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warren_ellis

BioRequiem Etsy: selected oil paintings and prints. Many of you will have seen her line art in COILHOUSE. As Zo-bot itself says, once these are gone, they’re gone forever. And since she’s doing more and more gallery shows, you’re unlikely to see them this cheap again.

IT SAYS OBEY.

wring

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Since u miss my shoe posts so much.

wring

T-Mobile

Mcdo breakfast is srs bzns. Ugh that infernal beeping is driving me mad! Pretend I'm saying that in Killface's voice+accent.

languagelog

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1572

For most intellectuals today, grammar is no longer a tool of rational analysis, but rather a source of incoherent metaphor. As a recent example, consider Margaret Carlson's analysis of Sarah Palin's resignation speech (from Countdown on July 9, 2009):

Sarah Palin is very good at stringing words together
that don't have a subject, a verb and an object, they're just
present participles and prepositions and "I love the people of Alaska"
and "I'm quitting so I can serve them better".
It makes no sense!

I believe that Carlson means to claim that Palin speaks in fragments rather than complete sentences. But having "a subject, a verb and an object" is a poor diagnostic for this: for example, the very sentence that Carlson uses to make the claim appears to fail the test. And I don't believe it's true, by any test, that Palin's resignation statement contained an unusual number of sentence fragments, or was particularly rich in present participles and prepositions.

I invite you to count (fragments, present participles, and prepositions) in the transcript of Gov. Palin's statement, and compare their frequency with what you find in Ms. Carlson's commentaries (e.g. here as well as the episode linked above). I don't have the time to do it myself, today. But as a suggestion of what you're likely to find, here are their respective openings in the passages under discussion:

OK, good.
Appreciate you all being here, and I just want to say hi to Alaska.
I appreciate speaking directly to the people that I serve as governor
and I thank you all for coming here today, on the shores of Lake Lucille –
this is a source of inspiration for my family and for me –
and I'm thankful that Todd flew in last night
from commercial fishing grounds in Bristol Bay, to
stand by my side
as always.

Well in- in the statement, in her back yard,
there- the- the- I'm surprised you found,
you know, the heart of it, which uh was
the- the- the legal fees. Because there was the lame duck,
she doesn't want to milk it, she doesn't want to go on junkets,
everybody does it, remember there're countless others,
who've quit, and when there're only two governors who've ever quit,
under pressure,
Eliot Spitzer and Jim McGreevy of- of New Jersey,
uh but you found this one,
and this one then turns out not to be right.

In my opinion, there are legitimate questions about the logical and rhetorical coherence of Gov. Palin's statement. But Ms. Carlson's apparent attempt to characterize this as syntactic incoherence was analytically lazy and linguistically silly.

[For a different take on the psycho-political correlates of sentence structure, see "Decisiveness is SVO: a Hitlerian theory of communication?", 9/30/2004; "Decisiveness and clause structure", 10/6/2004.]

[Update 7/12/2009: fev at Headsup: The Blog considers a range of recent cases where "the commenting class uses linguistic features of political speech to shed light on True Motives and Meaning", and observes ("Unseen Hand Club", 7/11/2009) that

These are very well organized assertions about personal and political character, and they fit neatly into a consistent pattern. […]

Incoherent metaphor? Hardly. I think we're seeing a carefully arranged meta-frame emerge — the sort of metaphor by which a certain part of the population lives.

Read the whole thing. ]

wexistence

(above image taken from Fcuk Earth Hour)

Before the word "slacktivism" was invented, there was a similar term used by those in The Movement to refer to the comrades or kasama who were averse to the more traditional modes of pagkikilos (e.g., rallies, organizing, immersions), and preferred more "intellectual" forms of activism like writing and educational discussions. These kasama were disparagingly called "Armchair Activists," and it was also used by many in the Left to put down left-leaning "moderate" activists who did not interact with the masses and instead chose to fight for their advocacies from the comfortable, airconditioned rooms of their houses.

...Your views on slacktivism are shared by many, especially those like yourself who are really DOING SOMETHING to make the world a better place. To a certain extent, your opinion of people who engage in (to quote from the Wikipedia entry) "feel-good measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it feel satisfaction" like "signing internet petitions, the wearing of wristbands ("awareness bracelets") with political messages, putting a ribbon magnet on a vehicle, joining a Facebook group, posting issue-oriented YouTube videos, altering one's personal data or avatar on social network services, or taking part in short-term boycotts such as Buy Nothing Day or Earth Hour" is justified. Again, to a certain extent.

However, I've always subscribed to the belief that ANYTHING is better than outright apathy... Let's keep in mind that no matter how disparaging the term "slacktivism" is, the word "act" can still be found in it––you just have to knock out a couple of letters to get it.

As inconsequential as these "feel-good measures" are, one has to give credit to the people doing these because at least they care enough to do something to assuage the guilt they feel from doing nothing at all. Kung tibak ka noon sa UP, magandang sign na yan. Freshmen students who wore issue-related pins (Ibasura ang TFI!) and attended EDs were considered ripe for organizing; writers who showed some concern for the marginalized in their essays in the school paper were potential recruits. If I were organizing today, I would look at my FB contacts who consistently join FB causes and post "issue-oriented YouTube videos" and invite them to an ED. Then I would invite them to another meeting. And another. Then I would ask them to do some small task––say, maybe, distribute flyers at a particular college––then another, until before you know it, sobrang involved na ang tao na sya na mismo gagalaw ng kusa.

I agree that people aren't DOING enough, and that talk is CHEAP. But to get people involved enough to convince them to cross the huge divide that separates sentiment from concrete action, one has to take advantage of the means available to sow the seeds of true ACTivism. Kung ang rally o mobilasyon ngayon ay nakikitang laos na porma ng pakikibaka, dapat handa ang mga organiser na magbago ng stratehiya upang mapaunawa sa masa ang isyu at mapakilos ito. Kung tingin ng iba na ang social networking sites ay pwedeng gamitin para mapalahok ang kabataan, di gamitin natin.

I've got nothing against "intellectual" forms of activism. In fact, a lot of my activities would fall under that category... I spend a LOT of time talking about democracy and civic duty and social responsibility and volunteerism etc...

No argument between us on the importance of public discourse. You can't care about things you don't understand. Awareness and information are definitely key to any kind of social transformation. The more people who understand an issue, the greater their capacity to care about it. (Of course, it doesn't necessarily follow that if one understands an issue one will have an emotional response and be moved to action, but understanding is a necessary pre-condition for meaningful participation.)

It's not so much the "feel-good measures" themselves that annoy me. It's the over-blown sense of self-importance of some of the people who engage in them. Go ahead and wear your IAmNinoy shirt or AkoMismo dog tag or who create a Facebook page for the cause du jour but don't delude yourself that you're making some huge contribution to society. Those "feel-good measures" have their place but let's keep things in perspective. In the greater scheme of things, they mean very little...

I agree that caring a little is better than not caring at all. And that these token expressions of concern are opportunities to engage "slacktivists" in more substantial activities. I'm just petty and irate. :P

...I feel that if people just do what they can, in the place that they are, in the time that they have, collectively we can do great things.

languagelog

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1571

A casual inspection of the 59 (true) Google hits on "Oooo, you look", suggests that Dr. Willis Jensen, a recent presenter in the brownbag lunch series at Language Log Plaza, vastly overestimated the correlation between utterance initial "Oooo" and sarcasm: the true rate is less than 50%. However, he is correct to identify "Oooo" as a common marker of sarcasm, e.g. the comment "oooo. you look lovely:)" in the comments here from the above search.

(A video report on Dr. Jensen's groundbreaking work is below the fold.)

Report: 70 Percent Of All Praise Sarcastic

warren_ellis

An exclusive first look at a forthcoming short series via Avatar Press.

(It’s not actually steampunk. And there’s not really a serial killer.)

wring

T-Mobile

Lookit what alex made! Cheesewax flowers!

warren_ellis

In which Bruce Sterling beats the shit out of some people:

”

languagelog

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1570

In some alternative history, according to the webcomic Teaching Baby Paranoia:

(Click on the image for a larger version. If your screen is too small, this may not work — in that case, try right-click>>view image or your browser/OS equivalent.)

David Brooks has so far missed this one.

[Hat tip: Neil Cohn]