest is in a different question: where's the money?
What is curious about this iteration of the Chinese men's room meme is the ingenious English translation:
we aim to please,
you aim too please.
Although this is more of a paraphrase than a translation, it gets the idea across quite effectively.
What the signmaker has done is to take a clever, preexisting English admonition (for examples, see the WeChat source cited above beneath the picture) and match it with a hackneyed Chinese injunction. The result, at least to me, is both witty and effective, with the Chinese and the English mutually reinforcing each other.
The video was published on June 15, just three days ago, and — as of this posting — already has 2,726,177 views on YouTube and more than 8 million views on Facebook, which makes it phenomenally viral.
The title of the video is "Japanese Donald Trump Commercialトランプ2016". It was created by Mike Diva, who is a 28-year-old southern Californian and is described as "an American video director, special effects artist, musician and YouTube personality."
Now for a few linguistic notes.
Perhaps the most perplexing — and suggestive — of all the katakana words in the video is this one:
kanto カント It can stand for "Kant", "cant", and perhaps (although I'm not a hundred percent certain about this) "cunt"; also, according to the online jisho.org dictionary, the place names Kanth, Cant, Canth, Ceannt, and Kant. Since this "kanto カント" occurs following pelvic gestures by the Donald and precisely at the moment when there is much heart symbolism, I'm inclined to believe that it does not mean "Kant" or "cant", much less any of the place names, but rather "cunt".
"President" is katakanaized as "purejidento プレジデント".
Twice we see this on the television screen:
Toranpu izu goddo トランプイズゴッド, which is the katakana transcription of "Trump is God".
Fangdan Li spotted the following in the banner at the bottom of the news presentation on the TV screen in the video: Toranpu sekai no daitōryō ni senkyo トランプ世界の大統領に選挙. She remarks:
[This] feels strange to me. I think what the sentence is trying to say is "Trump is selected as the World President", but the correct way to say it in Japanese should be "Toranpu wa sekai no daitōryō ni tōsen shita トランプは世界の大統領に当選した".
There is more about the wording in the video that Language Log readers may wish to point out, but I'm fascinated by how the female voice at the end reads "Trump" as "Toranpu トランプ" and 2016 as "twenty sixteen".
At the bottom of the last screen is "Toranpu banzai トランプ万歳", but she doesn't read that. "Banzai!" was one of the few Japanese words I knew as a rural Ohio boy back in the 40s and 50s of last century.
A final note on transformers, namely, they have been around a long time. My son was playing with them in the early 80s, if not before.
Both this and the "Ask the Gays" one immediately cited are interesting.
The discussion about Donald Trump's exhortation to "Ask the gays" has focused on several linguistic dimensions: the definite article the, the nounification gay, and the pluralization of gays. This reminds me of (what I think is) a recent trend: the novel use of definite pluralized nounified adjectives, often in ironic contexts.
Thus "the poors":
[link] The potential for confusion is effectively nil (no one planning to go to the Commonwealth School will have their pilot chopper them over to the Commonwealth Academy, shrug, and assume that the exclusive private school has been transformed into a place where the poors go).
[link] There’s nothing more annoying than haughty upper-middle-class social justice dorks getting on their high horses about a company used by the poors despite the fact that their betters have decided it’s “not good for them.”
[link] That is the standard NYC way of dealing with poverty: "Just wall off the poors so the tourists can't see them anymore."
Or "the youngs" and "the olds":
[link] While hiring Hadid is a great way for the brand to bring in the youngs via a product category they can actually afford (makeup), this is a pretty huge get for the model, too.
[link] Nevertheless, teaching the olds to chat like their kids do is likely to be a huge win—especially if they can be convinced to pay for things.
[link] TBQH, not a day goes by that the subject of Millennials and who they are and what they want and why the olds should give a hoot about them doesn’t come up during multiple conversations.
[link] As the war between the youngs and the olds wages on, the film’s male characters confront their histories of sexism.
And random other examples (of uncertain relevance):
[link] My ability to remain "willowy" while all the beautifuls and perfects pounded beer, pigged out on pizza, and put on the freshman 15 made me feel proud.
[link] Perhaps this notion of agricultural land is not as critically important to the urbans as it is to the rurals.
By "recent trend" I mean "something I've noticed in the last decade or so" — I do understand that this marks me as old to those for whom a decade or two is their entire sentient lifespan.
Of course, there's centuries of precedent for turning English adjectives into nouns (round, open, cold, primary), for pluralizing the results (principals, flats, blacks, whites), and for using definite articles with such nounifications of adjectives, whether singular or plural.
Any ideas about the origins and progress of this pattern?
The OED gives sense 1.c. of old as "In pl. colloq. Old persons; (Austral. and N.Z.) spec. a person's parents":
1883 W. Besant All in Garden Fair (1885) ii. vii. 167 Young clever people..are more difficult to catch than the olds. 1890Pall Mall Gaz. 30 Aug. 2/2 Although the ‘Olds’ have been the pioneers..of the movement, the ‘Youngs’ show an impatience with them at every meeting. 1977Ripped & Torn vi. 6/2 No Olds Allowed: Runaways. 1982Sydney Morning Herald 18 Sept. 1/2 Teenagers..try to avoid hassles with the olds. 1990 A. Duff Once were Warriors vii. 92 Whassa madda anyway, your olds been at it again?
Does this really come from Down Under? Or was there an independent invention in the U.S.?
Finally, there's a computer game that accurately simulates the political reaction after a mass shooting.How many thoughts and prayers can you rack up following these tragedies?
One of the odder things about modern zoning codes as applied in much of the Northeastern United States is that they generally would prohibit the construction of existing neighborhoods that people live in and love.
Take Somerville, Massachusetts, a nice town adjacent to Boston and Cambridge that’s chock full of what's come to be known as “missing middle” housing — structures that are denser than a detached single-family home sitting on a large lot but smaller than a high-rise condo building. It’s not the kind of place that everyone would want to live — hard to find a big yard, for example — but plenty of people do enjoy living there, and even more people might enjoy it if it were possible to build even more houses.
But it generally isn’t. Not due to a zoning code that strictly mandates the preservation of the city’s existing character, but due to a zoning code that says the city as it actually exists is totally illegal.
Here’s a map of the entire city highlighting which existing structures conform to the existing zoning:
There are only 22 of them. And as Daniel Hertz points out at City Observatory, “this calculation actually doesn’t include parking requirements, which might very well do away with those last 22 conforming buildings.”
Somerville is an extreme case but by no means a unique one. A recent New York Times study showed that 40 percent of Manhattan buildings are illegal; basically everything (the corner stores, the English basement rental units, the narrow houses) about the Georgetown neighborhood in DC is illegal; and so on and so forth throughout the historically settled parts of the urban Northeast.
The fact that there’s evidently nothing wrong with these illegal neighborhoods and illegal houses should give us some pause as to whether all these anti-building rules are necessary. There’s no need for every American town to be built up to Somerville levels of density (indeed, you could fit 200 million people into Massachusetts at Somerville’s population density), but what’s so wrong with some new neighborhoods growing as dense as historic ones?
Hungarian TV station M4 Sport's Mohay Bence was reporting from the Stade de France, in Paris, on Monday, after the Ireland vs. Sweden Euro 2016 match, when a group of happy Irish gentlemen surrounded him and crashed his report.
According to Marquette’s latest polling out of Wisconsin, they have Hillary Clinton leading +7 among registered voters, but +9 among likely voters. They also have Russ Feingold leading the Senate race +4 among registered voters, but +9 again among likely voters.
Both Clinton and Feingold will win Wisconsin in November, but what’s interesting here isn’t that they’re winning a state they’re supposed to win but rather the gap between the registered and likely voter screens. In short, Democrats always do better among registered voters. We’re not the ones that have trouble getting out our voters. The likely voter screen always looks better for Republicans. Until now.
If you look at Marquette’s poll around the same time-frame in 2012, it had Barack Obama leading by 6 among likely voters, but by 14 among registered votes.
This is like flushing toilets suddenly reversing direction, or gravity working up instead of down. This doesn’t happen. But if anyone could defy the laws of physics, it would be Donald Trump. You may remember him as the guy who said today, “There's nobody who understands the horror of nuclear better than me," not even the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks. And now, he’s doing what no Republican before him has managed—suppress his own vote.
The National Rifle Association on Wednesday announced that the group would be happy to meet with Donald Trump, after he said he would talk to the gun rights group about not allowing people on the terror watch list and no fly list to buy guns.
Happy to meet @realdonaldtrump. Our position is no guns for terrorists—period. Due process & right to self-defense for law-abiding Americans
In its first year of publication, Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more copies in America than the Bible did.
The novel catapulted Harriet Beecher Stowe onto the world stage, and by 1854, only two years after publication, the novel had been translated into 37 different languages. Attacking the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced free states to assist in recovering escaped slaves, Stowe ignited the powder keg of popular sentiments surrounding the tragedy of American slavery. She gave us the memorable figures of Uncle Tom and Little Eva, and the daring escape of Eliza Harris across the floating ice of the Ohio River. Today, on what would be Stowe’s 205th birthday, we have an opportunity to reassess her contribution to American letters, and to American culture at large.
As a professor of American literature, I face a challenge every time I teach Stowe’s famous book in the classroom. Her stock characters, her melodramatic set pieces, and the moralizing of her narrator grate on 21st-century readers. Yet this strange, sensational novel remains one of the most important works in our cultural heritage.
Is it, we might ask, just an artifact of our history? Do we dutifully overlook Stowe’s imperfect artistry for the sake of the admirable (if dated) anti-slavery message of her book? But as we read it, we find that inexplicable power surging between the lines of her prose. “You’re going to hate it,” I tell my students, “and then you’re going to love it.”
So why do I teach Uncle Tom’s Cabin? I teach it not only because of its anti-slavery message, but just as importantly because of the way that Stowe delivers it. That is, I think Stowe’s great contribution to American culture lies not merely in rejecting slavery, but in the amazing narrative technique that deeply moved millions of readers. Stowe’s powerful novel works not so much by arguing against the evils of slavery (although it does), but rather by bringing readers face-to-face with a suffering fellow human being. In that encounter, she creates dramatic moments of empathy that—for Stowe—serve as the necessary foundation for any future social or legal action. Her approach, even a century and a half after slavery’s abolition, remains extremely relevant to us today, as we face our own array of moral and societal evils. Stowe offers a fundamentally democratic approach to solving national problems: we must first change hearts if we want to change laws.
By the time Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, all the arguments for and against slavery had already been made. Legislators and thinkers on both sides of this divisive issue had used philosophy, economics, science, law, and even the Bible to make their case. But in Stowe’s mind, both argument and law had failed the American people, and the United States needed an approach that appealed instead to the human heart. Even for many Americans opposed to slavery, the issue remained somewhat abstract; but Stowe’s novel brings her readers into a fictional encounter with an individual slave, where human empathy—the power of shared feeling—does the work that other forms of persuasion had failed to do.
To bring about this encounter, Stowe consciously draws readers into the world of her novel. In the fourth chapter, titled “An Evening in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” she even addresses us directly with this invitation: describing Tom’s home, a “small log building,” Stowe’s narrator says, “Let us enter into the dwelling.” Indeed, the title of the novel itself is Uncle Tom’s Cabin so that when we begin to read, we enter the book itself, as if we were entering the cabin.
This entrance leads to an encounter. In an era noisy with abstract arguments for and against slavery, Stowe cuts through the debate to bring her readers directly into personal contact with the slaves in question. No longer simply a national “issue,” or “problem,” the slaves now have names, faces, stories, and recognizable human sufferings: Eliza, Harry, Uncle Tom, and Aunt Chloe, within the cozy space of Uncle Tom’s cabin.
What this personal encounter creates, Stowe believes, is conversion—a necessary first step to any kind of social or legal action. In the ninth chapter of her novel, titled “In Which It Appears that a Senator Is But a Man,” Stowe takes readers into another home, that of the fictional Ohio senator John Bird, who is personally opposed to slavery but a vocal advocate of the Fugitive Slave Act. The senator defends this contradiction to his wife, protesting, “Mary! Mary! My dear, let me reason with you.” We can hear Stowe’s own frustration in Mrs. Bird’s response: “I hate reasoning, John,—especially reasoning on such subjects. There’s a way you political folks have of coming round and round a plain right thing.” For Stowe, American reasoning can no longer be trusted, because politicians have sacrificed the good and the true upon the altar of the pragmatic.
But when the escaped slave Eliza Harris, fleeing the Kentucky master who tried to sell her child, arrives on Senator Bird’s doorstep in distress, Stowe creates an encounter that changes the heart of the legislator. The abstract issues of law and property collide with the physical presence of a suffering woman and her child. The senator, struck by Eliza’s real sorrow, and by her fierce love for her child—for he, too, is a father—rejects the Fugitive Slave Act and breaks the law. Stowe’s narrator tells us that, before this encounter,
his idea of a fugitive was only an idea of the letters that spell the word,—or , at the most, the image of a little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and bundle, with “Ran away from the subscriber” under it. The magic of the real presence of distress,—the imploring human eye, the frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony,—these he had never tried.
Here it is the vaguely Eucharistic “real presence” of an actual escaped slave (Stowe claimed to have conceived the novel during a communion service) that converts Senator Bird. Empathy—the compassionate experience of another’s suffering—rather than logic or debate, has won. Senator Bird himself helps Eliza escape, driving her by carriage at night to a safe location. Empathy has turned into real charitable action, for as Mrs. Bird says to her husband, “Your heart is better than your head.”
Stowe does more than change the hearts of her characters; she acts out this life-changing encounter for her readers in hopes that we will respond in kind. To move us in this way, she leaves one tragedy unanswered by the resolution of the novel: the brutal murder of Uncle Tom at the hands of Simon Legree. Tom’s death, for all its melodrama and heavy-handed Christian allegory, retains real dramatic power and clinches Stowe’s appeal to empathy. The characters in the novel cannot save Tom. Now it is we whose hearts must change to end the horror of human slavery. Stowe leaves it to us to decide what comes next.
Harriet Beecher Stowe made her mark on American culture, and she remains one of our most powerful literary advocates for human dignity and equality. To celebrate Stowe’s birthday, why not find a copy of her novel and pay another visit to Uncle Tom’s Cabin?
Kelly Scott Franklin is an assistant professor of English at Hillsdale College, where he teaches American literature and the great books.
Catherine Soanes asks: Is ‘themself’ a real word? She says, “Judging by the debate on the Net, themself stirs up much passion, with several pundits confidently declaring that ‘themself is not a word’. Well, much as I hate to be the bearer of bad news, themselfis a word and it has a long history to boot.” That history is quite interesting:
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records themself from the 14th century. It doesn’t have a separate entry of its own, but a note at the entry for themselves informs us:
in standard English themself was the normal form to c1540, but disappeared c1570. Themselfs, themselves appears c1500, and became the standard form c1540.
So for around 150 years, themself (though ending with the singular suffix –self) was considered to be correct when used to refer to a plural subject. A little more OED-delving shows that a similar situation existed when it came to first person plural reflexive pronouns. The form ourself is first recorded in the 14th century, when it was an accepted usage. There must have been a move towards pluralizing the singular suffix –self to –selfs or –selves for plural reflexive pronouns in the early to mid 16th century, when the forms ourselves and themselves first appeared.
Returning to the OED note, themselfs (with only 26 examples on the OEC) is no longer acceptable and has largely dropped out of use, meaning that for almost 500 years the main standard reflexive pronoun which corresponds to the plural forms they and them is the plural form themselves […].
She winds up with this sensible recommendation:
Given that it’s now largely acceptable to use they, them, or their instead of the more long-winded ‘he or she’, ‘him or her’, or ‘his or her’ (especially in conjunction with indefinite pronouns such as anyone or somebody) it might be argued that, logically, it should also be OK to use themself, it being viewed as the corresponding singular form of themselves. However, this isn’t yet the case, so beware of themself for now!
I myself occasionally use themself; it sounds a little strange, but I feel I’m helping advance the shining future.
Chris Christie, the sitting governor of New Jersey, has been diminished to an errand boy for Donald Trump’s campaign, according to a New Yorker report published online on Monday.
Yay! I love that he thinks this will win over enough people to win the nomination.
Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump hinted Monday that President Barack Obama is either naive about the threat of terror or actively working with extremists in a Fox News interview after the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
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City of Somerville
