#i did not take rhetoric classes just to be given a prescriptive on how to use language and punctuation!

[mybrainproblems]

Hello Alex, I hope you're having a good day. I want to keep an open mind here and I'm hoping you could please explain your dislike for the oxford comma. From your other posts and prior conversations, your strong critical thinking skills are more than evident and it is a primary reason I admire you. I'm hoping that this can be a chance to understand your perspective and perhaps open my eyes to a new point of view. Thank you for your time. Best, Renu

first off, i am a little crosswired on perception of visual stuff like writing or images. chartreuse sounds like a trombone. 5 is a friendly number but 3 is an annoying sibling and 7 is ready to shank me at all times. looking at the number 7 or numbers divisible by 7 makes me skittish. my teachers literally gave up on getting me to memorize my times tables for the number. basically, sometimes i have a weirdly visceral reaction to the way some things are presented visually.

dos! a thing to know about me is that i'm extremely claustrophobic. if it's less than 4 floors, i will walk up those stairs. i've walked up more than that if the elevator looked too small.

So: punctuation is maybe a bit more emotional and personal to me like it's not nuts and bolts it's about Feelings. the em dash is cuddly and the semi-colon is friendly and the comma is a warm hand on your shoulder. however! if someone puts a hand on your shoulder too many times maybe you get uncomfy! maybe it triggers my claustrophobia to see all these letters and words TRAPPED by hands and held in place. WHERE IS THE EMERGENCY EXIT. MAYBE I WILL TRIP OVER A COMMA SOMEONE LEFT IN THE WAY AND BURN TO DEATH.

THREE. i was left unsupervised with david foster wallace's non-fiction essays while in elementary school. nothing makes you want to break the english language like reading DFW while you're also learning how to write a five paragraph essay.

when a teacher fiiiiiinally told us we could stop doing five paragraph format essays i was in heaven.... i still got docked a lot of points for things like "run on sentences" and "overuse of semi-colons" but i was FREE to write one sentence paragraphs to punctuate my thoughts.

F O U R TH... i grew up reading the nytimes which meant also reading the nytimes style guide bc i was a little weirdo and they say not to use an oxford comma. literally i was in middle school and loved reading william safire's 'on language' column.

Cinq du soleil: ezra koenig was my tutor for a bit

VI: something about it having a special name just raises my hackles. oh, you're a comma with a special use? no. we are all commarades here. now stop trying to trip me while i make my way to the emergency exit.

[🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪] i like the little mystery of omitting the oxford comma! it adds a bit of flair! am i saying nelson mandela is an 800 year old demi-god and a dildo collector? didn't i just introduce a little intrigue into your day making you think about it? (also here's how to fix that headline without using an oxford comma)

8. idk man. the oxford comma? the serial comma? are we talking punctuation or jack the ripper?

[weil-weil-lautre]

By Jonathan Franzen September 8, 2019

“There is infinite hope,” Kafka tells us, “only not for us.” This is a fittingly mystical epigram from a writer whose characters strive for ostensibly reachable goals and, tragically or amusingly, never manage to get any closer to them. But it seems to me, in our rapidly darkening world, that the converse of Kafka’s quip is equally true: There is no hope, except for us.

I’m talking, of course, about climate change. The struggle to rein in global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the feel of Kafka’s fiction. The goal has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.

If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.

Even at this late date, expressions of unrealistic hope continue to abound. Hardly a day seems to pass without my reading that it’s time to “roll up our sleeves” and “save the planet”; that the problem of climate change can be “solved” if we summon the collective will. Although this message was probably still true in 1988, when the science became fully clear, we’ve emitted as much atmospheric carbon in the past thirty years as we did in the previous two centuries of industrialization. The facts have changed, but somehow the message stays the same.

Psychologically, this denial makes sense. Despite the outrageous fact that I’ll soon be dead forever, I live in the present, not the future. Given a choice between an alarming abstraction (death) and the reassuring evidence of my senses (breakfast!), my mind prefers to focus on the latter. The planet, too, is still marvelously intact, still basically normal—seasons changing, another election year coming, new comedies on Netflix—and its impending collapse is even harder to wrap my mind around than death. Other kinds of apocalypse, whether religious or thermonuclear or asteroidal, at least have the binary neatness of dying: one moment the world is there, the next moment it’s gone forever. Climate apocalypse, by contrast, is messy. It will take the form of increasingly severe crises compounding chaotically until civilization begins to fray. Things will get very bad, but maybe not too soon, and maybe not for everyone. Maybe not for me.

Some of the denial, however, is more willful. The evil of the Republican Party’s position on climate science is well known, but denial is entrenched in progressive politics, too, or at least in its rhetoric. The Green New Deal, the blueprint for some of the most substantial proposals put forth on the issue, is still framed as our last chance to avert catastrophe and save the planet, by way of gargantuan renewable-energy projects. Many of the groups that support those proposals deploy the language of “stopping” climate change, or imply that there’s still time to prevent it. Unlike the political right, the left prides itself on listening to climate scientists, who do indeed allow that catastrophe is theoretically avertable. But not everyone seems to be listening carefully. The stress falls on the word theoretically.

Our atmosphere and oceans can absorb only so much heat before climate change, intensified by various feedback loops, spins completely out of control. Some scientists and policymakers fear that we’re in danger of passing this point of no return if the global mean temperature rises by more than two degrees Celsius (maybe more, but also maybe less). The I.P.C.C.—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—tells us that, to limit the rise to less than two degrees, we not only need to reverse the trend of the past three decades. We need to approach zero net emissions, globally, in the next three decades.

This is, to say the least, a tall order. It also assumes that you trust the I.P.C.C.’s calculations. New research, described last month in Scientific American, demonstrates that climate scientists, far from exaggerating the threat of climate change, have underestimated its pace and severity. To project the rise in the global mean temperature, scientists rely on complicated atmospheric modelling. They take a host of variables and run them through supercomputers to generate, say, ten thousand different simulations for the coming century, in order to make a “best” prediction of the rise in temperature. When a scientist predicts a rise of two degrees Celsius, she’s merely naming a number about which she’s very confident: the rise will be at least two degrees. The rise might, in fact, be far higher.

As a non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling. I run various future scenarios through my brain, apply the constraints of human psychology and political reality, take note of the relentless rise in global energy consumption (thus far, the carbon savings provided by renewable energy have been more than offset by consumer demand), and count the scenarios in which collective action averts catastrophe. The scenarios, which I draw from the prescriptions of policymakers and activists, share certain necessary conditions.

The first condition is that every one of the world’s major polluting countries institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its economy. According to a recent paper in Nature, the carbon emissions from existing global infrastructure, if operated through its normal lifetime, will exceed our entire emissions “allowance”—the further gigatons of carbon that can be released without crossing the threshold of catastrophe. (This estimate does not include the thousands of new energy and transportation projects already planned or under construction.) To stay within that allowance, a top-down intervention needs to happen not only in every country but throughout every country. Making New York City a green utopia will not avail if Texans keep pumping oil and driving pickup trucks.

The actions taken by these countries must also be the right ones. Vast sums of government money must be spent without wasting it and without lining the wrong pockets. Here it’s useful to recall the Kafkaesque joke of the European Union’s biofuel mandate, which served to accelerate the deforestation of Indonesia for palm-oil plantations, and the American subsidy of ethanol fuel, which turned out to benefit no one but corn farmers.

Finally, overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting. They must accept the reality of climate change and have faith in the extreme measures taken to combat it. They can’t dismiss news they dislike as fake. They have to set aside nationalism and class and racial resentments. They have to make sacrifices for distant threatened nations and distant future generations. They have to be permanently terrified by hotter summers and more frequent natural disasters, rather than just getting used to them. Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast, they have to think about death.

Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met.

To judge from recent opinion polls, which show that a majority of Americans (many of them Republican) are pessimistic about the planet’s future, and from the success of a book like David Wallace-Wells’s harrowing “The Uninhabitable Earth,” which was released this year, I’m not alone in having reached this conclusion. But there continues to be a reluctance to broadcast it. Some climate activists argue that if we publicly admit that the problem can’t be solved, it will discourage people from taking any ameliorative action at all. This seems to me not only a patronizing calculation but an ineffectual one, given how little progress we have to show for it to date. The activists who make it remind me of the religious leaders who fear that, without the promise of eternal salvation, people won’t bother to behave well. In my experience, nonbelievers are no less loving of their neighbors than believers. And so I wonder what might happen if, instead of denying reality, we told ourselves the truth.

First of all, even if we can no longer hope to be saved from two degrees of warming, there’s still a strong practical and ethical case for reducing carbon emissions. In the long run, it probably makes no difference how badly we overshoot two degrees; once the point of no return is passed, the world will become self-transforming. In the shorter term, however, half measures are better than no measures. Halfway cutting our emissions would make the immediate effects of warming somewhat less severe, and it would somewhat postpone the point of no return. The most terrifying thing about climate change is the speed at which it’s advancing, the almost monthly shattering of temperature records. If collective action resulted in just one fewer devastating hurricane, just a few extra years of relative stability, it would be a goal worth pursuing.

[bountyofbeads]

Trump Relies on Populist Language, but He Mostly Sides With Corporate Interests

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/us/politics/trump-working-class.html

By Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman | Published July 23, 2019 | New York Times | Posted July 23, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — History will record last week as a moment when President Trump turned to raw racial appeals to attack a group of nonwhite lawmakers, but his attacks also underscored a remarkable fact of his first term: His rhetorical appeals to white working-class voters have not been matched by legislative accomplishments aimed at their economic interests.

As Mr. Trump was lashing out at Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna S. Pressley, House Democrats were passing a minimum wage bill with scant Republican support and little expectation of Senate passage. On the same day, the president issued a perfunctory announcement naming Eugene Scalia, a corporate lawyer and the son of Antonin Scalia, the former Supreme Court justice, as his new secretary of labor on the recommendation of Senator Tom Cotton, a hard-line Arkansas conservative.

The events offered a reminder not only of what Mr. Trump was interested in — racially driven grabs of media attention — but also of what he was not: governing the way he campaigned in 2016 and co-opting elements of the Democrats’ populist agenda to drive a wedge through their coalition.

Since he became president, Mr. Trump has largely operated as a conventional Republican, signing taxes that benefit high-end earners and companies, rolling back regulations on corporations and appointing administration officials and judges with deep roots in the conservative movement. His approach has delighted much of the political right.

It has also relieved Democrats.

“Just imagine if Trump married his brand of cultural populism to economic populism,” said Representative Brendan F. Boyle, a Democrat who represents a working-class district in Philadelphia. “He would be doing much better in the polls and be stronger heading into the general election.”

It is a question many Democrats still fret over: What would Mr. Trump’s prospects for re-election look like if he pressured Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, into passing bipartisan measures to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure, lower the cost of prescription drugs and increase the minimum wage?

Some officials in organized labor say those actions would appeal broadly to their rank-and-file and, in some cases, prompt individual unions to stay on the sidelines of the presidential race.

“If he were to pick and choose some of the House Democrats’ bills and embrace them, it would cross-pressure voters and make it a tougher sell for us that this guy is anti-worker,” said Steve Rosenthal, a longtime strategist in the labor movement.

There is still some hope on Capitol Hill that the president will eventually sign a bipartisan measure being drafted in the Senate that could offer consumers a rebate on prescription drugs that rise above the cost of inflation. A Democratic bill, passed almost unanimously last week, would repeal a tax on high-cost health insurance plans that was to help pay for the Affordable Care Act. If it passes the Senate, Mr. Trump could promote it as a middle-class tax cut, the way Democrats and unions are.

And he will almost certainly take credit for legislation passed on Tuesday that would pay the health care costs of emergency workers who rushed to ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001, for the rest of their lives.

Within the White House, a small group of staff has begun talking about the need to come up with an agenda for 2021 that could be useful for the re-election; Mr. Trump, who has seen the criticism on television that he has no forward-looking message, is also mindful of it, people close to the discussion said.

A White House deputy press secretary, Hogan Gidley, noted that Democrats were not exactly looking for deals either.

“When the speaker and Senator Schumer refuse to even negotiate, it destroys any chance of repairing our infrastructure, reducing health care costs, or making lasting reforms to our failed immigration laws,” he said in a statement, referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. He insisted that Democratic leadership is “so beholden to radical ideologies, they would rather fail to deliver for the American people than allow the president to add more accomplishments to his record.”

Democrats, however, have suggested that Mr. Gidley’s criticism rings hollow, pointing out that Mr. Trump walked out of a meeting with Mr. Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi that was focused on infrastructure, and that the president has said he would not work with Democrats while he was being investigated by Congress.

Mr. Trump faces internal impediments, as well. His impulses are often shaped by news coverage, particularly on Fox News, and the views of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, whose members have no desire to find common cause with Democrats.

The president is also largely detached from the legislative process and has rarely been heard discussing what a second-term agenda could look like or how to tie it to his re-election bid. His few bipartisan accomplishments scarcely get mentioned. Mr. Trump, for example, rarely discusses the criminal justice overhaul that he signed into law after his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, made it a personal mission and argued to the president that it could help him with African-American voters.

This is all to say Mr. Trump has shown no sign of aggressively pursuing the sort of working-class-oriented measures that his onetime adviser Stephen K. Bannon predicted would build an enduring Republican majority.

To be sure, the unemployment rate has continued to fall under Mr. Trump, reaching a 50-year low. Wage growth has accelerated modestly, and is strongest for the lowest-paid workers in the country. Voters give Mr. Trump higher approval on the economy than on his overall performance in office. But most workers are still gaining less under Mr. Trump than they did during previous times of low unemployment, such as the late 1990s, and fewer than two in five respondents to a SurveyMonkey poll for The New York Times this month said their family was better off financially today than a year ago.

With Mr. Bannon long gone, Mr. Trump is surrounded by conservatives in the White House, such as his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, a former Tea Party congressman who has no appetite for raising the gas tax to pay for an infrastructure bill or to make businesses swallow a minimum-wage increase. In fact, the prospect of a major public works bill has become a running joke among West Wing aides. When midlevel staff members were working on a plan several months ago, Mr. Mulvaney was across the country mocking it during an appearance at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference in California in April.

A deal struck Monday by Ms. Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to set higher spending levels for the next two fiscal years will take still more pressure off the White House to embrace large legislative initiatives — because Mr. Trump will have no more major fiscal deadlines this term to press for the kinds of concessions such legislation always takes.

And the moderates in the building who do have Mr. Trump’s ear, such as Mr. Kushner, are more interested in measures like overhauling the criminal justice system or trying to strike a bipartisan immigration deal than they are eager to notch populist victories that the president could trumpet in the industrial Midwest.

The president’s allies say that his talent is in scorching the opposition, and he is unlikely to deviate much from that task.

“I think he doesn’t mind if it happens, but it’s not his primary focus,” Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, said of racking up policy accomplishments. “His primary focus is to so thoroughly define Democrats as the party of the radical left. I think that matters much more to him than any particular bill.”

Even Republicans who would be open to a blue-collar agenda say any chance for Mr. Trump to cut deals with Democrats has vanished.

“I don’t see the president at this point doing anything with those guys, not as long as they’re coming after him with impeachment,” said former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. “He’s at war.”

It is a notably different environment from Mr. Gingrich’s day when, in the heat of the 1996 campaign, sizable majorities in both chambers of Congress passed an increase in the minimum wage bill.

Two Republican senators speaking separately, and on the condition of anonymity to be candid about their political assessment, said they had doubts that such legislation would appreciably move many voters in an era of diamond-hard polarization. Even if Mr. McConnell did move legislation, it may only redound to the benefit of the freshman House Democrats facing re-election in swing districts, one senator said.

For the Democrats most eager to see Mr. Trump defeated, such inaction is not exactly bad news. They are happy to see him engage in whatever rhetorical food fight piques his interest on a given day.

“This is a testimony to both the strength of McConnell’s convictions and to the weakness of Trump’s convictions,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster. “And it also speaks to the power of Mick Mulvaney, who may be the real deep state when all is said and done.”

Jim Tankersley contributed reporting.