"These endless arguments prompted efforts to better moderate discussion. The resulting desire, on the part of posters, to depose the moderators, or 'mods,' has been a constant of the Internet’s existence ever since—on Usenet groups, on Reddit, and on every form of social media. Who are the mods? The big ones are establishment institutions that aim to govern and to regulate, to maintain credentials and decorum. The mainstream press, obviously, which includes me and my employer, is a mod, and we are the target of endless ire, often rightly. The academy—particularly its most élite schools, the Harvards and the Yales—is another mod. But the mods have been weakening for some time.... The mods do have supporters: 'normie' liberals and conservatives who still put a degree of faith in the expert and media classes and who want, more than anything, to restore some bright line of truth so that society can continue to function...."
The article title "Arguing Ourselves to Death" is a play on the book title, "Amusing Ourselves to Death." The book, by Neil Postman, came out in 1985, and mostly took aim at television.
The article's subtitle reference to "the ideology of the Internet" is also inspired by "Amusing Ourselves to Death." There's this quote from the book:
"... delivering a stark rendition of 'Nothing Compares 2 U' in tribute to the late Sinéad O’Connor. Flanked by Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman of Prince’s legendary Revolution, Lennox concluded the balled by raising her fist in solidarity with Gaza: 'Artists for cease-fire!'"
Was that "solidarity with Gaza" or an attempt to resolve the longstanding conflict between O'Connor and Prince? No way for the 2 dead artists to declare a truce, but maybe some will see Lennox and Wendy and Lisa as proxies for the departed disputants.
But if we want to talk about symbolism, how does a raised fist represent a cease fire? Doesn't the fist let slip that a cease fire is wanted so that the struggle can continue?
CORRECTION: This post title was originally "It a new year." Yes, I started the new year of blogging with an error. The very first word, too. Glad I got that out of the way. What was your first mistake?
That was your first mistake/You took your lucky break and broke it in two/Now what can be done for you?/You broke it in two....
"Since late July, engagement on X posts linking to the New York Times has dropped dramatically. The drop in shares and other engagement on tweets with Times links is abrupt, and is not reflected in links to similar news organizations including CNN, the Washington Post, and the BBC...."
We're told this might have something to do with "a broad shift in platforms over the last five years... toward a splintering in which Facebook has largely gotten out of the news business, Twitter has shifted increasingly toward becoming a conservative media company, and Google and Apple are the remaining the platform giants interested in distributing other outlets’ news."
That's so sloppily written I feel insulted putting my time into trying to understand it. There's been a "shift" in which "Twitter has shifted." The double "shift" tells you no one serious is proofreading over there. And what's the "splintering"? It sounds exciting, but the sentence just goes on to make vague, questionable assertions. My impression was that Twitter (AKA X) has stopped censoring conservative speech. If you think it now looks like "a conservative media company," perhaps you're observing how important censorship has been to the dominance of liberal speech in social media.
The next sentence in that Semafor article is: "X recently objected to a California law requiring the disclosure of content moderate, for instance, by citing first amendment protections for its editorial decisions." What is "content moderate"? A typo?
There's a link to a Bloomberg article. I'm not able to read the whole thing, but it begins: "Elon Musk’s X Corp. sued California to undo the state’s law aimed at exposing sources of hate speech and disinformation by requiring social media companies to explain how they moderate their content."
So Semafor wrote "disclosure of content moderate" to mean disclosure of how content is moderated! I'd like Semafor to disclose how it goes about slapping articles together.
"Moments later, the sound of rapid gunfire erupts in the distance. The woman quickly lowers her head and moves her children out of the way as the officer reaches inside his patrol vehicle for a rifle and notifies dispatchers he's heard gunshots. The officer runs toward the stores, tracking the sounds of gunfire as they grew louder and louder the closer he gets. As he continues moving toward the blasts, shooting at people to leave the area and take cover...."
I chose this article to blog after I saw the video on Twitter, but I considered switching to a different source when I noticed the terrible typo, but I'll keep this as a lesson in finding the typos the spellchecker doesn't catch.
In any case, I'm glad this police officer was not indicted for what was an impressive demonstration of courage.
These plates have been around since 2010 (and obviously the bicentennial of the war was in 2012), but we're just noticing now, as somebody at Reddit is calling attention to the typo.
Here's a screenshot of what you might see if you go to the URL on the license plate:
You lie and smear, assuming you'll live out your days as a hanging judge and never find yourself in the dock. No cultural moment lasts forever. Yesterday's fanatics realise they joined the wrong mob. Populist movements shrivel and fall apart. Robespierre ended on the guillotine. pic.twitter.com/mlQhd22s2i
Face it, being called a Nazi by this crowd is like being called a lizard mutant from the plant Zorb. Let's both be careful to keep hiding our imaginary tails from those who're onto us.
ADDED, the next morning: I wrote this post on my iPad, which may have autocorrected or merely made my mistake hard for me to see. But it's funny now. And you know you always can "write about whatever you are." It could be an interesting topic! I hope it is. But I didn't mean to inject new weirdness to my classic format for a photo-less open thread. It was just supposed to be "write about whatever you want." But what the hell are you, anyway? I hope you know.
"It also incorrectly includes 245 names of service members who died in circumstances totally unrelated to the war, they say, including a man killed in a motorcycle accident in Hawaii and another who drank antifreeze thinking it was alcohol. And it includes one Marine who lived for 60 years after the war and had eight grandchildren.
Beyond that, there are about 500 names that should be listed but are not, according to the Barkers. They say that the official roster used for the wall was so slapdash that they cannot find much rhyme or reason to who was included and who was left out."
"... of daily living, they’ll be set free to explore. Maybe they’ll discover poetry they never had time to read, or go on more hikes. Maybe they’ll be able to spend their days in profound discussion with cherished friends, rather than in front of screens — or maybe they’ll spend all day in front of screens after all, having conversations with robots."
I've already read enough machine-written text to want to avoid it whenever I can, but unfortunately, much human-written text resembles the work product of ChatGPT... including what I just quoted above. There's a positive side to that, though. Sensitized to the the loathsomeness of machine-written text, I can defend more vigorously against the mechanical writings of the human being.
IN THE COMMENTS: Stephen wrote: "A machine would never have written that phrase…or is that what a machine would like me to believe?"
It's like the — or should I say "the the"? — way Rand McNally would add a nonexistent town to each map or the ancient Persians would weave a mistake into each carpet.
I was scanning the front page of the NYT, looking for headlines to click, and I noticed that the Times had picked out a set of things recommended for me. I was pleased for an instant and genuinely ready to to share Penn Jillett's love for hot baths and cold watermelon, but...
... I don't like the implications of the rest of it. The kiosk and the toilet are okay — lowly and functional — but don't push Jeffrey Dahmer at me, and don't juxtapose him with a person with a mysteriously drooping face.
I go to read the Penn Jillette article and the word editing slows me way down:
You might have noticed that for a couple minutes, the previous post had a miswritten first sentence: "I was commenting in off-blog life, so I can prove to you that I'd noticed the absence of this particular thing."
Obviously, "can" was supposed to be "can't," but I realize that it was an example of the kind of typo I find very easy to make because write by transcribing what feels like speech in my head.
That's why I, like many people, am forever writing "to" for "too" and "your" for "you're" and "their" for "there." The only problem is that you look slightly dumb until you correct it. But no one is confused.
"Can" for "can't" is another matter! I wrote the opposite of what I meant and forced readers to waste time puzzling over whether I was saying something counterintuitive or just making a mistake. But now I want to waste your time even more by asking you to look at something strange: We Americans — many of us — pronounce "can" and "can't" almost identically:
Why doesn't this cause more problems? You're saying "I can't" and it sounds like "I can." Maybe we're constantly verifying: Did you say you can or you can't?
Fortunately, I will and I do don't present the same problem. We have the irregular "n't" contraction for will. What woes were there before there was won't?
And for some reason, we pronounce the "do" in do and don't completely differently. Do gets an ooh and don't gets an oh. And do is often left out in expressions that use don't — like I understand and I don't understand.
Grammarphobia has some discussion of how the word "won't" came to be:
“Won’t was shortened from early wonnot, which in turn was formed from woll (or wol), a variant form of will, and not.”...
So etymologically, there’s a case to be made for contracting “will” and “not” as “won’t.” Nevertheless, some language commentators have grumbled about the usage.
Joseph Addison, for example, complained in a 1711 issue of the Spectator that “won’t” and other contractions had “untuned our language, and clogged it with consonants.”
“Won’t,” in particular, “seems to have been under something of a cloud, as far as the right-thinkers were concerned, for more than a century afterward,” Merriam-Webster’s says.
“This did not, of course, interfere with its employment,” the usage guide adds.
It was popular enough, M-W says, “to enjoy the distinction of being damned in the same breadth as ain’t in an address delivered before Newburyport (Mass.) Female High School in December 1846.”
Both “won’t” and “ain’t” were condemned by the Newburyport speaker as “absolutely vulgar.”
“How won’t eventually escaped the odium that still clings to ain’t is a mystery,” M-W Usage says....
"... was surely meant to be barbecued chicken wings. Not (entirely) displeased with my catch, he introduced me to his production editor — the person in a publishing house in charge of hiring copy editors and proofreaders.... In my early days, I would sulk in my office with the door closed if I found out that one of my books included a typo. A sentence referring to 'geneology' once sent me into a blue funk for hours.... I’m occasionally asked whether I can make my way through the world without shivering under the constant bombardment of typos.... [O]nce, watching the movie 'My Week With Marilyn,' I elbowed my husband sharply in the ribs over a prescription bottle, visible on a night table for approximately a second and a half, whose label read 'Tunial' instead of 'Tuinal.'
'I think it must hurt sometimes to live in your brain,' my husband has said on occasion, not unkindly. But, as he also notes, in a kind of nursery rhyme mantra, 'Your strengths are your weaknesses, your weaknesses are your strengths.'"
I don't want to send Dreyer into a blue funk, but if I were writing an essay that had the line "passing reference to barbecued chicken ribs," I would not also have "elbowed my husband sharply in the ribs." It's a repetition of a distinctive image — ribs — for no recognizable reason. That's a language mistake. Make it your husband's arm. You're in a movie theater. It was more likely his arm that you elbowed anyway, wasn't it? You just liked "ribs," but your feeling of liking it came, I'll bet, from having seen it so recently.
And here's the Wikipedia entry for Tuinal, a Eli Lilly sleeping pill introduced in the late 1940s and now discontinued:
We're told that "a new generation of music fans discovered them when Netflix's Stranger Things used their 1986 song 'Master of Puppets' during a pivotal scene."
This is another case of mainstream media reporting what's in social media. So just go straight to the social media. Here's Serena Trueblood on TikTok ticking off the sins of Metallica.
Or I'll just quote the hastily typed caption to the video: "I find it intersting that they only cared about gatekeeping in their fandom when they started getting big agaib from Stranger Things. Thy only care about what lines theor pockets."
Astronauts have been warned against masturbating in space over fears female astronauts could get impregnated by stray fluids.
There are strict guidelines over “alone-time” onboard in zero gravity.
Scientists have warned even the slightest rouge droplet could cause chaos on board.
Rouge droplet? In space, is semen red? No, it's just the kind of typo spell-checkers don't catch, the funniest ones, the ones that are other words, like "rouge" for "rogue."
Conan O’Brien was interviewing a NASA engineer, who said, “Three female astronauts can be impregnated by the same man on the same session … it finds its way.”
No matter where you live, every home should have a “go bag” and a “stay bin.” The go bag is what you grab when you have to leave the house in a hurry, whether to get to the emergency room or to evacuate because of a fire or a hurricane. The stay bin is a two-week stash of essentials to be used in case you have to hunker down at home without power, water or heat.
In the event that you need to stay put instead of flee, keep a stay bin in your home. Use a large plastic bin or a similar container to set aside the essential items for a two-week prion....
President Joe Biden is brushing off criticism of his administration's chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal because he and his aides believe the political fallout at home will be limited, according to White House allies and administration officials....
"The public opinion is pretty damn clear that Americans wanted out of the ongoing war and don't want to get back in. It's true today and it's going to be true in six months," said one Biden ally. "It isn't about not caring or being empathetic about what's going on over there, but worrying about what's happening in America."
ADDED: I came back into this post to edit something about the formatting and accidentally lopped the "P" off "President," leaving "resident Biden."
Resident Biden... doesn't that seem about right? He's the man living in the White House.
But while, say, the New York Times decided that Hilaria's cosplaying as a Latina stereotype was off-limits — even as they wrote growing profiles of her as well, including uncritically her "slight Spanish accent" — the paper of record has celebrated children having their college admissions revoked for a video of them singing the N-word along to a song when they were 15 as a "reckoning."
I found that because it has Rachel Dolezal in the headline ("Alec Baldwin's wife became Hollywood's Rachel Dolezal because of our sniveling, bootlicking press").
But come on — "they wrote growing profiles." Presumably, that should be "glowing profiles," Hilaria Baldwin has posted many selfies where she's standing sideways to display her pregnant belly. But no, that's not something the NYT can write. Here's the glowing profile in the Times, from back in 2014: "Hilaria Baldwin Holds Her Center" ("Her voice betrays a slight Spanish accent, remains of a childhood split between Boston and Spain").
I wonder how many people are faking accents... and why (and when) we feel a person acquires a pleasing air about them because of that. Oh! Just by chance, last night I watched an episode of "Friends" where the Friends were extremely irritated by a woman who'd acquired a fake English accent:
Well, clearly, blackface is a very specific problem that has been isolated, and everyone has been warned about it, so violations are harshly judged. The same is true of the "n-word," though the presence of lots of recorded music with the word creates confusion for young people who might not understand that this is the ONE thing you don't sing along with.
But accents... accents are different. You can do fake accents... can't you? I've seen people pick up a New York accent or a Southern accent... to try to fit in or to be thought well of. Many actors do accents and get special acclaim. Meryl Streep, etc. etc.
So must Hilaria Baldwin be denounced because she's doing what she's doing while being a highly privileged person? Or are accents different from skin darkening?
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