Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
So there were a couple of mini-meetups in September and October.
Here’s NotMax and Layer8Problem in the harbor.
Rumors that they commandeered the ship above for an afternoon sail were highly exaggerated.
Here we have NotMax, Hkedi [Kang T.Q.] and Sister Golden Bear. (left to right)
No idea who the handsome fellow in the black hat is!
Looks like a good time was had by all!
Open thread.
Shorter House: our work is done here. https://t.co/uAirCOHIt4
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 13, 2023
Buck tells reporters they announced breaking for the weekend and floor vote Tuesday https://t.co/SYQYIDkHCO
— Olivia Beavers (@Olivia_Beavers) October 13, 2023
if you're in line to run for speaker, STAY IN LINE https://t.co/EcwBwI9kOF
— Liz Charboneau (@lizchar) October 13, 2023
Josh Marshall, at TPM, on “The State of the Speaker Debacleship Going into the Weekend”:
Saturday Morning Open Thread: *Riveted*, I Am…Post + Comments (239)
Wag sent me a link to this about a week ago, and unless I’m mistaken, this is right up the Balloon Juice alley. Nothing else seems to be happening in the back room, and this feels like Friday night material. I hope you’re not all in bed already!
I don’t know my way around Reddit, but this appears to be from colin_morris. Why is the person not a commenter here? So awesome! (click the image to embiggen)
Compound pejoratives on Reddit – from buttface to wankpuffin
Jun 28, 2022
Dirty words are, let’s face it, a lot of fun. If you want to express your dislike for someone and a standard insult like “jerk” or “moron” won’t cut it, you can get creative. There are a few reliable recipes for forming derogatory noun-noun compounds in English. For example:
Start with a word for a disgusting or worthless substance
Add a word for an agglomeration or container
Hence, dirtwad, scumbag, pissbucket, snotwagon…(In case it’s not yet clear, this post will contain a lot of bad words. Most are merely silly or crude, but some are more seriously offensive, including slurs.)
Alternatively, -head, -face, and -brain(s) are incredibly versatile suffixes, which can be preceded by just about any taboo word.
The truly creative can go outside the box with oddball constructions like fucktrumpet, or wankpuffin, which perhaps succeed more by their euphony than their ability to invoke any coherent image.
If only we had some concrete data on how these pieces fit together…
Introducing the Reddit compound pejorative dataset
I collected lists of around 70 prefixes and 70 suffixes (collectively, “affixes”) that can be flexibly combined to form insulting compounds, based on a scan of Wiktionary’s English derogatory terms category. The terms covered a wide range of domains, including:
scatology (fart-, poop-)
political epithets (lib-, Trump-)
food (-waffle, -burger)
body parts (butt-, -face, -head, -brains)
gendered epithets (bitch-, -boy)
animals (dog-, -monkey)
Most terms were limited to appearing in one position. For example, while -face readily forms pejorative compounds as a suffix, it fails to produce felicitous compounds as a prefix (facewad? faceclown? facefart?).Taking the product of these lists gives around 4,800 possible A+B combinations. Most are of a pejorative character, though some false positives slipped in (e.g. dogpile, spitballs). I scraped all Reddit comments from 2006 to the end of 2020, and counted the number of comments containing each.
As a corpus, Reddit has the virtue of being uninhibited in its profanity, and on the cutting edge of new coinages. For example, Google Books Ngram Viewer, which indexes the majority of all books published in English up to 2019, gives no results for fuckwaffle, whereas the term has been used in 1,096 Reddit comments.
The full “matrix” of combinations is surprisingly dense. Of the ~4,800 possible compounds, more than half occurred in at least one comment. The most frequent compound, dumbass, appears in 3.6 million comments, but there’s also a long tail of many rare terms, including 444 hapax legomena (terms which appear only once in the dataset), such as pukebird, fartrag, sleazenozzle, and bastardbucket.
In fact, the dataset approximately follows Zipf’s law, meaning that a log-log plot of term rank vs. frequency is close to a straight line:
The Matrix of Pejoration
The full 66 x 73 matrix of all prefixes and suffixes is too big to fit readably in a single plot, so I’ve shown a 20 x 20 subset below, which includes many of the most frequent affixes. Note that frequency is mapped to colour using a logarithmic scale, because it varies over several orders of magnitude.
(Image by NEIVANMADE)
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.
War for Ukraine Day 597: President Zelenskyy Takes Dutch PM Rutke To Visit OdesaPost + Comments (44)
So proud of Joe Biden.
Biden: It’s also a priority for me to urgently address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza… We can’t lose sight of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with Hamas and the appalling attacks pic.twitter.com/oHybsZBvC7
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 13, 2023
Thank you, Joe!
⭐️
Is Ukraine becoming a literal proxy war between authoritarian countries and those who believe in democracy? Instead of just a figurative one.
Ukraine and the West are now fighting not just Russia and Iran in Ukraine, but North Korea too.
Quite a new axis – Russia, Iran, North Korea, Hamas, Hezbollah…….https://t.co/0fzbMMVpyd
— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) October 13, 2023
Anyone who thinks we don’t have to fight this fight in Ukraine, and win, is not grounded in reality.
⭐️
What’s the latest on the Speaker fight?
https://t.co/ebHsSiLSwJ pic.twitter.com/rYFZ7o5Mef
— Gary McCoy (@garymccoysf) October 12, 2023
I am with Josh Marshall, asking who the hell is Austin Scott?
I think the real breaking news is that there’s a rep from Georgia named Austin Scott.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 13, 2023
⭐️
Open thread.
This really might be Alexandra Petri’s best column ever. I think it’s perfect, and I’m a hard grader.
(If you are experiencing Déjà vu, you’re not crazy. I put this up last week, but it was only up for 5 or 10 minutes before another post went up, so only about 10 people saw it. This post from Petri deserves more than that!)
Help wanted!
We are in urgent need of a new speaker for the House of Representatives! Our most recent speaker, Kevin, had to leave unexpectedly, and we are shorthanded with a lot of important business coming up!
Who we are:
The U.S. House of Representatives! We have been called “the second-most august legislative body in the United States” and a lot of other things that are not printable in a family newspaper. Not ringing a bell? We were in a “School House Rock.” Or if you heard anyone complaining about partisan gridlock grinding something to a halt, that was probably us.
In our House, unlike an increasing number of statehouses around the country, gerrymandering has not resulted in a Republican majority that is trying to lock everyone with a womb in a vault underground where they cannot vote and their screams cannot be heard. No, here it has just resulted in a steadily increasing inability to keep the country functional! This is the place where Lauren Boebert goes for work! So do Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Marjorie Taylor Greene and more than 10 Mikes!
Speaker is the most important position we have to offer. This job has launched the careers of Newt Gingrich (failed presidential candidate), John Boehner (cannabis lobbyist), Paul Ryan (something at a … think tank, maybe?). Every man who has recently held this position has run away from it screaming, “No! Don’t send me back there! I don’t want to go back!” Though if you ask him what he saw, he will not answer, so there’s a possibility it’s haunted! Just in time for spooky season!
Do I need to be a member to apply? No! You don’t technically need to be a member of the House of Representatives to be speaker, but it helps if you are a member because that is one fewer vote you will need to wrangle.
What does the job entail? You have one job: Make all the laws for the entire country. This includes passing a budget so the government can keep running! If this sounds too overwhelming, just impeach the president.
Is there a dress code? Oh God, don’t ask us that right now.
What are the day-to-day responsibilities? You must count votes! While you’re doing this, keep in mind that there is a club of anywhere from eight to 45 people who don’t want you to get anything done, and some of them might hate your guts! Also, fundraising.
Requirements:
Must be able to count! Other useful skills include herding cats and walking and chewing gum at the same time, though these might be metaphors. You will get to preside from the chair, and recognize or not recognize people, and give them the floor (these might also be metaphors).
I see here that this job was done by a woman for eight years (nonconsecutively); how hard can it possibly be? Harder than you’d think!
Job perks include:
Great seat at State of the Union address, if you’re a fan of Joe Biden. Note: You cannot sell or trade the seat!
You get a little hammer!
Work with a man named Chip!
Second in line to the presidency of the United States!
Popcorn (We can get popcorn if this is important to you.)
Ideal candidate skills and traits:
Have a clear agenda but also be willing to reach across the aisle; be actively interested in making people’s lives better, either by repealing laws that don’t make sense or passing laws that do; be willing to listen and compromise, with the understanding that people live in this country and like it here and it would bring them peace of mind if the government did not arbitrarily stop working every four to six weeks.
But we’re probably just going to pick someone Matt Gaetz wants.
Open thread.
Alexandra Petri Is a National Treasure (Open Thread)Post + Comments (111)
I don’t know what the House GOP morons will do next. Their current flailing is damaging to the country and must end. But how? Now, in the one chamber they control, Repubs are suffer the consequences of the radical minoritarian rule they’ve imposed on the rest of the country.
Thanks to them, we can’t have nice things, like sensible gun control, bodily autonomy, representation and a more equitable society. Now they can’t have nice things either, like an unindicted presidential primary frontrunner or a functioning majority conference in the U.S. House of Representatives. They stopped respecting our votes a long time ago, and now they don’t respect each other’s either.
***
This is interesting (WaPo gift link):
President Biden’s reelection effort will launch a pilot test of its 2024 organizing strategy in Wisconsin and Arizona next month, hiring about two dozen staffers and opening a Milwaukee office with a new focus on digital and in-person outreach that aims to directly leverage the personal relationships of volunteers.
The moves come as the Democratic National Committee has redirected its organizing efforts to a new smartphone app that encourages supporters to communicate with people in their own friend, family and community circles and then report those contacts back to the party’s voter file.
This “relational organizing” has become a growing part of Democratic campaigns for several cycles, outperforming traditional door-knocking and call sheet lists that volunteers have long used to contact strangers during campaigns. But the scale of what the Biden campaign, in concert with the national party, is planning for next year has not been attempted before.
Swing state voters will be the focus of the strategy next year, according to the article. The campaign is taking a belt-and-suspenders approach and will launch traditional door-knocking and phone canvassing too. I hope it works!