Maskless Nadler says the violence from Antifa in Portland is a myth.

I ran into Jerry Nadler in DC and asked him to disavow the Antifa violence/rioting in Portland.

His response?

“THATS A MYTH” pic.twitter.com/veImyE2rju

— Essential Fleccas 🇺🇸 (@fleccas) July 27, 2020

I can't tell what he's calling a myth — maybe only the role of Antifa — but he sure scurried out of there. Did not want to discuss any details.

He calls it "a myth spread that's being spread only in Washington D.C." That's plainly untrue.

IN THE COMMENTS: Earnest Prole said:

A month ago you were saying it was “horrible” to hold Antifa responsible for the violence and disorder accompanying the protests, and now you’re mocking Jerry Nadler?

I appreciate that he provided a link to my June 22nd post, but let's take a close look at exactly what I said, because there is absolutely no contradiction. It begins with a quote from the WaPo "Fact Checker":

"There has not yet been a single confirmed case in which someone who self-identifies as antifa led violent acts at any of the protests across the country. The president and his administration have placed an outsize burden of blame on antifa, without waiting for arrest data and completed investigations. This is not the first time Trump has pointed to antifa as a shadowy nemesis. But the misinformation created by his continued insistence of antifa’s involvement has led to more chaos and violence in an already turbulent moment. As always, the burden of proof rests with the speaker — and the administration has provided no evidence, only assertions that it has evidence. Trump earns Four Pinocchios."

Write Meg Kelly and Elyse Samuels at the Washington Post "Fact Checker," addressing the many statements by Trump that the Black Lives Matter protests involve antifa.

I go on to connect that to the recent problem at the NYT and quote an earlier post of mine:

This, by the way, was also the problem the NYT had with the Tom Cotton op-ed. As I said when the NYT first expressed regret for publishing the piece:

A particular problem with Cotton's piece was that it said "left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes," but the NYT has not yet reported that the violent element was antifa. Its news story on June 1 had said "conservative commentators are asserting with little evidence that antifa, the far-left anti-fascism activist movement coordinates the riots and looting."

Whether Cotton was right or wrong about the facts, there is a problem with factual assertions in op-eds. I've written op-eds for the NYT, and it was with a very short deadline and I was trusted to get the facts in order. I don't know how much the Times intends to change its process, but I assume it wants and needs to have some distance between itself and the writers it brings in from the outside to give a hot take on a breaking controversial story.

I added: "Why isn't there more reporting in the NYT about who's responsible for the violence and disorder accompanying the protests?"

I'm mildly glad to see the WaPo Fact Checker addressing this topic, but it's pathetic that this basic level of journalistic inquiry is coming so late. It is, however, horrible that Trump (and Cotton) have spread this meme. Maybe they are right and the Fact Checker is wrong, but it's not enough to luck out in the end and have said something that turns out to be the truth. We should care about the truth for the sake of truth and care about it all along. There's so little of that these days.

You see my use of the word "horrible." Earnest Prole wrongly paraphrased me as saying "it was 'horrible' to hold Antifa responsible." I clearly said that I didn't know one way or the other and I wanted the journalists and the politicians to focus on getting the facts. It's not horrible to hold Antifa responsible if Antifa is responsible.

In this post today, I said "I can't tell what [Nadler is] calling a myth — maybe only the role of Antifa...." I'm still showing you that I don't know who is doing the violence. The interview in the clip is cut off. I'd like to see the whole thing. Is Nadler denying that there is violence in Portland? It's very weird to say that, so I'm inclined to guess that he was only saying that it's a myth to say it's Antifa. Now, he's still plainly wrong — as I said above — to say that it's only in Washington that people are saying the violent element in the protests is Antifa.

So I'm completely consistent with my June 22nd statement. I want to know who is doing the violence! Is it Antifa? Where is the investigative journalism? Are there peaceful protesters who deserve recognition for their dedication to nonviolence, whose cause is undermined by a separate set of people? I still don't know. I would like Nadler to issue a clear statement telling us what he knows and what he believes is going on.

Is "Antifa" a useful word or concept? Is it a shibboleth of the right?

About the teenage boys playing in the snow behind the Weather Channel reporter Justin Michaels last night....

Did anyone other than Meade notice that one of them yelled "Grab her by her pussy"?

ADDED: You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

IN THE COMMENTS: Earnest Prole said:

Might it have actually been “fuck her right in the pussy”?

If so, it's a viral meme that has nothing to do with Trump's Access Hollywood remarks.

More here.

Meade says:

I guess I had a case of Trumpbrain. New Media Meade regrets the error.

SO: I guess the boys really weren't out there thinking about Trump. They were just thinking about pussy. You can do that independently of Trump. Pussy is not a Trump-owned brand. It's more that pussy owns Trump than that Trump owns pussy. Which explains the banality of the original Access Hollywood story. But if Trump can get you to think of him when you think of pussy, he's got quite a brand.

"DoggoLingo, sometimes referred to as doggo-speak, 'seems to be quite lexical, there are a lot of distinctive words that are used'..."

"... says Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch. "It's cutesier than others, too. Doggo, woofer, pupper, pupperino, fluffer — those have all got an extra suffix on the end to make them cuter.' McCulloch also notes DoggoLingo is uniquely heavy on onomatopoeias like bork, blep, mlem and blop.... The origin of "bork" itself is less clear, but it's clearly onomatopoeic. It's perhaps most well-known thanks to Gabe the Dog, a tiny floof of a Miniature American Eskimo/Pomeranian whose borks have been remixed into countless classic tunes. Jurassic Bork, The Bork Files, Doggos of the Borkribbean, Imperial Borks — the list goes on and on."

I'm reading "Dogs Are Doggos: An Internet Language Built Around Love For The Puppers" at NPR.com. It's from last April, but NPR.org is featuring it on its front page today. Why? I can think of 2 reasons: 1. NPR thinks people are stressed from all the scary news — hurricane, race-focused protest, Trump — and need something reliably nice nice nice, or 2. The new story "What's Making These Dogs In Mumbai Turn Blue?" is getting a lot of clicks so they went digging back in the archive for something else about dogs.

Speaking of 2 reasons, I was interested in the "doggo-speak" story for 2 reasons, both relating to the infusion of a fun new life into a heretofore negative word:

1. "Bork" — based on the defeat of the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork — has meant "To defame or vilify (a person) systematically, esp. in the mass media, usually with the aim of preventing his or her appointment to public office." That's an OED definition. The verb "to Bork" is actually in the OED. Interestingly enough, the oldest usage plays up the dog-related similarity to "bark": "I think this time the local minorities are ‘Borking’ up the wrong." That's the L.A. Times in 1987. But the usage really got going when Clarence Thomas came along: "'We're going to Bork him,’ the National Organization for Women has promised. But if they succeed, liberals may discover that they have Borked themselves." (1991 New Republic).

2. "Doggo" — this has been slang — in the phrase "lying doggo," meaning to lie low and keep hidden — since the 19th century, where the first usage, according to the OED, was "He had been a guest, after lying doggoh for some time, at one of Blobbs' quiet little suppers." I'm most familiar with the word as it comes up in the Samuel Beckett play "Endgame." Clov has a flea and shakes a lot of insecticide powder into his pants. Hamm asks "Did you get him?" and Clov says "Looks like it. Unless he’s laying doggo." There's then some byplay about "laying" versus "lying," with the punchline "If he was laying we'd be bitched."

IN THE COMMENTS: Earnest Prole said:

Reason 3 for why NPR is featuring it today: It's National Dog Day.

Never heard of it before, but it checks out in Google News. National Dog Day.

"When we found this house, it became, like, the clubhouse, where guys would go every day and hang out... like a street gang."

"And it was a place to go, like a workshop... And this had been a dream of mine: If we could only have the clubhouse, where we could go every day, and we could lock ourselves away from the world and create something that we are meant to do, that we are on a mission to do."

I'll leave that quote unattributed for while. I didn't transcribe it to make a guessing game, but apart from the context, it's some fascinating psychology, perhaps distinctly masculine.

ADDED: Meade read this post and, without reading any comments, immediately gave the right answer: "He's talking about Big Pink."

Earnest Prole, at 7:30 a.m., gives a wrong answer that I believe is a humorous way to reveal he knows the right answer:

Obviously you’re referring to Hell House, an old cabin with a tin roof located in the Florida woods where the band One Percent wrote and perfected their music in the blazing Southern heat. You may know One Percent as the band later called Lynyrd Skynyrd. Sadly, Hell House and Lynyrd Skynyrd took the night train to the big adios, as we all shortly will.

3 minutes later, perhaps taking Earnest Prole's comments as a prompt, Amadeus 48 spells out the correct answer:

Robbie Robertson talking about "The Band" and music from Big Pink?

Here's Robbie Robertson on the Marc Maron podcast that went up this morning.

The shimmy, part 2.

Earlier today, I raised the question whether that shoulder thing that Hillary Clinton did during the debate...



... is properly called the shimmy. I took the position that what makes that shoulder shake a shimmy is if you're doing it to jiggle your breasts.

In the comments, MayBee said: "Yes! That's why it was so creepy!"

Tim in vermont said: "She sort of reminds me of Ursula in The Little Mermaid as she sang 'Poor deplorable souls'":



EDH linked to a "Gilligan's Island" clip of Ginger singing "I Want to Be "Loved by You" and asks: "If Hillary is Ginger, does that make Trump MaryAnn? If so, Trump wins." But I just want to say Ginger only wishes she could shimmy like her sister Marilyn:



She couldn't aspire to anything higher... than the presidency!

Noton Yalife and Earnest Prole both say: "That's a Bingo!"

Delving deeply into the question whether the Chinese have a word for "nerd."

You remember the discussion after NYT columnist David Brooks asserted that the Chinese don't have a word for "nerd." Victor Mair at Language Log has a lot to say on the subject:

First of all, we have to know what "nerd" itself means.  It doesn't just signify a bookish or pedantic person, but rather someone who is socially inept or square (try finding an exactly equivalent word for that in Chinese!), perhaps, but not necessarily, because of a consuming commitment to intellectual or technical pursuits....

I asked about thirty native speakers of various Sinitic languages and topolects how they would say "nerd" in Chinese.  Around half of them flat out said that you cannot say "nerd" in Chinese, but must borrow the English word.  Roughly another quarter mentioned shūdāizi ("bookworm"), or variants thereof, while another quarter listed all sorts of colorful terms meaning — more or less — "fool; blockhead; dolt; dunce; dullard; simpleton; numskull"; etc.), none of which are really comparable to "nerd".  I'll just list a few of the more interesting Chinese terms of the latter sort...

Much more at the link, including the awareness among native Chinese speakers of the nerd/geek distinction (and familiarity with this Venn diagram).

IN THE COMMENTS: Earnest Prole said:

For a subtler definition of nerd see this Venn diagram.