Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, August 6, 2024
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54 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Minor news story of salience to my family that has been mentioned here — Newbern AL.has fully empowered Patrick Braxton as its first black mayor and agreed to hold elections in future as (I suppose) incorporated cities are required to do.
@JohnMc: Whoa. That’s a long time coming
“He posed a dead bear with a bicycle in Central Park”
Well then.
The US Supreme Court has told Misery AG Andrew Bailey to sit down and shut up. If only the useless pos would.
Still no edit function for me, so eta: @OzarkHillbilly:
Because, of course.
@MarkedMan:
RFK JR. had apparently planned to skin it and eat it, but the cub corpse had deteriorated too much.
@CSK:
Oh, he said all kinds of things. My guess is that his “falconing” involved a lot of scotch and perhaps other substances and what he intended to do shifted from minute to minute as random thoughts fired, creating quickly dying sparks of haphazard thoughts in his sodden brain. Just my theory.
@MarkedMan:
He claimed the woman driving the car ahead of him hit the cub, but I always assumed he had done it.
The VP Pick is Walz!
@MarkedMan:
He was a long-term heroin addict.
TIM WALZ IS HARRIS’S PICK FOR VP.
Smotrich: Might be ‘justified and moral’ to cause 2 million Gazans to die of hunger, but world won’t let us
It took the world how many years to stop the Nazis from annihilating Jews?
Not sure how much this will tickle Professor Taylor* but I see that Governor Tim Walz is a member of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party. Not much of a difference from the National Democratic organization I suspect.
*I notice that “retired” is missing from Professor Taylor’s bio since the Great Migration. Somehow I don’t think he has returned to work.
From “never again” to “yet again” during the lifespan of the next generation. And not even an astounding change at that. Just people being what we are.
Full quote:
IOW, he believes it would be OK to starve out Gaza until hostages are released. Then goes on to regret that international pressure is forcing Israel to provide humanitarian aid despite the lack of reciprocity. Bad enough, no need to bowdlerize.
Harris and Waltz are getting the band back together to do to America what they did to working class POC neighborhoods in Minneapolis back in 2020.
Don’t worry the razing will be “mostly peaceful”
@JKB:
So don’t have your marching orders yet? Give it a few hours and Fox will let you know what lies to tell. Do let us know. It saves us having to watch.
@Michael Reynolds: I’m not sure that the moral ground of starving third parties who have no/limited control over the actions of the co-principal is the ground I’d choose to take my stand on. But, we all must take our stands on whatever ground is available.
I guess.
James Fallows called it at the end of July. Here’s his column on Walz and tells you a lot about a good man:
https://fallows.substack.com/p/election-countdown-99-days-to-go
@Michael Reynolds:
The George Floyd protests are the marching orders, methinks. What else to they have to hit Walz on – his ex-military, non-lawyer, former football coach background?
Trump’s “quiet part” pitch is that it takes an authoritarian to keep you safe and control inflation. The riotous parts of the MN protests are, like the misogynist/racist attack lines for Harris, the lines of attack that the GOP will favor even as it underscore the party’s pathologies. They won’t be able to help themselves.
LOL:
@Jen:
I am the stick-in-the-mud in every office who insists on oxford commas and the Strunk & White way of apostrophizing. My argument, “would you say ‘that’s ‘Harris’ ball” or “that’s ‘Harris-es’ ball?”
@Jen: This is the best argument for just referring to her as Kamala. It’s easier to struggle with the pronunciation than to struggle with the apostrophes.
@Neil Hudelson: I’m glad her husband has a different last name so we don’t have to pluralize and add the possessive.
The Harrises’ houseplants’ soil’s pH was too high.
The number of times I have to read that to be sure it’s right, and I’m still not 100% sure.
@Neil Hudelson:
@Gustopher:
This is how I know I’ve found my tribe! 😀
@Neil Hudelson: When the convention changed in the handbook our department used, I just told my students that if they couldn’t/didn’t want to try to keep track, to just always use /’s/ except for whose and ours*.
*There may be one or two others. It’s been a long time since I’ve cared.
@Gustopher: I used to teach this stuff and am not 100% sure. There are things I would always look up, and I always brought the handbook to lectures just in case I’d need it.
@Scott F.:
Trump tried that in 2020 in an attempt to flip Minnesota, and it utterly failed. In fact, the state was a perfect microcosm of the Trump-era realignment: Trump did well in the rural parts of the state, but Biden absolutely killed it in the Twin Cities, including the suburbs that Trump was trying to scare-monger into voting for him. If it didn’t work when the Floyd protests were actually happening, why should it suddenly work now?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I got really sick really fast of writing “it’s means it is” in the margins of student papers.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: My actual last name does not end in an “s” but there is a very common variant that does. Even when I am pluralizing it (say, taking about a bunch of my family members), when I form the possessive I use ‘s rather than s’. I die inside a little whenever I do it, but it is slightly less awful than if I were to give in to the cretins that want to add an s to my name.
@JKB: “Harris and Waltz are getting the band back together to do to America what they did to working class POC neighborhoods in Minneapolis back in 2020.”
Yes, attacking the Democrats from the left to prop up two wannabee fascists is guaranteed to work! Combine that with demanding Kamala prove she’s actually black, and you’ve got a landslide in the making!
@Neil Hudelson:
Back when we had downvotes, I got many for expressing dislike of the Oxford comma. But I came around to using them.
I admit that I have a weakness for non-traditional punctuation.
The issue I have with Harris’ vs. Harris’s: the latter looks inbred.
The technical reason is plural vs. singular, no?
Adding an ‘es’ to Harris looks wrong to me, is that actually a thing? But I would pronounce it as if I did, even if I wrote something like Harris’ jibe.
/full disclosure: stupidly gave one of my children a name ending in ‘s’ and still don’t know what to do
@Scott F.: Thinking of Repub pathologies how long will it be before some scum begins to intimate there might have been meetings with young boys on the football team that were questionable? I’m so sick of all this garbage and how the these times have warped our thinking.
Apologies to Margaret Wise Brown
@Franklin: Do you add “es” to “bus,” “kiss,” and “miss” to mark plural? Why would a name be different? (But, yeah, I know we get confused on the point.)
In case ya’ll were wondering… yes… Matt did break the site again.
Ironically it was trying to make it more secure… by taking it off line.
On the plus side, we went from being off line for 48 hours to being offline for about an hour and a half. So that’s progress!
Right…?
Right?!!!
@JKB:
Of course Trump is promising to protect all cops by further extending immunity. So if he had his way, Chauvin and friends never would have gone to jail.
Trump/Vance 2024: A knee on every minority member’s neck (and plenty of white folks too… but they’re worth the sacrifice)
The MAGAs hate Walz because he’s a Commie, but they’re thrilled with his selection since it will ensure Harris’s loss.
@Matt Bernius:..Right…? Right?!!!
Keep up the good work.
If I was trying to fix all this we would have to revert to clay tablets and a stylus.
@Neil Hudelson: I believe the Strunk & White rule is based on where the emphasis lands in the word ending in S. If the emphasis is on the last syllable, its s’. Otherwise its ‘s. The simpler question is whether its awkward to pronounce. The easy example is “Jesus’,” and here Harris’s or Walz’ (though I could go either way on Walz).
Trump appears to be having a wee meltdown this afternoon.
His current fantasy is that Biden, bereft and angry from having the campaign stolen from him, will storm the Democratic Convention to tear it back.
He so, so desperately wants to be running against Biden and not Harris.
Pathetic little man.
@Matt Bernius:
Do you work for Crowdstrike? And can you get me a job in their chaos dept?
(just teasing)
@CSK:
Huh? wha?
Is this like my MN inlaws totally convinced that Walz was going to lose (twice) and hate him because something something taxes?
Listen up Trump: JOE BIDEN IS STILL THE PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES of AMERICA and YOU ARE NOT!
@just nutha: I was only thinking about the possessive when I wrote that post, not the plural. Gustopher had pointed out that Kamala’s husband’s last name is not Harris so we wouldn’t need the plural of it, which was after Neil H had proposed Harris-es’ … and well it all got confused who was talking about precisely what!
@Joe: I’d be surprised if that’s the rule from Strunk and White, but I never used it. That suggestion only complicates matters by adding one more variable to remember (and Jesus may not be a good example given that the primary accent on nom-romance languages pronunciations is on the “Hay” and not the “Seuss”).
@Jen: Based on the news about the balloting (?) of convention delegates and the declaration that she had won the nomination officially, I thought that the convention had already happened last week. Of course, I don’t follow convention news for either party at all, so it’s an easy mistake for me.
@Jen, @Mister Bluster: I take it that this news item was from a news agency–or that Trump has hired a writer who can spell better. That’s disappointing. I like a slice or two of unconstitutional stollen at Christmastime.
Our dear, departed @Teve would be alllllll up in this apostrophe conversation. 😉
RFK, Jr. wanted to eat the bear cub? Bears are big time carriers of trichinosis. Was the brain worm lonely?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
For a singular subject, S&W say that adding apostrophe-s is never wrong, but that in some cases other things may also be acceptable. I found that liberating, as a youth.
I can’t double-check that, or quote the whole section, because we purged our home of all copies a while back, on the grounds that it is no longer authoritative (if it ever was) and that anything we needed to know could be checked online.
@Slugger: Worst game meat I ever ate. Greasy, smells bad and tastes worse.
@Mr. Prosser: That’s what I’ve always heard. I’m not a hunter and have only eaten wild game a couple o’ three times.
Essential reading for everyone truly interested in AI