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#weeklyreview 07/2026
February 8th – 14th, 2026
Summary
Somehow super hectic week. That’s why I only got to post last weeks review yesterday. Struggling with project management or the lack thereof in the office. More AI fiddling that I’m rather happy with. Good progress on #project25 and the China vacation plan. Also still enjoying the book about the Vienna Circle a lot.
AI, AI and more AI
This is a big topic for me right now. At the office of course but also in personal experiments.
Fediverse journaling plugin
With help of AI coding I’m getting to realise many small ideas I had but would never have had the time to realise. This week I’ve create a little WordPress plugin to use the fediverse as a journaling assistant.
I spent a lot of time in my fediverse clients (mostly Mona, IceCubes or the Mastodon web interface). So why not use that as an input channel for my weekly blogging. I tried different other approaches over the last few months to recollect what I was busy with during the week. Having scripts collecting my Mastodon posts over the weeks and compiling them into a weekly overview page for instance. So I thought it might be useful to just sent message in the Fediverse to my blog for journaling.
I’ve got the ActivityPub plugin installed and thus my Blog is just a normal account in the fediverse that I can mention or sent messages to. I’ve wrote a plugin in which I can authorise specific fediverse users in a WordPress author profile. If these fediverse users mention the WordPress author profile, that post gets appended to a weekly draft post on the Blog.
Now whenever I have something noteworthy, I’ll mention my blog account in my fediverse post and it gets automatically appended to a weekly review draft. At the end of the week I already have a list of things that bothered me during the week.
The code can be found here.
Some snippets from this weeks journal:
2026-02-11 17:37:06
I’d call it “vibe project management” where you just pretend to have a project plan. It visually looks like project plan. But factually it doesn’t make any sense because it has been created with Photoshop for Powerpoint …@falko2026-02-12 12:59:10
@Nico prinzipiell läuft es. Genutzt wird das Modell jetzt von einem Pi Coding Agent der in einer Debian VM läuft 🙈 @falkoI’ve tried my luck with an open weight coding model and the Pi Coding agent. Downloaded the qwen3-coder-next:latest model for Ollama. That’s a whopping 51GB in size as barely fits into my physical memory. The Pi coding agent was running inside a virtual machine. It works in principle… but is so slow that a reasonable test wasn’t really practical for the moment. Have to play a bit more with it. With that setup one could theoretically realise a fully offline coding agent. But I guess some more beefy hardware is needed. Although an Apple Silicon M2 Max isn’t really a slow machine.
Project Management in the age of vibe everything
To be honest, this has started much before AI and vibe coding became popular. The tendency to make up project plans with tools that are not meant for project planning. Most notorious in this field are Project Plans in Excel, Powerpoint or JIRA.
Why am I so upset about it? In my eyes a project plan helps you prioritise and visualise work by listing the tasks and milestones and putting them in chronological order. You define dependencies between tasks and maybe even resources. Once that has been established (and I don’t say this is trivial to collect) you can use proper project management software to identify the critical path of your project. That is the one sequence of events that you have to focus on. All the others will not move you necessarily closer to your project end (because they’re not on the critical path) until the items on the critical path are not finished.
It will also help you assess the effects of time lines slippage. How does that the affect to overall project timing? Or you can identify bottlenecks in your plan due to resources overload. So all good things that you management usually wants to see and from you as a project manager.
Yet, many project plans are just vibe fiddled with the likes of office software. So it just looks similar to a project plan visually. But these tools don’t help you actually manage your project. They just visualise what you think your project plan is. Not backed by hard data.
The most hilarious experience in this context was my conversation with the Atlassian Rovo AI assistant on the topic this week. Asked whether JIRA can be used for project management it of course answered that JIRA is actually best for this. Then probed how chronological order and critical path can then be managed it needed to back off and admit that you can’t do that in JIRA without lots of add-ons and/or paid extensions.
What puzzles me is, that this kind of “let’s just wing it” project management is accepted in many companies. My theory is, that management knows precisely that their demand for speed, quality and resource usage is completely unrealistic. Too much work get’s committed with too little resources. Milestone be set before the actually planning happened because it was promised to a customer or C-suite guy. Proper project management would proof with hard data that the timeline is totally unrealistic.
But with just vibe coded project plans they can just press and demand. And people obey with over-hours and compromises in quality and features.
Rural restaurants
On Sunday we’ve been at the lovely Kastanienhof in Flieth. A traditional village restaurant with traditional German food. It was really delicious and at a very affordable price range. For the three of us we payed something around 60 EUR in total including drinks and my starter. That’s about as much as I pay for me alone in Berlin when having BBQ ribs at Chicago Williams 😉
That Sunday morning I was helping a friend to put a new hard disk into his laptop. I needed more space and fortunately bought the new NVMe SSD already back in November. The same 4 TB disks now costs more than 100 EUR more thanks to the AI hype.
It had to be a Windows 11 installation as that’s what he had to use for his work. I’m not judging. It went surprisingly smooth. We’ve created a bootstick from the existing installation with the Windows 11 installer. He had already looked up a video on how to disassemble the laptop. That was a huge timesaver as the HP Laptop had 5 hidden screws that we had to uncover under the rubber feet.
New disk in, booted from USB and started the installation. After about 15 min the new OS was running and could start to install the needed software from scratch. He knew all his accounts and password and so we were done in a few hours with the whole setup. I honestly expected more fiddling needed.
China here we come
The planning of the upcoming China trip progresses. I’ve contacted a few friends in Beijing and established communication via WeChat with them now. We had stayed in contact loosely via Facebook and LinkedIN. Both services are just bad … for various reasons. But we switched to Chinas most popular chat app. They immediately offered pick up service and are generally excited to meet again. We’ve also got the rest of the schedule mostly sorted and now need to book the hotels and tours. It’s getting real.
#project25 update
This week the insulation material for the attic arrived and work is supposed to start next week. We quickly unloaded the stuff and placed partially into the attic and living room for convenience.
Unfortunately I noticed that the heating seemed to have stopped. It’s hopefully “just” because of low fuel level in the oil tanks. I had initially only bought 1000L back in June 2025 expecting this to last about a year.
I really have no experience with this kind of heating system. We didn’t spent much time in the house yet so the heating was set to winter mode most of the time. But then we also had a pretty cold winter so far and not insulated attic is kind of open to the lower floor norw. I’ve tried to seal it as good as possible with styrofoam plates. Still the heating seems to guzzle a lot of oil… that soon needs to be replace by a proper heat pump system.
still ice on the lake14 at last
Kiddo turned 14 this week … of course they grow up so fast 🙂
Learning
Learned (rather got it confirmed) this week from our doctor that ADS & depression is much harder noticed in women because they’re much better at blending in and make an effort to just play along to expectations. That of course is taxing and taking lots of energy which makes their symptoms even worse.
Reading
no changes over last week
#activitypub #coffee #enEN #project25 #tasskaff #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview #wordpress -
#weeklyreview 07/2026
February 8th – 14th, 2026
Summary
Somehow super hectic week. That’s why I only got to post last weeks review yesterday. Struggling with project management or the lack thereof in the office. More AI fiddling that I’m rather happy with. Good progress on #project25 and the China vacation plan. Also still enjoying the book about the Vienna Circle a lot.
AI, AI and more AI
This is a big topic for me right now. At the office of course but also in personal experiments.
Fediverse journaling plugin
With help of AI coding I’m getting to realise many small ideas I had but would never have had the time to realise. This week I’ve create a little WordPress plugin to use the fediverse as a journaling assistant.
I spent a lot of time in my fediverse clients (mostly Mona, IceCubes or the Mastodon web interface). So why not use that as an input channel for my weekly blogging. I tried different other approaches over the last few months to recollect what I was busy with during the week. Having scripts collecting my Mastodon posts over the weeks and compiling them into a weekly overview page for instance. So I thought it might be useful to just sent message in the Fediverse to my blog for journaling.
I’ve got the ActivityPub plugin installed and thus my Blog is just a normal account in the fediverse that I can mention or sent messages to. I’ve wrote a plugin in which I can authorise specific fediverse users in a WordPress author profile. If these fediverse users mention the WordPress author profile, that post gets appended to a weekly draft post on the Blog.
Now whenever I have something noteworthy, I’ll mention my blog account in my fediverse post and it gets automatically appended to a weekly review draft. At the end of the week I already have a list of things that bothered me during the week.
The code can be found here.
Some snippets from this weeks journal:
2026-02-11 17:37:06
I’d call it “vibe project management” where you just pretend to have a project plan. It visually looks like project plan. But factually it doesn’t make any sense because it has been created with Photoshop for Powerpoint …@falko2026-02-12 12:59:10
@Nico prinzipiell läuft es. Genutzt wird das Modell jetzt von einem Pi Coding Agent der in einer Debian VM läuft 🙈 @falkoI’ve tried my luck with an open weight coding model and the Pi Coding agent. Downloaded the qwen3-coder-next:latest model for Ollama. That’s a whopping 51GB in size as barely fits into my physical memory. The Pi coding agent was running inside a virtual machine. It works in principle… but is so slow that a reasonable test wasn’t really practical for the moment. Have to play a bit more with it. With that setup one could theoretically realise a fully offline coding agent. But I guess some more beefy hardware is needed. Although an Apple Silicon M2 Max isn’t really a slow machine.
Project Management in the age of vibe everything
To be honest, this has started much before AI and vibe coding became popular. The tendency to make up project plans with tools that are not meant for project planning. Most notorious in this field are Project Plans in Excel, Powerpoint or JIRA.
Why am I so upset about it? In my eyes a project plan helps you prioritise and visualise work by listing the tasks and milestones and putting them in chronological order. You define dependencies between tasks and maybe even resources. Once that has been established (and I don’t say this is trivial to collect) you can use proper project management software to identify the critical path of your project. That is the one sequence of events that you have to focus on. All the others will not move you necessarily closer to your project end (because they’re not on the critical path) until the items on the critical path are not finished.
It will also help you assess the effects of time lines slippage. How does that the affect to overall project timing? Or you can identify bottlenecks in your plan due to resources overload. So all good things that you management usually wants to see and from you as a project manager.
Yet, many project plans are just vibe fiddled with the likes of office software. So it just looks similar to a project plan visually. But these tools don’t help you actually manage your project. They just visualise what you think your project plan is. Not backed by hard data.
The most hilarious experience in this context was my conversation with the Atlassian Rovo AI assistant on the topic this week. Asked whether JIRA can be used for project management it of course answered that JIRA is actually best for this. Then probed how chronological order and critical path can then be managed it needed to back off and admit that you can’t do that in JIRA without lots of add-ons and/or paid extensions.
What puzzles me is, that this kind of “let’s just wing it” project management is accepted in many companies. My theory is, that management knows precisely that their demand for speed, quality and resource usage is completely unrealistic. Too much work get’s committed with too little resources. Milestone be set before the actually planning happened because it was promised to a customer or C-suite guy. Proper project management would proof with hard data that the timeline is totally unrealistic.
But with just vibe coded project plans they can just press and demand. And people obey with over-hours and compromises in quality and features.
Rural restaurants
On Sunday we’ve been at the lovely Kastanienhof in Flieth. A traditional village restaurant with traditional German food. It was really delicious and at a very affordable price range. For the three of us we payed something around 60 EUR in total including drinks and my starter. That’s about as much as I pay for me alone in Berlin when having BBQ ribs at Chicago Williams 😉
That Sunday morning I was helping a friend to put a new hard disk into his laptop. I needed more space and fortunately bought the new NVMe SSD already back in November. The same 4 TB disks now costs more than 100 EUR more thanks to the AI hype.
It had to be a Windows 11 installation as that’s what he had to use for his work. I’m not judging. It went surprisingly smooth. We’ve created a bootstick from the existing installation with the Windows 11 installer. He had already looked up a video on how to disassemble the laptop. That was a huge timesaver as the HP Laptop had 5 hidden screws that we had to uncover under the rubber feet.
New disk in, booted from USB and started the installation. After about 15 min the new OS was running and could start to install the needed software from scratch. He knew all his accounts and password and so we were done in a few hours with the whole setup. I honestly expected more fiddling needed.
China here we come
The planning of the upcoming China trip progresses. I’ve contacted a few friends in Beijing and established communication via WeChat with them now. We had stayed in contact loosely via Facebook and LinkedIN. Both services are just bad … for various reasons. But we switched to Chinas most popular chat app. They immediately offered pick up service and are generally excited to meet again. We’ve also got the rest of the schedule mostly sorted and now need to book the hotels and tours. It’s getting real.
#project25 update
This week the insulation material for the attic arrived and work is supposed to start next week. We quickly unloaded the stuff and placed partially into the attic and living room for convenience.
Unfortunately I noticed that the heating seemed to have stopped. It’s hopefully “just” because of low fuel level in the oil tanks. I had initially only bought 1000L back in June 2025 expecting this to last about a year.
I really have no experience with this kind of heating system. We didn’t spent much time in the house yet so the heating was set to winter mode most of the time. But then we also had a pretty cold winter so far and not insulated attic is kind of open to the lower floor norw. I’ve tried to seal it as good as possible with styrofoam plates. Still the heating seems to guzzle a lot of oil… that soon needs to be replace by a proper heat pump system.
still ice on the lake14 at last
Kiddo turned 14 this week … of course they grow up so fast 🙂
Learning
Learned (rather got it confirmed) this week from our doctor that ADS & depression is much harder noticed in women because they’re much better at blending in and make an effort to just play along to expectations. That of course is taxing and taking lots of energy which makes their symptoms even worse.
Reading
no changes over last week
#activitypub #coffee #enEN #project25 #tasskaff #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview #wordpress -
Kenstrosity’s Top Ten(ish) of 2024
By Kenstrosity
When I think back on this year, a year of unprecedented stress and struggle for this sponge, one predominant emotion rises above the rest. Gratitude. I went through hardships I couldn’t possibly have anticipated; watched as harrowing events, both global and domestic, rocked our world; and trudged through time-dilating frights that I only previously experienced in some of my worst nightmares. And yet, I persist! I found myself asking, once again, why I was spared a worse fate where others weren’t? What have I done in life to deserve the good fortune I’ve received? In time I’ve come to believe that understanding the why of it all isn’t always the most important part. In some ways, the pursuit of an answer to “why” even blinds us to more enriching lessons we can learn from the experiences we share, both mundane and extraordinary. These things teach us how to be human, how to grow, how to thrive, and how to come together as a community. So, for what must be the first time of my life, I stopped asking why anything happened, as tempting as that spiral always looked from outside. Instead, I spent all of my energy prioritizing the moment, experiencing it, allowing it to change me and mold me, and to be present in it not just for me, but for my friends, my family, and my neighbors.
Back to gratitude. More so this year than any other, I must express my deepest, most heartfelt gratitude for damn near everyone. When my roommate and I lost everything overnight, I felt completely and utterly overwhelmed by the response. Hands of friends, family, and community reached towards us, open to do whatever they could to help us up. AMG Himself, Steel Druhm, Sentynel, GardensTale, Twelve, Dolphin Whisperer, Maddog, Holdeneye, Cherd of Doom, Grymm, El Cuervo, Dr. Wvrm, Ferrous Beuller, Saunders, Eldritch Elitist, Doom_et_Al, Dear Hollow, Carcharodon, Felgund, Ferox, Thus Spoke, Iceberg, Mystikus Hugebeard, Itchy, the n00bs, a shit ton of Discord frens, all of my meatspace friends, Mom, Dad, my sister, some of my extended family, my work colleagues and acquaintances, random kind strangers, even Dr. A. N. Grier went above and beyond to help directly with our recovery. Every single member of staff here did whatever they could to give some relief, far beyond what I could’ve ever asked for, and it overwhelms my little heart to know they cared that deeply. My owlpal and great friend Rolderathis, writer and editor at Toilet ov Hell, unexpectedly swooped in via Discord to jump start our financial recovery by creating a crowdsourcing page for us—even as the admin for AMG planned to do the same. Instrumental to its dissemination and subsequent explosion,1 both AMG Himself and Steel Druhm made sure to aggressively spread the word via an official post on this very site, and in their own circles public and private. Friends and family did the same, to great effect. Toilet ov Hell even posted their own article, too, and I don’t even fucking write there. Incredible. My aunt and her husband helped us replace two full rooms worth of furniture without hesitation, and another close friend of mine provided yet another room’s worth on top of that. Our friends reached far and wide to find opportunities to get us shelter, food, essential items, and vital emotional support. FEMA did more than their part for us as well, and they continue to help us as we navigate the next stages of long-term recovery. My therapist stuck with me through the storm, helped carry me through some concerning emotional blockages shortly after, and continues to guide me now. The continuous waves of support and outreach blew me away, and motivated me to pay it forward in whatever way I was capable for those who were going through hell with us. I thank you all, from the bottom of my heart.
As if a hurricane wasn’t enough to bear, Mom was diagnosed with lung cancer just ten days after the storm hit. Still, there shined small silver linings that kept me going. It was caught very early, and she has already returned home after a resoundingly successful surgery, where they removed the tumor in block.2 As scary as the thought of losing my Mom right after everything else that’s happened was, I choose to emphasize the excellent treatment and attention to detail that allowed Mom to come home quickly and in decent health, all things considered. I choose to be with my family, to live in this moment through the pain, the fear, the uncertainty, so I can be there when the sun inevitably shines again, too. I want to extend a very special thanks to Dad, who remained constantly by Mom’s side and supported her through every stage of this development when I wasn’t able.
All of this merely scratches the surface of everything we’ve gone through in 2024. But we are still here!3 We are living the best we can, helping each other to survive, and perhaps soon to also thrive again. The sense of community I feel not just for my deeply wounded city, but also the people in my life, deepened significantly just in the last few months. These experiences have changed me, changed my outlook on life and on relationships. The fragility of life and the sheer power of the love that comes from the people in it sharpen my understanding of what’s really important. Life is about the people you have, the way you treat them, and how you conduct yourself in this world to try to improve it with your unique light, little by little. It’s about supporting your loved ones as they go through good times just as fiercely as when they go through hardship and change. It’s about growing every day into the very best version of yourself, and being there to witness and celebrate the same journey in those close to you. I understand that more today than ever before, and I am thankful that this lesson, above all else, is my takeaway from 2024.
It’s going to be a while before we can return home to AVL, but I’ve already returned full force to my home away from home, Angry Metal Guy! I’d like to thank Steel Druhm and AMG Himself again for keeping my spot warm for me and for being excellent taskmasters and blogrunners, to Sentynel for keeping things running smoothly on the back end and for being awesome in general at his job, to all the writers for continuously providing the internet with the best worst opinions on metal extant, and to Dr. A. N. Grier for deleting everything I’ve ever written so that nobody has to suffer my silly goofy ramblings.
With that said, everybody should probably snapshot this little Top Ten(ish) of mine before Grier deletes that, too. It looks mighty different to how it would’ve had the storm not happened, both because I couldn’t listen to any new music for a while and because the event itself ushered a sharp shift in my listening preferences. Regardless, I’m happy with my selections, and I fully expect the rest of you to rabble at my confounding omissions.4 Let it commence!
#ish. Elvellon // Ascending in Synergy – Elvellon holds a special place in my heart, and thanks to masterful songsmithing, Ascending in Synergy holds a well-deserved placement on my list. I simply haven’t been able to stop jamming it all year. Ascending in Synergy is everything I loved about metal when I first got into it, and it embodies much of what I love about metal today. It never hurts that the first eight songs are all megaton bangers. This record would have placed nearer the top if it weren’t for the monologue in the penultimate epic. Nonetheless, I love Ascending in Synergy.
#10. Madder Mortem // Old Eyes, New Heart – Ever since Marrow, Madder Mortem successfully won me over where every other album in their back catalog failed to resonate. I can’t explain what exactly it was that captured my adoration all of a sudden, but Old Eyes, New Heart has my heart just as Marrow did before it. Smart compositions, earnest delivery, crystalline lyrics, lush sound, this record has it all. I’d be a fool not to award it placement on this list.
#9. Oceans of Slumber // Where Gods Fear to Speak – Oceans of Slumber carved out an ever-evolving, fearlessly creative, and unique sound for themselves since their inception, but always seemed somewhat inconsistent with the quality of their songwriting. Not so on their magnum opus Where Gods Fear to Speak. Immense, cohesive, and richly layered with detail and compelling songwriting, Where Gods Fear to Speak feels like the culmination of their entire career, fully matured and refined to peak form.
#8. Sunburst // Manifesto – There was a point in time that I was confident Manifesto would top this list. That was largely due to sheer excitement that a new Sunburst album, which I never thought I would see in the first place, actually turned out to be great. Rich compositions, sharp hooks, and a masterful performance from everyone involved, Manifesto solidifies Sunburst as one of the best bands out of the Greek power metal scene. I just hope that I don’t have to wait another eight years for the next one!
#7. Scumbag // Homicide Cult – This record is simply unfair. I had my Top 10 all sorted out, and then some bottle-nosed bastard with a dorsal fin and a propensity for beating up smaller mammals on the wrong side of the sea had me check this out, with the promise of killer riffs by the main Noxis guitarist. That bastard was right, this record absolutely rips. There are so many unbelievably filthy, stank-face inducing riffs on Homicide Cult that I had to get plastic surgery to look like myself again. Otherwise, I’d look more like my rotted-out friend on the cover.
#6. Noxis // Violence Inherent in the System – Death metal this good hits me in a special place. While embodying all of the skullcrushing ways of olde, Violence Inherent in the System represents one of the most creative, smart, and well-produced records in modern death metal currently. And while my review helped spike the hype, it still feels a bit like Noxis are running further under the radar than they deserve. Coming out of absolute nowhere and dropping the best straight-up death metal of the year? Unreal.
#5. Feind // Ambulante Hirnamputation – Grind, and all of its hybrids, never once made it on my proper Top 10. I’ve written here for six years. That’s how powerful Feind’s Ambulante Hirnamputation truly is. Immense fun, more quality riffs stuffed into less than twenty minutes than some of the best records can fit into an hour, and cheeky to boot, Ambulante Hirnamputation proves that Feind mastered the grindset. Let’s hope this isn’t the last I get to hear of Feind.
#4. Brodequin // Harbinger of Woe – In contrast to grind, I almost always have a brutal death metal record on my Top 10. It’s a style that resonates with me very easily, and there’s never a shortage of it for my personal enjoyment. Brodequin won the day in a year chock full of great options, with the immensely accessible Harbinger of Woe. The sheer level of groove brimming from this torture chamber sends my booty into overdrive, and the thick, nasty production only serves to enhance the entire experience. There’s very little else I could ask for to sate my brutal death cravings.
#3. Iotunn // Kinship – It’s been a banner year for our friend Jon Aldará. Where Iotunn’s Access All Worlds interested, but did not woo, me, follow-up Kinship absolutely rocked my socks. Every single track is a celebration of epic, melodic, and deeply immersive extreme metal. Gorgeous compositions, ascendant guitar work, ridiculous replay value, and stellar vocals propelled Kinship way up on my list of favorite records at a blistering pace, leaving me revelling in an idyllic honeymoon period. Even after investing more time marinating in its wondrous environs, I’ve only fallen deeper and deeper in love with it. I just can’t imagine how Iotunn are going to top this.
#2. Replicant // Infinite Mortality – This is the year for records that floored me where their predecessors didn’t. Replicant’s Malignant Reality was enjoyable, but couldn’t touch my Top 10 in its year. Infinite Mortality, on the other hand, made a valiant bid for Album o’ the Year from the very first riff kicking “Acid Mirror” into the stratosphere. Hardcore-tinged technical death metal for fans of the discordant and the unorthodox, Infinite Mortality is supremely memorable not just for its sound, but for its infallible, hook-laden construction. Infinite Mortality may not be the only record of its kind released this year, but it’s without a doubt the greatest.
#1. Myrath // Karma – Hurricane Helene took my home. It changed the ecology, geology, and pedology of the entire Asheville region, likely for all time. But one thing it couldn’t take from me is my spirit, my drive to survive, and my determination to thrive. Even during a long period where access to music was a rare luxury, Karma remained at the forefront of my mind. It held me from giving up and reminded me of the strength that burgeoned not just in myself, but also in my friends, family, and greater community as we rebuilt our lives together. If there was ever a record released this year that embodies that spirit of triumph over adversity, it’s Myrath’s incredible Karma. It was always going to be high on this list, thanks to its insanely memorable songwriting and passionate performances of univerally great songs. However, it wasn’t until I personally resonated with its empowering message in the context of a devastating natural disaster that I knew this would be, unquestionably, my Album o’ the Year.
Honorable Mentions
- Amiensus // Reclamation Pt. II – Thoughtful, dynamic, and immersive, Reclamation Pt. II represents the pinnacle of what I like in progressive black metal.
- The Flaying // Ni dieu ni maître – Unsung melodic death metal heroes The Flaying offer up nonstop hooks and a crazy bass performance delivered at a feral pace.
- Hamferð // Men Guds hond er sterk – Empotionally compelling and monstrously heavy, Men Guds hond er sterk is death doom at its peak form.
- Khirki // Κυκεώνας – Massively dynamic hard rock that comes from the heart and the head, not the butt.
- Saidan // Visual Kill: The Blossoming of Psychotic Depravity – Fun, fast, ferocious, Visual Kill is an unqualified blast of killer hyper-melodic black metal.
- Unhallowed Deliverance // Of Spectres and Strife – Deathcore rarely offers this level of dynamics and quality in songwriting, and it hits like a runaway train full of unstable nuclear warheads.
Non-Metal Album o’ the Year
- Kali Uchis // Orquídeas – Simply put, this album is pure sex. Period.
EP o’ the Year
- Glassbone // Deaf to Suffering – Far and away the slimiest, crustiest, and bestest slam of the year. Absolute filth.
Song o’ the Year
- Elvellon – “A Vagabond’s Heart” – Easily my most listened to song of the year, “A Vagabond’s Heart” strikes a special chord in my spirit that embodies everything I used to love and everything I love today. Furthermore, it leaves me hopeful and excited for what the future holds. As a delightful bonus, it’s catchy as all get-out. I couldn’t ask for a better song to fit this slot.
Surprise o’ the Year:
- Nightwish // Yesterwynde – My original intent was to place this somewhere on my list proper, but the storm foiled that aspiration, as I rarely got to listen to any new music that came out in late September and pretty much all of October until it was way too late. But when I did get to spend time with Yesterwynde, it continually impressed me. Songs that felt novel and exciting, performances that brimmed with new life, and wonderful pacing from start to finish, Nightwish’s latest record feels like a return to form. I’m excited to follow them on this latest arc in their career.5
Disappointment o’ the Year:
- Vredehammer // God Slayer – The riffs are there, that’s for sure. But the album just doesn’t come together in a way that scratches my brain at all. Therefore, I had the most difficult time sitting through God Slayer. Shame, especially considering how much of a banger each of the previous two records were…
#2024 #Amiensus #Brodequin #Elvellon #Feind #Glassbone #Hamferð #Iotunn #KaliUchis #KenstrositySTopTenIshOf2024 #Khirki #MadderMortem #Myrath #Nightwish #Noxis #OceansOfSlumber #Replicant #Saidan #Scumbag #Sunburst #TheFlaying #UnhallowedDeliverance #Vredehammerð
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Kenstrosity’s Top Ten(ish) of 2024
By Kenstrosity
When I think back on this year, a year of unprecedented stress and struggle for this sponge, one predominant emotion rises above the rest. Gratitude. I went through hardships I couldn’t possibly have anticipated; watched as harrowing events, both global and domestic, rocked our world; and trudged through time-dilating frights that I only previously experienced in some of my worst nightmares. And yet, I persist! I found myself asking, once again, why I was spared a worse fate where others weren’t? What have I done in life to deserve the good fortune I’ve received? In time I’ve come to believe that understanding the why of it all isn’t always the most important part. In some ways, the pursuit of an answer to “why” even blinds us to more enriching lessons we can learn from the experiences we share, both mundane and extraordinary. These things teach us how to be human, how to grow, how to thrive, and how to come together as a community. So, for what must be the first time of my life, I stopped asking why anything happened, as tempting as that spiral always looked from outside. Instead, I spent all of my energy prioritizing the moment, experiencing it, allowing it to change me and mold me, and to be present in it not just for me, but for my friends, my family, and my neighbors.
Back to gratitude. More so this year than any other, I must express my deepest, most heartfelt gratitude for damn near everyone. When my roommate and I lost everything overnight, I felt completely and utterly overwhelmed by the response. Hands of friends, family, and community reached towards us, open to do whatever they could to help us up. AMG Himself, Steel Druhm, Sentynel, GardensTale, Twelve, Dolphin Whisperer, Maddog, Holdeneye, Cherd of Doom, Grymm, El Cuervo, Dr. Wvrm, Ferrous Beuller, Saunders, Eldritch Elitist, Doom_et_Al, Dear Hollow, Carcharodon, Felgund, Ferox, Thus Spoke, Iceberg, Mystikus Hugebeard, Itchy, the n00bs, a shit ton of Discord frens, all of my meatspace friends, Mom, Dad, my sister, some of my extended family, my work colleagues and acquaintances, random kind strangers, even Dr. A. N. Grier went above and beyond to help directly with our recovery. Every single member of staff here did whatever they could to give some relief, far beyond what I could’ve ever asked for, and it overwhelms my little heart to know they cared that deeply. My owlpal and great friend Rolderathis, writer and editor at Toilet ov Hell, unexpectedly swooped in via Discord to jump start our financial recovery by creating a crowdsourcing page for us—even as the admin for AMG planned to do the same. Instrumental to its dissemination and subsequent explosion,1 both AMG Himself and Steel Druhm made sure to aggressively spread the word via an official post on this very site, and in their own circles public and private. Friends and family did the same, to great effect. Toilet ov Hell even posted their own article, too, and I don’t even fucking write there. Incredible. My aunt and her husband helped us replace two full rooms worth of furniture without hesitation, and another close friend of mine provided yet another room’s worth on top of that. Our friends reached far and wide to find opportunities to get us shelter, food, essential items, and vital emotional support. FEMA did more than their part for us as well, and they continue to help us as we navigate the next stages of long-term recovery. My therapist stuck with me through the storm, helped carry me through some concerning emotional blockages shortly after, and continues to guide me now. The continuous waves of support and outreach blew me away, and motivated me to pay it forward in whatever way I was capable for those who were going through hell with us. I thank you all, from the bottom of my heart.
As if a hurricane wasn’t enough to bear, Mom was diagnosed with lung cancer just ten days after the storm hit. Still, there shined small silver linings that kept me going. It was caught very early, and she has already returned home after a resoundingly successful surgery, where they removed the tumor in block.2 As scary as the thought of losing my Mom right after everything else that’s happened was, I choose to emphasize the excellent treatment and attention to detail that allowed Mom to come home quickly and in decent health, all things considered. I choose to be with my family, to live in this moment through the pain, the fear, the uncertainty, so I can be there when the sun inevitably shines again, too. I want to extend a very special thanks to Dad, who remained constantly by Mom’s side and supported her through every stage of this development when I wasn’t able.
All of this merely scratches the surface of everything we’ve gone through in 2024. But we are still here!3 We are living the best we can, helping each other to survive, and perhaps soon to also thrive again. The sense of community I feel not just for my deeply wounded city, but also the people in my life, deepened significantly just in the last few months. These experiences have changed me, changed my outlook on life and on relationships. The fragility of life and the sheer power of the love that comes from the people in it sharpen my understanding of what’s really important. Life is about the people you have, the way you treat them, and how you conduct yourself in this world to try to improve it with your unique light, little by little. It’s about supporting your loved ones as they go through good times just as fiercely as when they go through hardship and change. It’s about growing every day into the very best version of yourself, and being there to witness and celebrate the same journey in those close to you. I understand that more today than ever before, and I am thankful that this lesson, above all else, is my takeaway from 2024.
It’s going to be a while before we can return home to AVL, but I’ve already returned full force to my home away from home, Angry Metal Guy! I’d like to thank Steel Druhm and AMG Himself again for keeping my spot warm for me and for being excellent taskmasters and blogrunners, to Sentynel for keeping things running smoothly on the back end and for being awesome in general at his job, to all the writers for continuously providing the internet with the best worst opinions on metal extant, and to Dr. A. N. Grier for deleting everything I’ve ever written so that nobody has to suffer my silly goofy ramblings.
With that said, everybody should probably snapshot this little Top Ten(ish) of mine before Grier deletes that, too. It looks mighty different to how it would’ve had the storm not happened, both because I couldn’t listen to any new music for a while and because the event itself ushered a sharp shift in my listening preferences. Regardless, I’m happy with my selections, and I fully expect the rest of you to rabble at my confounding omissions.4 Let it commence!
#ish. Elvellon // Ascending in Synergy – Elvellon holds a special place in my heart, and thanks to masterful songsmithing, Ascending in Synergy holds a well-deserved placement on my list. I simply haven’t been able to stop jamming it all year. Ascending in Synergy is everything I loved about metal when I first got into it, and it embodies much of what I love about metal today. It never hurts that the first eight songs are all megaton bangers. This record would have placed nearer the top if it weren’t for the monologue in the penultimate epic. Nonetheless, I love Ascending in Synergy.
#10. Madder Mortem // Old Eyes, New Heart – Ever since Marrow, Madder Mortem successfully won me over where every other album in their back catalog failed to resonate. I can’t explain what exactly it was that captured my adoration all of a sudden, but Old Eyes, New Heart has my heart just as Marrow did before it. Smart compositions, earnest delivery, crystalline lyrics, lush sound, this record has it all. I’d be a fool not to award it placement on this list.
#9. Oceans of Slumber // Where Gods Fear to Speak – Oceans of Slumber carved out an ever-evolving, fearlessly creative, and unique sound for themselves since their inception, but always seemed somewhat inconsistent with the quality of their songwriting. Not so on their magnum opus Where Gods Fear to Speak. Immense, cohesive, and richly layered with detail and compelling songwriting, Where Gods Fear to Speak feels like the culmination of their entire career, fully matured and refined to peak form.
#8. Sunburst // Manifesto – There was a point in time that I was confident Manifesto would top this list. That was largely due to sheer excitement that a new Sunburst album, which I never thought I would see in the first place, actually turned out to be great. Rich compositions, sharp hooks, and a masterful performance from everyone involved, Manifesto solidifies Sunburst as one of the best bands out of the Greek power metal scene. I just hope that I don’t have to wait another eight years for the next one!
#7. Scumbag // Homicide Cult – This record is simply unfair. I had my Top 10 all sorted out, and then some bottle-nosed bastard with a dorsal fin and a propensity for beating up smaller mammals on the wrong side of the sea had me check this out, with the promise of killer riffs by the main Noxis guitarist. That bastard was right, this record absolutely rips. There are so many unbelievably filthy, stank-face inducing riffs on Homicide Cult that I had to get plastic surgery to look like myself again. Otherwise, I’d look more like my rotted-out friend on the cover.
#6. Noxis // Violence Inherent in the System – Death metal this good hits me in a special place. While embodying all of the skullcrushing ways of olde, Violence Inherent in the System represents one of the most creative, smart, and well-produced records in modern death metal currently. And while my review helped spike the hype, it still feels a bit like Noxis are running further under the radar than they deserve. Coming out of absolute nowhere and dropping the best straight-up death metal of the year? Unreal.
#5. Feind // Ambulante Hirnamputation – Grind, and all of its hybrids, never once made it on my proper Top 10. I’ve written here for six years. That’s how powerful Feind’s Ambulante Hirnamputation truly is. Immense fun, more quality riffs stuffed into less than twenty minutes than some of the best records can fit into an hour, and cheeky to boot, Ambulante Hirnamputation proves that Feind mastered the grindset. Let’s hope this isn’t the last I get to hear of Feind.
#4. Brodequin // Harbinger of Woe – In contrast to grind, I almost always have a brutal death metal record on my Top 10. It’s a style that resonates with me very easily, and there’s never a shortage of it for my personal enjoyment. Brodequin won the day in a year chock full of great options, with the immensely accessible Harbinger of Woe. The sheer level of groove brimming from this torture chamber sends my booty into overdrive, and the thick, nasty production only serves to enhance the entire experience. There’s very little else I could ask for to sate my brutal death cravings.
#3. Iotunn // Kinship – It’s been a banner year for our friend Jon Aldará. Where Iotunn’s Access All Worlds interested, but did not woo, me, follow-up Kinship absolutely rocked my socks. Every single track is a celebration of epic, melodic, and deeply immersive extreme metal. Gorgeous compositions, ascendant guitar work, ridiculous replay value, and stellar vocals propelled Kinship way up on my list of favorite records at a blistering pace, leaving me revelling in an idyllic honeymoon period. Even after investing more time marinating in its wondrous environs, I’ve only fallen deeper and deeper in love with it. I just can’t imagine how Iotunn are going to top this.
#2. Replicant // Infinite Mortality – This is the year for records that floored me where their predecessors didn’t. Replicant’s Malignant Reality was enjoyable, but couldn’t touch my Top 10 in its year. Infinite Mortality, on the other hand, made a valiant bid for Album o’ the Year from the very first riff kicking “Acid Mirror” into the stratosphere. Hardcore-tinged technical death metal for fans of the discordant and the unorthodox, Infinite Mortality is supremely memorable not just for its sound, but for its infallible, hook-laden construction. Infinite Mortality may not be the only record of its kind released this year, but it’s without a doubt the greatest.
#1. Myrath // Karma – Hurricane Helene took my home. It changed the ecology, geology, and pedology of the entire Asheville region, likely for all time. But one thing it couldn’t take from me is my spirit, my drive to survive, and my determination to thrive. Even during a long period where access to music was a rare luxury, Karma remained at the forefront of my mind. It held me from giving up and reminded me of the strength that burgeoned not just in myself, but also in my friends, family, and greater community as we rebuilt our lives together. If there was ever a record released this year that embodies that spirit of triumph over adversity, it’s Myrath’s incredible Karma. It was always going to be high on this list, thanks to its insanely memorable songwriting and passionate performances of univerally great songs. However, it wasn’t until I personally resonated with its empowering message in the context of a devastating natural disaster that I knew this would be, unquestionably, my Album o’ the Year.
Honorable Mentions
- Amiensus // Reclamation Pt. II – Thoughtful, dynamic, and immersive, Reclamation Pt. II represents the pinnacle of what I like in progressive black metal.
- The Flaying // Ni dieu ni maître – Unsung melodic death metal heroes The Flaying offer up nonstop hooks and a crazy bass performance delivered at a feral pace.
- Hamferð // Men Guds hond er sterk – Empotionally compelling and monstrously heavy, Men Guds hond er sterk is death doom at its peak form.
- Khirki // Κυκεώνας – Massively dynamic hard rock that comes from the heart and the head, not the butt.
- Saidan // Visual Kill: The Blossoming of Psychotic Depravity – Fun, fast, ferocious, Visual Kill is an unqualified blast of killer hyper-melodic black metal.
- Unhallowed Deliverance // Of Spectres and Strife – Deathcore rarely offers this level of dynamics and quality in songwriting, and it hits like a runaway train full of unstable nuclear warheads.
Non-Metal Album o’ the Year
- Kali Uchis // Orquídeas – Simply put, this album is pure sex. Period.
EP o’ the Year
- Glassbone // Deaf to Suffering – Far and away the slimiest, crustiest, and bestest slam of the year. Absolute filth.
Song o’ the Year
- Elvellon – “A Vagabond’s Heart” – Easily my most listened to song of the year, “A Vagabond’s Heart” strikes a special chord in my spirit that embodies everything I used to love and everything I love today. Furthermore, it leaves me hopeful and excited for what the future holds. As a delightful bonus, it’s catchy as all get-out. I couldn’t ask for a better song to fit this slot.
Surprise o’ the Year:
- Nightwish // Yesterwynde – My original intent was to place this somewhere on my list proper, but the storm foiled that aspiration, as I rarely got to listen to any new music that came out in late September and pretty much all of October until it was way too late. But when I did get to spend time with Yesterwynde, it continually impressed me. Songs that felt novel and exciting, performances that brimmed with new life, and wonderful pacing from start to finish, Nightwish’s latest record feels like a return to form. I’m excited to follow them on this latest arc in their career.5
Disappointment o’ the Year:
- Vredehammer // God Slayer – The riffs are there, that’s for sure. But the album just doesn’t come together in a way that scratches my brain at all. Therefore, I had the most difficult time sitting through God Slayer. Shame, especially considering how much of a banger each of the previous two records were…
#2024 #Amiensus #Brodequin #Elvellon #Feind #Glassbone #Hamferð #Iotunn #KaliUchis #KenstrositySTopTenIshOf2024 #Khirki #MadderMortem #Myrath #Nightwish #Noxis #OceansOfSlumber #Replicant #Saidan #Scumbag #Sunburst #TheFlaying #UnhallowedDeliverance #Vredehammerð
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Kenstrosity’s Top Ten(ish) of 2024
By Kenstrosity
When I think back on this year, a year of unprecedented stress and struggle for this sponge, one predominant emotion rises above the rest. Gratitude. I went through hardships I couldn’t possibly have anticipated; watched as harrowing events, both global and domestic, rocked our world; and trudged through time-dilating frights that I only previously experienced in some of my worst nightmares. And yet, I persist! I found myself asking, once again, why I was spared a worse fate where others weren’t? What have I done in life to deserve the good fortune I’ve received? In time I’ve come to believe that understanding the why of it all isn’t always the most important part. In some ways, the pursuit of an answer to “why” even blinds us to more enriching lessons we can learn from the experiences we share, both mundane and extraordinary. These things teach us how to be human, how to grow, how to thrive, and how to come together as a community. So, for what must be the first time of my life, I stopped asking why anything happened, as tempting as that spiral always looked from outside. Instead, I spent all of my energy prioritizing the moment, experiencing it, allowing it to change me and mold me, and to be present in it not just for me, but for my friends, my family, and my neighbors.
Back to gratitude. More so this year than any other, I must express my deepest, most heartfelt gratitude for damn near everyone. When my roommate and I lost everything overnight, I felt completely and utterly overwhelmed by the response. Hands of friends, family, and community reached towards us, open to do whatever they could to help us up. AMG Himself, Steel Druhm, Sentynel, GardensTale, Twelve, Dolphin Whisperer, Maddog, Holdeneye, Cherd of Doom, Grymm, El Cuervo, Dr. Wvrm, Ferrous Beuller, Saunders, Eldritch Elitist, Doom_et_Al, Dear Hollow, Carcharodon, Felgund, Ferox, Thus Spoke, Iceberg, Mystikus Hugebeard, Itchy, the n00bs, a shit ton of Discord frens, all of my meatspace friends, Mom, Dad, my sister, some of my extended family, my work colleagues and acquaintances, random kind strangers, even Dr. A. N. Grier went above and beyond to help directly with our recovery. Every single member of staff here did whatever they could to give some relief, far beyond what I could’ve ever asked for, and it overwhelms my little heart to know they cared that deeply. My owlpal and great friend Rolderathis, writer and editor at Toilet ov Hell, unexpectedly swooped in via Discord to jump start our financial recovery by creating a crowdsourcing page for us—even as the admin for AMG planned to do the same. Instrumental to its dissemination and subsequent explosion,1 both AMG Himself and Steel Druhm made sure to aggressively spread the word via an official post on this very site, and in their own circles public and private. Friends and family did the same, to great effect. Toilet ov Hell even posted their own article, too, and I don’t even fucking write there. Incredible. My aunt and her husband helped us replace two full rooms worth of furniture without hesitation, and another close friend of mine provided yet another room’s worth on top of that. Our friends reached far and wide to find opportunities to get us shelter, food, essential items, and vital emotional support. FEMA did more than their part for us as well, and they continue to help us as we navigate the next stages of long-term recovery. My therapist stuck with me through the storm, helped carry me through some concerning emotional blockages shortly after, and continues to guide me now. The continuous waves of support and outreach blew me away, and motivated me to pay it forward in whatever way I was capable for those who were going through hell with us. I thank you all, from the bottom of my heart.
As if a hurricane wasn’t enough to bear, Mom was diagnosed with lung cancer just ten days after the storm hit. Still, there shined small silver linings that kept me going. It was caught very early, and she has already returned home after a resoundingly successful surgery, where they removed the tumor in block.2 As scary as the thought of losing my Mom right after everything else that’s happened was, I choose to emphasize the excellent treatment and attention to detail that allowed Mom to come home quickly and in decent health, all things considered. I choose to be with my family, to live in this moment through the pain, the fear, the uncertainty, so I can be there when the sun inevitably shines again, too. I want to extend a very special thanks to Dad, who remained constantly by Mom’s side and supported her through every stage of this development when I wasn’t able.
All of this merely scratches the surface of everything we’ve gone through in 2024. But we are still here!3 We are living the best we can, helping each other to survive, and perhaps soon to also thrive again. The sense of community I feel not just for my deeply wounded city, but also the people in my life, deepened significantly just in the last few months. These experiences have changed me, changed my outlook on life and on relationships. The fragility of life and the sheer power of the love that comes from the people in it sharpen my understanding of what’s really important. Life is about the people you have, the way you treat them, and how you conduct yourself in this world to try to improve it with your unique light, little by little. It’s about supporting your loved ones as they go through good times just as fiercely as when they go through hardship and change. It’s about growing every day into the very best version of yourself, and being there to witness and celebrate the same journey in those close to you. I understand that more today than ever before, and I am thankful that this lesson, above all else, is my takeaway from 2024.
It’s going to be a while before we can return home to AVL, but I’ve already returned full force to my home away from home, Angry Metal Guy! I’d like to thank Steel Druhm and AMG Himself again for keeping my spot warm for me and for being excellent taskmasters and blogrunners, to Sentynel for keeping things running smoothly on the back end and for being awesome in general at his job, to all the writers for continuously providing the internet with the best worst opinions on metal extant, and to Dr. A. N. Grier for deleting everything I’ve ever written so that nobody has to suffer my silly goofy ramblings.
With that said, everybody should probably snapshot this little Top Ten(ish) of mine before Grier deletes that, too. It looks mighty different to how it would’ve had the storm not happened, both because I couldn’t listen to any new music for a while and because the event itself ushered a sharp shift in my listening preferences. Regardless, I’m happy with my selections, and I fully expect the rest of you to rabble at my confounding omissions.4 Let it commence!
#ish. Elvellon // Ascending in Synergy – Elvellon holds a special place in my heart, and thanks to masterful songsmithing, Ascending in Synergy holds a well-deserved placement on my list. I simply haven’t been able to stop jamming it all year. Ascending in Synergy is everything I loved about metal when I first got into it, and it embodies much of what I love about metal today. It never hurts that the first eight songs are all megaton bangers. This record would have placed nearer the top if it weren’t for the monologue in the penultimate epic. Nonetheless, I love Ascending in Synergy.
#10. Madder Mortem // Old Eyes, New Heart – Ever since Marrow, Madder Mortem successfully won me over where every other album in their back catalog failed to resonate. I can’t explain what exactly it was that captured my adoration all of a sudden, but Old Eyes, New Heart has my heart just as Marrow did before it. Smart compositions, earnest delivery, crystalline lyrics, lush sound, this record has it all. I’d be a fool not to award it placement on this list.
#9. Oceans of Slumber // Where Gods Fear to Speak – Oceans of Slumber carved out an ever-evolving, fearlessly creative, and unique sound for themselves since their inception, but always seemed somewhat inconsistent with the quality of their songwriting. Not so on their magnum opus Where Gods Fear to Speak. Immense, cohesive, and richly layered with detail and compelling songwriting, Where Gods Fear to Speak feels like the culmination of their entire career, fully matured and refined to peak form.
#8. Sunburst // Manifesto – There was a point in time that I was confident Manifesto would top this list. That was largely due to sheer excitement that a new Sunburst album, which I never thought I would see in the first place, actually turned out to be great. Rich compositions, sharp hooks, and a masterful performance from everyone involved, Manifesto solidifies Sunburst as one of the best bands out of the Greek power metal scene. I just hope that I don’t have to wait another eight years for the next one!
#7. Scumbag // Homicide Cult – This record is simply unfair. I had my Top 10 all sorted out, and then some bottle-nosed bastard with a dorsal fin and a propensity for beating up smaller mammals on the wrong side of the sea had me check this out, with the promise of killer riffs by the main Noxis guitarist. That bastard was right, this record absolutely rips. There are so many unbelievably filthy, stank-face inducing riffs on Homicide Cult that I had to get plastic surgery to look like myself again. Otherwise, I’d look more like my rotted-out friend on the cover.
#6. Noxis // Violence Inherent in the System – Death metal this good hits me in a special place. While embodying all of the skullcrushing ways of olde, Violence Inherent in the System represents one of the most creative, smart, and well-produced records in modern death metal currently. And while my review helped spike the hype, it still feels a bit like Noxis are running further under the radar than they deserve. Coming out of absolute nowhere and dropping the best straight-up death metal of the year? Unreal.
#5. Feind // Ambulante Hirnamputation – Grind, and all of its hybrids, never once made it on my proper Top 10. I’ve written here for six years. That’s how powerful Feind’s Ambulante Hirnamputation truly is. Immense fun, more quality riffs stuffed into less than twenty minutes than some of the best records can fit into an hour, and cheeky to boot, Ambulante Hirnamputation proves that Feind mastered the grindset. Let’s hope this isn’t the last I get to hear of Feind.
#4. Brodequin // Harbinger of Woe – In contrast to grind, I almost always have a brutal death metal record on my Top 10. It’s a style that resonates with me very easily, and there’s never a shortage of it for my personal enjoyment. Brodequin won the day in a year chock full of great options, with the immensely accessible Harbinger of Woe. The sheer level of groove brimming from this torture chamber sends my booty into overdrive, and the thick, nasty production only serves to enhance the entire experience. There’s very little else I could ask for to sate my brutal death cravings.
#3. Iotunn // Kinship – It’s been a banner year for our friend Jon Aldará. Where Iotunn’s Access All Worlds interested, but did not woo, me, follow-up Kinship absolutely rocked my socks. Every single track is a celebration of epic, melodic, and deeply immersive extreme metal. Gorgeous compositions, ascendant guitar work, ridiculous replay value, and stellar vocals propelled Kinship way up on my list of favorite records at a blistering pace, leaving me revelling in an idyllic honeymoon period. Even after investing more time marinating in its wondrous environs, I’ve only fallen deeper and deeper in love with it. I just can’t imagine how Iotunn are going to top this.
#2. Replicant // Infinite Mortality – This is the year for records that floored me where their predecessors didn’t. Replicant’s Malignant Reality was enjoyable, but couldn’t touch my Top 10 in its year. Infinite Mortality, on the other hand, made a valiant bid for Album o’ the Year from the very first riff kicking “Acid Mirror” into the stratosphere. Hardcore-tinged technical death metal for fans of the discordant and the unorthodox, Infinite Mortality is supremely memorable not just for its sound, but for its infallible, hook-laden construction. Infinite Mortality may not be the only record of its kind released this year, but it’s without a doubt the greatest.
#1. Myrath // Karma – Hurricane Helene took my home. It changed the ecology, geology, and pedology of the entire Asheville region, likely for all time. But one thing it couldn’t take from me is my spirit, my drive to survive, and my determination to thrive. Even during a long period where access to music was a rare luxury, Karma remained at the forefront of my mind. It held me from giving up and reminded me of the strength that burgeoned not just in myself, but also in my friends, family, and greater community as we rebuilt our lives together. If there was ever a record released this year that embodies that spirit of triumph over adversity, it’s Myrath’s incredible Karma. It was always going to be high on this list, thanks to its insanely memorable songwriting and passionate performances of univerally great songs. However, it wasn’t until I personally resonated with its empowering message in the context of a devastating natural disaster that I knew this would be, unquestionably, my Album o’ the Year.
Honorable Mentions
- Amiensus // Reclamation Pt. II – Thoughtful, dynamic, and immersive, Reclamation Pt. II represents the pinnacle of what I like in progressive black metal.
- The Flaying // Ni dieu ni maître – Unsung melodic death metal heroes The Flaying offer up nonstop hooks and a crazy bass performance delivered at a feral pace.
- Hamferð // Men Guds hond er sterk – Empotionally compelling and monstrously heavy, Men Guds hond er sterk is death doom at its peak form.
- Khirki // Κυκεώνας – Massively dynamic hard rock that comes from the heart and the head, not the butt.
- Saidan // Visual Kill: The Blossoming of Psychotic Depravity – Fun, fast, ferocious, Visual Kill is an unqualified blast of killer hyper-melodic black metal.
- Unhallowed Deliverance // Of Spectres and Strife – Deathcore rarely offers this level of dynamics and quality in songwriting, and it hits like a runaway train full of unstable nuclear warheads.
Non-Metal Album o’ the Year
- Kali Uchis // Orquídeas – Simply put, this album is pure sex. Period.
EP o’ the Year
- Glassbone // Deaf to Suffering – Far and away the slimiest, crustiest, and bestest slam of the year. Absolute filth.
Song o’ the Year
- Elvellon – “A Vagabond’s Heart” – Easily my most listened to song of the year, “A Vagabond’s Heart” strikes a special chord in my spirit that embodies everything I used to love and everything I love today. Furthermore, it leaves me hopeful and excited for what the future holds. As a delightful bonus, it’s catchy as all get-out. I couldn’t ask for a better song to fit this slot.
Surprise o’ the Year:
- Nightwish // Yesterwynde – My original intent was to place this somewhere on my list proper, but the storm foiled that aspiration, as I rarely got to listen to any new music that came out in late September and pretty much all of October until it was way too late. But when I did get to spend time with Yesterwynde, it continually impressed me. Songs that felt novel and exciting, performances that brimmed with new life, and wonderful pacing from start to finish, Nightwish’s latest record feels like a return to form. I’m excited to follow them on this latest arc in their career.5
Disappointment o’ the Year:
- Vredehammer // God Slayer – The riffs are there, that’s for sure. But the album just doesn’t come together in a way that scratches my brain at all. Therefore, I had the most difficult time sitting through God Slayer. Shame, especially considering how much of a banger each of the previous two records were…
#2024 #Amiensus #Brodequin #Elvellon #Feind #Glassbone #Hamferð #Iotunn #KaliUchis #KenstrositySTopTenIshOf2024 #Khirki #MadderMortem #Myrath #Nightwish #Noxis #OceansOfSlumber #Replicant #Saidan #Scumbag #Sunburst #TheFlaying #UnhallowedDeliverance #Vredehammerð
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DATE: May 12, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New study finds sustainable living relies on stable personality traits, not temporary bursts of willpower
Recent research suggests that people who naturally possess higher levels of self-control tend to engage in more environmentally friendly habits over time. However, short-term changes in a person’s willpower do not directly lead to greener choices. These findings provide evidence that making sustainable choices easier, rather than relying on individual discipline, might be a more effective way to encourage eco-friendly habits. The study was published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.
Scientists conducted this study to better understand the psychological traits that drive people to protect the environment. Environmental challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss require immediate action from everyday people. Actions that reduce a person’s negative impact on the planet are known as pro-environmental behaviors. Taking these actions often requires individuals to override their immediate conveniences for the sake of long-term ecological goals.
Pursuing these long-term goals requires a degree of self-regulation. Self-control is a specific and essential type of self-regulation. It involves managing internal reactions, delaying gratification, and resisting unwanted behavioral impulses. Previous research suggests that people with higher self-control tend to act more sustainably because they can keep long-term goals in mind.
“The idea first struck me during a very ordinary moment,” said Jingguang Li, a professor of psychology at Dali University in China. “I had just finished a bottle of water and there was no recycling bin in sight. I felt the urge to simply discard it, but instead I held onto it until I found a proper disposal point.”
“That minor internal struggle made me curious: do people with stronger self-control naturally gravitate toward greener choices in their daily lives?” Li said. His laboratory was already studying self-control, making the connection to everyday environmental behavior a natural extension of their work.
Most previous studies on this topic relied on cross-sectional designs. A cross-sectional study looks at a group of people at a single point in time, much like a photograph. This makes it difficult to know the exact direction of the relationship between variables.
“Previous studies found that more self-controlled people also report more sustainable habits, but almost all of that evidence came from cross-sectional surveys, single snapshots in time,” Li told PsyPost. “That leaves a crucial ambiguity: does the link simply reflect stable differences between people, or can a real change in self-control actually drive a change in behavior?”
This single-snapshot approach also leaves room for survey bias. “Because both self-control and pro-environmental behavior are socially valued traits, respondents filling out a one-shot questionnaire tend to paint a consistently positive picture of themselves,” Li said. “If they rate themselves as highly disciplined, they often feel compelled to rate themselves as environmentally conscious too.”
This bias can artificially inflate the correlation, making the two traits look more tightly linked than they truly are in daily life. “To get around both problems, we followed the same participants across multiple time points,” Li said. “Spacing out the measurements helps separate genuine directional effects from the bias of wanting to appear virtuous in a single sitting.”
Longitudinal studies track the exact same individuals across multiple points in time. This allows scientists to see how changes in one trait might predict changes in another trait over months or years. The researchers specifically chose to study adolescents and young adults. Late adolescence and early adulthood are periods when individuals are still developing their self-regulation capacities and forming their long-term environmental habits.
In the first study, the researchers recruited 221 high school students from a public school in China. The sample included about 66 percent female students with an average age of roughly 16 years old. The researchers assessed the students twice, with a full year passing between the first and second assessment waves. During each wave, the students filled out paper questionnaires in their classrooms while supervised by research assistants.
To measure self-control, the scientists used a 13-item questionnaire. Students rated statements about their ability to resist temptation and their tendency to think before acting. To measure pro-environmental behavior, the students rated how often they engaged in specific green activities over the past 12 months. These activities included recycling cans, saving energy at home, or buying products in reusable containers.
When analyzing the data, the scientists used a statistical technique called a cross-lagged panel model. This method looks at how a variable at the first time point predicts a different variable at the second time point. The findings of this first study showed that higher self-control at the start of the year predicted an increase in pro-environmental behaviors by the end of the year.
The researchers conducted a second study to expand on these findings using a larger sample and a longer timeframe. The second study included 1286 university students from a single university in China. This group was about 63 percent female with an average age of roughly 19 years old. Instead of just two check-ins, the researchers tracked these students across three distinct waves, with exactly one year between each wave.
Because the study spanned three full years, the scientists could use a more advanced statistical tool called a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model. This advanced statistical model separates the survey data into two different mathematical layers. The first layer looks at stable differences between different people. The second layer looks at temporary fluctuations within the exact same person.
Separating these layers helps scientists avoid confusing a stable personality trait with a passing state of mind. At the stable, trait-like level, the researchers found a positive association between the two factors. Individuals who consistently showed higher self-control compared to their peers also consistently reported more sustainable behaviors. This suggests that self-control is a stable personal trait strongly linked to living a greener lifestyle.
At the fluctuating, individual level, the data showed a different pattern. When a specific student experienced a natural drop or increase in their own typical self-control, it did not predict any subsequent change in their sustainable habits. This suggests that year-to-year shifts in a person’s willpower do not directly drive short-term changes in how they treat the environment.
“We were genuinely surprised by what we found inside the same person over time,” Li said. “At the outset, we had assumed that if someone’s self-control improved, their pro-environmental behavior would improve with it. But when we tracked the same individuals across waves, natural fluctuations in self-control simply did not translate into meaningful shifts in pro-environmental behavior.”
“The link is really anchored in stable, long-term trait differences,” Li continued. “It underscores that promoting sustainability requires more than urging people to ‘try harder’; we need to build habits and shape environments that make green choices effortless.”
The results provide evidence that having greener habits is part of an overarching lifestyle rather than a fleeting mood. “The main message is that the connection between self-control and green behavior is primarily a stable trait-level pattern: people who generally have stronger self-control also tend to live more sustainably across time,” Li said. “Yet when we tracked the same individuals over multiple waves, short-term ups and downs in their self-control did not reliably produce immediate changes in their environmental habits.”
“So it is not about heroic bursts of willpower in the moment; it is about who you are, on average, over the long haul,” Li added. “That distinction matters for everyday life. Sustainable living is really a marathon built from countless small decisions, turning off lights, carrying reusable bags, sorting waste, that add up over months and years.”
This highlights the need for structural changes that make sustainable choices easier for everyone. “If we rely solely on asking people to ‘try harder’ each time, we are fighting an uphill battle against human nature,” Li said. “A smarter approach is to reduce the self-control demand itself. Putting reminder stickers near light switches, placing recycling bins in convenient locations, or sharing monthly electricity or water-use feedback with family members can make the green choice the easy choice.”
Communities can also use nudging strategies to encourage green behaviors. Nudging involves designing choices in a way that guides people toward a desired action without restricting their freedom. Making recycling bins more accessible or automatically opting people into green energy plans reduces the amount of willpower needed to help the planet. “By designing environments and routines that minimize friction, we can promote sustainable actions without requiring constant mental effort,” Li said.
The researchers also note that self-control could be used as a helpful metric when assembling teams to tackle climate issues. People with naturally high self-control might be better equipped to handle the long-term demands of environmental advocacy. “One final thought: when selecting people for roles with significant environmental responsibilities, it makes sense to weigh self-control alongside their environmental attitudes and professional competence,” Li said.
The study does have a few limitations that should be noted. “We used self-report questionnaires and focused on Chinese high school and university students,” Li said. “That makes the findings suggestive rather than definitive. Future work should test whether the same pattern holds in other populations and with objective measures, such as actual behavioral tasks or real-world tracking, before drawing firmer conclusions.”
In addition, the one-year gap between the data collection waves might have missed smaller, short-term connections between willpower and sustainable choices. A full year is a long time, and a person’s self-control might fluctuate on a daily or weekly basis.
Going forward, the researchers plan to look at other psychological traits that support sustainable living. “Our next step is to understand why some people follow through on environmental intentions while others do not,” Li said. “We are especially interested in grit, passion and perseverance for long-term goals, because environmental protection is not a one-off act; it is a decades-long commitment.”
“The Paris Agreement, for instance, sets carbon-neutrality targets for the mid-twenty-first century, a timeline that feels distant to most people alive today,” Li noted. “That means safeguarding the planet demands sustained effort against slow, incremental payoffs, exactly the conditions where grit should matter.”
The scientists hope to figure out exactly how to foster this type of long-term dedication. “We want to test whether grit and related traits can help explain who stays the course in the face of such delayed rewards, and whether we can design interventions or educational programs that cultivate this kind of persistence for ecological goals,” Li said.
The study, “Longitudinal associations between self-control and pro-environmental behaviors,” was authored by Xingbo Wang, Yanru Liu, Yalun Zhang, Zhenglian Su, Liyun Hua, Yajun Zhao, and Jingguang Li.
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #SelfControl #ProEnvironmentalBehavior #SustainableLiving #EnvironmentalPsychology #HabitFormation #GreenerChoices #Nudging #EcoFriendlyHabits #LongitudinalStudy #ClimateAction
-
DATE: May 12, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New study finds sustainable living relies on stable personality traits, not temporary bursts of willpower
Recent research suggests that people who naturally possess higher levels of self-control tend to engage in more environmentally friendly habits over time. However, short-term changes in a person’s willpower do not directly lead to greener choices. These findings provide evidence that making sustainable choices easier, rather than relying on individual discipline, might be a more effective way to encourage eco-friendly habits. The study was published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.
Scientists conducted this study to better understand the psychological traits that drive people to protect the environment. Environmental challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss require immediate action from everyday people. Actions that reduce a person’s negative impact on the planet are known as pro-environmental behaviors. Taking these actions often requires individuals to override their immediate conveniences for the sake of long-term ecological goals.
Pursuing these long-term goals requires a degree of self-regulation. Self-control is a specific and essential type of self-regulation. It involves managing internal reactions, delaying gratification, and resisting unwanted behavioral impulses. Previous research suggests that people with higher self-control tend to act more sustainably because they can keep long-term goals in mind.
“The idea first struck me during a very ordinary moment,” said Jingguang Li, a professor of psychology at Dali University in China. “I had just finished a bottle of water and there was no recycling bin in sight. I felt the urge to simply discard it, but instead I held onto it until I found a proper disposal point.”
“That minor internal struggle made me curious: do people with stronger self-control naturally gravitate toward greener choices in their daily lives?” Li said. His laboratory was already studying self-control, making the connection to everyday environmental behavior a natural extension of their work.
Most previous studies on this topic relied on cross-sectional designs. A cross-sectional study looks at a group of people at a single point in time, much like a photograph. This makes it difficult to know the exact direction of the relationship between variables.
“Previous studies found that more self-controlled people also report more sustainable habits, but almost all of that evidence came from cross-sectional surveys, single snapshots in time,” Li told PsyPost. “That leaves a crucial ambiguity: does the link simply reflect stable differences between people, or can a real change in self-control actually drive a change in behavior?”
This single-snapshot approach also leaves room for survey bias. “Because both self-control and pro-environmental behavior are socially valued traits, respondents filling out a one-shot questionnaire tend to paint a consistently positive picture of themselves,” Li said. “If they rate themselves as highly disciplined, they often feel compelled to rate themselves as environmentally conscious too.”
This bias can artificially inflate the correlation, making the two traits look more tightly linked than they truly are in daily life. “To get around both problems, we followed the same participants across multiple time points,” Li said. “Spacing out the measurements helps separate genuine directional effects from the bias of wanting to appear virtuous in a single sitting.”
Longitudinal studies track the exact same individuals across multiple points in time. This allows scientists to see how changes in one trait might predict changes in another trait over months or years. The researchers specifically chose to study adolescents and young adults. Late adolescence and early adulthood are periods when individuals are still developing their self-regulation capacities and forming their long-term environmental habits.
In the first study, the researchers recruited 221 high school students from a public school in China. The sample included about 66 percent female students with an average age of roughly 16 years old. The researchers assessed the students twice, with a full year passing between the first and second assessment waves. During each wave, the students filled out paper questionnaires in their classrooms while supervised by research assistants.
To measure self-control, the scientists used a 13-item questionnaire. Students rated statements about their ability to resist temptation and their tendency to think before acting. To measure pro-environmental behavior, the students rated how often they engaged in specific green activities over the past 12 months. These activities included recycling cans, saving energy at home, or buying products in reusable containers.
When analyzing the data, the scientists used a statistical technique called a cross-lagged panel model. This method looks at how a variable at the first time point predicts a different variable at the second time point. The findings of this first study showed that higher self-control at the start of the year predicted an increase in pro-environmental behaviors by the end of the year.
The researchers conducted a second study to expand on these findings using a larger sample and a longer timeframe. The second study included 1286 university students from a single university in China. This group was about 63 percent female with an average age of roughly 19 years old. Instead of just two check-ins, the researchers tracked these students across three distinct waves, with exactly one year between each wave.
Because the study spanned three full years, the scientists could use a more advanced statistical tool called a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model. This advanced statistical model separates the survey data into two different mathematical layers. The first layer looks at stable differences between different people. The second layer looks at temporary fluctuations within the exact same person.
Separating these layers helps scientists avoid confusing a stable personality trait with a passing state of mind. At the stable, trait-like level, the researchers found a positive association between the two factors. Individuals who consistently showed higher self-control compared to their peers also consistently reported more sustainable behaviors. This suggests that self-control is a stable personal trait strongly linked to living a greener lifestyle.
At the fluctuating, individual level, the data showed a different pattern. When a specific student experienced a natural drop or increase in their own typical self-control, it did not predict any subsequent change in their sustainable habits. This suggests that year-to-year shifts in a person’s willpower do not directly drive short-term changes in how they treat the environment.
“We were genuinely surprised by what we found inside the same person over time,” Li said. “At the outset, we had assumed that if someone’s self-control improved, their pro-environmental behavior would improve with it. But when we tracked the same individuals across waves, natural fluctuations in self-control simply did not translate into meaningful shifts in pro-environmental behavior.”
“The link is really anchored in stable, long-term trait differences,” Li continued. “It underscores that promoting sustainability requires more than urging people to ‘try harder’; we need to build habits and shape environments that make green choices effortless.”
The results provide evidence that having greener habits is part of an overarching lifestyle rather than a fleeting mood. “The main message is that the connection between self-control and green behavior is primarily a stable trait-level pattern: people who generally have stronger self-control also tend to live more sustainably across time,” Li said. “Yet when we tracked the same individuals over multiple waves, short-term ups and downs in their self-control did not reliably produce immediate changes in their environmental habits.”
“So it is not about heroic bursts of willpower in the moment; it is about who you are, on average, over the long haul,” Li added. “That distinction matters for everyday life. Sustainable living is really a marathon built from countless small decisions, turning off lights, carrying reusable bags, sorting waste, that add up over months and years.”
This highlights the need for structural changes that make sustainable choices easier for everyone. “If we rely solely on asking people to ‘try harder’ each time, we are fighting an uphill battle against human nature,” Li said. “A smarter approach is to reduce the self-control demand itself. Putting reminder stickers near light switches, placing recycling bins in convenient locations, or sharing monthly electricity or water-use feedback with family members can make the green choice the easy choice.”
Communities can also use nudging strategies to encourage green behaviors. Nudging involves designing choices in a way that guides people toward a desired action without restricting their freedom. Making recycling bins more accessible or automatically opting people into green energy plans reduces the amount of willpower needed to help the planet. “By designing environments and routines that minimize friction, we can promote sustainable actions without requiring constant mental effort,” Li said.
The researchers also note that self-control could be used as a helpful metric when assembling teams to tackle climate issues. People with naturally high self-control might be better equipped to handle the long-term demands of environmental advocacy. “One final thought: when selecting people for roles with significant environmental responsibilities, it makes sense to weigh self-control alongside their environmental attitudes and professional competence,” Li said.
The study does have a few limitations that should be noted. “We used self-report questionnaires and focused on Chinese high school and university students,” Li said. “That makes the findings suggestive rather than definitive. Future work should test whether the same pattern holds in other populations and with objective measures, such as actual behavioral tasks or real-world tracking, before drawing firmer conclusions.”
In addition, the one-year gap between the data collection waves might have missed smaller, short-term connections between willpower and sustainable choices. A full year is a long time, and a person’s self-control might fluctuate on a daily or weekly basis.
Going forward, the researchers plan to look at other psychological traits that support sustainable living. “Our next step is to understand why some people follow through on environmental intentions while others do not,” Li said. “We are especially interested in grit, passion and perseverance for long-term goals, because environmental protection is not a one-off act; it is a decades-long commitment.”
“The Paris Agreement, for instance, sets carbon-neutrality targets for the mid-twenty-first century, a timeline that feels distant to most people alive today,” Li noted. “That means safeguarding the planet demands sustained effort against slow, incremental payoffs, exactly the conditions where grit should matter.”
The scientists hope to figure out exactly how to foster this type of long-term dedication. “We want to test whether grit and related traits can help explain who stays the course in the face of such delayed rewards, and whether we can design interventions or educational programs that cultivate this kind of persistence for ecological goals,” Li said.
The study, “Longitudinal associations between self-control and pro-environmental behaviors,” was authored by Xingbo Wang, Yanru Liu, Yalun Zhang, Zhenglian Su, Liyun Hua, Yajun Zhao, and Jingguang Li.
-------------------------------------------------
DAILY EMAIL DIGEST: Email [email protected] -- no subject or message needed.
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
NYU Information for Practice puts out 400-500 good quality health-related research posts per week but its too much for many people, so that bot is limited to just subscribers. You can read it or subscribe at @PsychResearchBot
Since 1991 The National Psychologist has focused on keeping practicing psychologists current with news, information and items of interest. Check them out for more free articles, resources, and subscription information: https://www.nationalpsychologist.com
EMAIL DAILY DIGEST OF RSS FEEDS -- SUBSCRIBE: http://subscribe-article-digests.clinicians-exchange.org
READ ONLINE: http://read-the-rss-mega-archive.clinicians-exchange.org
It's primitive... but it works... mostly...
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #SelfControl #ProEnvironmentalBehavior #SustainableLiving #EnvironmentalPsychology #HabitFormation #GreenerChoices #Nudging #EcoFriendlyHabits #LongitudinalStudy #ClimateAction
-
DATE: May 12, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New study finds sustainable living relies on stable personality traits, not temporary bursts of willpower
Recent research suggests that people who naturally possess higher levels of self-control tend to engage in more environmentally friendly habits over time. However, short-term changes in a person’s willpower do not directly lead to greener choices. These findings provide evidence that making sustainable choices easier, rather than relying on individual discipline, might be a more effective way to encourage eco-friendly habits. The study was published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.
Scientists conducted this study to better understand the psychological traits that drive people to protect the environment. Environmental challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss require immediate action from everyday people. Actions that reduce a person’s negative impact on the planet are known as pro-environmental behaviors. Taking these actions often requires individuals to override their immediate conveniences for the sake of long-term ecological goals.
Pursuing these long-term goals requires a degree of self-regulation. Self-control is a specific and essential type of self-regulation. It involves managing internal reactions, delaying gratification, and resisting unwanted behavioral impulses. Previous research suggests that people with higher self-control tend to act more sustainably because they can keep long-term goals in mind.
“The idea first struck me during a very ordinary moment,” said Jingguang Li, a professor of psychology at Dali University in China. “I had just finished a bottle of water and there was no recycling bin in sight. I felt the urge to simply discard it, but instead I held onto it until I found a proper disposal point.”
“That minor internal struggle made me curious: do people with stronger self-control naturally gravitate toward greener choices in their daily lives?” Li said. His laboratory was already studying self-control, making the connection to everyday environmental behavior a natural extension of their work.
Most previous studies on this topic relied on cross-sectional designs. A cross-sectional study looks at a group of people at a single point in time, much like a photograph. This makes it difficult to know the exact direction of the relationship between variables.
“Previous studies found that more self-controlled people also report more sustainable habits, but almost all of that evidence came from cross-sectional surveys, single snapshots in time,” Li told PsyPost. “That leaves a crucial ambiguity: does the link simply reflect stable differences between people, or can a real change in self-control actually drive a change in behavior?”
This single-snapshot approach also leaves room for survey bias. “Because both self-control and pro-environmental behavior are socially valued traits, respondents filling out a one-shot questionnaire tend to paint a consistently positive picture of themselves,” Li said. “If they rate themselves as highly disciplined, they often feel compelled to rate themselves as environmentally conscious too.”
This bias can artificially inflate the correlation, making the two traits look more tightly linked than they truly are in daily life. “To get around both problems, we followed the same participants across multiple time points,” Li said. “Spacing out the measurements helps separate genuine directional effects from the bias of wanting to appear virtuous in a single sitting.”
Longitudinal studies track the exact same individuals across multiple points in time. This allows scientists to see how changes in one trait might predict changes in another trait over months or years. The researchers specifically chose to study adolescents and young adults. Late adolescence and early adulthood are periods when individuals are still developing their self-regulation capacities and forming their long-term environmental habits.
In the first study, the researchers recruited 221 high school students from a public school in China. The sample included about 66 percent female students with an average age of roughly 16 years old. The researchers assessed the students twice, with a full year passing between the first and second assessment waves. During each wave, the students filled out paper questionnaires in their classrooms while supervised by research assistants.
To measure self-control, the scientists used a 13-item questionnaire. Students rated statements about their ability to resist temptation and their tendency to think before acting. To measure pro-environmental behavior, the students rated how often they engaged in specific green activities over the past 12 months. These activities included recycling cans, saving energy at home, or buying products in reusable containers.
When analyzing the data, the scientists used a statistical technique called a cross-lagged panel model. This method looks at how a variable at the first time point predicts a different variable at the second time point. The findings of this first study showed that higher self-control at the start of the year predicted an increase in pro-environmental behaviors by the end of the year.
The researchers conducted a second study to expand on these findings using a larger sample and a longer timeframe. The second study included 1286 university students from a single university in China. This group was about 63 percent female with an average age of roughly 19 years old. Instead of just two check-ins, the researchers tracked these students across three distinct waves, with exactly one year between each wave.
Because the study spanned three full years, the scientists could use a more advanced statistical tool called a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model. This advanced statistical model separates the survey data into two different mathematical layers. The first layer looks at stable differences between different people. The second layer looks at temporary fluctuations within the exact same person.
Separating these layers helps scientists avoid confusing a stable personality trait with a passing state of mind. At the stable, trait-like level, the researchers found a positive association between the two factors. Individuals who consistently showed higher self-control compared to their peers also consistently reported more sustainable behaviors. This suggests that self-control is a stable personal trait strongly linked to living a greener lifestyle.
At the fluctuating, individual level, the data showed a different pattern. When a specific student experienced a natural drop or increase in their own typical self-control, it did not predict any subsequent change in their sustainable habits. This suggests that year-to-year shifts in a person’s willpower do not directly drive short-term changes in how they treat the environment.
“We were genuinely surprised by what we found inside the same person over time,” Li said. “At the outset, we had assumed that if someone’s self-control improved, their pro-environmental behavior would improve with it. But when we tracked the same individuals across waves, natural fluctuations in self-control simply did not translate into meaningful shifts in pro-environmental behavior.”
“The link is really anchored in stable, long-term trait differences,” Li continued. “It underscores that promoting sustainability requires more than urging people to ‘try harder’; we need to build habits and shape environments that make green choices effortless.”
The results provide evidence that having greener habits is part of an overarching lifestyle rather than a fleeting mood. “The main message is that the connection between self-control and green behavior is primarily a stable trait-level pattern: people who generally have stronger self-control also tend to live more sustainably across time,” Li said. “Yet when we tracked the same individuals over multiple waves, short-term ups and downs in their self-control did not reliably produce immediate changes in their environmental habits.”
“So it is not about heroic bursts of willpower in the moment; it is about who you are, on average, over the long haul,” Li added. “That distinction matters for everyday life. Sustainable living is really a marathon built from countless small decisions, turning off lights, carrying reusable bags, sorting waste, that add up over months and years.”
This highlights the need for structural changes that make sustainable choices easier for everyone. “If we rely solely on asking people to ‘try harder’ each time, we are fighting an uphill battle against human nature,” Li said. “A smarter approach is to reduce the self-control demand itself. Putting reminder stickers near light switches, placing recycling bins in convenient locations, or sharing monthly electricity or water-use feedback with family members can make the green choice the easy choice.”
Communities can also use nudging strategies to encourage green behaviors. Nudging involves designing choices in a way that guides people toward a desired action without restricting their freedom. Making recycling bins more accessible or automatically opting people into green energy plans reduces the amount of willpower needed to help the planet. “By designing environments and routines that minimize friction, we can promote sustainable actions without requiring constant mental effort,” Li said.
The researchers also note that self-control could be used as a helpful metric when assembling teams to tackle climate issues. People with naturally high self-control might be better equipped to handle the long-term demands of environmental advocacy. “One final thought: when selecting people for roles with significant environmental responsibilities, it makes sense to weigh self-control alongside their environmental attitudes and professional competence,” Li said.
The study does have a few limitations that should be noted. “We used self-report questionnaires and focused on Chinese high school and university students,” Li said. “That makes the findings suggestive rather than definitive. Future work should test whether the same pattern holds in other populations and with objective measures, such as actual behavioral tasks or real-world tracking, before drawing firmer conclusions.”
In addition, the one-year gap between the data collection waves might have missed smaller, short-term connections between willpower and sustainable choices. A full year is a long time, and a person’s self-control might fluctuate on a daily or weekly basis.
Going forward, the researchers plan to look at other psychological traits that support sustainable living. “Our next step is to understand why some people follow through on environmental intentions while others do not,” Li said. “We are especially interested in grit, passion and perseverance for long-term goals, because environmental protection is not a one-off act; it is a decades-long commitment.”
“The Paris Agreement, for instance, sets carbon-neutrality targets for the mid-twenty-first century, a timeline that feels distant to most people alive today,” Li noted. “That means safeguarding the planet demands sustained effort against slow, incremental payoffs, exactly the conditions where grit should matter.”
The scientists hope to figure out exactly how to foster this type of long-term dedication. “We want to test whether grit and related traits can help explain who stays the course in the face of such delayed rewards, and whether we can design interventions or educational programs that cultivate this kind of persistence for ecological goals,” Li said.
The study, “Longitudinal associations between self-control and pro-environmental behaviors,” was authored by Xingbo Wang, Yanru Liu, Yalun Zhang, Zhenglian Su, Liyun Hua, Yajun Zhao, and Jingguang Li.
-------------------------------------------------
DAILY EMAIL DIGEST: Email [email protected] -- no subject or message needed.
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
NYU Information for Practice puts out 400-500 good quality health-related research posts per week but its too much for many people, so that bot is limited to just subscribers. You can read it or subscribe at @PsychResearchBot
Since 1991 The National Psychologist has focused on keeping practicing psychologists current with news, information and items of interest. Check them out for more free articles, resources, and subscription information: https://www.nationalpsychologist.com
EMAIL DAILY DIGEST OF RSS FEEDS -- SUBSCRIBE: http://subscribe-article-digests.clinicians-exchange.org
READ ONLINE: http://read-the-rss-mega-archive.clinicians-exchange.org
It's primitive... but it works... mostly...
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #SelfControl #ProEnvironmentalBehavior #SustainableLiving #EnvironmentalPsychology #HabitFormation #GreenerChoices #Nudging #EcoFriendlyHabits #LongitudinalStudy #ClimateAction
-
Mostly Monday Reads: It’s the Policies Stupid!
“Arresting development,” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I don’t know about you, but these first 100 days of #FARTUS have taken a toll on me. So many bad policies in such a short time have me spinning and anxious. I can’t even plan my one-person, small-house, semi-retired life. I can’t even figure out what state and local governments, big and small businesses, and the courts have on their hands right now.
The assessment of these first 100 days, coming from polls and pundits, is stunningly bad. Bad to the point that any polling firm is considered to be a criminal organization by yam tits. I will start with this analysis in The Guardian by Steven Greenhouse. “Trump’s second term will be the worst presidential term ever. Tragically, the president’s second term is already more lawless and more authoritarian than any in US history.”
In his first 100 days back in office, Donald Trump has made a strong case that his second term will be by far the worst presidential term in US history. So many of his flood-the-zone actions have been head-spinning and stomach-turning. His administration seems to be powered by ignorance and incoherence, spleen and sycophancy. Both he and his right-hand man, Elon Musk, with their resentment-fueled desire to disrupt everything, seem intent on pulverizing the foundations of our government, our democracy, our alliances as well as any notions of truth. Tragically, Trump’s second term is already more lawless and more authoritarian than any in US history.
The worst and most dangerous part of Trump’s agenda is his war against our democracy and constitution – defying judges’ orders, deporting people without due process, suggesting he will run for a third term, calling to impeach judges who rule against him, pardoning hundreds of January 6 criminals, gutting federal agencies and firing thousands of federal employees in flagrant violation of the law, and banning books from military libraries. (One wonders: will book burning be next?) Underlining just how dangerous and lawless Trump is, he is talking publicly about disappearing US citizens to foreign countries where they could be locked in prison forever. For those who care about democracy and basic freedoms, this is Defcon 1 stuff.
From Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, every president since the second world war has worked hard to build alliances to promote peace and prosperity and deter aggression. But right out of the box, Trump 2.0 has rushed to blow up our alliances and cavalierly alienate our allies. Trump quickly rejected the US’s traditional foreign policy and ideals by warmly embracing Vladimir Putin, a brutal dictator, and turning against Ukraine and its noble fight against Putin’s aggression. Trump sounded like a rapacious 19th-century imperialist when he threatened to take over the Panama canal and, ditto, when he talked of using force to seize control of Greenland, which belongs to our longtime Nato ally, Denmark. Then there’s Trump’s astoundingly idiotic talk – and taunt – that Canada should be our 51st state. What a way to anger and alienate a nation that has long been the US’s best friend.
Then there is the disaster – or should we say clown show – of Trump’s on-again, off-again, on-again, who-knows-what’s-going-to-happen-tomorrow tariffs. His “liberation day” tariffs were put together by a clown-car crew, just three hours before he announced it, and Trump and company seemed to have zero idea that his hodgepodge of tariffs would send the world’s stock markets into a nervous breakdown. Trump’s team was stupid enough to think that China was too feeble to respond effectively to Trump’s trade war – treasury secretary Scott Bessent said China had “a losing hand” with just “a pair of twos”. Trump and his clown car failed to realize that China had the ability to retaliate in devastating ways – by clamping down on rare earth exports that American manufacturers and tech companies desperately need, and perhaps by selling off hundreds of billions of dollars in US bonds. Former treasury secretary Janet Yellen was appalled, saying: “This is the worst self-inflicted policy wound I’ve ever seen in my career inflicted on our economy.”
What really gets to me is his “bombastic rhetoric.” It’s like you’re either with the bully or being bullied. But what appalls me is his stewardship of the US and global Economy. He is completely detached from all we have learned about policy impacts from the 1930s. It was clear that as industrialization increased, the old mercantilism of the colonial days was fading fast. Industrialization created a different trade paradigm.
The switch from the Gold Standard created a different-looking financial economic system. The Information Age and the rise of advanced technology like robotics have changed us even more. We have complex, intertwined, mixed market economies. While the basics of market structure remain similar, the frictions within them have become much more complicated. You may check the academic research of Nobel Prize-winning Joseph E. Stiglitz for his legendary study on how the various quirks in producing specific goods and services can lead to fairly serious economic issues.
I don’t think anyone in the West Wing or the Agencies knows how economic policy works. For that matter, Trump doesn’t even know how many countries there are in the world since he keeps mentioning 200 trade deals when there are only 195. Maybe the Penguin islands are more autonomous than we know?
In fact, the communication style of the entire MAGA movement makes it an impossible environment for governing. This is how Amanda Marcotte–writing for Salon— puts it. “MAGA loves a tantrum: How public meltdowns became the preferred method of GOP communication. Why Nancy Mace, Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller keep throwing fits on camera.”
If there were an Oscar for the category “hard to watch,” I’d have to nominate the video of Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., barking expletives at a constituent after he asked her if she would have a town hall soon. It’s produced in a beauty supply store instead of a movie studio, but in a brief minute and 42 seconds, the video finds its place in the canon of horror films shot from the villain’s perspective. The camera focuses entirely on the story’s hero, a man in a polo and shorts holding a bottle of what appears to be face cleanser, as he holds his own against his congressional representative getting increasingly shrill as she yells invective at him. Even though he said nothing about gay marriage, she demands his gratitude for voting “for gay marriage twice.” When he gets annoyed at her reductive assumption, she calls him “crazy” and “absolutely f—king crazy,” and repeatedly says “f—k you” to him.
In the eyes of normal people, Mace, as her interlocutor said when he fled from this encounter, is a “disgrace.” Most adults who act like Mace in public immediately wish to disappear off the face of the earth in shame. But not our Nancy! No, she’s the one who posted this video online, proud of her emotional incontinence. She even offered a homophobic “gay panic” defense, by describing the man as “wearing daisy dukes, at a makeup store.” (Sorry, Miss Nancy, they aren’t daisy dukes until we see cheeks.) To people outside the MAGA bubble, it’s a baffling choice. She’s not even a fun villain. There’s none of the sleek appeal of Loki from the “Avengers” franchise or camp glee of Ursula from “The Little Mermaid.” Mace is serving pure toddler here. She likely wished to throw herself to the floor and start pounding it, but doing so would have meant dropping her iPhone.
Mace isn’t wrong, however, to think that what most adults find embarrassing, the MAGA base will eat right up. The public meltdown, in which you declare yourself the world’s greatest victim, is the preferred GOP method of political communication these days. Despite this effort, Mace didn’t even come close to nabbing last week’s gold star for the most histronic MAGA performance. She was outdone by Stephen Miller, whose usual register on TV is “verge of a nervous breakdown,” but got so shrill on Fox News Tuesday that Lauren Tousignant at Jezebel worried she’d soon have to “look at Stephen Miller’s face as he pops a dozen blood vessels as his brain explodes.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth turned in two performances that would cause Al Pacino to tell him to settle down. While carping about “the fake news media” during the White House Easter egg roll, Hegseth’s whining got so pitched his voice started to crack, while his children stood behind him, embarrassed at the spectacle.
Despite his own family’s discomfort with his antics, Hegseth kept up the scenery-chewing, bellowing about the all-powerful, forever-mysterious “they” have “come after me from day one.” (“They,” in this case, means close friends and advisors who got pushed out after beginning to question Hegseth’s fitness for the job.)
All this yelling and bellyaching serves a pragmatic purpose: to distract from how what they’re saying makes no sense. Miller’s claim that the six Republican judges on the Supreme Court — three appointed by Trump — are “communist” wouldn’t withstand even a moment’s thought at a normal volume. Because he’s delivering his commentary at “front row at Led Zepplin” levels, the brain can’t even process how preposterous the lie is. Mace’s routine showed this working in a literal way. Her target runs away, because trying to talk to someone behaving like her is like trying to converse with a wildfire.
It’s part of the overall too-muchness that is the signature of the MAGA aesthetic, which goes right back to Trump’s gold-plated tastelessness. We see it in the infamous “Mar-a-Lago” face, which uses plastic surgery and spackled-on make-up to turn women into terrifyingly exaggerated caricatures of femininity. Or the love of roided-out male bodies, which try to recreate the impossibly huge muscles of comic books on human bodies. It’s a maximalist aesthetic, minus all the playfulness of Las Vegas casinos or “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” There’s a grim vibe to the undertaking, as if they’re trying to pound your head into the ground with the excess.
“Fake Melania mystery solved. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer–writing for The Atlantic—dialed up Trump on his private phone one day in late March. He spoke to them even though he had described them both heinously.
The week our interview was supposed to occur, Trump posted a vituperative message on Truth Social, attacking us by name. “Ashley Parker is not capable of doing a fair and unbiased interview. She is a Radical Left Lunatic, and has been as terrible as is possible for as long as I have known her,” he wrote. “To this date, she doesn’t even know that I won the Presidency THREE times.” (That last sentence is true—Ashley Parker does not know that Trump won the presidency three times.) “Likewise, Michael Scherer has never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES.”
Yes, it was full-on #FARTUS Bully Verbal Bombing them publicly. They actually just called him later. He picked up. This article is the result
Despite his attacks on us a few days earlier, the president, evidently feeling buoyed by a week of successes, was eager to talk about his accomplishments. As we spoke, the sounds of another conversation, perhaps from a television, hummed in the background.
The president seemed exhilarated by everything he had managed to do in the first two months of his second term: He had begun a purge of diversity efforts from the federal government; granted clemency to nearly 1,600 supporters who had participated in the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those caught beating police officers on camera; and signed 98 executive orders and counting (26 of them on his first day in office). He had fired independent regulators; gutted entire agencies; laid off great swaths of the federal workforce; and invoked 18th-century wartime powers to use against a criminal gang from Venezuela. He had adjusted tariffs like a DJ spinning knobs in the booth, upsetting the rhythms of global trade and inducing vertigo in the financial markets. He had raged at the leader of Ukraine, a democratic ally repelling an imperialist invasion, for not being “thankful”—and praised the leader of the invading country, Russia, as “very smart,” reversing in an instant 80 years of U.S. foreign-policy doctrine, and prompting the countries of NATO to prepare for their own defense, without the protective umbrella of American power, for the first time since 1945.
…
We asked Trump why he thought the billionaire class was prostrating itself before him.
“It’s just a higher level of respect. I don’t know,” Trump said. “Maybe they didn’t know me at the beginning, and they know me now.”
“I mean, you saw yesterday with the law firm,” he said. He was referring to Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of the nation’s most prestigious firms, whose leader had come to the Oval Office days earlier to beg for relief from an executive order that could have crippled its business. Trump had issued the order at least partially because a former partner at the firm had in 2021 gone to work for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, where he was part of an investigation of the Trump Organization’s business practices. Also that week, an Ivy League institution, threatened with the cancellation of $400 million in federal funding, had agreed to overhaul its Middle Eastern–studies programs at the Trump administration’s request, while also acceding to other significant demands. “You saw yesterday with Columbia University. What do you think of the law firm? Were you shocked at that?” Trump asked us.
Yes—all of it was shocking, much of it without precedent. Legal scholars were drawing comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the early stages of the New Deal, when Congress had allowed FDR to demolish norms and greatly expand the powers of the presidency.
As ever, Trump was on the hunt for a deal. If he liked the story we wrote, he said, he might even speak with us again.
“Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” he said. Perhaps the magazine can risk forgoing hotness, he suggested, because it is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, which buffers it, he implied, from commercial imperatives. But that doesn’t guarantee anything, he warned. “You know at some point, they give up,” he said, referring to media owners generally and—we suspected—Bezos specifically. “At some point they say, No más, no más.” He laughed quietly.
Media owners weren’t the only ones on his mind. He also seemed to be referring to law firms, universities, broadcast networks, tech titans, artists, research scientists, military commanders, civil servants, moderate Republicans—all the people and institutions he expected to eventually, inevitably, submit to his will.
We asked the president if his second term felt different from his first. He said it did. “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
More like the country and the world run from him. I have to admit. I admire the Chinese method of trolling him. It’s funny and effective. Philip Bump at the Washington Post analyzes this self-defeating policy of the second term. “The bubble that created Trump is the reason he’s stumbling. The White House is now a bubble where loyalty, not ability, defines success.”
Consider Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
No one should be surprised that Hegseth is flailing in his new role, one of the most arduous and complicated in the U.S. government, if not the world. When Donald Trump proposed that Hegseth run the agency, the response was broadly unified: Hegseth lacked the experience needed to do the job effectively. You could debate the other controversies surrounding his bid for the role ad nauseam, but there was no way to reasonably argue that the Fox News talk-show host was prepared to run the Pentagon.
Hegseth was confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate anyway because Trump and a universe of voices who support him insisted Hegseth was the best choice for the job — because he was Trump’s choice for the job. Republican senators who undoubtedly knew better went along, betting that things wouldn’t get so bad under Hegseth that it was worth stirring up the fury of that pro-Trump bubble.
It’s the same bet that prominent Republicans have been making on Trump himself since 2015. Now, as Trump too is flailing — polling and the data make clear that he is — it’s trivial to identify that insular chorus of cheerleaders and cynics as a root cause.
The president owes his political career to that same bubble. Over the past few decades, the fringe right and then Republicans more broadly embraced discussions of the world that were mostly devoid of nuance: left bad, right good. The internet allowed for the emergence of bespoke “news” organizations (and, later, social media accounts) catering to conspiratorial partisan rhetoric — an alternative to traditional reporting unhampered by criticism or unpopular truths.
Trump secured the 2016 Republican nomination not because he was the best spokesperson for the Republican Party but because he echoed the refrains of that surreal universe of information. When you hear his supporters praise his straightforwardness, this is what they are referring to: He says the false things with which they agree.
We’re about to say goodbye to Musk. Hopefully, Hegseth will be a quick second out. But what comes next? Certainly, nothing better. Even Rubio seems to have caught the munificently Kiss Ass Fever. The speed of light is the rate at which he contradicts the old Little Marco makes me wonder if he a Musk AI robot and the ex-Senator is up in space some where. Here’s the latest example from The Independent. “Marco Rubio claims Canada should be 51st state as PM told Trump they ‘couldn’t survive’ without U.S. Rubio says State Department has not taken action on the president’s push to annex Canada and Greenland.”
America’s top diplomat was questioned on Sunday about Donald Trump’s reasoning for repeatedly calling for Canada to join the United States as the 51st state.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared on NBC’s Meet the Presson Sunday where moderator Kristen Welker asked him if the administration was actually taking any steps to make Trump’s vision a reality.
The president has made his opinion clear: he wants Canada to join the United States and suggested his administration would also acquire the Danish-held territory Greenland by any means.
The secretary of state gave his own translation of the president’s remarks on the matter:
“What the president has said, and he has said this repeatedly, is he was told by the previous prime minister that Canada could not survive without unfair trade with the United States, at which point he asked, ‘Well, if you can’t survive as a nation without treating us unfairly in trade, then you should become a state.’ That’s what he said.”
Rubio told Welker that the administration had taken no action to realize this particular strain of Trump’s bluster, which has alarmed U.S. allies.
There’s a U.S. military base on Greenland, and the president has cited the self-governing nation’s geographical importance as a reasoning for his expansionist goal. Trump has made the comments on numerous occasions, including in conversations with his Canadian counterparts.
Trump himself made his goals of northward expansion apparent during his address to Congress in February.
“We need Greenland for national security and even international security. And we’re working with everybody involved to try and get it,” Trump said at the time. “And I think we’re going to get it one way or the other. We’re going to get it.”
But he was making similar remarks publicly as early as December 2024.
“No one can answer why we subsidize Canada to the tune of over $100,000,000 a year? Makes no sense!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st State.”
“They would save massively on taxes and military protection. I think it is a great idea,” added Trump.
So tell me if you ever thought you’d see the day that an American Secretary of State believes annexing your best allies, the ones you’ve fought beside in Wars, and stood by you when you were attacked, would say that sort of thing? Meanwhile, the entire Deportation debacle continues on its cruel and ugly path. This is from Politico. “Homan presses undocumented immigrants to self-deport, threatening prosecution. The push comes as the monthly deportation numbers have lagged behind the Biden administration’s.” Homan is now the antonym for Human. Deportation in this country does not just fall on the undocumented. It impacts everyone.
White House border czar Tom Homan on Monday warned undocumented immigrants that they “cannot hide” and will be prosecuted in they remain in the U.S. illegally — the latest effort from the Trump administration to push self-deportation.
“Get your affairs in order. If you’re in the country illegally, work with ICE, go to CBP One Home app, and leave on your own,” Homan said from the White House press briefing room.
Homan said every immigrant in the U.S. illegally must register with the federal government and carry documentation. And those who fail to register with the Department of Homeland Security or neglect to update any new address will have those actions treated as criminal offenses “starting today.” He also warned other undocumented immigrants that if they have a final order to leave the country but remain anyway, the Trump administration will “aggressively prosecute” and issue daily monetary fines of up to $998.
The border czar’s briefing room appearance comes as the Trump administration marks its 100th day in office this week, with Homan touting the administration’s progress on border security. He pointed to a significant drop in illegal border crossings, which have plunged since Trump took office to the lowest level in decades.
Homan said Monday that the administration has deported 139,000 migrants since Jan. 20 as Trump officials have struggled to ramp up removal numbers. This figure includes people deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and the Coast Guard, who would have been encountered at or before they reached the border, according to a DHS official. The Trump administration’s monthly deportation numbers have lagged behind the Biden administration’s, according to data obtained by NBC News.
The bluster is abusive, but the actions are unconstitutional, illegal, and inhumane. The New York Times reports on the weekend’s 60 Minutes sign-off. Every voice raised against the dismantling of US democracy is a voice that counts! “‘60 Minutes’ Chastises Its Corporate Parent in Unusual On-Air Rebuke. The show’s top producer abruptly said last week he was quitting. “Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” the correspondent Scott Pelley told viewers.”
In an extraordinary on-air rebuke, one of the top journalists at “60 Minutes” directly criticized the program’s parent company in the final moments of its Sunday night CBS telecast, its first episode since the program’s executive producer, Bill Owens, announced his intention to resign.
“Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” the correspondent, Scott Pelley, told viewers. “None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”
A spokesman for Paramount had no immediate comment, and has previously declined to comment on Mr. Owens’s departure.
Mr. Owens stunned the show’s staff on Tuesday when he said he would leave the highest-rated program in television news over disagreements with Paramount, CBS’s corporate parent, saying, “It’s clear the company is done with me.”
Mr. Owens’s comments were widely reported in the press last week. The show’s decision to repeat those grievances on-air may have exposed viewers to the serious tensions between “60 Minutes” and its corporate overseers for the first time.
Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of Paramount, has been intent on securing approval from the Trump administration for a multibillion-dollar sale of her media company to a studio run by the son of Larry Ellison, the tech billionaire.
President Trump sued CBS last year, claiming $10 billion in damages, in a case stemming from a “60 Minutes” interview with the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, that Mr. Trump said was deceptively edited. Ms. Redstone has expressed her desire to settle Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, although legal experts have called the case far-fetched.
So that’s it for me today. I’m just trying to keep my head above water and my thoughts on calm, clear awareness. I hope you’re finding a way to cope with this mess. I try to tune out as much as possible, but my job is to teach folks about financial and economic policies, so I can only shut out so much. A friend of mine posted a picture of American NAZIs partying in the French Quarter and getting drinks from the Dungeon. The tattoos and the t-shirts said it all. What’s most disturbing about all of this is these folks are out of their hidey holes, and they don’t care who sees them and what they say. I’ll be out on Wednesday at a protest in front of the ICE offices here in the Central Business District. I need to do something, even just being with like-minded people.
Also, we’re finding some older Dem Pols stepping down to make way for new blood. “Rep. Gerry Connolly, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will step down from his leadership post on the panel and not run for reelection.” Let’s try to hope.
What’s on your Reading and Blogging list today?
#FartusDeportUs #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #AllApologies #BombasticRhetoric #FARTUS #KashPatel #PamBondiWeirdo #PeteHegsethWeirdoSexualAssaulter #VerbalBullyBombs #YamTits100DaysOfOops
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Mostly Monday Reads: It’s the Policies Stupid!
“Arresting development,” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I don’t know about you, but these first 100 days of #FARTUS have taken a toll on me. So many bad policies in such a short time have me spinning and anxious. I can’t even plan my one-person, small-house, semi-retired life. I can’t even figure out what state and local governments, big and small businesses, and the courts have on their hands right now.
The assessment of these first 100 days, coming from polls and pundits, is stunningly bad. Bad to the point that any polling firm is considered to be a criminal organization by yam tits. I will start with this analysis in The Guardian by Steven Greenhouse. “Trump’s second term will be the worst presidential term ever. Tragically, the president’s second term is already more lawless and more authoritarian than any in US history.”
In his first 100 days back in office, Donald Trump has made a strong case that his second term will be by far the worst presidential term in US history. So many of his flood-the-zone actions have been head-spinning and stomach-turning. His administration seems to be powered by ignorance and incoherence, spleen and sycophancy. Both he and his right-hand man, Elon Musk, with their resentment-fueled desire to disrupt everything, seem intent on pulverizing the foundations of our government, our democracy, our alliances as well as any notions of truth. Tragically, Trump’s second term is already more lawless and more authoritarian than any in US history.
The worst and most dangerous part of Trump’s agenda is his war against our democracy and constitution – defying judges’ orders, deporting people without due process, suggesting he will run for a third term, calling to impeach judges who rule against him, pardoning hundreds of January 6 criminals, gutting federal agencies and firing thousands of federal employees in flagrant violation of the law, and banning books from military libraries. (One wonders: will book burning be next?) Underlining just how dangerous and lawless Trump is, he is talking publicly about disappearing US citizens to foreign countries where they could be locked in prison forever. For those who care about democracy and basic freedoms, this is Defcon 1 stuff.
From Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, every president since the second world war has worked hard to build alliances to promote peace and prosperity and deter aggression. But right out of the box, Trump 2.0 has rushed to blow up our alliances and cavalierly alienate our allies. Trump quickly rejected the US’s traditional foreign policy and ideals by warmly embracing Vladimir Putin, a brutal dictator, and turning against Ukraine and its noble fight against Putin’s aggression. Trump sounded like a rapacious 19th-century imperialist when he threatened to take over the Panama canal and, ditto, when he talked of using force to seize control of Greenland, which belongs to our longtime Nato ally, Denmark. Then there’s Trump’s astoundingly idiotic talk – and taunt – that Canada should be our 51st state. What a way to anger and alienate a nation that has long been the US’s best friend.
Then there is the disaster – or should we say clown show – of Trump’s on-again, off-again, on-again, who-knows-what’s-going-to-happen-tomorrow tariffs. His “liberation day” tariffs were put together by a clown-car crew, just three hours before he announced it, and Trump and company seemed to have zero idea that his hodgepodge of tariffs would send the world’s stock markets into a nervous breakdown. Trump’s team was stupid enough to think that China was too feeble to respond effectively to Trump’s trade war – treasury secretary Scott Bessent said China had “a losing hand” with just “a pair of twos”. Trump and his clown car failed to realize that China had the ability to retaliate in devastating ways – by clamping down on rare earth exports that American manufacturers and tech companies desperately need, and perhaps by selling off hundreds of billions of dollars in US bonds. Former treasury secretary Janet Yellen was appalled, saying: “This is the worst self-inflicted policy wound I’ve ever seen in my career inflicted on our economy.”
What really gets to me is his “bombastic rhetoric.” It’s like you’re either with the bully or being bullied. But what appalls me is his stewardship of the US and global Economy. He is completely detached from all we have learned about policy impacts from the 1930s. It was clear that as industrialization increased, the old mercantilism of the colonial days was fading fast. Industrialization created a different trade paradigm.
The switch from the Gold Standard created a different-looking financial economic system. The Information Age and the rise of advanced technology like robotics have changed us even more. We have complex, intertwined, mixed market economies. While the basics of market structure remain similar, the frictions within them have become much more complicated. You may check the academic research of Nobel Prize-winning Joseph E. Stiglitz for his legendary study on how the various quirks in producing specific goods and services can lead to fairly serious economic issues.
I don’t think anyone in the West Wing or the Agencies knows how economic policy works. For that matter, Trump doesn’t even know how many countries there are in the world since he keeps mentioning 200 trade deals when there are only 195. Maybe the Penguin islands are more autonomous than we know?
In fact, the communication style of the entire MAGA movement makes it an impossible environment for governing. This is how Amanda Marcotte–writing for Salon— puts it. “MAGA loves a tantrum: How public meltdowns became the preferred method of GOP communication. Why Nancy Mace, Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller keep throwing fits on camera.”
If there were an Oscar for the category “hard to watch,” I’d have to nominate the video of Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., barking expletives at a constituent after he asked her if she would have a town hall soon. It’s produced in a beauty supply store instead of a movie studio, but in a brief minute and 42 seconds, the video finds its place in the canon of horror films shot from the villain’s perspective. The camera focuses entirely on the story’s hero, a man in a polo and shorts holding a bottle of what appears to be face cleanser, as he holds his own against his congressional representative getting increasingly shrill as she yells invective at him. Even though he said nothing about gay marriage, she demands his gratitude for voting “for gay marriage twice.” When he gets annoyed at her reductive assumption, she calls him “crazy” and “absolutely f—king crazy,” and repeatedly says “f—k you” to him.
In the eyes of normal people, Mace, as her interlocutor said when he fled from this encounter, is a “disgrace.” Most adults who act like Mace in public immediately wish to disappear off the face of the earth in shame. But not our Nancy! No, she’s the one who posted this video online, proud of her emotional incontinence. She even offered a homophobic “gay panic” defense, by describing the man as “wearing daisy dukes, at a makeup store.” (Sorry, Miss Nancy, they aren’t daisy dukes until we see cheeks.) To people outside the MAGA bubble, it’s a baffling choice. She’s not even a fun villain. There’s none of the sleek appeal of Loki from the “Avengers” franchise or camp glee of Ursula from “The Little Mermaid.” Mace is serving pure toddler here. She likely wished to throw herself to the floor and start pounding it, but doing so would have meant dropping her iPhone.
Mace isn’t wrong, however, to think that what most adults find embarrassing, the MAGA base will eat right up. The public meltdown, in which you declare yourself the world’s greatest victim, is the preferred GOP method of political communication these days. Despite this effort, Mace didn’t even come close to nabbing last week’s gold star for the most histronic MAGA performance. She was outdone by Stephen Miller, whose usual register on TV is “verge of a nervous breakdown,” but got so shrill on Fox News Tuesday that Lauren Tousignant at Jezebel worried she’d soon have to “look at Stephen Miller’s face as he pops a dozen blood vessels as his brain explodes.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth turned in two performances that would cause Al Pacino to tell him to settle down. While carping about “the fake news media” during the White House Easter egg roll, Hegseth’s whining got so pitched his voice started to crack, while his children stood behind him, embarrassed at the spectacle.
Despite his own family’s discomfort with his antics, Hegseth kept up the scenery-chewing, bellowing about the all-powerful, forever-mysterious “they” have “come after me from day one.” (“They,” in this case, means close friends and advisors who got pushed out after beginning to question Hegseth’s fitness for the job.)
All this yelling and bellyaching serves a pragmatic purpose: to distract from how what they’re saying makes no sense. Miller’s claim that the six Republican judges on the Supreme Court — three appointed by Trump — are “communist” wouldn’t withstand even a moment’s thought at a normal volume. Because he’s delivering his commentary at “front row at Led Zepplin” levels, the brain can’t even process how preposterous the lie is. Mace’s routine showed this working in a literal way. Her target runs away, because trying to talk to someone behaving like her is like trying to converse with a wildfire.
It’s part of the overall too-muchness that is the signature of the MAGA aesthetic, which goes right back to Trump’s gold-plated tastelessness. We see it in the infamous “Mar-a-Lago” face, which uses plastic surgery and spackled-on make-up to turn women into terrifyingly exaggerated caricatures of femininity. Or the love of roided-out male bodies, which try to recreate the impossibly huge muscles of comic books on human bodies. It’s a maximalist aesthetic, minus all the playfulness of Las Vegas casinos or “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” There’s a grim vibe to the undertaking, as if they’re trying to pound your head into the ground with the excess.
“Fake Melania mystery solved. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer–writing for The Atlantic—dialed up Trump on his private phone one day in late March. He spoke to them even though he had described them both heinously.
The week our interview was supposed to occur, Trump posted a vituperative message on Truth Social, attacking us by name. “Ashley Parker is not capable of doing a fair and unbiased interview. She is a Radical Left Lunatic, and has been as terrible as is possible for as long as I have known her,” he wrote. “To this date, she doesn’t even know that I won the Presidency THREE times.” (That last sentence is true—Ashley Parker does not know that Trump won the presidency three times.) “Likewise, Michael Scherer has never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES.”
Yes, it was full-on #FARTUS Bully Verbal Bombing them publicly. They actually just called him later. He picked up. This article is the result
Despite his attacks on us a few days earlier, the president, evidently feeling buoyed by a week of successes, was eager to talk about his accomplishments. As we spoke, the sounds of another conversation, perhaps from a television, hummed in the background.
The president seemed exhilarated by everything he had managed to do in the first two months of his second term: He had begun a purge of diversity efforts from the federal government; granted clemency to nearly 1,600 supporters who had participated in the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those caught beating police officers on camera; and signed 98 executive orders and counting (26 of them on his first day in office). He had fired independent regulators; gutted entire agencies; laid off great swaths of the federal workforce; and invoked 18th-century wartime powers to use against a criminal gang from Venezuela. He had adjusted tariffs like a DJ spinning knobs in the booth, upsetting the rhythms of global trade and inducing vertigo in the financial markets. He had raged at the leader of Ukraine, a democratic ally repelling an imperialist invasion, for not being “thankful”—and praised the leader of the invading country, Russia, as “very smart,” reversing in an instant 80 years of U.S. foreign-policy doctrine, and prompting the countries of NATO to prepare for their own defense, without the protective umbrella of American power, for the first time since 1945.
…
We asked Trump why he thought the billionaire class was prostrating itself before him.
“It’s just a higher level of respect. I don’t know,” Trump said. “Maybe they didn’t know me at the beginning, and they know me now.”
“I mean, you saw yesterday with the law firm,” he said. He was referring to Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of the nation’s most prestigious firms, whose leader had come to the Oval Office days earlier to beg for relief from an executive order that could have crippled its business. Trump had issued the order at least partially because a former partner at the firm had in 2021 gone to work for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, where he was part of an investigation of the Trump Organization’s business practices. Also that week, an Ivy League institution, threatened with the cancellation of $400 million in federal funding, had agreed to overhaul its Middle Eastern–studies programs at the Trump administration’s request, while also acceding to other significant demands. “You saw yesterday with Columbia University. What do you think of the law firm? Were you shocked at that?” Trump asked us.
Yes—all of it was shocking, much of it without precedent. Legal scholars were drawing comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the early stages of the New Deal, when Congress had allowed FDR to demolish norms and greatly expand the powers of the presidency.
As ever, Trump was on the hunt for a deal. If he liked the story we wrote, he said, he might even speak with us again.
“Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” he said. Perhaps the magazine can risk forgoing hotness, he suggested, because it is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, which buffers it, he implied, from commercial imperatives. But that doesn’t guarantee anything, he warned. “You know at some point, they give up,” he said, referring to media owners generally and—we suspected—Bezos specifically. “At some point they say, No más, no más.” He laughed quietly.
Media owners weren’t the only ones on his mind. He also seemed to be referring to law firms, universities, broadcast networks, tech titans, artists, research scientists, military commanders, civil servants, moderate Republicans—all the people and institutions he expected to eventually, inevitably, submit to his will.
We asked the president if his second term felt different from his first. He said it did. “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
More like the country and the world run from him. I have to admit. I admire the Chinese method of trolling him. It’s funny and effective. Philip Bump at the Washington Post analyzes this self-defeating policy of the second term. “The bubble that created Trump is the reason he’s stumbling. The White House is now a bubble where loyalty, not ability, defines success.”
Consider Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
No one should be surprised that Hegseth is flailing in his new role, one of the most arduous and complicated in the U.S. government, if not the world. When Donald Trump proposed that Hegseth run the agency, the response was broadly unified: Hegseth lacked the experience needed to do the job effectively. You could debate the other controversies surrounding his bid for the role ad nauseam, but there was no way to reasonably argue that the Fox News talk-show host was prepared to run the Pentagon.
Hegseth was confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate anyway because Trump and a universe of voices who support him insisted Hegseth was the best choice for the job — because he was Trump’s choice for the job. Republican senators who undoubtedly knew better went along, betting that things wouldn’t get so bad under Hegseth that it was worth stirring up the fury of that pro-Trump bubble.
It’s the same bet that prominent Republicans have been making on Trump himself since 2015. Now, as Trump too is flailing — polling and the data make clear that he is — it’s trivial to identify that insular chorus of cheerleaders and cynics as a root cause.
The president owes his political career to that same bubble. Over the past few decades, the fringe right and then Republicans more broadly embraced discussions of the world that were mostly devoid of nuance: left bad, right good. The internet allowed for the emergence of bespoke “news” organizations (and, later, social media accounts) catering to conspiratorial partisan rhetoric — an alternative to traditional reporting unhampered by criticism or unpopular truths.
Trump secured the 2016 Republican nomination not because he was the best spokesperson for the Republican Party but because he echoed the refrains of that surreal universe of information. When you hear his supporters praise his straightforwardness, this is what they are referring to: He says the false things with which they agree.
We’re about to say goodbye to Musk. Hopefully, Hegseth will be a quick second out. But what comes next? Certainly, nothing better. Even Rubio seems to have caught the munificently Kiss Ass Fever. The speed of light is the rate at which he contradicts the old Little Marco makes me wonder if he a Musk AI robot and the ex-Senator is up in space some where. Here’s the latest example from The Independent. “Marco Rubio claims Canada should be 51st state as PM told Trump they ‘couldn’t survive’ without U.S. Rubio says State Department has not taken action on the president’s push to annex Canada and Greenland.”
America’s top diplomat was questioned on Sunday about Donald Trump’s reasoning for repeatedly calling for Canada to join the United States as the 51st state.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared on NBC’s Meet the Presson Sunday where moderator Kristen Welker asked him if the administration was actually taking any steps to make Trump’s vision a reality.
The president has made his opinion clear: he wants Canada to join the United States and suggested his administration would also acquire the Danish-held territory Greenland by any means.
The secretary of state gave his own translation of the president’s remarks on the matter:
“What the president has said, and he has said this repeatedly, is he was told by the previous prime minister that Canada could not survive without unfair trade with the United States, at which point he asked, ‘Well, if you can’t survive as a nation without treating us unfairly in trade, then you should become a state.’ That’s what he said.”
Rubio told Welker that the administration had taken no action to realize this particular strain of Trump’s bluster, which has alarmed U.S. allies.
There’s a U.S. military base on Greenland, and the president has cited the self-governing nation’s geographical importance as a reasoning for his expansionist goal. Trump has made the comments on numerous occasions, including in conversations with his Canadian counterparts.
Trump himself made his goals of northward expansion apparent during his address to Congress in February.
“We need Greenland for national security and even international security. And we’re working with everybody involved to try and get it,” Trump said at the time. “And I think we’re going to get it one way or the other. We’re going to get it.”
But he was making similar remarks publicly as early as December 2024.
“No one can answer why we subsidize Canada to the tune of over $100,000,000 a year? Makes no sense!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st State.”
“They would save massively on taxes and military protection. I think it is a great idea,” added Trump.
So tell me if you ever thought you’d see the day that an American Secretary of State believes annexing your best allies, the ones you’ve fought beside in Wars, and stood by you when you were attacked, would say that sort of thing? Meanwhile, the entire Deportation debacle continues on its cruel and ugly path. This is from Politico. “Homan presses undocumented immigrants to self-deport, threatening prosecution. The push comes as the monthly deportation numbers have lagged behind the Biden administration’s.” Homan is now the antonym for Human. Deportation in this country does not just fall on the undocumented. It impacts everyone.
White House border czar Tom Homan on Monday warned undocumented immigrants that they “cannot hide” and will be prosecuted in they remain in the U.S. illegally — the latest effort from the Trump administration to push self-deportation.
“Get your affairs in order. If you’re in the country illegally, work with ICE, go to CBP One Home app, and leave on your own,” Homan said from the White House press briefing room.
Homan said every immigrant in the U.S. illegally must register with the federal government and carry documentation. And those who fail to register with the Department of Homeland Security or neglect to update any new address will have those actions treated as criminal offenses “starting today.” He also warned other undocumented immigrants that if they have a final order to leave the country but remain anyway, the Trump administration will “aggressively prosecute” and issue daily monetary fines of up to $998.
The border czar’s briefing room appearance comes as the Trump administration marks its 100th day in office this week, with Homan touting the administration’s progress on border security. He pointed to a significant drop in illegal border crossings, which have plunged since Trump took office to the lowest level in decades.
Homan said Monday that the administration has deported 139,000 migrants since Jan. 20 as Trump officials have struggled to ramp up removal numbers. This figure includes people deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and the Coast Guard, who would have been encountered at or before they reached the border, according to a DHS official. The Trump administration’s monthly deportation numbers have lagged behind the Biden administration’s, according to data obtained by NBC News.
The bluster is abusive, but the actions are unconstitutional, illegal, and inhumane. The New York Times reports on the weekend’s 60 Minutes sign-off. Every voice raised against the dismantling of US democracy is a voice that counts! “‘60 Minutes’ Chastises Its Corporate Parent in Unusual On-Air Rebuke. The show’s top producer abruptly said last week he was quitting. “Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” the correspondent Scott Pelley told viewers.”
In an extraordinary on-air rebuke, one of the top journalists at “60 Minutes” directly criticized the program’s parent company in the final moments of its Sunday night CBS telecast, its first episode since the program’s executive producer, Bill Owens, announced his intention to resign.
“Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” the correspondent, Scott Pelley, told viewers. “None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”
A spokesman for Paramount had no immediate comment, and has previously declined to comment on Mr. Owens’s departure.
Mr. Owens stunned the show’s staff on Tuesday when he said he would leave the highest-rated program in television news over disagreements with Paramount, CBS’s corporate parent, saying, “It’s clear the company is done with me.”
Mr. Owens’s comments were widely reported in the press last week. The show’s decision to repeat those grievances on-air may have exposed viewers to the serious tensions between “60 Minutes” and its corporate overseers for the first time.
Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of Paramount, has been intent on securing approval from the Trump administration for a multibillion-dollar sale of her media company to a studio run by the son of Larry Ellison, the tech billionaire.
President Trump sued CBS last year, claiming $10 billion in damages, in a case stemming from a “60 Minutes” interview with the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, that Mr. Trump said was deceptively edited. Ms. Redstone has expressed her desire to settle Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, although legal experts have called the case far-fetched.
So that’s it for me today. I’m just trying to keep my head above water and my thoughts on calm, clear awareness. I hope you’re finding a way to cope with this mess. I try to tune out as much as possible, but my job is to teach folks about financial and economic policies, so I can only shut out so much. A friend of mine posted a picture of American NAZIs partying in the French Quarter and getting drinks from the Dungeon. The tattoos and the t-shirts said it all. What’s most disturbing about all of this is these folks are out of their hidey holes, and they don’t care who sees them and what they say. I’ll be out on Wednesday at a protest in front of the ICE offices here in the Central Business District. I need to do something, even just being with like-minded people.
Also, we’re finding some older Dem Pols stepping down to make way for new blood. “Rep. Gerry Connolly, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will step down from his leadership post on the panel and not run for reelection.” Let’s try to hope.
What’s on your Reading and Blogging list today?
#FartusDeportUs #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #AllApologies #BombasticRhetoric #FARTUS #KashPatel #PamBondiWeirdo #PeteHegsethWeirdoSexualAssaulter #VerbalBullyBombs #YamTits100DaysOfOops
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Would of, could of, might of, must of
When we say would have, could have, should have, must have, might have, may have and ought to have, we often put some stress on the modal auxiliary and none on the have. We may show this in writing by abbreviating to could’ve, must’ve, etc. (Would can contract further by merging with the subject: We would have → We’d’ve.)
Unstressed ’ve is phonetically identical (/əv/) to unstressed of: hence the widespread misspellings would of, could of, should of, must of, might of, may of, and ought to of. Negative forms also appear: shouldn’t of, mightn’t of, etc. This explanation – that misanalysis of the notorious schwa lies behind the error – has general support among linguists.
The mistake dates to at least 1837, according to the OED, so it has probably been infuriating pedants for almost 200 years. Common words spelt incorrectly provoke particular ire, sometimes accompanied by aspersions cast on the writer’s intelligence, fitness for society, degree of evolution, and so on. But there’s no need for any of that.
Usage authorities unanimously call it a mistake, though some allow for its deliberate use (more on that below). Many associate it specifically with children and other less educated writers. For example, Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage finds it a practice of ‘semiliterate writers’, and accepts no excuses: ‘the word is have, or a contraction ending in ’ve, and it should be written so.’
Merriam-Webster’s Pocket Guide to English Usage says ‘children and those who have not completed grammar school may have an excuse for making this mistake, but most others do not.’ What’s meant by that most is what we’ll now consider: that the misspellings don’t always indicate carelessness or relative illiteracy.
The Columbia Guide to Standard American English finds room for the anomalous forms as a stylistic device:
substituting of for ’ve in writing can be an example of eye dialect, which deliberately misspells words to suggest Nonstandard or dialectal speech. . . . The important thing is to correct it when it isn’t intentional.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage elaborates on this, saying writers use the spelling ‘to create an unlettered persona’. It cites several examples, including a ‘he’d of got me’ from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who ‘used the spelling to represent the speech of a woman who was not overeducated’, as MWDEU politely puts it.
Here is must of in an intertitle in the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928):
And in Josef von Sternberg’s 1928 The Docks of New York:
Over the last number of years, I’ve seen the non-standard of-form in many books by authors who presumably knew what they were doing:
‘I could of sworn I’d run into you some place before.’ (Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding)
‘Oh Miz, oh Miz,’ he moaned, rubbing his leg. ‘You shouldn’t of done that, you shouldn’t, you reely shouldn’t.’ (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
‘All bloody and mucked up, with figuring away aboard the Vénus, when two minutes would of changed it.’ (Patrick O’Brian, The Mauritius Command)
‘I’d of liked to be stabbed – and have lashings of red paint.’ (Agatha Christie, Dead Man’s Folly)
‘Never should of married‘ (Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood)
‘See, they must of had them already saddled.’ (Elmore Leonard, The Law at Randado)
‘If I hadn’t of got my tubes tied, it could of been me, say I was ten years younger.’ (Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale)
‘You could of just told him.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘You could of said no and I could of not believed you.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘She must of grabbed some pills.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘You ought to of asked for me in the first place.’ (Raymond Chandler, ‘Trouble Is My Business’, in Trouble Is My Business)
‘Maybe I had ought to of gone to the servant’s entrance.’ (Raymond Chandler, ‘Trouble Is My Business’, in Trouble Is My Business)
‘Youve never seen anything so mad, the lassie couldnt of known what kind of nut house she was in.’ (Alan Warner, Morvern Callar)
‘I don’t suppose he would remember you,’ the woman said thoughtfully. ‘Seems like he would of mentioned you sometimes if he did.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Lie’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘He shouldn’t of done it, that’s all’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘Root of Evil’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘My wife,’ he said, putting his elbows on the counter and still watching Judith, ‘my wife, you ought to of heard her when she thought I was going.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘Homecoming’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘If he’d of been a friend of mine you would have said plenty, believe me,” Mrs. Royster said darkly. (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘She sure must of been glad to see him, the way he looked,’ the old man said. (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘I never saw him,’ the clerk in the drugstore said. ‘I know because I would of noticed the flowers.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘If you had of been dead, you’d of had a funeral. I only just thought a that now. I’d of went along.’ (Claire Kilroy, The Devil I Know)
Mabey I shoudnt of let them oparate on my branes like she said if its agenst god. (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
Now that makes me feel bad because I would never of hurt the baby. (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
‘I should of had my head examined.’ (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
‘She should of got it lit before we arrived.’ (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)
‘Maybe you should of shot us when we was far away.’ (Chris Cleave, The Other Hand)
‘If he’d been an animal, he’d of been the runt of the litter and we’d of put him down.’ (Gillian Flynn, Dark Places)
‘I could of used the money,’ Donna said. ‘That’s what I was thinking.’ […] ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I could of used the money.’ (Raymond Carver, ‘Vitamins’, in Cathedral)
‘And here I’d of sworn…’ He took another try at the coffee cup, registered surprise to find it empty. (James Sallis, Drive)
‘Figured they must of took you when they took Ellis.’ (James Sallis, Bluebottle)
Must of been May 14 as May 12 is my birthday and it was by way of a late present. (Minette Walters, The Ice House)
‘You could of got it from the paper.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
‘You should of shown me this last time.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
‘She went guilty so she must of done it.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
Yorkin cringed. ‘Me. Pierce told me to clip him. I shouldn’t of done it by the drop.’ (James Ellroy, L. A. Confidential)
‘That sure could of been true,’ says the clerk at the Salon City store (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild)
‘I must of fell asleep, eh?’
‘I guess you must have,’ said Isserley. (Michel Faber, Under the Skin)Then one day, it must of rained, and man discovered a new place: indoors. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
And where that monkey might of come from. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
I would of put loads more dinosaurs in. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
‘Donnie, we’d of finished this Betamax deal in ten days. And we’d have had winter money, all three of us.’ (Joseph D. Pistone with Richard Woodley, Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia)
‘And who else could of built it?’ Mr Madden shouted. (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
Sheila, the woodshed, should of paddled you sooner. (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
‘You went had in there. Stark mad. You’d have raped her if . . .’
‘I’d of what?‘ (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)‘I never should of come here.’ (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
‘Whether Miriam would of been any different, I don’t know, but I’d say she’d of been worse.’ (Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train)
‘I’d of thought Mrs Herman was the last person in the world to—’ (Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse)
…the marshal hadn’t taken any of the Collinsons’ property though of course he might of. (Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse)
‘I wouldn’t of flagged that taxi if the For Hire flag hadn’t been up.’ (Dashiell Hammet, ‘Fly Paper’, in The Big Knockover and other stories)
”F he’d of been a man I’d of seen him in hell ‘fore I’d of gave it to him.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘Corkscrew’, in The Big Knockover and other stories)
‘They may of gone,’ he said slowly. (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Golden Horseshoe’, in The Continental Op)
‘But he must of gone through the house and out front . . .’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Girls with the Silver Eyes’, in The ContinentalOp)
‘Anybody could of got in them with a ladder.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Farewell Murder’, in The Continental Op)
‘Well, we would of if she hadn’t put the two X’s to me the same as she done to you’ . . . ‘but if my rod hadn’t of got snagged in my flogger you wouldn’t have seen nothing else.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Whosis Kid’, in The Continental Op)
‘If I’d known you five years ago I’d of given it to you.’ (Sara Paretsky, ‘The Maltese Cat’, in Windy City Blues)
‘Mate, I’ve probably said enough already. More than I should of (taps nose) . . . Professional conduct an’ all that.’ (Nicola Barker, Darkmans)
‘Yes, and if the bastard hadn’t of moved I’d have got him, too.’ (Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards)
‘I’m Billy Baker. Your Daddy might of talked about me, called me Space?’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher) (pictured and quoted below: Preacher no. 2: Proud Americans)
”Cause I hope I ain’t outta line here, but I think he’d of been cool about you hearin’ it…’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
‘He was stupid an’ clumsy an’ kind of a weakling, an’ he wouldn’t of lasted a fuckin’ day over there if it hadn’t been for one thing’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
‘See, we’d of done Murphy there an’ then, we’d of had to do Van Patten as well — an’ I knew your Daddy didn’t really wanna do that.’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
The Dunns must of felt this when Tracy vanished. (Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower)
‘She must of really gotten knocked out.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Girl in Landscape)
‘He’s not around now, or you’d of met him.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Girl in Landscape)
‘They could of just been losing us,’ said Coney. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Your parents must of been hippies,’ he’d tell me. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘He might of been a little impatient for his date with Frank.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘If it weren’t for Gilbert I would of told him to stick it—’ (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Oh, I’d of straightened it out,’ Tony said. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Each one of them, he says it might of been you, it might of been two other guys.’ (Robert Anton Wilson, The Universe Next Door)
‘You must of been back on the reservation eating peyote again.’ (Robert Anton Wilson, The Universe Next Door)
‘And it wouldn’t of mattered to me whether you did or did not like women.’ (George Pelecanos, Drama City)
‘I wouldn’t of thought of such a thing in a million years.’ (George Pelecanos, The Big Blowdown)
‘If you hadn’t of stepped in the middle of everything—’ (George Pelecanos, The Big Blowdown)
It would of done no good gettin’ somebody else te scratch it for me because that was a sin as well. (Frances Molloy, No Mate for the Magpie)
‘Been calling all night. Four, five calls, must of been.’ (Lawrence Block, A Ticket to the Boneyard)
‘Six-thirty or so, you must of just got on your way to Maspeth, guy goes out back with a load of kitchen garbage.’ (Lawrence Block, A Dance at the Slaughterhouse)
‘Another minute and I would of made it, you rats.’ (Lawrence Block, No Score)
‘Now if you would of done this we wouldn’t have any trouble.’ (Lawrence Block, No Score)
‘Need a social security card,’ he said. ‘You must of had one, I guess.’ (Lawrence Block, Chip Harrison Scores Again)
‘Guess they must of been chafing you some on that bus ride.’ (Lawrence Block, Chip Harrison Scores Again)
‘You might not of noticed yesterday but he’s only got one hand.’ (Ron Rash, The Cove)
‘Would he of died?’ (Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic)
‘Pete should of told me,’ he said. (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘Okay,’ Dortmunder said. ‘Could be worse. She could of been wearing her habit, right?’ (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘Wound up, it took him forty-eight years to serve a ten-year sentence that he should of got out in three.’ (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘She has on a pair of bikinis I couldn’t of got into when I was ten years old.’ (Elmore Leonard, Mr. Paradise)
‘We could’ve settled, the city pays out a few bucks, it wouldn’t of cost you a dime.’ (Elmore Leonard, Mr. Paradise)
‘You know what I sor?’ said the child patiently. ‘Well, the train must of stopped, see, and some little men with bundles on their backs got on.’ (Mavis Gallant, ‘Up North’, in The Omnibus of 20th Century Ghost Stories, edited by Robert Phillips)
‘You two might of settled down and had a nice baby or something.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘Maybe you should of looked around some more.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘He must of gone to the show.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘I shouldn’t of toog you id,’ Angelo breathed. ‘I got nerbous.’
‘It was all my fault,’ Mrs Reilly said, ‘for trying to protect that Ignatius. I should of let you lock him away, Angelo.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)‘I don’t think I’d of wanted to go down there even for the Grape-Nuts. But maybe if we’d’ve gone real fast . . .’ (Harlan Ellison, ‘Sensible City’, in The Dead that Walk, edited by Stephen Jones)
‘You could of killed someone!’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘There’s a lot of places round here you could of bin.’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘If she’d stuck around, I could of asked her advice. I bet she could of come up with somewhere to put you that no one would think of lookin’, not if you paid them ready money.’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘If you’d gotten into a fight with that swordarm of yours, there’d of been bodies all over’ (Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, vol. 2: The Gateless Barrier, translated by Dana Lewis)
‘It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known.’ (Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find)’The other vics probably would have lived if Lewin hadn’t of made that play.’ (George Pelecanos, Shame the Devil)
‘I should of thought of that my own self.’ (George Pelecanos, Shame the Devil)
‘If you’d gone in right away, you would of got him, none of this would of happened. . . . I’d of got off! You think I’d of stood around that roadblock for seven hours?’ (Richard Stark, Slayground)
‘That guy talks pretty big, Cory. We should of called his bluff right there.’ (Richard Stark, Ask the Parrot)
‘Everything screws up, it just gets worse and worse, we should never of got into this, we’re fuckups, that’s all, we’re just fuckups.’ (Richard Stark, Comeback)
‘Might of slipped in and out, nobody the wiser, except we were already on the scene, account of Parmitt being gone.’ (Richard Stark, Flashfire)
‘Couldn’t you of – oh, he was ignorant in his speech – couldn’t you of prevented it?’ (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
‘I should of thought to bring a sun lounger, from the garden centre,’ Mart said. (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
‘He could of been,’ her mother said vaguely. (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
When she provoked him and he was in a temper with her, he would say, count your blessings, girl, you fink I’m bad but you could of had MacArthur. You could have had Bob Fox, or Aitkenside, or Pikey Pete. You could have had my mate Keef Capstick. You could of had Nick, and then where’d you be? (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
He shouldn’t of been near enough . . . (Donal Ryan, ‘Aisling’, in A Slanting of the Sun)
Stupid idea anyway I dont think he ever wud of really done it. (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting – this example is from a teenager’s text message)
But if she hadn’t of drank she would never have seen him at all and better that she was there she thought where she could at least try to keep some grip on him before he lost the run of himself completely (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
Lar thought about it They must of gone out on a job he said (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I wonder what kind of life you might have had, if you hadn’t of been dragged back here. (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I paid a man to write it he says He must of never sent it at all (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I wish someone had of told me you croak into his shoulder (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
Lars frowns Choosing his words He didn’t think you should of married Dickie he says (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
U SHUD OF TOLD ME I CUD OF SHOWD U AROUD!!!! (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting, text message)
‘Hell, if I knew I was sitting on a gold mine, I’d of sold ’em a long time ago.’ (Jim Dodge, Not Fade Away)
‘And he couldn’t of loved me because he took away my kid, he’s off someplace where I can’t never see him.’ (James Baldwin, Another Country)
‘But I would of died for my kid, I wouldn’t never of let anything happen to him.’ (James Baldwin, Another Country)
‘I couldn’t of done nothing else,’ he cried, ‘what else could I of done? Where could I of gone with Esther, and me a preacher, too? And what could I of done with you?’ (James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain)
‘Must of had a heart attack or something!?’ (Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin, Tank Girl One):
A curious example in Jim Nesbit’s novel Lethal Injection, where a character says “would’ve of”. My first thought was that it was a copy-editing or proofreading fix that stopped halfway: changing “would of” to “would’ve” and neglecting to delete the “of”. But a search online shows occasional analogous examples in unedited writing, and adjacent discussion on Language Log, so it may well be authentically dialectal:
The example below, from alt-manga historian Ryan Holmberg’s The Translator Without Talent, is from The Marvel Times, a pretend-newspaper about comics that he created on his twelfth birthday. So its must of is probably not deliberate and also completely forgivable:
Such phrases appear often in Cormac McCarthy’s novels. Here are some from Cities of the Plain, all used in dialogue:
You’d never of knowed it though.
I wouldn’t of wrote home for nothin.
Looks like they’d of learned to stay out of it.
Johnny if he hadnt of found that girl would of found somethin else.
And there was nothin any mortal man could of done to of stopped it.
And from Blood Meridian:
No, No, he said. I mean ye was lost to of come here.
It might of been a mule.
Somebody ought to of pickled it a long time ago.
Must of been a thousand indians in there all settin around.
He appears to of spoke for hisself.
I couldnt of learned it off ten dutchmen.
Him and the governor they sat up till breakfast and it was Paris this and London that in five languages, you’d of give something to of heard them.
Don’t you know he’d of took you with him? He’d of took you, boy.
Glanton spat. Ort to of shot that one too, he said.
Well, he said. I’d of thought any damn fool could saw the barrels off a shotgun.
That old boy you bought them off of might of said they was injins but that dont make it so.
The man didnt answer.
Them ears could of come off of cannibals . . .You wouldnt of lived anyway, the man said.
And from All the Pretty Horses:
They might as well of, he said.
Otherwise I’d of been born in Alabama.
…it was a mistake not to of told you.
But if it hadnt of been for her I wouldnt of made it.
He might well could of
Might well could of is also a nice example of a double modal. The [modal]-of construction is used frequently throughout Chris Cleave’s remarkable novel Incendiary:
She was like that was Mena. Philosophical. I’d definitely of killed myself if it hadn’t of been for her.
If you could of looked in my eyes you’d of seen the same thing I shouldn’t wonder.
I wouldn’t of come near you I’d never of let you touch me you should be ashamed.
Most notably in this exchange between two people only one of whom uses it dialectally:
– He would of said something.
– Maybe he wouldn’t have.
– Wouldn’t you of?A remarkable example in A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore uses it without a preceding modal, in the speech of a young child:
‘You got brown eyes,’ she said. ‘I of brown eyes.’
Searching the Corpus of Contemporary American English for the string would of [v*], where [v*] is a verb, produces the graph below. It shows that the of-form’s predominant setting is fiction, usually ‘would of been’, and it also shows up in transcription of actual speech, as in the academic and newspaper instances. You can click through the image to view examples, sources, and further information at COCA.
The magazine data are false positives (‘we’d have a better chance of achieving a breakthrough in quantum gravity than we would of figuring out how to reliably connect with teenagers’), but you get an idea of the construction’s low frequency and particular genre distribution.
Plotting could of [v*] usages over time, using the related Corpus of Historical American English, suggests the construction may have peaked. Or is that just wishful thinking? Again, you can click on this graph for details, or open it in another tab.
Of 1000 occurrences of could/would of in the Oxford English Corpus, about 850 are from ‘representations of direct speech (mostly from the Fiction domain, but also from interviews and courtroom transcripts)’. That leaves 150 genuine written instances of could/would of, compared with 4 million examples of standard could/would have. I can’t help picturing a global battalion of editors keeping it firmly at bay.
The of-form is not frequent in edited prose, but it appears quite often in casual writing and it has been around a while. Does that count for much? MWDEU says its prolonged use has ‘not made it respectable’, and recommends avoiding it – including in transcriptions of real speech, since ’ve serves the purpose equally well. I agree, and I think if someone explicitly says of, and stresses it, that might warrant a ‘[sic]’.
Regular readers know I like to make room for literary effect and poetic licence, but I have never warmed to this mistake. Every time I see it – be its use naive or intentional – I want to fix it. Authenticity of dialect and character are all well and good, but I think the main effect of the deliberate usage in edited prose is further uncertainty and error (not to mention irritation, in some quarters). What do you think?
Updates:
Years after writing this, I’ve softened considerably on the modal-of construction. This is partly because of exposure to its use by so many great writers, and also because it’s a good example of language change – a natural, essential characteristic of a living language. See my post on reconciling descriptivism with editing for more discussion.
I’ve come across many more examples in books, and have added them to the sets above and below. @desktopenglish on Twitter drew my attention to this BBC article that quotes a footballer saying he ‘Shouldn’t of reacted the way I did’.
What sounds to me like a good audio example comes from author Zadie Smith on the Adam Buxton Podcast. This link should cue the player automatically at 15:50, but if it doesn’t, that’s the time stamp. The relevant exchange is as follows, discussing Smith’s father:
Smith: He was very uptight about time, yeah.
Buxton: It rubbed off on you.
Smith: It must of, yeah.
Medievalist Lucy Allen found the line ‘For methowte I wold not for my life a sen it fallen’ in a 14thC religious text, The Shewings of Julian of Norwich. Translating it as ‘I thought I would not for my life of seen it fall’ [underlines mine], she writes: ‘it’s always fun when you notice something in a medieval text that is a dead ringer for one of the “modern” mistakes that horrify the pearl-clutchers’.
David Crystal adds further historical commentary in his book Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of English Grammar:
On 5 September 1819 the poet John Keats sends an apologetic letter to his publisher John Taylor, in which he writes:
Had I known of your illness I should not of written in such fierry phrase in my first Letter.
‘Should not of written’? From such a great poet? It must have been just a slip, because later on in the same letter he writes ‘You should not have delayed.’ What interests me is to find this confusion 200 years ago. It isn’t just a modern thing, as some critics say. That identity in pronunciation between the preposition of and the unstressed form of the auxiliary verb have has been around a long time.
Morph, a linguistics blog by the Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey, has a great post on different aspects of the modal-of usage: ‘What’s the good of “would of”?’
Lots of examples in Anne Tyler’s If Morning Ever Comes, spoken by several different characters (of different ages, backgrounds, and ethnicities):
‘You mustn’t of been but twelve or so but I remembered.’
‘You shouldn’t of mentioned breakfast, boy,’ he said.
‘Course I think he could of made a better choice in wives, but then Sally’s right pretty and I reckon I can see his point in picking her.’
‘You know, when I was a boy we’d of been plumb through town by now.’
‘If we’d of known,’ she said, ‘I’d of cleaned up house a little.’
‘Folks tell me I take too good care of him, so it can’t of been that he got too cold. Though he is right much of a puddle-wader, that could’ve done it.’ [Note nearby use of could’ve.]
‘I don’t guess my letter would of made any change in him one way or the other.’
‘If I’d of married Jamie,” she said, “I would of had a different family.’
‘Well, if it hadn’t of been her, it’d been someone else.’
‘She mustn’t of seen us.’
Ross Macdonald also makes regular use of the construction:
‘If they knew they had a buyer, they might of stayed in business to accommodate you.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Blue Hammer)
‘I wish I could of died instead of him.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Blue Hammer)
‘The other man took them, he must of.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He must of got away.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He must of fell down on the knife and stabbed himself.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He would of killed him too.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘When Culligan came marching out, armed up to the teeth, you could of knocked me over with a ‘dozer.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘Lucky for him I was out, or I’d of shown him what’s what.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘You were just a tiny baby, but that wouldn’t of stopped him.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
As does Elmore Leonard; these are from The Hot Kid:
Emmett Long kept looking at him. ‘You had a gun you’d of shot me, huh?’
‘I’d of shoved the ice cream cone up his goddamn nose.’
What Oris did, he got mad, changed the name of the company from Busy Bee Oil & Gas – a cartoon bumblebee in the trademark they’d of had one day – to NMD Oil & Gas, standing for No More Dusters, and worked a year as a driller to restore his capital.
‘The only one I told was Emmett,’ Carl said. ‘It had to of been Crystal told the papers.’
She had to wonder if she had been here would he of recognized her, and bet he would’ve.
‘I’d of arrested him he’s walking in the door,’ Lester said.
Franklin was shaking his head. ‘I’d of seen ’em.’
‘I told him he shouldn’t of left the key in it.’
‘She looked at him again with a faint smile. ‘I would never of suspected.’
‘The first remark out of his mouth, I’d of pulled and killed him where he stood.’
‘She’d of given me the choice of taking a chance with Teddy or being locked up.’
‘She wouldn’t of started breakfast if they weren’t all downstairs near ready to eat.’
‘Jack’s a talker,’ Carl said. ‘He’d of thought of a reason to go alone, pick up a bottle? And Tony’s polite, he would’ve said don’t steal the car, okay?’
‘No, he couldn’t of known that.’
‘Jack Belmont wouldn’t of left with bullets in his gun.’
The minute Jack wasn’t looking, like taking a leak or something, she’d of run out of the house to find a cop.
But Nancy knew who he was, so so the kidnapping wouldn’t of worked.
‘If I hadn’t decided to step back inside to answer the phone, I’d of missed one of the great opportunities of my career as a journalist . . .’
Richard Stark, already quoted above, has half a dozen examples in his first novel, The Hunter:
The spelling occurs often in Kent Haruf’s novel Plainsong:‘If Art wanted to see you, he’d of told you where to find him.’
Stegman blinked. ‘He must of believed me.’
‘His wife must of known it, but she never told me.’
‘Five minutes later,’ the owner told him, ‘you’d of been out of luck.’
‘…it must of meant something, that’s all.’
‘I wouldn’t of believed it.’
He should of taken it last year.
She might of come down and gone back, Ike said. She might not of too.
She must not of stuck.
She must of went home, Mr. Guthrie.
You shouldn’t even of touched that.
Well, he might of went to Denver, Raymond said. Then he might of went back to the Rosebud in South Dakota.
I should of called during these months, I know.
You could of done something yourself too, you know, he said.
Something must of happened to her, Harold said. She must of got taken off or something.
I can’t think of anything we might of did.
You don’t even know where he might of took her for sure.
He might of landed her in Pueblo or Walsenburg.We didn’t know what we might of done to cause you to want to leave here like that.
He better not of hurt her permanent, Raymond said.
And in Pete Dexter’s novel Train:
“They must of left the sprinklers on all night,” the fat man said after he got back in control of his deportment again.
“He must of got home somehow,” Train said.
“She all convulsed the whole time they going through the house; she keeps saying, ‘Oh, no, he couldn’t of did that….'”
Train began thinking more and more that the world might of decided to let him alone.
Now he thought about he, she might not of even noticed the table leg if he hadn’t dropped it and woke up the dog…
Train thought it must of reminded him of that feeling when he was hit by that car and rolled across the road.
Then, if it was the right officer, they might of just carted Mayflower out of there, just because she was pretty, and then took his ass out into the desert and left it.
“One of them must of got up here and took it,” he said.
It seemed like Mr. Cooper must of told him where he come from, or how else would he know?
Must of bought his clothes in the boy’s department.
Melrose might of been trying to say something too, and Train distinctly saw his jaw slide out from under his face.
It came to Train the Plural must of heard her before she even come out of the double-wide, that he must of known from how she was walking that she was mad.
“A blind man,” he said, “We should of sold tickets.”
Walter Tevis’s The Hustler, from multiple characters:
‘You should never of quit going to Sunday school.’
‘I already watched you lose – watched you lose to a man you should of beat.’
‘And if I hadn’t already paid for it I could of with the money I won in side bets.’
‘They couldn’t of helped but hear of me.’
‘I should of let that guy quit, Charlie, like you told me.’
#books #corpusLinguistics #couldOf #dialects #dialogue #etymology #eyeDialect #fiction #grammar #language #linguistics #literacy #modalVerbs #modals #phrases #reading #schwa #speech #speechErrors #spelling #transcription #typos #usage #verbs #writing
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Would of, could of, might of, must of
When we say would have, could have, should have, must have, might have, may have and ought to have, we often put some stress on the modal auxiliary and none on the have. We may show this in writing by abbreviating to could’ve, must’ve, etc. (Would can contract further by merging with the subject: We would have → We’d’ve.)
Unstressed ’ve is phonetically identical (/əv/) to unstressed of: hence the widespread misspellings would of, could of, should of, must of, might of, may of, and ought to of. Negative forms also appear: shouldn’t of, mightn’t of, etc. This explanation – that misanalysis of the notorious schwa lies behind the error – has general support among linguists.
The mistake dates to at least 1837, according to the OED, so it has probably been infuriating pedants for almost 200 years. Common words spelt incorrectly provoke particular ire, sometimes accompanied by aspersions cast on the writer’s intelligence, fitness for society, degree of evolution, and so on. But there’s no need for any of that.
Usage authorities unanimously call it a mistake, though some allow for its deliberate use (more on that below). Many associate it specifically with children and other less educated writers. For example, Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage finds it a practice of ‘semiliterate writers’, and accepts no excuses: ‘the word is have, or a contraction ending in ’ve, and it should be written so.’
Merriam-Webster’s Pocket Guide to English Usage says ‘children and those who have not completed grammar school may have an excuse for making this mistake, but most others do not.’ What’s meant by that most is what we’ll now consider: that the misspellings don’t always indicate carelessness or relative illiteracy.
The Columbia Guide to Standard American English finds room for the anomalous forms as a stylistic device:
substituting of for ’ve in writing can be an example of eye dialect, which deliberately misspells words to suggest Nonstandard or dialectal speech. . . . The important thing is to correct it when it isn’t intentional.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage elaborates on this, saying writers use the spelling ‘to create an unlettered persona’. It cites several examples, including a ‘he’d of got me’ from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who ‘used the spelling to represent the speech of a woman who was not overeducated’, as MWDEU politely puts it.
Here is must of in an intertitle in the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928):
And in Josef von Sternberg’s 1928 The Docks of New York:
Over the last number of years, I’ve seen the non-standard of-form in many books by authors who presumably knew what they were doing:
‘I could of sworn I’d run into you some place before.’ (Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding)
‘Oh Miz, oh Miz,’ he moaned, rubbing his leg. ‘You shouldn’t of done that, you shouldn’t, you reely shouldn’t.’ (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
‘All bloody and mucked up, with figuring away aboard the Vénus, when two minutes would of changed it.’ (Patrick O’Brian, The Mauritius Command)
‘I’d of liked to be stabbed – and have lashings of red paint.’ (Agatha Christie, Dead Man’s Folly)
‘Never should of married‘ (Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood)
‘See, they must of had them already saddled.’ (Elmore Leonard, The Law at Randado)
‘If I hadn’t of got my tubes tied, it could of been me, say I was ten years younger.’ (Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale)
‘You could of just told him.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘You could of said no and I could of not believed you.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘She must of grabbed some pills.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘You ought to of asked for me in the first place.’ (Raymond Chandler, ‘Trouble Is My Business’, in Trouble Is My Business)
‘Maybe I had ought to of gone to the servant’s entrance.’ (Raymond Chandler, ‘Trouble Is My Business’, in Trouble Is My Business)
‘Youve never seen anything so mad, the lassie couldnt of known what kind of nut house she was in.’ (Alan Warner, Morvern Callar)
‘I don’t suppose he would remember you,’ the woman said thoughtfully. ‘Seems like he would of mentioned you sometimes if he did.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Lie’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘He shouldn’t of done it, that’s all’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘Root of Evil’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘My wife,’ he said, putting his elbows on the counter and still watching Judith, ‘my wife, you ought to of heard her when she thought I was going.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘Homecoming’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘If he’d of been a friend of mine you would have said plenty, believe me,” Mrs. Royster said darkly. (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘She sure must of been glad to see him, the way he looked,’ the old man said. (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘I never saw him,’ the clerk in the drugstore said. ‘I know because I would of noticed the flowers.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘If you had of been dead, you’d of had a funeral. I only just thought a that now. I’d of went along.’ (Claire Kilroy, The Devil I Know)
Mabey I shoudnt of let them oparate on my branes like she said if its agenst god. (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
Now that makes me feel bad because I would never of hurt the baby. (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
‘I should of had my head examined.’ (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
‘She should of got it lit before we arrived.’ (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)
‘Maybe you should of shot us when we was far away.’ (Chris Cleave, The Other Hand)
‘If he’d been an animal, he’d of been the runt of the litter and we’d of put him down.’ (Gillian Flynn, Dark Places)
‘I could of used the money,’ Donna said. ‘That’s what I was thinking.’ […] ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I could of used the money.’ (Raymond Carver, ‘Vitamins’, in Cathedral)
‘And here I’d of sworn…’ He took another try at the coffee cup, registered surprise to find it empty. (James Sallis, Drive)
‘Figured they must of took you when they took Ellis.’ (James Sallis, Bluebottle)
Must of been May 14 as May 12 is my birthday and it was by way of a late present. (Minette Walters, The Ice House)
‘You could of got it from the paper.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
‘You should of shown me this last time.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
‘She went guilty so she must of done it.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
Yorkin cringed. ‘Me. Pierce told me to clip him. I shouldn’t of done it by the drop.’ (James Ellroy, L. A. Confidential)
‘That sure could of been true,’ says the clerk at the Salon City store (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild)
‘I must of fell asleep, eh?’
‘I guess you must have,’ said Isserley. (Michel Faber, Under the Skin)Then one day, it must of rained, and man discovered a new place: indoors. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
And where that monkey might of come from. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
I would of put loads more dinosaurs in. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
‘Donnie, we’d of finished this Betamax deal in ten days. And we’d have had winter money, all three of us.’ (Joseph D. Pistone with Richard Woodley, Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia)
‘And who else could of built it?’ Mr Madden shouted. (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
Sheila, the woodshed, should of paddled you sooner. (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
‘You went had in there. Stark mad. You’d have raped her if . . .’
‘I’d of what?‘ (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)‘I never should of come here.’ (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
‘Whether Miriam would of been any different, I don’t know, but I’d say she’d of been worse.’ (Patrician Highsmith, Strangers on a Train)
‘I’d of thought Mrs Herman was the last person in the world to—’ (Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse)
…the marshal hadn’t taken any of the Collinsons’ property though of course he might of. (Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse)
‘I wouldn’t of flagged that taxi if the For Hire flag hadn’t been up.’ (Dashiell Hammet, ‘Fly Paper’, in The Big Knockover and other stories)
”F he’d of been a man I’d of seen him in hell ‘fore I’d of gave it to him.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘Corkscrew’, in The Big Knockover and other stories)
‘They may of gone,’ he said slowly. (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Golden Horseshoe’, in The Continental Op)
‘But he must of gone through the house and out front . . .’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Girls with the Silver Eyes’, in The ContinentalOp)
‘Anybody could of got in them with a ladder.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Farewell Murder’, in The Continental Op)
‘Well, we would of if she hadn’t put the two X’s to me the same as she done to you’ . . . ‘but if my rod hadn’t of got snagged in my flogger you wouldn’t have seen nothing else.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Whosis Kid’, in The Continental Op)
‘If I’d known you five years ago I’d of given it to you.’ (Sara Paretsky, ‘The Maltese Cat’, in Windy City Blues)
‘Mate, I’ve probably said enough already. More than I should of (taps nose) . . . Professional conduct an’ all that.’ (Nicola Barker, Darkmans)
‘Yes, and if the bastard hadn’t of moved I’d have got him, too.’ (Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards)
‘I’m Billy Baker. Your Daddy might of talked about me, called me Space?’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher) (pictured and quoted below: Preacher no. 2: Proud Americans)
”Cause I hope I ain’t outta line here, but I think he’d of been cool about you hearin’ it…’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
‘He was stupid an’ clumsy an’ kind of a weakling, an’ he wouldn’t of lasted a fuckin’ day over there if it hadn’t been for one thing’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
‘See, we’d of done Murphy there an’ then, we’d of had to do Van Patten as well — an’ I knew your Daddy didn’t really wanna do that.’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
The Dunns must of felt this when Tracy vanished. (Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower)
‘She must of really gotten knocked out.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Girl in Landscape)
‘He’s not around now, or you’d of met him.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Girl in Landscape)
‘They could of just been losing us,’ said Coney. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Your parents must of been hippies,’ he’d tell me. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘He might of been a little impatient for his date with Frank.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘If it weren’t for Gilbert I would of told him to stick it—’ (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Oh, I’d of straightened it out,’ Tony said. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Each one of them, he says it might of been you, it might of been two other guys.’ (Robert Anton Wilson, The Universe Next Door)
‘You must of been back on the reservation eating peyote again.’ (Robert Anton Wilson, The Universe Next Door)
‘And it wouldn’t of mattered to me whether you did or did not like women.’ (George Pelecanos, Drama City)
‘I wouldn’t of thought of such a thing in a million years.’ (George Pelecanos, The Big Blowdown)
‘If you hadn’t of stepped in the middle of everything—’ (George Pelecanos, The Big Blowdown)
It would of done no good gettin’ somebody else te scratch it for me because that was a sin as well. (Frances Molloy, No Mate for the Magpie)
‘Been calling all night. Four, five calls, must of been.’ (Lawrence Block, A Ticket to the Boneyard)
‘Six-thirty or so, you must of just got on your way to Maspeth, guy goes out back with a load of kitchen garbage.’ (Lawrence Block, A Dance at the Slaughterhouse)
‘Another minute and I would of made it, you rats.’ (Lawrence Block, No Score)
‘Now if you would of done this we wouldn’t have any trouble.’ (Lawrence Block, No Score)
‘Need a social security card,’ he said. ‘You must of had one, I guess.’ (Lawrence Block, Chip Harrison Scores Again)
‘Guess they must of been chafing you some on that bus ride.’ (Lawrence Block, Chip Harrison Scores Again)
‘You might not of noticed yesterday but he’s only got one hand.’ (Ron Rash, The Cove)
‘Would he of died?’ (Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic)
‘Pete should of told me,’ he said. (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘Okay,’ Dortmunder said. ‘Could be worse. She could of been wearing her habit, right?’ (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘Wound up, it took him forty-eight years to serve a ten-year sentence that he should of got out in three.’ (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘She has on a pair of bikinis I couldn’t of got into when I was ten years old.’ (Elmore Leonard, Mr. Paradise)
‘We could’ve settled, the city pays out a few bucks, it wouldn’t of cost you a dime.’ (Elmore Leonard, Mr. Paradise)
‘You know what I sor?’ said the child patiently. ‘Well, the train must of stopped, see, and some little men with bundles on their backs got on.’ (Mavis Gallant, ‘Up North’, in The Omnibus of 20th Century Ghost Stories, edited by Robert Phillips)
‘You two might of settled down and had a nice baby or something.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘Maybe you should of looked around some more.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘He must of gone to the show.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘I shouldn’t of toog you id,’ Angelo breathed. ‘I got nerbous.’
‘It was all my fault,’ Mrs Reilly said, ‘for trying to protect that Ignatius. I should of let you lock him away, Angelo.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)‘I don’t think I’d of wanted to go down there even for the Grape-Nuts. But maybe if we’d’ve gone real fast . . .’ (Harlan Ellison, ‘Sensible City’, in The Dead that Walk, edited by Stephen Jones)
‘You could of killed someone!’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘There’s a lot of places round here you could of bin.’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘If she’d stuck around, I could of asked her advice. I bet she could of come up with somewhere to put you that no one would think of lookin’, not if you paid them ready money.’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘If you’d gotten into a fight with that swordarm of yours, there’d of been bodies all over’ (Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, vol. 2: The Gateless Barrier, translated by Dana Lewis)
‘It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known.’ (Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find)’The other vics probably would have lived if Lewin hadn’t of made that play.’ (George Pelecanos, Shame the Devil)
‘I should of thought of that my own self.’ (George Pelecanos, Shame the Devil)
‘If you’d gone in right away, you would of got him, none of this would of happened. . . . I’d of got off! You think I’d of stood around that roadblock for seven hours?’ (Richard Stark, Slayground)
‘That guy talks pretty big, Cory. We should of called his bluff right there.’ (Richard Stark, Ask the Parrot)
‘Everything screws up, it just gets worse and worse, we should never of got into this, we’re fuckups, that’s all, we’re just fuckups.’ (Richard Stark, Comeback)
‘Might of slipped in and out, nobody the wiser, except we were already on the scene, account of Parmitt being gone.’ (Richard Stark, Flashfire)
‘Couldn’t you of – oh, he was ignorant in his speech – couldn’t you of prevented it?’ (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
‘I should of thought to bring a sun lounger, from the garden centre,’ Mart said. (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
‘He could of been,’ her mother said vaguely. (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
When she provoked him and he was in a temper with her, he would say, count your blessings, girl, you fink I’m bad but you could of had MacArthur. You could have had Bob Fox, or Aitkenside, or Pikey Pete. You could have had my mate Keef Capstick. You could of had Nick, and then where’d you be? (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
He shouldn’t of been near enough . . . (Donal Ryan, ‘Aisling’, in A Slanting of the Sun)
Stupid idea anyway I dont think he ever wud of really done it. (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting – this example is from a teenager’s text message)
But if she hadn’t of drank she would never have seen him at all and better that she was there she thought where she could at least try to keep some grip on him before he lost the run of himself completely (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
Lar thought about it They must of gone out on a job he said (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I wonder what kind of life you might have had, if you hadn’t of been dragged back here. (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I paid a man to write it he says He must of never sent it at all (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I wish someone had of told me you croak into his shoulder (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
Lars frowns Choosing his words He didn’t think you should of married Dickie he says (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
U SHUD OF TOLD ME I CUD OF SHOWD U AROUD!!!! (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting, text message)
‘Hell, if I knew I was sitting on a gold mine, I’d of sold ’em a long time ago.’ (Jim Dodge, Not Fade Away)
‘And he couldn’t of loved me because he took away my kid, he’s off someplace where I can’t never see him.’ (James Baldwin, Another Country)
‘But I would of died for my kid, I wouldn’t never of let anything happen to him.’ (James Baldwin, Another Country)
‘I couldn’t of done nothing else,’ he cried, ‘what else could I of done? Where could I of gone with Esther, and me a preacher, too? And what could I of done with you?’ (James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain)
‘Must of had a heart attack or something!?’ (Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin, Tank Girl One):
A curious example in Jim Nesbit’s novel Lethal Injection, which suggests an attempted copy-editing or proofreading fix that stopped halfway: changing “would of” to “would’ve” but not deleting the “of”. Or maybe it’s else entirely:
The example below, from alt-manga historian Ryan Holmberg’s The Translator Without Talent, is from The Marvel Times, a pretend-newspaper about comics that he created on his twelfth birthday. So its must of is probably not deliberate and also completely forgivable:
Such phrases appear often in Cormac McCarthy’s novels. Here are some from Cities of the Plain, all used in dialogue:
You’d never of knowed it though.
I wouldn’t of wrote home for nothin.
Looks like they’d of learned to stay out of it.
Johnny if he hadnt of found that girl would of found somethin else.
And there was nothin any mortal man could of done to of stopped it.
And from Blood Meridian:
No, No, he said. I mean ye was lost to of come here.
It might of been a mule.
Somebody ought to of pickled it a long time ago.
Must of been a thousand indians in there all settin around.
He appears to of spoke for hisself.
I couldnt of learned it off ten dutchmen.
Him and the governor they sat up till breakfast and it was Paris this and London that in five languages, you’d of give something to of heard them.
Don’t you know he’d of took you with him? He’d of took you, boy.
Glanton spat. Ort to of shot that one too, he said.
Well, he said. I’d of thought any damn fool could saw the barrels off a shotgun.
That old boy you bought them off of might of said they was injins but that dont make it so.
The man didnt answer.
Them ears could of come off of cannibals . . .You wouldnt of lived anyway, the man said.
And from All the Pretty Horses:
They might as well of, he said.
Otherwise I’d of been born in Alabama.
…it was a mistake not to of told you.
But if it hadnt of been for her I wouldnt of made it.
He might well could of
Might well could of is also a nice example of a double modal. The [modal]-of construction is used frequently throughout Chris Cleave’s remarkable novel Incendiary:
She was like that was Mena. Philosophical. I’d definitely of killed myself if it hadn’t of been for her.
If you could of looked in my eyes you’d of seen the same thing I shouldn’t wonder.
I wouldn’t of come near you I’d never of let you touch me you should be ashamed.
Most notably in this exchange between two people only one of whom uses it dialectally:
– He would of said something.
– Maybe he wouldn’t have.
– Wouldn’t you of?A remarkable example in A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore uses it without a preceding modal, in the speech of a young child:
‘You got brown eyes,’ she said. ‘I of brown eyes.’
Searching the Corpus of Contemporary American English for the string would of [v*], where [v*] is a verb, produces the graph below. It shows that the of-form’s predominant setting is fiction, usually ‘would of been’, and it also shows up in transcription of actual speech, as in the academic and newspaper instances. You can click through the image to view examples, sources, and further information at COCA.
The magazine data are false positives (‘we’d have a better chance of achieving a breakthrough in quantum gravity than we would of figuring out how to reliably connect with teenagers’), but you get an idea of the construction’s low frequency and particular genre distribution.
Plotting could of [v*] usages over time, using the related Corpus of Historical American English, suggests the construction may have peaked. Or is that just wishful thinking? Again, you can click on this graph for details, or open it in another tab.
Of 1000 occurrences of could/would of in the Oxford English Corpus, about 850 are from ‘representations of direct speech (mostly from the Fiction domain, but also from interviews and courtroom transcripts)’. That leaves 150 genuine written instances of could/would of, compared with 4 million examples of standard could/would have. I can’t help picturing a global battalion of editors keeping it firmly at bay.
The of-form is not frequent in edited prose, but it appears quite often in casual writing and it has been around a while. Does that count for much? MWDEU says its prolonged use has ‘not made it respectable’, and recommends avoiding it – including in transcriptions of real speech, since ’ve serves the purpose equally well. I agree, and I think if someone explicitly says of, and stresses it, that might warrant a ‘[sic]’.
Regular readers know I like to make room for literary effect and poetic licence, but I have never warmed to this mistake. Every time I see it – be its use naive or intentional – I want to fix it. Authenticity of dialect and character are all well and good, but I think the main effect of the deliberate usage in edited prose is further uncertainty and error (not to mention irritation, in some quarters). What do you think?
Updates:
Years after writing this, I’ve softened considerably on the modal-of construction. This is partly because of exposure to its use by so many great writers, and also because it’s a good example of language change – a natural, essential characteristic of a living language. See my post on reconciling descriptivism with editing for more discussion.
I’ve come across many more examples in books, and have added them to the sets above and below. @desktopenglish on Twitter drew my attention to this BBC article that quotes a footballer saying he ‘Shouldn’t of reacted the way I did’.
What sounds to me like a good audio example comes from author Zadie Smith on the Adam Buxton Podcast. This link should cue the player automatically at 15:50, but if it doesn’t, that’s the time stamp. The relevant exchange is as follows, discussing Smith’s father:
Smith: He was very uptight about time, yeah.
Buxton: It rubbed off on you.
Smith: It must of, yeah.
Medievalist Lucy Allen found the line ‘For methowte I wold not for my life a sen it fallen’ in a 14thC religious text, The Shewings of Julian of Norwich. Translating it as ‘I thought I would not for my life of seen it fall’ [underlines mine], she writes: ‘it’s always fun when you notice something in a medieval text that is a dead ringer for one of the “modern” mistakes that horrify the pearl-clutchers’.
David Crystal adds further historical commentary in his book Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of English Grammar:
On 5 September 1819 the poet John Keats sends an apologetic letter to his publisher John Taylor, in which he writes:
Had I known of your illness I should not of written in such fierry phrase in my first Letter.
‘Should not of written’? From such a great poet? It must have been just a slip, because later on in the same letter he writes ‘You should not have delayed.’ What interests me is to find this confusion 200 years ago. It isn’t just a modern thing, as some critics say. That identity in pronunciation between the preposition of and the unstressed form of the auxiliary verb have has been around a long time.
Morph, a linguistics blog by the Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey, has a great post on different aspects of the modal-of usage: ‘What’s the good of “would of”?’
Lots of examples in Anne Tyler’s If Morning Ever Comes, spoken by several different characters (of different ages, backgrounds, and ethnicities):
‘You mustn’t of been but twelve or so but I remembered.’
‘You shouldn’t of mentioned breakfast, boy,’ he said.
‘Course I think he could of made a better choice in wives, but then Sally’s right pretty and I reckon I can see his point in picking her.’
‘You know, when I was a boy we’d of been plumb through town by now.’
‘If we’d of known,’ she said, ‘I’d of cleaned up house a little.’
‘Folks tell me I take too good care of him, so it can’t of been that he got too cold. Though he is right much of a puddle-wader, that could’ve done it.’ [Note nearby use of could’ve.]
‘I don’t guess my letter would of made any change in him one way or the other.’
‘If I’d of married Jamie,” she said, “I would of had a different family.’
‘Well, if it hadn’t of been her, it’d been someone else.’
‘She mustn’t of seen us.’
Ross Macdonald also makes regular use of the construction:
‘If they knew they had a buyer, they might of stayed in business to accommodate you.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Blue Hammer)
‘I wish I could of died instead of him.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Blue Hammer)
‘The other man took them, he must of.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He must of got away.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He must of fell down on the knife and stabbed himself.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He would of killed him too.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘When Culligan came marching out, armed up to the teeth, you could of knocked me over with a ‘dozer.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘Lucky for him I was out, or I’d of shown him what’s what.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘You were just a tiny baby, but that wouldn’t of stopped him.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
As does Elmore Leonard; these are from The Hot Kid:
Emmett Long kept looking at him. ‘You had a gun you’d of shot me, huh?’
‘I’d of shoved the ice cream cone up his goddamn nose.’
What Oris did, he got mad, changed the name of the company from Busy Bee Oil & Gas – a cartoon bumblebee in the trademark they’d of had one day – to NMD Oil & Gas, standing for No More Dusters, and worked a year as a driller to restore his capital.
‘The only one I told was Emmett,’ Carl said. ‘It had to of been Crystal told the papers.’
She had to wonder if she had been here would he of recognized her, and bet he would’ve.
‘I’d of arrested him he’s walking in the door,’ Lester said.
Franklin was shaking his head. ‘I’d of seen ’em.’
‘I told him he shouldn’t of left the key in it.’
‘She looked at him again with a faint smile. ‘I would never of suspected.’
‘The first remark out of his mouth, I’d of pulled and killed him where he stood.’
‘She’d of given me the choice of taking a chance with Teddy or being locked up.’
‘She wouldn’t of started breakfast if they weren’t all downstairs near ready to eat.’
‘Jack’s a talker,’ Carl said. ‘He’d of thought of a reason to go alone, pick up a bottle? And Tony’s polite, he would’ve said don’t steal the car, okay?’
‘No, he couldn’t of known that.’
‘Jack Belmont wouldn’t of left with bullets in his gun.’
The minute Jack wasn’t looking, like taking a leak or something, she’d of run out of the house to find a cop.
But Nancy knew who he was, so so the kidnapping wouldn’t of worked.
‘If I hadn’t decided to step back inside to answer the phone, I’d of missed one of the great opportunities of my career as a journalist . . .’
Richard Stark, already quoted above, has half a dozen examples in his first novel, The Hunter:
The spelling occurs often in Kent Haruf’s novel Plainsong:‘If Art wanted to see you, he’d of told you where to find him.’
Stegman blinked. ‘He must of believed me.’
‘His wife must of known it, but she never told me.’
‘Five minutes later,’ the owner told him, ‘you’d of been out of luck.’
‘…it must of meant something, that’s all.’
‘I wouldn’t of believed it.’
He should of taken it last year.
She might of come down and gone back, Ike said. She might not of too.
She must not of stuck.
She must of went home, Mr. Guthrie.
You shouldn’t even of touched that.
Well, he might of went to Denver, Raymond said. Then he might of went back to the Rosebud in South Dakota.
I should of called during these months, I know.
You could of done something yourself too, you know, he said.
Something must of happened to her, Harold said. She must of got taken off or something.
I can’t think of anything we might of did.
You don’t even know where he might of took her for sure.
He might of landed her in Pueblo or Walsenburg.We didn’t know what we might of done to cause you to want to leave here like that.
He better not of hurt her permanent, Raymond said.
And in Pete Dexter’s novel Train:
“They must of left the sprinklers on all night,” the fat man said after he got back in control of his deportment again.
“He must of got home somehow,” Train said.
“She all convulsed the whole time they going through the house; she keeps saying, ‘Oh, no, he couldn’t of did that….'”
Train began thinking more and more that the world might of decided to let him alone.
Now he thought about he, she might not of even noticed the table leg if he hadn’t dropped it and woke up the dog…
Train thought it must of reminded him of that feeling when he was hit by that car and rolled across the road.
Then, if it was the right officer, they might of just carted Mayflower out of there, just because she was pretty, and then took his ass out into the desert and left it.
“One of them must of got up here and took it,” he said.
It seemed like Mr. Cooper must of told him where he come from, or how else would he know?
Must of bought his clothes in the boy’s department.
Melrose might of been trying to say something too, and Train distinctly saw his jaw slide out from under his face.
It came to Train the Plural must of heard her before she even come out of the double-wide, that he must of known from how she was walking that she was mad.
“A blind man,” he said, “We should of sold tickets.”
Walter Tevis’s The Hustler, from multiple characters:
‘You should never of quit going to Sunday school.’
‘I already watched you lose – watched you lose to a man you should of beat.’
‘And if I hadn’t already paid for it I could of with the money I won in side bets.’
‘They couldn’t of helped but hear of me.’
‘I should of let that guy quit, Charlie, like you told me.’
#books #corpusLinguistics #couldOf #dialects #dialogue #etymology #eyeDialect #fiction #grammar #language #linguistics #literacy #modalVerbs #modals #phrases #reading #schwa #speech #speechErrors #spelling #transcription #typos #usage #verbs #writing
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Would of, could of, might of, must of
When we say would have, could have, should have, must have, might have, may have and ought to have, we often put some stress on the modal auxiliary and none on the have. We may show this in writing by abbreviating to could’ve, must’ve, etc. (Would can contract further by merging with the subject: We would have → We’d’ve.)
Unstressed ’ve is phonetically identical (/əv/) to unstressed of: hence the widespread misspellings would of, could of, should of, must of, might of, may of, and ought to of. Negative forms also appear: shouldn’t of, mightn’t of, etc. This explanation – that misanalysis of the notorious schwa lies behind the error – has general support among linguists.
The mistake dates to at least 1837, according to the OED, so it has probably been infuriating pedants for almost 200 years. Common words spelt incorrectly provoke particular ire, sometimes accompanied by aspersions cast on the writer’s intelligence, fitness for society, degree of evolution, and so on. But there’s no need for any of that.
Usage authorities unanimously call it a mistake, though some allow for its deliberate use (more on that below). Many associate it specifically with children and other less educated writers. For example, Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage finds it a practice of ‘semiliterate writers’, and accepts no excuses: ‘the word is have, or a contraction ending in ’ve, and it should be written so.’
Merriam-Webster’s Pocket Guide to English Usage says ‘children and those who have not completed grammar school may have an excuse for making this mistake, but most others do not.’ What’s meant by that most is what we’ll now consider: that the misspellings don’t always indicate carelessness or relative illiteracy.
The Columbia Guide to Standard American English finds room for the anomalous forms as a stylistic device:
substituting of for ’ve in writing can be an example of eye dialect, which deliberately misspells words to suggest Nonstandard or dialectal speech. . . . The important thing is to correct it when it isn’t intentional.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage elaborates on this, saying writers use the spelling ‘to create an unlettered persona’. It cites several examples, including a ‘he’d of got me’ from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who ‘used the spelling to represent the speech of a woman who was not overeducated’, as MWDEU politely puts it.
Here is must of in an intertitle in the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928):
And in Josef von Sternberg’s 1928 The Docks of New York:
Over the last number of years, I’ve seen the non-standard of-form in many books by authors who presumably knew what they were doing:
‘I could of sworn I’d run into you some place before.’ (Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding)
‘Oh Miz, oh Miz,’ he moaned, rubbing his leg. ‘You shouldn’t of done that, you shouldn’t, you reely shouldn’t.’ (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
‘All bloody and mucked up, with figuring away aboard the Vénus, when two minutes would of changed it.’ (Patrick O’Brian, The Mauritius Command)
‘I’d of liked to be stabbed – and have lashings of red paint.’ (Agatha Christie, Dead Man’s Folly)
‘Never should of married‘ (Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood)
‘See, they must of had them already saddled.’ (Elmore Leonard, The Law at Randado)
‘If I hadn’t of got my tubes tied, it could of been me, say I was ten years younger.’ (Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale)
‘You could of just told him.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘You could of said no and I could of not believed you.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘She must of grabbed some pills.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘You ought to of asked for me in the first place.’ (Raymond Chandler, ‘Trouble Is My Business’, in Trouble Is My Business)
‘Maybe I had ought to of gone to the servant’s entrance.’ (Raymond Chandler, ‘Trouble Is My Business’, in Trouble Is My Business)
‘Youve never seen anything so mad, the lassie couldnt of known what kind of nut house she was in.’ (Alan Warner, Morvern Callar)
‘I don’t suppose he would remember you,’ the woman said thoughtfully. ‘Seems like he would of mentioned you sometimes if he did.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Lie’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘He shouldn’t of done it, that’s all’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘Root of Evil’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘My wife,’ he said, putting his elbows on the counter and still watching Judith, ‘my wife, you ought to of heard her when she thought I was going.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘Homecoming’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘If he’d of been a friend of mine you would have said plenty, believe me,” Mrs. Royster said darkly. (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘She sure must of been glad to see him, the way he looked,’ the old man said. (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘I never saw him,’ the clerk in the drugstore said. ‘I know because I would of noticed the flowers.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘If you had of been dead, you’d of had a funeral. I only just thought a that now. I’d of went along.’ (Claire Kilroy, The Devil I Know)
Mabey I shoudnt of let them oparate on my branes like she said if its agenst god. (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
Now that makes me feel bad because I would never of hurt the baby. (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
‘I should of had my head examined.’ (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
‘She should of got it lit before we arrived.’ (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)
‘Maybe you should of shot us when we was far away.’ (Chris Cleave, The Other Hand)
‘If he’d been an animal, he’d of been the runt of the litter and we’d of put him down.’ (Gillian Flynn, Dark Places)
‘I could of used the money,’ Donna said. ‘That’s what I was thinking.’ […] ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I could of used the money.’ (Raymond Carver, ‘Vitamins’, in Cathedral)
‘And here I’d of sworn…’ He took another try at the coffee cup, registered surprise to find it empty. (James Sallis, Drive)
‘Figured they must of took you when they took Ellis.’ (James Sallis, Bluebottle)
Must of been May 14 as May 12 is my birthday and it was by way of a late present. (Minette Walters, The Ice House)
‘You could of got it from the paper.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
‘You should of shown me this last time.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
‘She went guilty so she must of done it.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
Yorkin cringed. ‘Me. Pierce told me to clip him. I shouldn’t of done it by the drop.’ (James Ellroy, L. A. Confidential)
‘That sure could of been true,’ says the clerk at the Salon City store (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild)
‘I must of fell asleep, eh?’
‘I guess you must have,’ said Isserley. (Michel Faber, Under the Skin)Then one day, it must of rained, and man discovered a new place: indoors. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
And where that monkey might of come from. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
I would of put loads more dinosaurs in. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
‘Donnie, we’d of finished this Betamax deal in ten days. And we’d have had winter money, all three of us.’ (Joseph D. Pistone with Richard Woodley, Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia)
‘And who else could of built it?’ Mr Madden shouted. (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
Sheila, the woodshed, should of paddled you sooner. (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
‘You went had in there. Stark mad. You’d have raped her if . . .’
‘I’d of what?‘ (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)‘I never should of come here.’ (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
‘Whether Miriam would of been any different, I don’t know, but I’d say she’d of been worse.’ (Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train)
‘I’d of thought Mrs Herman was the last person in the world to—’ (Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse)
…the marshal hadn’t taken any of the Collinsons’ property though of course he might of. (Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse)
‘I wouldn’t of flagged that taxi if the For Hire flag hadn’t been up.’ (Dashiell Hammet, ‘Fly Paper’, in The Big Knockover and other stories)
”F he’d of been a man I’d of seen him in hell ‘fore I’d of gave it to him.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘Corkscrew’, in The Big Knockover and other stories)
‘They may of gone,’ he said slowly. (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Golden Horseshoe’, in The Continental Op)
‘But he must of gone through the house and out front . . .’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Girls with the Silver Eyes’, in The ContinentalOp)
‘Anybody could of got in them with a ladder.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Farewell Murder’, in The Continental Op)
‘Well, we would of if she hadn’t put the two X’s to me the same as she done to you’ . . . ‘but if my rod hadn’t of got snagged in my flogger you wouldn’t have seen nothing else.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Whosis Kid’, in The Continental Op)
‘If I’d known you five years ago I’d of given it to you.’ (Sara Paretsky, ‘The Maltese Cat’, in Windy City Blues)
‘Mate, I’ve probably said enough already. More than I should of (taps nose) . . . Professional conduct an’ all that.’ (Nicola Barker, Darkmans)
‘Yes, and if the bastard hadn’t of moved I’d have got him, too.’ (Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards)
‘I’m Billy Baker. Your Daddy might of talked about me, called me Space?’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher) (pictured and quoted below: Preacher no. 2: Proud Americans)
”Cause I hope I ain’t outta line here, but I think he’d of been cool about you hearin’ it…’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
‘He was stupid an’ clumsy an’ kind of a weakling, an’ he wouldn’t of lasted a fuckin’ day over there if it hadn’t been for one thing’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
‘See, we’d of done Murphy there an’ then, we’d of had to do Van Patten as well — an’ I knew your Daddy didn’t really wanna do that.’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
The Dunns must of felt this when Tracy vanished. (Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower)
‘She must of really gotten knocked out.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Girl in Landscape)
‘He’s not around now, or you’d of met him.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Girl in Landscape)
‘They could of just been losing us,’ said Coney. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Your parents must of been hippies,’ he’d tell me. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘He might of been a little impatient for his date with Frank.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘If it weren’t for Gilbert I would of told him to stick it—’ (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Oh, I’d of straightened it out,’ Tony said. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Each one of them, he says it might of been you, it might of been two other guys.’ (Robert Anton Wilson, The Universe Next Door)
‘You must of been back on the reservation eating peyote again.’ (Robert Anton Wilson, The Universe Next Door)
‘And it wouldn’t of mattered to me whether you did or did not like women.’ (George Pelecanos, Drama City)
‘I wouldn’t of thought of such a thing in a million years.’ (George Pelecanos, The Big Blowdown)
‘If you hadn’t of stepped in the middle of everything—’ (George Pelecanos, The Big Blowdown)
It would of done no good gettin’ somebody else te scratch it for me because that was a sin as well. (Frances Molloy, No Mate for the Magpie)
‘Been calling all night. Four, five calls, must of been.’ (Lawrence Block, A Ticket to the Boneyard)
‘Six-thirty or so, you must of just got on your way to Maspeth, guy goes out back with a load of kitchen garbage.’ (Lawrence Block, A Dance at the Slaughterhouse)
‘Another minute and I would of made it, you rats.’ (Lawrence Block, No Score)
‘Now if you would of done this we wouldn’t have any trouble.’ (Lawrence Block, No Score)
‘Need a social security card,’ he said. ‘You must of had one, I guess.’ (Lawrence Block, Chip Harrison Scores Again)
‘Guess they must of been chafing you some on that bus ride.’ (Lawrence Block, Chip Harrison Scores Again)
‘You might not of noticed yesterday but he’s only got one hand.’ (Ron Rash, The Cove)
‘Would he of died?’ (Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic)
‘Pete should of told me,’ he said. (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘Okay,’ Dortmunder said. ‘Could be worse. She could of been wearing her habit, right?’ (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘Wound up, it took him forty-eight years to serve a ten-year sentence that he should of got out in three.’ (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘She has on a pair of bikinis I couldn’t of got into when I was ten years old.’ (Elmore Leonard, Mr. Paradise)
‘We could’ve settled, the city pays out a few bucks, it wouldn’t of cost you a dime.’ (Elmore Leonard, Mr. Paradise)
‘You know what I sor?’ said the child patiently. ‘Well, the train must of stopped, see, and some little men with bundles on their backs got on.’ (Mavis Gallant, ‘Up North’, in The Omnibus of 20th Century Ghost Stories, edited by Robert Phillips)
‘You two might of settled down and had a nice baby or something.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘Maybe you should of looked around some more.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘He must of gone to the show.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘I shouldn’t of toog you id,’ Angelo breathed. ‘I got nerbous.’
‘It was all my fault,’ Mrs Reilly said, ‘for trying to protect that Ignatius. I should of let you lock him away, Angelo.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)‘I don’t think I’d of wanted to go down there even for the Grape-Nuts. But maybe if we’d’ve gone real fast . . .’ (Harlan Ellison, ‘Sensible City’, in The Dead that Walk, edited by Stephen Jones)
‘You could of killed someone!’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘There’s a lot of places round here you could of bin.’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘If she’d stuck around, I could of asked her advice. I bet she could of come up with somewhere to put you that no one would think of lookin’, not if you paid them ready money.’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘If you’d gotten into a fight with that swordarm of yours, there’d of been bodies all over’ (Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, vol. 2: The Gateless Barrier, translated by Dana Lewis)
‘It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known.’ (Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find)’The other vics probably would have lived if Lewin hadn’t of made that play.’ (George Pelecanos, Shame the Devil)
‘I should of thought of that my own self.’ (George Pelecanos, Shame the Devil)
‘If you’d gone in right away, you would of got him, none of this would of happened. . . . I’d of got off! You think I’d of stood around that roadblock for seven hours?’ (Richard Stark, Slayground)
‘That guy talks pretty big, Cory. We should of called his bluff right there.’ (Richard Stark, Ask the Parrot)
‘Everything screws up, it just gets worse and worse, we should never of got into this, we’re fuckups, that’s all, we’re just fuckups.’ (Richard Stark, Comeback)
‘Might of slipped in and out, nobody the wiser, except we were already on the scene, account of Parmitt being gone.’ (Richard Stark, Flashfire)
‘Couldn’t you of – oh, he was ignorant in his speech – couldn’t you of prevented it?’ (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
‘I should of thought to bring a sun lounger, from the garden centre,’ Mart said. (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
‘He could of been,’ her mother said vaguely. (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
When she provoked him and he was in a temper with her, he would say, count your blessings, girl, you fink I’m bad but you could of had MacArthur. You could have had Bob Fox, or Aitkenside, or Pikey Pete. You could have had my mate Keef Capstick. You could of had Nick, and then where’d you be? (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
He shouldn’t of been near enough . . . (Donal Ryan, ‘Aisling’, in A Slanting of the Sun)
Stupid idea anyway I dont think he ever wud of really done it. (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting – this example is from a teenager’s text message)
But if she hadn’t of drank she would never have seen him at all and better that she was there she thought where she could at least try to keep some grip on him before he lost the run of himself completely (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
Lar thought about it They must of gone out on a job he said (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I wonder what kind of life you might have had, if you hadn’t of been dragged back here. (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I paid a man to write it he says He must of never sent it at all (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I wish someone had of told me you croak into his shoulder (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
Lars frowns Choosing his words He didn’t think you should of married Dickie he says (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
U SHUD OF TOLD ME I CUD OF SHOWD U AROUD!!!! (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting, text message)
‘Hell, if I knew I was sitting on a gold mine, I’d of sold ’em a long time ago.’ (Jim Dodge, Not Fade Away)
‘And he couldn’t of loved me because he took away my kid, he’s off someplace where I can’t never see him.’ (James Baldwin, Another Country)
‘But I would of died for my kid, I wouldn’t never of let anything happen to him.’ (James Baldwin, Another Country)
‘I couldn’t of done nothing else,’ he cried, ‘what else could I of done? Where could I of gone with Esther, and me a preacher, too? And what could I of done with you?’ (James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain)
‘Must of had a heart attack or something!?’ (Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin, Tank Girl One):
A curious example in Jim Nesbit’s novel Lethal Injection, where a character says “would’ve of”. My first thought was that it was a copy-editing or proofreading fix that stopped halfway: changing “would of” to “would’ve” and neglecting to delete the “of”. But a search online shows occasional analogous examples in unedited writing, and adjacent discussion on Language Log, so it may well be authentically dialectal:
The example below, from alt-manga historian Ryan Holmberg’s The Translator Without Talent, is from The Marvel Times, a pretend-newspaper about comics that he created on his twelfth birthday. So its must of is probably not deliberate and also completely forgivable:
Such phrases appear often in Cormac McCarthy’s novels. Here are some from Cities of the Plain, all used in dialogue:
You’d never of knowed it though.
I wouldn’t of wrote home for nothin.
Looks like they’d of learned to stay out of it.
Johnny if he hadnt of found that girl would of found somethin else.
And there was nothin any mortal man could of done to of stopped it.
And from Blood Meridian:
No, No, he said. I mean ye was lost to of come here.
It might of been a mule.
Somebody ought to of pickled it a long time ago.
Must of been a thousand indians in there all settin around.
He appears to of spoke for hisself.
I couldnt of learned it off ten dutchmen.
Him and the governor they sat up till breakfast and it was Paris this and London that in five languages, you’d of give something to of heard them.
Don’t you know he’d of took you with him? He’d of took you, boy.
Glanton spat. Ort to of shot that one too, he said.
Well, he said. I’d of thought any damn fool could saw the barrels off a shotgun.
That old boy you bought them off of might of said they was injins but that dont make it so.
The man didnt answer.
Them ears could of come off of cannibals . . .You wouldnt of lived anyway, the man said.
And from All the Pretty Horses:
They might as well of, he said.
Otherwise I’d of been born in Alabama.
…it was a mistake not to of told you.
But if it hadnt of been for her I wouldnt of made it.
He might well could of
Might well could of is also a nice example of a double modal. The [modal]-of construction is used frequently throughout Chris Cleave’s remarkable novel Incendiary:
She was like that was Mena. Philosophical. I’d definitely of killed myself if it hadn’t of been for her.
If you could of looked in my eyes you’d of seen the same thing I shouldn’t wonder.
I wouldn’t of come near you I’d never of let you touch me you should be ashamed.
Most notably in this exchange between two people only one of whom uses it dialectally:
– He would of said something.
– Maybe he wouldn’t have.
– Wouldn’t you of?A remarkable example in A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore uses it without a preceding modal, in the speech of a young child:
‘You got brown eyes,’ she said. ‘I of brown eyes.’
Searching the Corpus of Contemporary American English for the string would of [v*], where [v*] is a verb, produces the graph below. It shows that the of-form’s predominant setting is fiction, usually ‘would of been’, and it also shows up in transcription of actual speech, as in the academic and newspaper instances. You can click through the image to view examples, sources, and further information at COCA.
The magazine data are false positives (‘we’d have a better chance of achieving a breakthrough in quantum gravity than we would of figuring out how to reliably connect with teenagers’), but you get an idea of the construction’s low frequency and particular genre distribution.
Plotting could of [v*] usages over time, using the related Corpus of Historical American English, suggests the construction may have peaked. Or is that just wishful thinking? Again, you can click on this graph for details, or open it in another tab.
Of 1000 occurrences of could/would of in the Oxford English Corpus, about 850 are from ‘representations of direct speech (mostly from the Fiction domain, but also from interviews and courtroom transcripts)’. That leaves 150 genuine written instances of could/would of, compared with 4 million examples of standard could/would have. I can’t help picturing a global battalion of editors keeping it firmly at bay.
The of-form is not frequent in edited prose, but it appears quite often in casual writing and it has been around a while. Does that count for much? MWDEU says its prolonged use has ‘not made it respectable’, and recommends avoiding it – including in transcriptions of real speech, since ’ve serves the purpose equally well. I agree, and I think if someone explicitly says of, and stresses it, that might warrant a ‘[sic]’.
Regular readers know I like to make room for literary effect and poetic licence, but I have never warmed to this mistake. Every time I see it – be its use naive or intentional – I want to fix it. Authenticity of dialect and character are all well and good, but I think the main effect of the deliberate usage in edited prose is further uncertainty and error (not to mention irritation, in some quarters). What do you think?
Updates:
Years after writing this, I’ve softened considerably on the modal-of construction. This is partly because of exposure to its use by so many great writers, and also because it’s a good example of language change – a natural, essential characteristic of a living language. See my post on reconciling descriptivism with editing for more discussion.
I’ve come across many more examples in books, and have added them to the sets above and below. @desktopenglish on Twitter drew my attention to this BBC article that quotes a footballer saying he ‘Shouldn’t of reacted the way I did’.
What sounds to me like a good audio example comes from author Zadie Smith on the Adam Buxton Podcast. This link should cue the player automatically at 15:50, but if it doesn’t, that’s the time stamp. The relevant exchange is as follows, discussing Smith’s father:
Smith: He was very uptight about time, yeah.
Buxton: It rubbed off on you.
Smith: It must of, yeah.
Medievalist Lucy Allen found the line ‘For methowte I wold not for my life a sen it fallen’ in a 14thC religious text, The Shewings of Julian of Norwich. Translating it as ‘I thought I would not for my life of seen it fall’ [underlines mine], she writes: ‘it’s always fun when you notice something in a medieval text that is a dead ringer for one of the “modern” mistakes that horrify the pearl-clutchers’.
David Crystal adds further historical commentary in his book Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of English Grammar:
On 5 September 1819 the poet John Keats sends an apologetic letter to his publisher John Taylor, in which he writes:
Had I known of your illness I should not of written in such fierry phrase in my first Letter.
‘Should not of written’? From such a great poet? It must have been just a slip, because later on in the same letter he writes ‘You should not have delayed.’ What interests me is to find this confusion 200 years ago. It isn’t just a modern thing, as some critics say. That identity in pronunciation between the preposition of and the unstressed form of the auxiliary verb have has been around a long time.
Morph, a linguistics blog by the Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey, has a great post on different aspects of the modal-of usage: ‘What’s the good of “would of”?’
Lots of examples in Anne Tyler’s If Morning Ever Comes, spoken by several different characters (of different ages, backgrounds, and ethnicities):
‘You mustn’t of been but twelve or so but I remembered.’
‘You shouldn’t of mentioned breakfast, boy,’ he said.
‘Course I think he could of made a better choice in wives, but then Sally’s right pretty and I reckon I can see his point in picking her.’
‘You know, when I was a boy we’d of been plumb through town by now.’
‘If we’d of known,’ she said, ‘I’d of cleaned up house a little.’
‘Folks tell me I take too good care of him, so it can’t of been that he got too cold. Though he is right much of a puddle-wader, that could’ve done it.’ [Note nearby use of could’ve.]
‘I don’t guess my letter would of made any change in him one way or the other.’
‘If I’d of married Jamie,” she said, “I would of had a different family.’
‘Well, if it hadn’t of been her, it’d been someone else.’
‘She mustn’t of seen us.’
Ross Macdonald also makes regular use of the construction:
‘If they knew they had a buyer, they might of stayed in business to accommodate you.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Blue Hammer)
‘I wish I could of died instead of him.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Blue Hammer)
‘The other man took them, he must of.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He must of got away.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He must of fell down on the knife and stabbed himself.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He would of killed him too.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘When Culligan came marching out, armed up to the teeth, you could of knocked me over with a ‘dozer.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘Lucky for him I was out, or I’d of shown him what’s what.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘You were just a tiny baby, but that wouldn’t of stopped him.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
As does Elmore Leonard; these are from The Hot Kid:
Emmett Long kept looking at him. ‘You had a gun you’d of shot me, huh?’
‘I’d of shoved the ice cream cone up his goddamn nose.’
What Oris did, he got mad, changed the name of the company from Busy Bee Oil & Gas – a cartoon bumblebee in the trademark they’d of had one day – to NMD Oil & Gas, standing for No More Dusters, and worked a year as a driller to restore his capital.
‘The only one I told was Emmett,’ Carl said. ‘It had to of been Crystal told the papers.’
She had to wonder if she had been here would he of recognized her, and bet he would’ve.
‘I’d of arrested him he’s walking in the door,’ Lester said.
Franklin was shaking his head. ‘I’d of seen ’em.’
‘I told him he shouldn’t of left the key in it.’
‘She looked at him again with a faint smile. ‘I would never of suspected.’
‘The first remark out of his mouth, I’d of pulled and killed him where he stood.’
‘She’d of given me the choice of taking a chance with Teddy or being locked up.’
‘She wouldn’t of started breakfast if they weren’t all downstairs near ready to eat.’
‘Jack’s a talker,’ Carl said. ‘He’d of thought of a reason to go alone, pick up a bottle? And Tony’s polite, he would’ve said don’t steal the car, okay?’
‘No, he couldn’t of known that.’
‘Jack Belmont wouldn’t of left with bullets in his gun.’
The minute Jack wasn’t looking, like taking a leak or something, she’d of run out of the house to find a cop.
But Nancy knew who he was, so so the kidnapping wouldn’t of worked.
‘If I hadn’t decided to step back inside to answer the phone, I’d of missed one of the great opportunities of my career as a journalist . . .’
Richard Stark, already quoted above, has half a dozen examples in his first novel, The Hunter:
The spelling occurs often in Kent Haruf’s novel Plainsong:‘If Art wanted to see you, he’d of told you where to find him.’
Stegman blinked. ‘He must of believed me.’
‘His wife must of known it, but she never told me.’
‘Five minutes later,’ the owner told him, ‘you’d of been out of luck.’
‘…it must of meant something, that’s all.’
‘I wouldn’t of believed it.’
He should of taken it last year.
She might of come down and gone back, Ike said. She might not of too.
She must not of stuck.
She must of went home, Mr. Guthrie.
You shouldn’t even of touched that.
Well, he might of went to Denver, Raymond said. Then he might of went back to the Rosebud in South Dakota.
I should of called during these months, I know.
You could of done something yourself too, you know, he said.
Something must of happened to her, Harold said. She must of got taken off or something.
I can’t think of anything we might of did.
You don’t even know where he might of took her for sure.
He might of landed her in Pueblo or Walsenburg.We didn’t know what we might of done to cause you to want to leave here like that.
He better not of hurt her permanent, Raymond said.
And in Pete Dexter’s novel Train:
“They must of left the sprinklers on all night,” the fat man said after he got back in control of his deportment again.
“He must of got home somehow,” Train said.
“She all convulsed the whole time they going through the house; she keeps saying, ‘Oh, no, he couldn’t of did that….'”
Train began thinking more and more that the world might of decided to let him alone.
Now he thought about he, she might not of even noticed the table leg if he hadn’t dropped it and woke up the dog…
Train thought it must of reminded him of that feeling when he was hit by that car and rolled across the road.
Then, if it was the right officer, they might of just carted Mayflower out of there, just because she was pretty, and then took his ass out into the desert and left it.
“One of them must of got up here and took it,” he said.
It seemed like Mr. Cooper must of told him where he come from, or how else would he know?
Must of bought his clothes in the boy’s department.
Melrose might of been trying to say something too, and Train distinctly saw his jaw slide out from under his face.
It came to Train the Plural must of heard her before she even come out of the double-wide, that he must of known from how she was walking that she was mad.
“A blind man,” he said, “We should of sold tickets.”
Walter Tevis’s The Hustler, from multiple characters:
‘You should never of quit going to Sunday school.’
‘I already watched you lose – watched you lose to a man you should of beat.’
‘And if I hadn’t already paid for it I could of with the money I won in side bets.’
‘They couldn’t of helped but hear of me.’
‘I should of let that guy quit, Charlie, like you told me.’
#books #corpusLinguistics #couldOf #dialects #dialogue #etymology #eyeDialect #fiction #grammar #language #linguistics #literacy #modalVerbs #modals #phrases #reading #schwa #speech #speechErrors #spelling #transcription #typos #usage #verbs #writing
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The Great Storm of 1901: the thread about the tragic loss of the cutter “Active”
On the 12th November 1901 a terrible storm formed over the North Sea and battered the East Coast of Scotland. The Firth of Forth felt its full fury and by the following morning twenty men would lie dead in the cold waters of Wardie Bay, when the Royal Navy cutter Active was driven ashore and wrecked against the Granton Breakwater.
Headline from the Edinburgh Evening News, 13th November 1901.The Active was a 135 ton sailing yawl, built in Kent in 1867. For 20 years she had been stationed in the Forth as tender to the navy’s guardship at South Queensferry, the old battleship HMS Anson. She had recently returned south from secondment to the Revenue Service as a fisheries cutter off of the Shetland Islands. Her captain was Lt. Charles Culley RN, a pious and temperate man who was a “good husband, a good father and a real Christian” in the words of his widow. Culley had started out life as a pit boy in Somerset but had turned to Methodism and joined the Navy. He was therefore somewhat unusual in being a Bluejacket, having come up through the ranks and had recently learned that he was being advanced in the service and would be receiving command of a steam gunboat.
HM Revenue Cutter Active, London Illustrated News – Saturday 23rd November 1901During the day on November 12th the temperature plunged and the wind got increasingly strong. Soon it brought heavy squalls of rain and sleet. The waves ran high along the Forth and were “breaking with great violence against the piers and embankments, doing considerable damage“. At the end of the eastern breakwater at Granton the green marker lighthouse and a gangway were carried away. On the quayside, part of the roof of the North British Railway station was blown off. At Trinity Crescent the sea wall was breached and the road was left impassable. On account of the intensity of the storm in the North Sea the east coast fishing fleet returned home early, boats from as far as Dundee and Aberdeen running for the safety of Granton. The Burntisland ferry was stopped, with the William Muir being kept tied up alongside at Granton. At North Queensferry the Norwegian steamer Dronning Gyda of Kristiansund was driven ashore and the Swedish schooner Tura was wrecked on the island of Inchgarvie, her crew of 7 managing to scramble ashore and seek shelter. Many vessels came into Leith Roads to seek shelter; those that could sought refuge in the harbours; those left out in the Forth were seen to be straining at their anchors. Similar stories were repeated all along the east coast of Scotland and England.
“Approaching Storm, Entrance to the Firth of Forth”; Jock Wilson, mid-19th century; Wolverhampton Arts and Heritage via ArtUKThe gale swept across the city early in the afternoon and many a chimney pot came crashing down. A cartload of hay was blown over and several shop windows were blown in. Trees were brought down in the Botanics, at St. Bernard’s Crescent and on Moray Place. At the Usher’s bonded warehouse at St. Leonards the lamplighter, Donald Cormack, lost his life when an external wooden staircase he was climbing collapsed in the wind. At 74 Causewayside, twelve year old Annie Hanlan was killed as she lay in bed when the chimney breast of the tenement collapsed through the roof. A heroic effort on the part of the Sciennes firemen under the command of Lt. Grinton saw her 14 year old sister Mary, who had been sharing the same bed, rescued and taken to the Infirmary suffering from serious injuries. Two others were injured and the tenement was condemned, rendering 12 families homeless.
The maximum average wind speed during the storm would be recorded at 67mph. Beyond the city boundaries nearly all telegraph and telephone cables came down. There was no communication north, only three wires to Glasgow left intact and a single each to Newcastle and Leeds for all southwards communications. A huge backlog of messages piled up in the telegraph offices, unsent. Within the city, the telephone network was “very much out of order“, hampering the emergency response. Out in the Forth, Lt. Culley and the Active had been sent from their mooring at South Queenferry to seek shelter in Leith Roads in the time honoured way, in the lee of the island of Inchkeith. Culley had three anchors put down to secure his charge and during the day it was seen by observers on the shore to be riding out the storm as comfortably as could be expected.
“Inchkeith on the Forth in a Fresh Gale”. Ships have long sought refuge in Leith Roads, sheltering in the lee of the island of Inchkeith from gales coming in off the North Sea. John Gabriel Stedman, 1781. CC-by-NC National Galleries ScotlandAround 3 O’clock in the morning the Active was seen to be dragging her anchors. Her tiller was smashed, and orders were given to bring the spare up from below decks. Her foresail was raised to try and sail out of trouble, but it jammed and had to be hauled back down. Attempts by a Granton-based tug to reach her were futile and what few onlookers were present watched helplessly as she was soon being driven uncontrollably towards the shore. Culley let off his distress rockets to try and summon assistance and mustered the remaining men from their sleep on deck. However, before any attempt to save lives could be made, the little ship was dashed against the breakwater and “smashed to match-wood“. Observers saw her two blue marker lights disappear from view at about 4:15AM. In the last moments before disaster, Culley had ordered his men to climb the rigging in the hope of safety but of the twenty-five souls on board, only three were spared. Such had been the haste of her demise that only three men had managed to put on their cork life jackets and Ordinary Seamen W. Travis, G. Dady (or Peady) and G. Pearce would be the only men who made it off. Two of them were washed completely over the breakwater and into the harbour, being picked up by the steamer Bele who had heard their cries.
The saving of Ordinary Seaman Travis by the crew of the Bele. Artist’s reconstruction in The Graphic illustrated newspaper, November 28th 1901The third, dressed only in his string vest and life jacket, managed to cling to the breakwater and “through dogged persistence” crawled along it to safety. The other two survivors of the ship’s complement were Quartermaster Walsenham (or Wakenham) and the Second Mate, Boatswain John Donovan, both of whom had been allowed shore leave in Leith the day before and had been unable to rejoin ship on account of the weather.
Headline from the Dundee Evening Telegraph, 13th November 1901. Note that at this time it was thought that 23 lives, not 20, had been lost.With the telephone and telegraph systems being out of order, news had to be carried on foot to the police office at Gayfield Square from where 10 constables and two doctors were dispatched under the command of Superintendent Lamb , Inspector Cruickshanks and Sergeant Ford. By 11AM, only three bodies had been recovered, the vessel having been driven ashore on an ebb tide, which meant that most of the victims’ bodies were carried away from the shore and out into the Forth. The local fishermen, intimately in tune with the currents and habits of the Firth, pronounced that bodies would be carried to the vicinity of Elie.
All morning on the 13th, dense crowds lined the Wardie foreshore to gaze on at the macabre spectacle of wreckage and flotsam being tossed around in the bay and of policemen combing the shore with boathooks looking for survivors (or, more realistically, bodies). Rifles, cutlasses and uniforms were brought up on the slipway at Granton and large quantities of Rum had to be secured by the Customs men before they found their way into jacket pockets. Sergeant Bain of the Police was able to pull ashore the ship’s colours from the breakwater at considerable risk to his life.
Granton Harbour from Wardie in 1900, the year before the loss of the Active. She was driven against the eastern breakwater, on the right of the picture. © Edinburgh City LibrariesOn Thursday 14th, the newspapers reported that the foreshore along the coast was being searched for bodies and that divers had arrived to scour the seabed around the wreckage. The gunboats HMS Redwing and Cockchafer arrived to trawl up and down the Forth. In the aftermath, observers with the benefit of hindsight said that the Active had been anchored too close to the shore and not far enough north to be safely sheltered in the lee of Inchkeith. Some were of the opinion that she should have been brought into the safety of the harbour, however it was noted in the papers that this would have been against Culley’s instructions. Others still wrote to the Scotsman bemoaning the lack of a coastguard watch or lifeboat at Granton, Leith or Newhaven.
The first funerals took place on Saturday 16th, with a cortège leaving the City Mortuary on Infirmary Street with full naval honours on its way to the Admiralty’s plot at Seafield cemetery. The procession was led by the officers and men of HMS Anson and the band of the shore base HMS Caledonia. Thousands turned out to line the streets and pay their respects to seamen John (or Herbert) Walker, R. Pearson and E. Farrow, Carpenter’s Mate H. Williams and Ship’s Boy J. Mulvaney. The same day, a requiem mass was held for James Donovan at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea R.C. Church in Leith. All six were interred side-by-side at Seafield, the men from the Anson firing a salute over the graves. That same day, a remarkable event occurred; a glass bottle was recovered on the shore at Granton, containing a message: “H.M.C. Active, Sinking Fast. From Captain Culley. Good-bye.” Mrs Culley identified the handwriting as that of her late husband.
On Tuesday 26th of November, a further body was recovered from the mud in Granton harbour, Ordinary Seaman James Lyall could only be identified from his names stitched inside his clothing. On the 29th, tugs brought the remains of the Active to a position in Wardie Bay where they could be hauled ashore and broken up. The following day, a benevolent fund was opened for the families of the deceased by Captain William Fisher CB of the Anson and his officers, with the Lifeboat Institution making an opening contribution of £2,000. Lieutenant Culley alone left behind 6 children, the eldest being 17.
Name NameLieutenant Charley Culley, TrinityChief Quartermaster James Donovan, KingstonPetty Officer 2nd Class Reuben Weller, KentCarpenter’s Mate Harry Williams, PembrokeAble Seaman Richard Pearson, LondonAble Seaman Edward Farrow, LondonAble Seaman George Gregory, LondonAble Seaman Richard Randall, LondonAble Seaman William Thompson, HartlepoolAble Seaman Edward Plumber, LondonAble Seaman William Burton, LondonOrdinary Seaman James LyallOrdinary Seaman Thomas AmosOrdinary Seaman James TempleOrdinary Seaman John (or Herbert) WalkerOrdinary Seaman Arthur PreynnOrdinary Seaman Arthur BanhamOrdinary Seaman William MillingOrdinary Seaman John ButtonsShip’s Boy Joseph MulvaneyOfficers and men lost on the ActiveBodies were slowly recovered in November and by the 20th, seventeen had been recovered. On 27th November, Ordinary Seaman James Lyall was buried at Seafield. A court martial into the disaster was held in distant Chatham on 3rd December. Four of the five survivors (George Pearce was still in hospital recovering) appeared, but were not charged or asked to plead. Captain Fisher of the Anson gave witness, confirming that he had ordered Culley not to risk his ship on any account, and to anchor her in Leith Roads. He did however say that Culley had not done so in the exact position he had been shown on the chart. The survivors stated that the loss of the tiller and jamming of the sails had prevented them for seeking safety, and that the Granton tugs had not approached close enough to offer assistance. The court exonerated the survivors from all blame, but noted – with the benefit of hindsight – that Culley should have “shown better judgement had he either weighed or slipped anchors and run for safety” but that when the disaster was inevitable “he appeared to have maintained discipline and done all possible to save life.” Culley’s body was not recovered until late in January 1902, and he was buried with full naval honours near his men in Seafield Cemetery.
Lt. Charles Culley’s gravestone at Seafield Cemetery. Photo © SelfNote to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior, especially in collective matters of media and technology, where the individual is almost inevitably unaware of their effects upon him.”*…
TV glasses, modeled by their creator, Hugo Gernsback (1963) sourceIn the early 1970’s Marshall McLuhan and his son set out to discover if there might be general principles of technology, attributes, and effects common to all products of human innovation, to all of these artificial extensions of ourselves. Eric’s son, Andrew McLuhan shares their findings…
… Toward the end of his life, a life which ended before his 70th birthday, Avant Garde magazine asked Marshall McLuhan what he considered his greatest achievement. His reply?
“I consider my greatest achievement is the discovery that all human artifacts, all the extensions of man, are patterned structurally in the mode of the word. Whether it is a medium like radio, a bull dozer, or a safety pin; whether it is the word or a law of science, all these utterings and outerings of man have a four-part structure which is that of metaphor itself. I will illustrate this discovery from the character of money, which:
(a) enhances the speed of exchange
(b) obsolesces barter
(c) retrieves potlatch (conspicuous waste) and
(d) when pushed to its limits, flips or reverses its character into credit.
A book of these things is due to appear, title ‘The Laws of the Media’.”
But no one was interested in publishing it. It wasn’t published until 1988 when Eric McLuhan finally got someone – University of Toronto Press – to put it out as ‘Laws of Media: The New Science.’ The subtitle was a deliberate nod to Francis Bacon (Novum Organon) and Giambattista Vico (Scienza Nuova) of which tradition the McLuhans felt their work was part.
I have noticed more people using the laws of media, or the ‘tetrad’ (group of four) as it’s called, lately.
The laws of media can’t tell you everything about any technology, but they give you four reliable places from which to begin to explore what any technology is and what it does – another way of saying ‘the medium is the message.’ Particularly, it’s a way of examining the form of a thing and not just its content. The content of a medium, what we do with it, pay attention to, is always both the smaller part of the situation, and the less affective area. In Understanding Media McLuhan brilliantly paraphrases T S Eliot when he describes content as the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The content keeps us busy, hold our attention, while the media do their work rearranging us, our lives, our world. To enlist Mary Poppins, content is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.
The four things the McLuhans discovered are that:
Any given technology enhances or amplifies some aspect of us. We create tools to do something we already do faster, more easily or efficiently. Gloves to save our hands. Computers, to calculate. Telephone, that our voice carries across the world.
“It is a persistent theme of this book that all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed.” (‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ 1964)
It obsolesces, it upsets or displaces, disrupts something already in a dominant position. The Linotype machine put 90% of typesetters out of work. Twitter broke the news that television and radio networks used to.
“Now today, we speak of the book as obsolete. This means the book is acquiring ever new uses in the age of Xerox and the age of paperbacks.” (Marshall and Eric McLuhan in conversation, 1971)
It retrieves, or brings back something from the past, however near or far, in a new form. Text messaging put a telegraph in your pocket. The man in the car, the knight in shining armour.
“What recurrence or retrieval of earlier actions and services is brought into play simultaneously by the new form? What older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form?” ‘Laws of Media: The New Science’ 1988
When pushed past a point, it tends to flip or reverses its utility or characteristics. A glass of wine or two can make for a good time, relieve stress, grease the social wheels. A few bottles… quite the opposite. Information assists informed, timely decisions, too much information leads to overload, paralysis.
“When pushed to the limits of its potential the new form will tend to reverse what had been its original characteristics. What is the reversal potential of the new form?” (Laws of Media: The New Science 1988)
For example, here’s a tetrad from Laws of Media:
Xerox:
enhances: the speed of the printing press
obsolesces: the assembly-line book
reverses into: everybody becomes a publisher
retrieves: the oral tradition
Laws of Media: The New Science (Marshall and Eric McLuhan, 1988)
While media can be complex in nature and do many things, Marshall and Eric found that all media, without exception, do these four things. As remarkable as this discovery is – so remarkable that Marshall McLuhan considered it his most impressive achievement – almost equally remarkable is that so few people know about it.
They found four things which applied in all cases, but never stopped looking for a fifth. I know my father Eric was still keeping an eye or ear out for a fifth common dimension, something that would apply without exception to all media. A few people have ventured one thing or another but they did not satisfy my father’s criteria…
… The ‘laws of media’ can’t tell you everything about any medium, but it does give us something remarkable: predictability. We know that anything we can come up with will do these four things. It will amplify some part of us. It will make something obsolete. It will bring something back from the past in a new form. It will, when pushed, flip. This is an incredible advantage when it comes to new media. It gives us a real head start on being able to anticipate the effects of new forms on us and our world…
… [Per the title quote above] The point of the tetrad, the point of media studies at all, is to make media visible. To force us to pay attention to what’s happening all around us, sometimes only slightly beneath our awareness, sometimes buried deeply underneath. The true user experience is what we don’t notice but which shapes us all the same…
More (including how to “make” tetrads yourself): “Laws of (New) Media.”
* Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964
###
As we engage with the emergent, we might recall that it was on this date in 1993 that ABC and CBS simultaneously broadcast their own movies based on the Amy Fisher story with ABC’s starring Drew Barrymore and CBS’s starring Alyssa Milano. NBC had already scooped the other networks, airing their own version (starring Noelle Parker) about six days prior.
Milano, Parker, and Barrymore (source) #AmyFisher #culture #history #LawsOfMedia #MarshallMcLuhan #media #newMedia #Technology #television #tetrads #UnderstandingMedia -
“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior, especially in collective matters of media and technology, where the individual is almost inevitably unaware of their effects upon him.”*…
TV glasses, modeled by their creator, Hugo Gernsback (1963) sourceIn the early 1970’s Marshall McLuhan and his son set out to discover if there might be general principles of technology, attributes, and effects common to all products of human innovation, to all of these artificial extensions of ourselves. Eric’s son, Andrew McLuhan shares their findings…
… Toward the end of his life, a life which ended before his 70th birthday, Avant Garde magazine asked Marshall McLuhan what he considered his greatest achievement. His reply?
“I consider my greatest achievement is the discovery that all human artifacts, all the extensions of man, are patterned structurally in the mode of the word. Whether it is a medium like radio, a bull dozer, or a safety pin; whether it is the word or a law of science, all these utterings and outerings of man have a four-part structure which is that of metaphor itself. I will illustrate this discovery from the character of money, which:
(a) enhances the speed of exchange
(b) obsolesces barter
(c) retrieves potlatch (conspicuous waste) and
(d) when pushed to its limits, flips or reverses its character into credit.
A book of these things is due to appear, title ‘The Laws of the Media’.”
But no one was interested in publishing it. It wasn’t published until 1988 when Eric McLuhan finally got someone – University of Toronto Press – to put it out as ‘Laws of Media: The New Science.’ The subtitle was a deliberate nod to Francis Bacon (Novum Organon) and Giambattista Vico (Scienza Nuova) of which tradition the McLuhans felt their work was part.
I have noticed more people using the laws of media, or the ‘tetrad’ (group of four) as it’s called, lately.
The laws of media can’t tell you everything about any technology, but they give you four reliable places from which to begin to explore what any technology is and what it does – another way of saying ‘the medium is the message.’ Particularly, it’s a way of examining the form of a thing and not just its content. The content of a medium, what we do with it, pay attention to, is always both the smaller part of the situation, and the less affective area. In Understanding Media McLuhan brilliantly paraphrases T S Eliot when he describes content as the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The content keeps us busy, hold our attention, while the media do their work rearranging us, our lives, our world. To enlist Mary Poppins, content is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.
The four things the McLuhans discovered are that:
Any given technology enhances or amplifies some aspect of us. We create tools to do something we already do faster, more easily or efficiently. Gloves to save our hands. Computers, to calculate. Telephone, that our voice carries across the world.
“It is a persistent theme of this book that all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed.” (‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ 1964)
It obsolesces, it upsets or displaces, disrupts something already in a dominant position. The Linotype machine put 90% of typesetters out of work. Twitter broke the news that television and radio networks used to.
“Now today, we speak of the book as obsolete. This means the book is acquiring ever new uses in the age of Xerox and the age of paperbacks.” (Marshall and Eric McLuhan in conversation, 1971)
It retrieves, or brings back something from the past, however near or far, in a new form. Text messaging put a telegraph in your pocket. The man in the car, the knight in shining armour.
“What recurrence or retrieval of earlier actions and services is brought into play simultaneously by the new form? What older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form?” ‘Laws of Media: The New Science’ 1988
When pushed past a point, it tends to flip or reverses its utility or characteristics. A glass of wine or two can make for a good time, relieve stress, grease the social wheels. A few bottles… quite the opposite. Information assists informed, timely decisions, too much information leads to overload, paralysis.
“When pushed to the limits of its potential the new form will tend to reverse what had been its original characteristics. What is the reversal potential of the new form?” (Laws of Media: The New Science 1988)
For example, here’s a tetrad from Laws of Media:
Xerox:
enhances: the speed of the printing press
obsolesces: the assembly-line book
reverses into: everybody becomes a publisher
retrieves: the oral tradition
Laws of Media: The New Science (Marshall and Eric McLuhan, 1988)
While media can be complex in nature and do many things, Marshall and Eric found that all media, without exception, do these four things. As remarkable as this discovery is – so remarkable that Marshall McLuhan considered it his most impressive achievement – almost equally remarkable is that so few people know about it.
They found four things which applied in all cases, but never stopped looking for a fifth. I know my father Eric was still keeping an eye or ear out for a fifth common dimension, something that would apply without exception to all media. A few people have ventured one thing or another but they did not satisfy my father’s criteria…
… The ‘laws of media’ can’t tell you everything about any medium, but it does give us something remarkable: predictability. We know that anything we can come up with will do these four things. It will amplify some part of us. It will make something obsolete. It will bring something back from the past in a new form. It will, when pushed, flip. This is an incredible advantage when it comes to new media. It gives us a real head start on being able to anticipate the effects of new forms on us and our world…
… [Per the title quote above] The point of the tetrad, the point of media studies at all, is to make media visible. To force us to pay attention to what’s happening all around us, sometimes only slightly beneath our awareness, sometimes buried deeply underneath. The true user experience is what we don’t notice but which shapes us all the same…
More (including how to “make” tetrads yourself): “Laws of (New) Media.”
* Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964
###
As we engage with the emergent, we might recall that it was on this date in 1993 that ABC and CBS simultaneously broadcast their own movies based on the Amy Fisher story with ABC’s starring Drew Barrymore and CBS’s starring Alyssa Milano. NBC had already scooped the other networks, airing their own version (starring Noelle Parker) about six days prior.
Milano, Parker, and Barrymore (source) #AmyFisher #culture #history #LawsOfMedia #MarshallMcLuhan #media #newMedia #Technology #television #tetrads #UnderstandingMedia -
“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior, especially in collective matters of media and technology, where the individual is almost inevitably unaware of their effects upon him.”*…
TV glasses, modeled by their creator, Hugo Gernsback (1963) sourceIn the early 1970’s Marshall McLuhan and his son set out to discover if there might be general principles of technology, attributes, and effects common to all products of human innovation, to all of these artificial extensions of ourselves. Eric’s son, Andrew McLuhan shares their findings…
… Toward the end of his life, a life which ended before his 70th birthday, Avant Garde magazine asked Marshall McLuhan what he considered his greatest achievement. His reply?
“I consider my greatest achievement is the discovery that all human artifacts, all the extensions of man, are patterned structurally in the mode of the word. Whether it is a medium like radio, a bull dozer, or a safety pin; whether it is the word or a law of science, all these utterings and outerings of man have a four-part structure which is that of metaphor itself. I will illustrate this discovery from the character of money, which:
(a) enhances the speed of exchange
(b) obsolesces barter
(c) retrieves potlatch (conspicuous waste) and
(d) when pushed to its limits, flips or reverses its character into credit.
A book of these things is due to appear, title ‘The Laws of the Media’.”
But no one was interested in publishing it. It wasn’t published until 1988 when Eric McLuhan finally got someone – University of Toronto Press – to put it out as ‘Laws of Media: The New Science.’ The subtitle was a deliberate nod to Francis Bacon (Novum Organon) and Giambattista Vico (Scienza Nuova) of which tradition the McLuhans felt their work was part.
I have noticed more people using the laws of media, or the ‘tetrad’ (group of four) as it’s called, lately.
The laws of media can’t tell you everything about any technology, but they give you four reliable places from which to begin to explore what any technology is and what it does – another way of saying ‘the medium is the message.’ Particularly, it’s a way of examining the form of a thing and not just its content. The content of a medium, what we do with it, pay attention to, is always both the smaller part of the situation, and the less affective area. In Understanding Media McLuhan brilliantly paraphrases T S Eliot when he describes content as the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The content keeps us busy, hold our attention, while the media do their work rearranging us, our lives, our world. To enlist Mary Poppins, content is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.
The four things the McLuhans discovered are that:
Any given technology enhances or amplifies some aspect of us. We create tools to do something we already do faster, more easily or efficiently. Gloves to save our hands. Computers, to calculate. Telephone, that our voice carries across the world.
“It is a persistent theme of this book that all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed.” (‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ 1964)
It obsolesces, it upsets or displaces, disrupts something already in a dominant position. The Linotype machine put 90% of typesetters out of work. Twitter broke the news that television and radio networks used to.
“Now today, we speak of the book as obsolete. This means the book is acquiring ever new uses in the age of Xerox and the age of paperbacks.” (Marshall and Eric McLuhan in conversation, 1971)
It retrieves, or brings back something from the past, however near or far, in a new form. Text messaging put a telegraph in your pocket. The man in the car, the knight in shining armour.
“What recurrence or retrieval of earlier actions and services is brought into play simultaneously by the new form? What older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form?” ‘Laws of Media: The New Science’ 1988
When pushed past a point, it tends to flip or reverses its utility or characteristics. A glass of wine or two can make for a good time, relieve stress, grease the social wheels. A few bottles… quite the opposite. Information assists informed, timely decisions, too much information leads to overload, paralysis.
“When pushed to the limits of its potential the new form will tend to reverse what had been its original characteristics. What is the reversal potential of the new form?” (Laws of Media: The New Science 1988)
For example, here’s a tetrad from Laws of Media:
Xerox:
enhances: the speed of the printing press
obsolesces: the assembly-line book
reverses into: everybody becomes a publisher
retrieves: the oral tradition
Laws of Media: The New Science (Marshall and Eric McLuhan, 1988)
While media can be complex in nature and do many things, Marshall and Eric found that all media, without exception, do these four things. As remarkable as this discovery is – so remarkable that Marshall McLuhan considered it his most impressive achievement – almost equally remarkable is that so few people know about it.
They found four things which applied in all cases, but never stopped looking for a fifth. I know my father Eric was still keeping an eye or ear out for a fifth common dimension, something that would apply without exception to all media. A few people have ventured one thing or another but they did not satisfy my father’s criteria…
… The ‘laws of media’ can’t tell you everything about any medium, but it does give us something remarkable: predictability. We know that anything we can come up with will do these four things. It will amplify some part of us. It will make something obsolete. It will bring something back from the past in a new form. It will, when pushed, flip. This is an incredible advantage when it comes to new media. It gives us a real head start on being able to anticipate the effects of new forms on us and our world…
… [Per the title quote above] The point of the tetrad, the point of media studies at all, is to make media visible. To force us to pay attention to what’s happening all around us, sometimes only slightly beneath our awareness, sometimes buried deeply underneath. The true user experience is what we don’t notice but which shapes us all the same…
More (including how to “make” tetrads yourself): “Laws of (New) Media.”
* Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964
###
As we engage with the emergent, we might recall that it was on this date in 1993 that ABC and CBS simultaneously broadcast their own movies based on the Amy Fisher story with ABC’s starring Drew Barrymore and CBS’s starring Alyssa Milano. NBC had already scooped the other networks, airing their own version (starring Noelle Parker) about six days prior.
Milano, Parker, and Barrymore (source) #AmyFisher #culture #history #LawsOfMedia #MarshallMcLuhan #media #newMedia #Technology #television #tetrads #UnderstandingMedia -
“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior, especially in collective matters of media and technology, where the individual is almost inevitably unaware of their effects upon him.”*…
TV glasses, modeled by their creator, Hugo Gernsback (1963) sourceIn the early 1970’s Marshall McLuhan and his son set out to discover if there might be general principles of technology, attributes, and effects common to all products of human innovation, to all of these artificial extensions of ourselves. Eric’s son, Andrew McLuhan shares their findings…
… Toward the end of his life, a life which ended before his 70th birthday, Avant Garde magazine asked Marshall McLuhan what he considered his greatest achievement. His reply?
“I consider my greatest achievement is the discovery that all human artifacts, all the extensions of man, are patterned structurally in the mode of the word. Whether it is a medium like radio, a bull dozer, or a safety pin; whether it is the word or a law of science, all these utterings and outerings of man have a four-part structure which is that of metaphor itself. I will illustrate this discovery from the character of money, which:
(a) enhances the speed of exchange
(b) obsolesces barter
(c) retrieves potlatch (conspicuous waste) and
(d) when pushed to its limits, flips or reverses its character into credit.
A book of these things is due to appear, title ‘The Laws of the Media’.”
But no one was interested in publishing it. It wasn’t published until 1988 when Eric McLuhan finally got someone – University of Toronto Press – to put it out as ‘Laws of Media: The New Science.’ The subtitle was a deliberate nod to Francis Bacon (Novum Organon) and Giambattista Vico (Scienza Nuova) of which tradition the McLuhans felt their work was part.
I have noticed more people using the laws of media, or the ‘tetrad’ (group of four) as it’s called, lately.
The laws of media can’t tell you everything about any technology, but they give you four reliable places from which to begin to explore what any technology is and what it does – another way of saying ‘the medium is the message.’ Particularly, it’s a way of examining the form of a thing and not just its content. The content of a medium, what we do with it, pay attention to, is always both the smaller part of the situation, and the less affective area. In Understanding Media McLuhan brilliantly paraphrases T S Eliot when he describes content as the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The content keeps us busy, hold our attention, while the media do their work rearranging us, our lives, our world. To enlist Mary Poppins, content is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.
The four things the McLuhans discovered are that:
Any given technology enhances or amplifies some aspect of us. We create tools to do something we already do faster, more easily or efficiently. Gloves to save our hands. Computers, to calculate. Telephone, that our voice carries across the world.
“It is a persistent theme of this book that all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed.” (‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ 1964)
It obsolesces, it upsets or displaces, disrupts something already in a dominant position. The Linotype machine put 90% of typesetters out of work. Twitter broke the news that television and radio networks used to.
“Now today, we speak of the book as obsolete. This means the book is acquiring ever new uses in the age of Xerox and the age of paperbacks.” (Marshall and Eric McLuhan in conversation, 1971)
It retrieves, or brings back something from the past, however near or far, in a new form. Text messaging put a telegraph in your pocket. The man in the car, the knight in shining armour.
“What recurrence or retrieval of earlier actions and services is brought into play simultaneously by the new form? What older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form?” ‘Laws of Media: The New Science’ 1988
When pushed past a point, it tends to flip or reverses its utility or characteristics. A glass of wine or two can make for a good time, relieve stress, grease the social wheels. A few bottles… quite the opposite. Information assists informed, timely decisions, too much information leads to overload, paralysis.
“When pushed to the limits of its potential the new form will tend to reverse what had been its original characteristics. What is the reversal potential of the new form?” (Laws of Media: The New Science 1988)
For example, here’s a tetrad from Laws of Media:
Xerox:
enhances: the speed of the printing press
obsolesces: the assembly-line book
reverses into: everybody becomes a publisher
retrieves: the oral tradition
Laws of Media: The New Science (Marshall and Eric McLuhan, 1988)
While media can be complex in nature and do many things, Marshall and Eric found that all media, without exception, do these four things. As remarkable as this discovery is – so remarkable that Marshall McLuhan considered it his most impressive achievement – almost equally remarkable is that so few people know about it.
They found four things which applied in all cases, but never stopped looking for a fifth. I know my father Eric was still keeping an eye or ear out for a fifth common dimension, something that would apply without exception to all media. A few people have ventured one thing or another but they did not satisfy my father’s criteria…
… The ‘laws of media’ can’t tell you everything about any medium, but it does give us something remarkable: predictability. We know that anything we can come up with will do these four things. It will amplify some part of us. It will make something obsolete. It will bring something back from the past in a new form. It will, when pushed, flip. This is an incredible advantage when it comes to new media. It gives us a real head start on being able to anticipate the effects of new forms on us and our world…
… [Per the title quote above] The point of the tetrad, the point of media studies at all, is to make media visible. To force us to pay attention to what’s happening all around us, sometimes only slightly beneath our awareness, sometimes buried deeply underneath. The true user experience is what we don’t notice but which shapes us all the same…
More (including how to “make” tetrads yourself): “Laws of (New) Media.”
* Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964
###
As we engage with the emergent, we might recall that it was on this date in 1993 that ABC and CBS simultaneously broadcast their own movies based on the Amy Fisher story with ABC’s starring Drew Barrymore and CBS’s starring Alyssa Milano. NBC had already scooped the other networks, airing their own version (starring Noelle Parker) about six days prior.
Milano, Parker, and Barrymore (source) #AmyFisher #culture #history #LawsOfMedia #MarshallMcLuhan #media #newMedia #Technology #television #tetrads #UnderstandingMedia -
“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior, especially in collective matters of media and technology, where the individual is almost inevitably unaware of their effects upon him.”*…
TV glasses, modeled by their creator, Hugo Gernsback (1963) sourceIn the early 1970’s Marshall McLuhan and his son set out to discover if there might be general principles of technology, attributes, and effects common to all products of human innovation, to all of these artificial extensions of ourselves. Eric’s son, Andrew McLuhan shares their findings…
… Toward the end of his life, a life which ended before his 70th birthday, Avant Garde magazine asked Marshall McLuhan what he considered his greatest achievement. His reply?
“I consider my greatest achievement is the discovery that all human artifacts, all the extensions of man, are patterned structurally in the mode of the word. Whether it is a medium like radio, a bull dozer, or a safety pin; whether it is the word or a law of science, all these utterings and outerings of man have a four-part structure which is that of metaphor itself. I will illustrate this discovery from the character of money, which:
(a) enhances the speed of exchange
(b) obsolesces barter
(c) retrieves potlatch (conspicuous waste) and
(d) when pushed to its limits, flips or reverses its character into credit.
A book of these things is due to appear, title ‘The Laws of the Media’.”
But no one was interested in publishing it. It wasn’t published until 1988 when Eric McLuhan finally got someone – University of Toronto Press – to put it out as ‘Laws of Media: The New Science.’ The subtitle was a deliberate nod to Francis Bacon (Novum Organon) and Giambattista Vico (Scienza Nuova) of which tradition the McLuhans felt their work was part.
I have noticed more people using the laws of media, or the ‘tetrad’ (group of four) as it’s called, lately.
The laws of media can’t tell you everything about any technology, but they give you four reliable places from which to begin to explore what any technology is and what it does – another way of saying ‘the medium is the message.’ Particularly, it’s a way of examining the form of a thing and not just its content. The content of a medium, what we do with it, pay attention to, is always both the smaller part of the situation, and the less affective area. In Understanding Media McLuhan brilliantly paraphrases T S Eliot when he describes content as the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The content keeps us busy, hold our attention, while the media do their work rearranging us, our lives, our world. To enlist Mary Poppins, content is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.
The four things the McLuhans discovered are that:
Any given technology enhances or amplifies some aspect of us. We create tools to do something we already do faster, more easily or efficiently. Gloves to save our hands. Computers, to calculate. Telephone, that our voice carries across the world.
“It is a persistent theme of this book that all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed.” (‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ 1964)
It obsolesces, it upsets or displaces, disrupts something already in a dominant position. The Linotype machine put 90% of typesetters out of work. Twitter broke the news that television and radio networks used to.
“Now today, we speak of the book as obsolete. This means the book is acquiring ever new uses in the age of Xerox and the age of paperbacks.” (Marshall and Eric McLuhan in conversation, 1971)
It retrieves, or brings back something from the past, however near or far, in a new form. Text messaging put a telegraph in your pocket. The man in the car, the knight in shining armour.
“What recurrence or retrieval of earlier actions and services is brought into play simultaneously by the new form? What older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form?” ‘Laws of Media: The New Science’ 1988
When pushed past a point, it tends to flip or reverses its utility or characteristics. A glass of wine or two can make for a good time, relieve stress, grease the social wheels. A few bottles… quite the opposite. Information assists informed, timely decisions, too much information leads to overload, paralysis.
“When pushed to the limits of its potential the new form will tend to reverse what had been its original characteristics. What is the reversal potential of the new form?” (Laws of Media: The New Science 1988)
For example, here’s a tetrad from Laws of Media:
Xerox:
enhances: the speed of the printing press
obsolesces: the assembly-line book
reverses into: everybody becomes a publisher
retrieves: the oral tradition
Laws of Media: The New Science (Marshall and Eric McLuhan, 1988)
While media can be complex in nature and do many things, Marshall and Eric found that all media, without exception, do these four things. As remarkable as this discovery is – so remarkable that Marshall McLuhan considered it his most impressive achievement – almost equally remarkable is that so few people know about it.
They found four things which applied in all cases, but never stopped looking for a fifth. I know my father Eric was still keeping an eye or ear out for a fifth common dimension, something that would apply without exception to all media. A few people have ventured one thing or another but they did not satisfy my father’s criteria…
… The ‘laws of media’ can’t tell you everything about any medium, but it does give us something remarkable: predictability. We know that anything we can come up with will do these four things. It will amplify some part of us. It will make something obsolete. It will bring something back from the past in a new form. It will, when pushed, flip. This is an incredible advantage when it comes to new media. It gives us a real head start on being able to anticipate the effects of new forms on us and our world…
… [Per the title quote above] The point of the tetrad, the point of media studies at all, is to make media visible. To force us to pay attention to what’s happening all around us, sometimes only slightly beneath our awareness, sometimes buried deeply underneath. The true user experience is what we don’t notice but which shapes us all the same…
More (including how to “make” tetrads yourself): “Laws of (New) Media.”
* Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964
###
As we engage with the emergent, we might recall that it was on this date in 1993 that ABC and CBS simultaneously broadcast their own movies based on the Amy Fisher story with ABC’s starring Drew Barrymore and CBS’s starring Alyssa Milano. NBC had already scooped the other networks, airing their own version (starring Noelle Parker) about six days prior.
Milano, Parker, and Barrymore (source) #AmyFisher #culture #history #LawsOfMedia #MarshallMcLuhan #media #newMedia #Technology #television #tetrads #UnderstandingMedia -
Mostly Monday Reads: Coping with Crazy
“It just comes naturally, “John (repeat1968) Buss
@johnbuss.bsky.socialGood Day, Sky Dancers!
Well, one of the most unqualified, mediocre white men ever started a full-scale attack on our troops and their morale as the American Defense Secretary. He’s lowering troop morale. My Daddy didn’t tell me many stories about his time bombing NAZIs while based in Ipswich, England. His favorite story was that the crew was on a mission one day, and the mission commander was Jimmy Stewart. Can you imagine hearing that voice issuing orders from your radio? My High School Russian History teacher was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He wrote a memoir and it’s sitting in the National Archives. The one thing that really defines the Boomer generation is the war and the stories of our family members, who were all involved in one way or another. My Grandfather was in charge of War Bonds at the Kansas City Fed. My other Grandfather worked for the Railroad, where troops and supplies were vital. One of my uncles was in the Navy, and the other was in Army Intelligence. They all had stories about that time. There were all kinds of people doing all kinds of things to save the American Way and its democracy.
If you ever find your way to New Orleans, I highly recommend the National World War 2 Museum. When the daughters and I took Dad there, it was very new. Dad was given hero treatment. They only had their European theatre displays up, but there are more now. Their big feature was the Higgins boats that stormed the beaches during D-Day that were made in New Orleans. Never in a million years would I expect some of the most honored war heroes to be erased from the textbooks of the military, the USAF’s military curriculum. This is from WSAF Channel 12 in Montgomery, Alabama. A historic city for many reasons, but a lot of it comes from essential changes that improved the status of black Americans. You undoubtedly know their story. “Defense secretary orders immediate reversal of USAF’s removal of Tuskegee Airmen from the curriculum,”
Newly-confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth confirmed Sunday in a social media post that the U.S. Air Force will continue teaching about the famed Tuskegee Airmen.
In a statement posted Sunday afternoon, Sen. Katie Britt said she has “no doubt” Hegseth will “correct and get to the bottom of the malicious compliance we’ve seen in recent days.”
Senator Katie Boyd Britt immediately sent this out to what’s left of Twitter.
“Little Big Man” Walt Handelsman, https://www.nola.com/opinions/walt_handelsman/
Newsweek has more details here.
The Air Force says it has reinstated training material on the Tuskegee Airmen and Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) after a brief delay to revise it in line with the Trump administration’s rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday, Hegseth clarified that any attempt to cut the Tuskegee Airmen training material had been “immediately reversed.”
The decision resolves a controversy that emerged as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth began his first day at the Pentagon.
After announcing this intervention, the country’s worst mediocre white christianist nationalist man in an office he’s got no busy holding making completely insulting and inappropriate decisions. This happens when people are hired based on skin color, religion, and favoritism from the boss. We get the rule of mediocre white men and their misplaced confidence that makes the rest of us do the work so the entire outfit doesn’t go down the shitter.
Trump is also announcing big changes for the military comprised of volunteers who may soon be volunteering their asses straight back to being civilians at all this moral-lowering hate. It wasn’t enough that he summarily ousted the first woman Coast Guard Chief on his first full day in the office. This is what CNN has in its big story today. “Trump expected to sign executive orders to reshape the military, including banning transgender troops.” This is the man who called people in the military “suckers” and “losers.” Let’s just call all this for what it is. It is racist. It is misogynistic. It defines every person by their sex and not by their gender identity or sexual preferences. In short, it demeans every human being who is not a white male christianist and strips them of their Constitutional rights..
President Donald Trump on Monday is expected to sign four executive orders that would reshape the military, including banning transgender service members from serving in the US armed forces, gutting the military’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, and reinstating with back pay service members who were discharged for refusing to get vaccinated from Covid-19, two White House officials told CNN.
The orders, which were first reported by the New York Post, come as Trump’s nominee to lead the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, was sworn in as secretary of defense on Saturday. Hegseth has long stated he planned to implement major cultural changes to the military, including ending DEI practices and removing “woke” service members.
Moments after his arrival at the Pentagon on Monday, Hegseth told reporters that there are “more executive orders coming.”
This is a purge and a crusade. We need to know more to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our country.
That same FARTUS, the mediocre white man-in-chief, had a hissy fit at Colombia over the weekend. The BBC reports today.“Colombia yields on US deportation flights to avert trade war. Today’s lesson is not to surrender in advance. All those coffee-drinking Americans would not like the result more than Colombians. You have no idea how reliant we are on Colombia for goods. And to top it off, he couldn’t even spell the country’s name correctly in his Social Media Barf zone. You can read about that at the BBC link.
A looming trade war between the US and Colombia appears to have been averted after the Colombian government agreed to allow US military flights carrying deported migrants to land in the Andean country.
The spat erupted on Sunday when President Gustavo Petro barred two military planes carrying Colombians deported from the US from landing.
The Trump administration responded by threatening to slap punitive tariffs on Colombian exports to the US.
President Petro at first said Colombia would retaliate by imposing tariffs on US goods, but the White House later announced that Colombia had agreed to accept migrants – including those arriving on US military aircraft – “without limitation or delay”.
The White House hailed the agreement with Colombia as a victory for Trump’s hard-line approach, after the country’s two leaders had exchanged threats on social media on Sunday.
“Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a statement.
She added that the tariffs and sanctions which the Trump administration had threatened to impose on Colombia, should it not comply, would be “held in reserve, and not signed, unless Colombia fails to honour this agreement”.
She also said that President Donald Trump “expects all other nations of the world to fully co-operate in accepting deportation of their citizens illegally present in the United States”.
- Trump’s threat to Colombia sends a message
- Follow live: Nearly 1,000 arrests in a day as Trump’s promise of mass deportations ramps up
- What the president has done since taking power
A cornerstone of Trump’s immigration policy is removing unlawful migrants from the US, with the promise of “mass deportations”.
It seems even the legacy media of the UK are weasel-wording his insanity. A “spat”? Look at those words as what we are talking about: human beings being herded around like cattle.
How do we cope with all of this? According to sociologist Jennifer Walter we must understand what is happening in this country and what to do about it. It is all about overwhelming our feelings, responses, and lives.
As a sociologist, I need to tell you: 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗺 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝗮𝗹. 1/ The flood of 200+ executive orders in Trump’s first days exemplifies Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine” — using chaos and crisis to push through radical changes while people are too disoriented to effectively resist. This isn’t just politics as usual — it’s a strategic exploitation of cognitive limits. 2/ Media theorist McLuhan predicted this: When humans face information overload, they become passive and disengaged. The rapid-fire executive orders create a cognitive bottleneck, making it nearly impossible for citizens and media to thoroughly analyze any single policy. 3/ Agenda-setting theory explains the strategy: When multiple major policies compete for attention simultaneously, it fragments public discourse. Traditional media can’t keep up with the pace, leading to superficial coverage. The result? Weakened democratic oversight and reduced public engagement. What now? 1/ Set boundaries: Pick 2-3 key issues you deeply care about and focus your attention there. You can’t track everything — that’s by design. Impact comes from sustained focus, not scattered awareness. 2/ Use aggregators & experts: Find trusted analysts who do the heavy lifting of synthesis. Look for those explaining patterns, not just events. 3/ Remember: Feeling overwhelmed is the point. When you recognize this, you regain some power. Take breaks. Process. This is a marathon. 4/ Practice going slow: Wait 48 hrs before reacting to new policies. The urgent clouds the important. Initial reporting often misses context. 5/ Build community: Share the cognitive load. Different people track different issues. Network intelligence beats individual overload. Remember: They want you scattered. Your focus is resistance.
You may read many sources to get you to focus on how they will continue to manipulate you if you let them. This one actually comes from the period of the first adventure of FARTUS (Felon, Adjudicated Rapist, and Traitor of the US) in 2018. “The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide” is posted on Verfassungblog. It’s written by Martin Mycielski, who studies Democratic Backsldiing
1. They will come to power with a campaign based on fear, scaremongering and distorting the truth. Nevertheless, their victory will be achieved through a democratic electoral process. But beware, as this will be their argument every time you question the legitimacy of their actions. They will claim a mandate from the People to change the system.
Remember – gaining power through a democratic system does not give them permission to cross legal boundaries and undermine said democracy.
2. They will divide and rule. Their strength lies in unity, in one voice and one ideology, and so should yours. They will call their supporters Patriots, the only “true Americans”. You will be labelled as traitors, enemies of the state, unpatriotic, the corrupt elite, the old regime trying to regain power. Their supporters will be the “People”, the “sovereign” who chose their leaders.
Don’t let them divide you – remember you’re one People, one Nation, with one common good.
You may read a lot more at that link. So, the most recent rabbit hole I went down deals with learning more about Global Backsliding. I thought I’d share some reads for you. The first comes from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Understanding and Responding to Global Democratic Backsliding. As the world faces a democratic recession, many of the most common explanations fall short. But looking more closely at antidemocratic leaders’ motivations and methods reveals valuable insights about different types of backsliding and how international actors should respond.” The paper is written by by Thomas Carothers and Benjamin Press. This is its summary page.
Over the past two decades, democratic backsliding has become a defining trend in global politics. However, despite the extensive attention paid to the phenomenon, there is surprisingly little consensus about what is driving it. The most common explanations offered by analysts—ranging from the role of Russia and China and disruptive technologies to the rise of populism, the spread of political polarization, and democracies’ failure to deliver—fall short when tested across a wide range of cases.
A more persuasive account of backsliding focuses on the central role of leader-driven antidemocratic political projects and the variety of mechanisms and motivations they entail. This paper identifies and analyzes three distinct types of backsliding efforts: grievance-fueled illiberalism, opportunistic authoritarianism, and entrenched-interest revanchism. In cases of grievance-fueled illiberalism, a political figure mobilizes a grievance, claims that the grievance is being perpetuated by the existing political system, and argues that it is necessary to dismantle democratic norms and institutions to redress the underlying wrongs. Opportunistic authoritarians, by contrast, come to power via conventional political appeals but later turn against democracy for the sake of personal political survival. In still other backsliding cases, entrenched interest groups—generally the military—that were displaced by a democratic transition use undemocratic means to reassert their claims to power. Although motivations and methods differ across backsliding efforts, a key commonality among them is their relentless focus on undermining countervailing governmental and nongovernmental institutions that are designed to keep them in check.
As international democracy supporters continue to refine their strategies of responding to democratic backsliding, they must better differentiate between facilitating factors and core drivers. Such an approach will point to the need for a stronger focus on the nature of leader-driven antidemocratic projects, identifying ways to create significant disincentives for backsliding leaders, and bolstering crucial countervailing institutions. Moreover, they should deepen their differentiation of strategies to take account of the diverse motivations and methods among the three main patterns of backsliding. Only in this way will they build the needed analytic and practical capacity to meet the formidable challenge that democratic backsliding presents.
The concept that grabbed me was the type of backsliding and the first type, grievance-fueled illiberalism, which sounds pretty spot on for what we are enduring and fighting against now. You’ll notice our new technologies are helping these movements spread. It helps to see where else this has happened. I have no doubt FARTUS, and his close relationship with Erdogan are that of student and mentor.
Some backsliding leaders employ a grievance-centered strategy: they mobilize a widely held sense of frustration to justify dismantling the existing set of democratic norms and institutions, which they blame for having created the conditions that gave rise to the grievance. The grievances they embrace are diverse—ranging well beyond core economic conditions to include racial, religious, and ethnic marginalization and public frustration over corruption, crime, or general governance fecklessness.
A grievance-fueled illiberal drive typically begins with a political figure articulating and politicizing a grievance. In some cases, this grievance is widely and openly shared, especially in cases where corruption or misgovernance has disillusioned many with the existing political system and inspires a search for political alternatives. In Hungary, for example, Orbán and his Fidesz party came to power in 2010 by appealing to the widely held frustration among Hungarians with the previous Socialist government and its perceived mishandling of the economy and its inability to address the devastation of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. Similarly, in Brazil, Bolsonaro exploited widespread citizen outrage at the Brazilian political class for its pervasive corruption, which had been put on vivid display during the mid-2010s by a series of prominent scandals and investigations.
In other cases, entrepreneurial illiberal political actors articulate grievances that have festered below the political surface for some time. Advancing such grievances may, at first, seem taboo. But as they tap into that grievance, they normalize it and thus reframe what is politically possible. In Turkey, for example, Erdoğan found electoral success in the early 2000s by making appeals to conservative religious values, in a break from long-standing norms of the staunchly secular Turkish Republic. As he appealed to the latent sense among many Turkish citizens that religion had been unduly displaced from public life, he normalized increasingly explicit calls to revisit the principles underlying liberal democracy, including strict separation of religion and public life, respect for religious minority groups, and an equal playing field for opposition. Similarly, in India under the BJP, Modi has articulated a novel vision of Hindu nationalism and directly confronted the country’s liberal founding ideas by arguing that a single religious group should hold a special place in sociopolitical life. And in the United States, Trump appealed to racial and social class grievances that had long simmered below the surface of the country’s politics, normalizing discriminatory speech and stoking anti-minority sentiments as well as anti-elite anger. In still other cases, political leaders politicize frustrations that had not previously been salient. In the Philippines, for example, Duterte played up the threat of drug use and trafficking, which until his campaign had not registered among voters’ major concerns.35
The next phase of the grievance-fueled illiberal drive entails linking the grievance with democratic norms and institutions. In many cases where the grievance is explicitly directed at the governing class—as in Brazil or Hungary—this process is relatively straightforward. But in others, some political maneuvering and artfulness are required to make this link. In India, for example, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist organization, and the BJP, its political wing, spent years arguing that the country’s Hindu majority was being unfairly oppressed by the country’s long-standing liberal, secular political order and that correcting this wrong would require a wholesale reform of norms and institutions. And in the Philippines, Duterte argued during his campaign that drug use was enabled by political elites who didn’t do enough to punish them. He ran on a campaign of rooting out corruption and circumventing democratic norms and institutions that would stop him from solving the problem—namely by killing criminals.
If and when such drives yield an electoral victory, the government then sets about confronting the norms and institutions that have putatively perpetuated the grievance.
You may read more at the link if you want to. I’m beginning to feel like I’m assigning homework, which is not my intent. I think, though, we must embrace the concept that this was the plan all along, and there were a lot of organizations and people enabling our slide. My hope is that through knowing these things, we can deal better with what is going on around us. I still believe that knowledge is power.
So, it’s finally thawed out here. Temple and I can take our usual walks. There’s a lot of mess to clean up because most of the plants will need a good few whacks with my machete. I really hope that you are doing every self-care trick that you know and that you can discover new, more powerful ones.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #cultureOfMisogyny #deadlyRacism #DemocraticBacksliding #kakistocracy #MediocreTrump #mediocreWhiteMan #PeteHegsethWeirdoSexualAssaulter #WhiteChristianNationalismFascism
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Mostly Monday Reads: Coping with Crazy
“It just comes naturally, “John (repeat1968) Buss
@johnbuss.bsky.socialGood Day, Sky Dancers!
Well, one of the most unqualified, mediocre white men ever started a full-scale attack on our troops and their morale as the American Defense Secretary. He’s lowering troop morale. My Daddy didn’t tell me many stories about his time bombing NAZIs while based in Ipswich, England. His favorite story was that the crew was on a mission one day, and the mission commander was Jimmy Stewart. Can you imagine hearing that voice issuing orders from your radio? My High School Russian History teacher was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He wrote a memoir and it’s sitting in the National Archives. The one thing that really defines the Boomer generation is the war and the stories of our family members, who were all involved in one way or another. My Grandfather was in charge of War Bonds at the Kansas City Fed. My other Grandfather worked for the Railroad, where troops and supplies were vital. One of my uncles was in the Navy, and the other was in Army Intelligence. They all had stories about that time. There were all kinds of people doing all kinds of things to save the American Way and its democracy.
If you ever find your way to New Orleans, I highly recommend the National World War 2 Museum. When the daughters and I took Dad there, it was very new. Dad was given hero treatment. They only had their European theatre displays up, but there are more now. Their big feature was the Higgins boats that stormed the beaches during D-Day that were made in New Orleans. Never in a million years would I expect some of the most honored war heroes to be erased from the textbooks of the military, the USAF’s military curriculum. This is from WSAF Channel 12 in Montgomery, Alabama. A historic city for many reasons, but a lot of it comes from essential changes that improved the status of black Americans. You undoubtedly know their story. “Defense secretary orders immediate reversal of USAF’s removal of Tuskegee Airmen from the curriculum,”
Newly-confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth confirmed Sunday in a social media post that the U.S. Air Force will continue teaching about the famed Tuskegee Airmen.
In a statement posted Sunday afternoon, Sen. Katie Britt said she has “no doubt” Hegseth will “correct and get to the bottom of the malicious compliance we’ve seen in recent days.”
Senator Katie Boyd Britt immediately sent this out to what’s left of Twitter.
“Little Big Man” Walt Handelsman, https://www.nola.com/opinions/walt_handelsman/
Newsweek has more details here.
The Air Force says it has reinstated training material on the Tuskegee Airmen and Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) after a brief delay to revise it in line with the Trump administration’s rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday, Hegseth clarified that any attempt to cut the Tuskegee Airmen training material had been “immediately reversed.”
The decision resolves a controversy that emerged as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth began his first day at the Pentagon.
After announcing this intervention, the country’s worst mediocre white christianist nationalist man in an office he’s got no busy holding making completely insulting and inappropriate decisions. This happens when people are hired based on skin color, religion, and favoritism from the boss. We get the rule of mediocre white men and their misplaced confidence that makes the rest of us do the work so the entire outfit doesn’t go down the shitter.
Trump is also announcing big changes for the military comprised of volunteers who may soon be volunteering their asses straight back to being civilians at all this moral-lowering hate. It wasn’t enough that he summarily ousted the first woman Coast Guard Chief on his first full day in the office. This is what CNN has in its big story today. “Trump expected to sign executive orders to reshape the military, including banning transgender troops.” This is the man who called people in the military “suckers” and “losers.” Let’s just call all this for what it is. It is racist. It is misogynistic. It defines every person by their sex and not by their gender identity or sexual preferences. In short, it demeans every human being who is not a white male christianist and strips them of their Constitutional rights..
President Donald Trump on Monday is expected to sign four executive orders that would reshape the military, including banning transgender service members from serving in the US armed forces, gutting the military’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, and reinstating with back pay service members who were discharged for refusing to get vaccinated from Covid-19, two White House officials told CNN.
The orders, which were first reported by the New York Post, come as Trump’s nominee to lead the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, was sworn in as secretary of defense on Saturday. Hegseth has long stated he planned to implement major cultural changes to the military, including ending DEI practices and removing “woke” service members.
Moments after his arrival at the Pentagon on Monday, Hegseth told reporters that there are “more executive orders coming.”
This is a purge and a crusade. We need to know more to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our country.
That same FARTUS, the mediocre white man-in-chief, had a hissy fit at Colombia over the weekend. The BBC reports today.“Colombia yields on US deportation flights to avert trade war. Today’s lesson is not to surrender in advance. All those coffee-drinking Americans would not like the result more than Colombians. You have no idea how reliant we are on Colombia for goods. And to top it off, he couldn’t even spell the country’s name correctly in his Social Media Barf zone. You can read about that at the BBC link.
A looming trade war between the US and Colombia appears to have been averted after the Colombian government agreed to allow US military flights carrying deported migrants to land in the Andean country.
The spat erupted on Sunday when President Gustavo Petro barred two military planes carrying Colombians deported from the US from landing.
The Trump administration responded by threatening to slap punitive tariffs on Colombian exports to the US.
President Petro at first said Colombia would retaliate by imposing tariffs on US goods, but the White House later announced that Colombia had agreed to accept migrants – including those arriving on US military aircraft – “without limitation or delay”.
The White House hailed the agreement with Colombia as a victory for Trump’s hard-line approach, after the country’s two leaders had exchanged threats on social media on Sunday.
“Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a statement.
She added that the tariffs and sanctions which the Trump administration had threatened to impose on Colombia, should it not comply, would be “held in reserve, and not signed, unless Colombia fails to honour this agreement”.
She also said that President Donald Trump “expects all other nations of the world to fully co-operate in accepting deportation of their citizens illegally present in the United States”.
- Trump’s threat to Colombia sends a message
- Follow live: Nearly 1,000 arrests in a day as Trump’s promise of mass deportations ramps up
- What the president has done since taking power
A cornerstone of Trump’s immigration policy is removing unlawful migrants from the US, with the promise of “mass deportations”.
It seems even the legacy media of the UK are weasel-wording his insanity. A “spat”? Look at those words as what we are talking about: human beings being herded around like cattle.
How do we cope with all of this? According to sociologist Jennifer Walter we must understand what is happening in this country and what to do about it. It is all about overwhelming our feelings, responses, and lives.
As a sociologist, I need to tell you: 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗺 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝗮𝗹. 1/ The flood of 200+ executive orders in Trump’s first days exemplifies Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine” — using chaos and crisis to push through radical changes while people are too disoriented to effectively resist. This isn’t just politics as usual — it’s a strategic exploitation of cognitive limits. 2/ Media theorist McLuhan predicted this: When humans face information overload, they become passive and disengaged. The rapid-fire executive orders create a cognitive bottleneck, making it nearly impossible for citizens and media to thoroughly analyze any single policy. 3/ Agenda-setting theory explains the strategy: When multiple major policies compete for attention simultaneously, it fragments public discourse. Traditional media can’t keep up with the pace, leading to superficial coverage. The result? Weakened democratic oversight and reduced public engagement. What now? 1/ Set boundaries: Pick 2-3 key issues you deeply care about and focus your attention there. You can’t track everything — that’s by design. Impact comes from sustained focus, not scattered awareness. 2/ Use aggregators & experts: Find trusted analysts who do the heavy lifting of synthesis. Look for those explaining patterns, not just events. 3/ Remember: Feeling overwhelmed is the point. When you recognize this, you regain some power. Take breaks. Process. This is a marathon. 4/ Practice going slow: Wait 48 hrs before reacting to new policies. The urgent clouds the important. Initial reporting often misses context. 5/ Build community: Share the cognitive load. Different people track different issues. Network intelligence beats individual overload. Remember: They want you scattered. Your focus is resistance.
You may read many sources to get you to focus on how they will continue to manipulate you if you let them. This one actually comes from the period of the first adventure of FARTUS (Felon, Adjudicated Rapist, and Traitor of the US) in 2018. “The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide” is posted on Verfassungblog. It’s written by Martin Mycielski, who studies Democratic Backsldiing
1. They will come to power with a campaign based on fear, scaremongering and distorting the truth. Nevertheless, their victory will be achieved through a democratic electoral process. But beware, as this will be their argument every time you question the legitimacy of their actions. They will claim a mandate from the People to change the system.
Remember – gaining power through a democratic system does not give them permission to cross legal boundaries and undermine said democracy.
2. They will divide and rule. Their strength lies in unity, in one voice and one ideology, and so should yours. They will call their supporters Patriots, the only “true Americans”. You will be labelled as traitors, enemies of the state, unpatriotic, the corrupt elite, the old regime trying to regain power. Their supporters will be the “People”, the “sovereign” who chose their leaders.
Don’t let them divide you – remember you’re one People, one Nation, with one common good.
You may read a lot more at that link. So, the most recent rabbit hole I went down deals with learning more about Global Backsliding. I thought I’d share some reads for you. The first comes from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Understanding and Responding to Global Democratic Backsliding. As the world faces a democratic recession, many of the most common explanations fall short. But looking more closely at antidemocratic leaders’ motivations and methods reveals valuable insights about different types of backsliding and how international actors should respond.” The paper is written by by Thomas Carothers and Benjamin Press. This is its summary page.
Over the past two decades, democratic backsliding has become a defining trend in global politics. However, despite the extensive attention paid to the phenomenon, there is surprisingly little consensus about what is driving it. The most common explanations offered by analysts—ranging from the role of Russia and China and disruptive technologies to the rise of populism, the spread of political polarization, and democracies’ failure to deliver—fall short when tested across a wide range of cases.
A more persuasive account of backsliding focuses on the central role of leader-driven antidemocratic political projects and the variety of mechanisms and motivations they entail. This paper identifies and analyzes three distinct types of backsliding efforts: grievance-fueled illiberalism, opportunistic authoritarianism, and entrenched-interest revanchism. In cases of grievance-fueled illiberalism, a political figure mobilizes a grievance, claims that the grievance is being perpetuated by the existing political system, and argues that it is necessary to dismantle democratic norms and institutions to redress the underlying wrongs. Opportunistic authoritarians, by contrast, come to power via conventional political appeals but later turn against democracy for the sake of personal political survival. In still other backsliding cases, entrenched interest groups—generally the military—that were displaced by a democratic transition use undemocratic means to reassert their claims to power. Although motivations and methods differ across backsliding efforts, a key commonality among them is their relentless focus on undermining countervailing governmental and nongovernmental institutions that are designed to keep them in check.
As international democracy supporters continue to refine their strategies of responding to democratic backsliding, they must better differentiate between facilitating factors and core drivers. Such an approach will point to the need for a stronger focus on the nature of leader-driven antidemocratic projects, identifying ways to create significant disincentives for backsliding leaders, and bolstering crucial countervailing institutions. Moreover, they should deepen their differentiation of strategies to take account of the diverse motivations and methods among the three main patterns of backsliding. Only in this way will they build the needed analytic and practical capacity to meet the formidable challenge that democratic backsliding presents.
The concept that grabbed me was the type of backsliding and the first type, grievance-fueled illiberalism, which sounds pretty spot on for what we are enduring and fighting against now. You’ll notice our new technologies are helping these movements spread. It helps to see where else this has happened. I have no doubt FARTUS, and his close relationship with Erdogan are that of student and mentor.
Some backsliding leaders employ a grievance-centered strategy: they mobilize a widely held sense of frustration to justify dismantling the existing set of democratic norms and institutions, which they blame for having created the conditions that gave rise to the grievance. The grievances they embrace are diverse—ranging well beyond core economic conditions to include racial, religious, and ethnic marginalization and public frustration over corruption, crime, or general governance fecklessness.
A grievance-fueled illiberal drive typically begins with a political figure articulating and politicizing a grievance. In some cases, this grievance is widely and openly shared, especially in cases where corruption or misgovernance has disillusioned many with the existing political system and inspires a search for political alternatives. In Hungary, for example, Orbán and his Fidesz party came to power in 2010 by appealing to the widely held frustration among Hungarians with the previous Socialist government and its perceived mishandling of the economy and its inability to address the devastation of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. Similarly, in Brazil, Bolsonaro exploited widespread citizen outrage at the Brazilian political class for its pervasive corruption, which had been put on vivid display during the mid-2010s by a series of prominent scandals and investigations.
In other cases, entrepreneurial illiberal political actors articulate grievances that have festered below the political surface for some time. Advancing such grievances may, at first, seem taboo. But as they tap into that grievance, they normalize it and thus reframe what is politically possible. In Turkey, for example, Erdoğan found electoral success in the early 2000s by making appeals to conservative religious values, in a break from long-standing norms of the staunchly secular Turkish Republic. As he appealed to the latent sense among many Turkish citizens that religion had been unduly displaced from public life, he normalized increasingly explicit calls to revisit the principles underlying liberal democracy, including strict separation of religion and public life, respect for religious minority groups, and an equal playing field for opposition. Similarly, in India under the BJP, Modi has articulated a novel vision of Hindu nationalism and directly confronted the country’s liberal founding ideas by arguing that a single religious group should hold a special place in sociopolitical life. And in the United States, Trump appealed to racial and social class grievances that had long simmered below the surface of the country’s politics, normalizing discriminatory speech and stoking anti-minority sentiments as well as anti-elite anger. In still other cases, political leaders politicize frustrations that had not previously been salient. In the Philippines, for example, Duterte played up the threat of drug use and trafficking, which until his campaign had not registered among voters’ major concerns.35
The next phase of the grievance-fueled illiberal drive entails linking the grievance with democratic norms and institutions. In many cases where the grievance is explicitly directed at the governing class—as in Brazil or Hungary—this process is relatively straightforward. But in others, some political maneuvering and artfulness are required to make this link. In India, for example, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist organization, and the BJP, its political wing, spent years arguing that the country’s Hindu majority was being unfairly oppressed by the country’s long-standing liberal, secular political order and that correcting this wrong would require a wholesale reform of norms and institutions. And in the Philippines, Duterte argued during his campaign that drug use was enabled by political elites who didn’t do enough to punish them. He ran on a campaign of rooting out corruption and circumventing democratic norms and institutions that would stop him from solving the problem—namely by killing criminals.
If and when such drives yield an electoral victory, the government then sets about confronting the norms and institutions that have putatively perpetuated the grievance.
You may read more at the link if you want to. I’m beginning to feel like I’m assigning homework, which is not my intent. I think, though, we must embrace the concept that this was the plan all along, and there were a lot of organizations and people enabling our slide. My hope is that through knowing these things, we can deal better with what is going on around us. I still believe that knowledge is power.
So, it’s finally thawed out here. Temple and I can take our usual walks. There’s a lot of mess to clean up because most of the plants will need a good few whacks with my machete. I really hope that you are doing every self-care trick that you know and that you can discover new, more powerful ones.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #cultureOfMisogyny #deadlyRacism #DemocraticBacksliding #kakistocracy #MediocreTrump #mediocreWhiteMan #PeteHegsethWeirdoSexualAssaulter #WhiteChristianNationalismFascism
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Mostly Monday Reads: Coping with Crazy
“It just comes naturally, “John (repeat1968) Buss
@johnbuss.bsky.socialGood Day, Sky Dancers!
Well, one of the most unqualified, mediocre white men ever started a full-scale attack on our troops and their morale as the American Defense Secretary. He’s lowering troop morale. My Daddy didn’t tell me many stories about his time bombing NAZIs while based in Ipswich, England. His favorite story was that the crew was on a mission one day, and the mission commander was Jimmy Stewart. Can you imagine hearing that voice issuing orders from your radio? My High School Russian History teacher was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He wrote a memoir and it’s sitting in the National Archives. The one thing that really defines the Boomer generation is the war and the stories of our family members, who were all involved in one way or another. My Grandfather was in charge of War Bonds at the Kansas City Fed. My other Grandfather worked for the Railroad, where troops and supplies were vital. One of my uncles was in the Navy, and the other was in Army Intelligence. They all had stories about that time. There were all kinds of people doing all kinds of things to save the American Way and its democracy.
If you ever find your way to New Orleans, I highly recommend the National World War 2 Museum. When the daughters and I took Dad there, it was very new. Dad was given hero treatment. They only had their European theatre displays up, but there are more now. Their big feature was the Higgins boats that stormed the beaches during D-Day that were made in New Orleans. Never in a million years would I expect some of the most honored war heroes to be erased from the textbooks of the military, the USAF’s military curriculum. This is from WSAF Channel 12 in Montgomery, Alabama. A historic city for many reasons, but a lot of it comes from essential changes that improved the status of black Americans. You undoubtedly know their story. “Defense secretary orders immediate reversal of USAF’s removal of Tuskegee Airmen from the curriculum,”
Newly-confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth confirmed Sunday in a social media post that the U.S. Air Force will continue teaching about the famed Tuskegee Airmen.
In a statement posted Sunday afternoon, Sen. Katie Britt said she has “no doubt” Hegseth will “correct and get to the bottom of the malicious compliance we’ve seen in recent days.”
Senator Katie Boyd Britt immediately sent this out to what’s left of Twitter.
“Little Big Man” Walt Handelsman, https://www.nola.com/opinions/walt_handelsman/
Newsweek has more details here.
The Air Force says it has reinstated training material on the Tuskegee Airmen and Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) after a brief delay to revise it in line with the Trump administration’s rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday, Hegseth clarified that any attempt to cut the Tuskegee Airmen training material had been “immediately reversed.”
The decision resolves a controversy that emerged as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth began his first day at the Pentagon.
After announcing this intervention, the country’s worst mediocre white christianist nationalist man in an office he’s got no busy holding making completely insulting and inappropriate decisions. This happens when people are hired based on skin color, religion, and favoritism from the boss. We get the rule of mediocre white men and their misplaced confidence that makes the rest of us do the work so the entire outfit doesn’t go down the shitter.
Trump is also announcing big changes for the military comprised of volunteers who may soon be volunteering their asses straight back to being civilians at all this moral-lowering hate. It wasn’t enough that he summarily ousted the first woman Coast Guard Chief on his first full day in the office. This is what CNN has in its big story today. “Trump expected to sign executive orders to reshape the military, including banning transgender troops.” This is the man who called people in the military “suckers” and “losers.” Let’s just call all this for what it is. It is racist. It is misogynistic. It defines every person by their sex and not by their gender identity or sexual preferences. In short, it demeans every human being who is not a white male christianist and strips them of their Constitutional rights..
President Donald Trump on Monday is expected to sign four executive orders that would reshape the military, including banning transgender service members from serving in the US armed forces, gutting the military’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, and reinstating with back pay service members who were discharged for refusing to get vaccinated from Covid-19, two White House officials told CNN.
The orders, which were first reported by the New York Post, come as Trump’s nominee to lead the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, was sworn in as secretary of defense on Saturday. Hegseth has long stated he planned to implement major cultural changes to the military, including ending DEI practices and removing “woke” service members.
Moments after his arrival at the Pentagon on Monday, Hegseth told reporters that there are “more executive orders coming.”
This is a purge and a crusade. We need to know more to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our country.
That same FARTUS, the mediocre white man-in-chief, had a hissy fit at Colombia over the weekend. The BBC reports today.“Colombia yields on US deportation flights to avert trade war. Today’s lesson is not to surrender in advance. All those coffee-drinking Americans would not like the result more than Colombians. You have no idea how reliant we are on Colombia for goods. And to top it off, he couldn’t even spell the country’s name correctly in his Social Media Barf zone. You can read about that at the BBC link.
A looming trade war between the US and Colombia appears to have been averted after the Colombian government agreed to allow US military flights carrying deported migrants to land in the Andean country.
The spat erupted on Sunday when President Gustavo Petro barred two military planes carrying Colombians deported from the US from landing.
The Trump administration responded by threatening to slap punitive tariffs on Colombian exports to the US.
President Petro at first said Colombia would retaliate by imposing tariffs on US goods, but the White House later announced that Colombia had agreed to accept migrants – including those arriving on US military aircraft – “without limitation or delay”.
The White House hailed the agreement with Colombia as a victory for Trump’s hard-line approach, after the country’s two leaders had exchanged threats on social media on Sunday.
“Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a statement.
She added that the tariffs and sanctions which the Trump administration had threatened to impose on Colombia, should it not comply, would be “held in reserve, and not signed, unless Colombia fails to honour this agreement”.
She also said that President Donald Trump “expects all other nations of the world to fully co-operate in accepting deportation of their citizens illegally present in the United States”.
- Trump’s threat to Colombia sends a message
- Follow live: Nearly 1,000 arrests in a day as Trump’s promise of mass deportations ramps up
- What the president has done since taking power
A cornerstone of Trump’s immigration policy is removing unlawful migrants from the US, with the promise of “mass deportations”.
It seems even the legacy media of the UK are weasel-wording his insanity. A “spat”? Look at those words as what we are talking about: human beings being herded around like cattle.
How do we cope with all of this? According to sociologist Jennifer Walter we must understand what is happening in this country and what to do about it. It is all about overwhelming our feelings, responses, and lives.
As a sociologist, I need to tell you: 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗺 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝗮𝗹. 1/ The flood of 200+ executive orders in Trump’s first days exemplifies Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine” — using chaos and crisis to push through radical changes while people are too disoriented to effectively resist. This isn’t just politics as usual — it’s a strategic exploitation of cognitive limits. 2/ Media theorist McLuhan predicted this: When humans face information overload, they become passive and disengaged. The rapid-fire executive orders create a cognitive bottleneck, making it nearly impossible for citizens and media to thoroughly analyze any single policy. 3/ Agenda-setting theory explains the strategy: When multiple major policies compete for attention simultaneously, it fragments public discourse. Traditional media can’t keep up with the pace, leading to superficial coverage. The result? Weakened democratic oversight and reduced public engagement. What now? 1/ Set boundaries: Pick 2-3 key issues you deeply care about and focus your attention there. You can’t track everything — that’s by design. Impact comes from sustained focus, not scattered awareness. 2/ Use aggregators & experts: Find trusted analysts who do the heavy lifting of synthesis. Look for those explaining patterns, not just events. 3/ Remember: Feeling overwhelmed is the point. When you recognize this, you regain some power. Take breaks. Process. This is a marathon. 4/ Practice going slow: Wait 48 hrs before reacting to new policies. The urgent clouds the important. Initial reporting often misses context. 5/ Build community: Share the cognitive load. Different people track different issues. Network intelligence beats individual overload. Remember: They want you scattered. Your focus is resistance.
You may read many sources to get you to focus on how they will continue to manipulate you if you let them. This one actually comes from the period of the first adventure of FARTUS (Felon, Adjudicated Rapist, and Traitor of the US) in 2018. “The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide” is posted on Verfassungblog. It’s written by Martin Mycielski, who studies Democratic Backsldiing
1. They will come to power with a campaign based on fear, scaremongering and distorting the truth. Nevertheless, their victory will be achieved through a democratic electoral process. But beware, as this will be their argument every time you question the legitimacy of their actions. They will claim a mandate from the People to change the system.
Remember – gaining power through a democratic system does not give them permission to cross legal boundaries and undermine said democracy.
2. They will divide and rule. Their strength lies in unity, in one voice and one ideology, and so should yours. They will call their supporters Patriots, the only “true Americans”. You will be labelled as traitors, enemies of the state, unpatriotic, the corrupt elite, the old regime trying to regain power. Their supporters will be the “People”, the “sovereign” who chose their leaders.
Don’t let them divide you – remember you’re one People, one Nation, with one common good.
You may read a lot more at that link. So, the most recent rabbit hole I went down deals with learning more about Global Backsliding. I thought I’d share some reads for you. The first comes from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Understanding and Responding to Global Democratic Backsliding. As the world faces a democratic recession, many of the most common explanations fall short. But looking more closely at antidemocratic leaders’ motivations and methods reveals valuable insights about different types of backsliding and how international actors should respond.” The paper is written by by Thomas Carothers and Benjamin Press. This is its summary page.
Over the past two decades, democratic backsliding has become a defining trend in global politics. However, despite the extensive attention paid to the phenomenon, there is surprisingly little consensus about what is driving it. The most common explanations offered by analysts—ranging from the role of Russia and China and disruptive technologies to the rise of populism, the spread of political polarization, and democracies’ failure to deliver—fall short when tested across a wide range of cases.
A more persuasive account of backsliding focuses on the central role of leader-driven antidemocratic political projects and the variety of mechanisms and motivations they entail. This paper identifies and analyzes three distinct types of backsliding efforts: grievance-fueled illiberalism, opportunistic authoritarianism, and entrenched-interest revanchism. In cases of grievance-fueled illiberalism, a political figure mobilizes a grievance, claims that the grievance is being perpetuated by the existing political system, and argues that it is necessary to dismantle democratic norms and institutions to redress the underlying wrongs. Opportunistic authoritarians, by contrast, come to power via conventional political appeals but later turn against democracy for the sake of personal political survival. In still other backsliding cases, entrenched interest groups—generally the military—that were displaced by a democratic transition use undemocratic means to reassert their claims to power. Although motivations and methods differ across backsliding efforts, a key commonality among them is their relentless focus on undermining countervailing governmental and nongovernmental institutions that are designed to keep them in check.
As international democracy supporters continue to refine their strategies of responding to democratic backsliding, they must better differentiate between facilitating factors and core drivers. Such an approach will point to the need for a stronger focus on the nature of leader-driven antidemocratic projects, identifying ways to create significant disincentives for backsliding leaders, and bolstering crucial countervailing institutions. Moreover, they should deepen their differentiation of strategies to take account of the diverse motivations and methods among the three main patterns of backsliding. Only in this way will they build the needed analytic and practical capacity to meet the formidable challenge that democratic backsliding presents.
The concept that grabbed me was the type of backsliding and the first type, grievance-fueled illiberalism, which sounds pretty spot on for what we are enduring and fighting against now. You’ll notice our new technologies are helping these movements spread. It helps to see where else this has happened. I have no doubt FARTUS, and his close relationship with Erdogan are that of student and mentor.
Some backsliding leaders employ a grievance-centered strategy: they mobilize a widely held sense of frustration to justify dismantling the existing set of democratic norms and institutions, which they blame for having created the conditions that gave rise to the grievance. The grievances they embrace are diverse—ranging well beyond core economic conditions to include racial, religious, and ethnic marginalization and public frustration over corruption, crime, or general governance fecklessness.
A grievance-fueled illiberal drive typically begins with a political figure articulating and politicizing a grievance. In some cases, this grievance is widely and openly shared, especially in cases where corruption or misgovernance has disillusioned many with the existing political system and inspires a search for political alternatives. In Hungary, for example, Orbán and his Fidesz party came to power in 2010 by appealing to the widely held frustration among Hungarians with the previous Socialist government and its perceived mishandling of the economy and its inability to address the devastation of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. Similarly, in Brazil, Bolsonaro exploited widespread citizen outrage at the Brazilian political class for its pervasive corruption, which had been put on vivid display during the mid-2010s by a series of prominent scandals and investigations.
In other cases, entrepreneurial illiberal political actors articulate grievances that have festered below the political surface for some time. Advancing such grievances may, at first, seem taboo. But as they tap into that grievance, they normalize it and thus reframe what is politically possible. In Turkey, for example, Erdoğan found electoral success in the early 2000s by making appeals to conservative religious values, in a break from long-standing norms of the staunchly secular Turkish Republic. As he appealed to the latent sense among many Turkish citizens that religion had been unduly displaced from public life, he normalized increasingly explicit calls to revisit the principles underlying liberal democracy, including strict separation of religion and public life, respect for religious minority groups, and an equal playing field for opposition. Similarly, in India under the BJP, Modi has articulated a novel vision of Hindu nationalism and directly confronted the country’s liberal founding ideas by arguing that a single religious group should hold a special place in sociopolitical life. And in the United States, Trump appealed to racial and social class grievances that had long simmered below the surface of the country’s politics, normalizing discriminatory speech and stoking anti-minority sentiments as well as anti-elite anger. In still other cases, political leaders politicize frustrations that had not previously been salient. In the Philippines, for example, Duterte played up the threat of drug use and trafficking, which until his campaign had not registered among voters’ major concerns.35
The next phase of the grievance-fueled illiberal drive entails linking the grievance with democratic norms and institutions. In many cases where the grievance is explicitly directed at the governing class—as in Brazil or Hungary—this process is relatively straightforward. But in others, some political maneuvering and artfulness are required to make this link. In India, for example, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist organization, and the BJP, its political wing, spent years arguing that the country’s Hindu majority was being unfairly oppressed by the country’s long-standing liberal, secular political order and that correcting this wrong would require a wholesale reform of norms and institutions. And in the Philippines, Duterte argued during his campaign that drug use was enabled by political elites who didn’t do enough to punish them. He ran on a campaign of rooting out corruption and circumventing democratic norms and institutions that would stop him from solving the problem—namely by killing criminals.
If and when such drives yield an electoral victory, the government then sets about confronting the norms and institutions that have putatively perpetuated the grievance.
You may read more at the link if you want to. I’m beginning to feel like I’m assigning homework, which is not my intent. I think, though, we must embrace the concept that this was the plan all along, and there were a lot of organizations and people enabling our slide. My hope is that through knowing these things, we can deal better with what is going on around us. I still believe that knowledge is power.
So, it’s finally thawed out here. Temple and I can take our usual walks. There’s a lot of mess to clean up because most of the plants will need a good few whacks with my machete. I really hope that you are doing every self-care trick that you know and that you can discover new, more powerful ones.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
#JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #cultureOfMisogyny #deadlyRacism #DemocraticBacksliding #kakistocracy #MediocreTrump #mediocreWhiteMan #PeteHegsethWeirdoSexualAssaulter #WhiteChristianNationalismFascism
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A good news story… because I need one.
A bottle in the water from a Newfoundland couple has been found in Ireland 🇮🇪 13 years later. And the couple is still together.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/nl-message-bottle-13-1.7581471
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Une histoire qui fait du bien… parce que j’en ai besoin d’une.Une bouteille à la mer d’une couple ténelien a été trouvé en Irlande 🇮🇪 13 ans plus tard. Et le couple sont toujours ensemble.
// Article en anglais //
#Newfoundland #TerreNeuve #NewfoundlandAndLabrador #TerreNeuveEtLabrador #Ireland
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XQ
https://github.com/misskey-dev/xq
This must be a part of the plan to turn Misskey into proprietary silo. ATProto and Nostr creators at least tried to solve a real problem, but arguments for creating this protocol are incredibly weak:
>Messages are in plain JSON format, which is wasteful
Message size is not a bottleneck in Fediverse.
>Having schema definitions
>Statically-typed-language-friendly structure.
Skill issue. Many Fediverse projects use statically typed languages.
>Eliminate unnecessary data and boilerplate by focusing on microblogging for its intended use
There is no boilerplate other than
@context. It can be dropped without making your implementation completely incompatible with everything else.>Allows multiple messages to be combined into a single request to reduce overhead.
Use a different inbox that supports batching:
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/0499/fep-0499.md
-
XQ
https://github.com/misskey-dev/xq
This must be a part of the plan to turn Misskey into proprietary silo. ATProto and Nostr creators at least tried to solve a real problem, but arguments for creating this protocol are incredibly weak:
>Messages are in plain JSON format, which is wasteful
Message size is not a bottleneck in Fediverse.
>Having schema definitions
>Statically-typed-language-friendly structure.
Skill issue. Many Fediverse projects use statically typed languages.
>Eliminate unnecessary data and boilerplate by focusing on microblogging for its intended use
There is no boilerplate other than
@context. It can be dropped without making your implementation completely incompatible with everything else.>Allows multiple messages to be combined into a single request to reduce overhead.
Use a different inbox that supports batching:
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/0499/fep-0499.md
-
XQ
https://github.com/misskey-dev/xq
This must be a part of the plan to turn Misskey into proprietary silo. ATProto and Nostr creators at least tried to solve a real problem, but arguments for creating this protocol are incredibly weak:
>Messages are in plain JSON format, which is wasteful
Message size is not a bottleneck in Fediverse.
>Having schema definitions
>Statically-typed-language-friendly structure.
Skill issue. Many Fediverse projects use statically typed languages.
>Eliminate unnecessary data and boilerplate by focusing on microblogging for its intended use
There is no boilerplate other than
@context. It can be dropped without making your implementation completely incompatible with everything else.>Allows multiple messages to be combined into a single request to reduce overhead.
Use a different inbox that supports batching:
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/0499/fep-0499.md
-
XQ
https://github.com/misskey-dev/xq
This must be a part of the plan to turn Misskey into proprietary silo. ATProto and Nostr creators at least tried to solve a real problem, but arguments for creating this protocol are incredibly weak:
>Messages are in plain JSON format, which is wasteful
Message size is not a bottleneck in Fediverse.
>Having schema definitions
>Statically-typed-language-friendly structure.
Skill issue. Many Fediverse projects use statically typed languages.
>Eliminate unnecessary data and boilerplate by focusing on microblogging for its intended use
There is no boilerplate other than
@context. It can be dropped without making your implementation completely incompatible with everything else.>Allows multiple messages to be combined into a single request to reduce overhead.
Use a different inbox that supports batching:
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/0499/fep-0499.md
-
So, I noticed something odd the other day. I was writing in a notebook using my Asvine V126 with Diamine Writer’s Blood. When I came home I grabbed by V200 with Writer’s Blood to finish what I was writing, but the color / shading of the ink was very different. It was a lot darker and more saturated from the V200 vs the V126.
I compared the nibs under my loupe, but they seem to be mostly the same (ie, tines about the same width, no mis-alignment, etc.)
So, I decided to take things a step further and made the image in this message. Note both the Diamine Aurora Borealis and Writer’s Blood seem to have quite different characteristics.
(I should mention: all pens were recently cleaned, and all filled at the same time from the same bottle(s) of ink…)
Anyone have any thoughts on why this would be the case?
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So, I noticed something odd the other day. I was writing in a notebook using my Asvine V126 with Diamine Writer’s Blood. When I came home I grabbed by V200 with Writer’s Blood to finish what I was writing, but the color / shading of the ink was very different. It was a lot darker and more saturated from the V200 vs the V126.
I compared the nibs under my loupe, but they seem to be mostly the same (ie, tines about the same width, no mis-alignment, etc.)
So, I decided to take things a step further and made the image in this message. Note both the Diamine Aurora Borealis and Writer’s Blood seem to have quite different characteristics.
(I should mention: all pens were recently cleaned, and all filled at the same time from the same bottle(s) of ink…)
Anyone have any thoughts on why this would be the case?
Hashtags -
So, I noticed something odd the other day. I was writing in a notebook using my Asvine V126 with Diamine Writer’s Blood. When I came home I grabbed by V200 with Writer’s Blood to finish what I was writing, but the color / shading of the ink was very different. It was a lot darker and more saturated from the V200 vs the V126.
I compared the nibs under my loupe, but they seem to be mostly the same (ie, tines about the same width, no mis-alignment, etc.)
So, I decided to take things a step further and made the image in this message. Note both the Diamine Aurora Borealis and Writer’s Blood seem to have quite different characteristics.
(I should mention: all pens were recently cleaned, and all filled at the same time from the same bottle(s) of ink…)
Anyone have any thoughts on why this would be the case?
Hashtags