Quotulatiousness

February 18, 2023

Nikki Haley’s presidential bid is clearly doomed because … she uses her middle name? Let me read that again.

Filed under: India, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jim Treacher (whose name I should now probably put in scare quotes because it’s a nom-de-plume) explains why Nikki Haley is a no-hoper in the next Republican presidential primaries:

As I revealed over a decade ago, “Jim Treacher” isn’t my real name. This is just a message-board pseudonym that got way out of hand, and now I guess I’m stuck with it. My government name is Robert Sean Medlock, but my parents have always called me Sean. I don’t know why they didn’t just name me Sean Robert Medlock, but I was in no position to argue my case at the time because I couldn’t talk yet.

So now, every time I need to fill out paperwork somewhere, I have to explain that I go by my middle name. Doctors, dentists, car repairs, insurance, what have you. The routine is kind of annoying, but at this point I’m used to it.

I’m not deceiving anybody by using my middle name. It’s just my name, man. Lots of people go by their middle name.

In other news: This week Nikki Haley announced she’s running for president. I don’t know if she has a shot, but the libs sure seem to think so. They’re already attacking her for … going by her middle name.

Check out this idiot:

She didn’t. Her birth name was Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. Not “Nimrata”, as it’s commonly misspelled by supposedly sophisticated libs:

My goodness. Guess it runs in the family, huh?

The Randhawa family referred to their daughter as Nikki, which is Punjabi for “little one”. And she changed her last name to Haley when she married a man named Michael Haley.

Y’know, like Hillary Rodham did when she married Bill Clinton.

Here’s another dummy, who of course works for CNN:

Yeah. Wait. What?

And if that scandal wasn’t enough to sink Nikki Haley’s chances utterly, CNN’s Don Lemon helpfully points out that she’s way, way, way past her peak:

Now, you know I’m not one to cry sexism often. Frankly, when I found out a hot college professor of mine had been fired for doing a #MeToo, I was offended for not being involved. I’d gone to office hours, for godsakes. But there is sexism this week we have to call out. Nikki Haley announced she is running for president. She’s a reasonable Republican candidate who is, of course, a long shot against Trump. There are plenty of ways to criticize her politics, but for some reason a bunch of people we are meant to respect tried to say that the real problem is that she’s a woman, that she’s not young, and that she’s Indian.

You may think I’m exaggerating.

Here is Don Lemon on CNN: “Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime. Sorry”, he says, looking to camera, a little smile on his face. “When a woman is considered to be in her prime in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s …” His co-hosts, both women, balk. (“Prime for what?”) But Lemon keeps going. Watch the extremely stressful video here, where he goes on … and on … about how Nikki Haley, who is 51, cannot criticize Biden’s age. Because women peak in their 20s, and she’s long past that.

Or here’s progressive hero Mary Trump, Donald’s niece, who disavowed him and became a star of the intelligentsia. She decided that the best way to insult Nikki Haley this week was by highlighting that she’s Indian, because Nikki is her middle name. Again, this is a real statement Mary Trump released on Twitter: “First of all, fuck you Nimrata Haley.” Sorry, I’m slow: If you’re a white person trying to insult someone who’s not white and you do it by highlighting their race, what’s that called again? I’m sure there’s a Robin DiAngelo chapter on this somewhere.

January 30, 2023

QotD: Teaching … back in the day

Filed under: Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There’s so much truth to this. The “authority figure” thing is especially interesting. As I started in “education” fairly late, I was conspicuously older than most of my graduate school cohort. They had discipline problems in their classes; I never did. This was because I at least looked like an adult, and dressed like one, too. Every other TA was all of three months removed from undergrad, and tried to show up to teach wearing backwards hats and ratty school apparel. The one kid who took my advice and switched to teaching in “business casual” didn’t have a single discipline problem afterward (poor bastard, he no doubt got killed by his peers for “ageism” or something).

Of course, this was so long ago that students used to be unsure how to address me. Most professors had gone “hip” and had students call them by first name, but there were enough crusty old codgers around who insisted on “Dr. So-and-So” that they didn’t assume. After which I started telling them “you can call me whatever you want, but as a general rule life runs smoother if we respect each other’s station. If you know someone has a title, it’s best to use it unless they specifically tell you otherwise, and it’s always good to respect the social distance between yourself and someone who has something you want. So, choose accordingly.” 20 years ago, most of them got it, and addressed me by my title. 15 years ago, I started getting lots of puzzled puppy dog looks (“what’s a ‘social station’?”). 10 years ago, they all just assumed first names were fine, and before I retired I counted myself lucky if I got so much as a “hey dude”.

Meanwhile, as far as the students were concerned, my job went from “trying to teach them something” to “the annoying meat puppet whose presence we have to tolerate until he puts the A+ in the gradebook for record-keeping purposes”.

Severian, responding to a comment on “Movies Made On Mars”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-02-04.

July 23, 2020

Edmonton’s CFL team will abandon the “Eskimos” nickname that’s been in use for over 100 years

Filed under: Cancon, Football, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Anything that happens in the United States tends to also happen later in Canada. The Washington NFL franchise has abandoned their “Redskins” nickname (although to many the “Washington” part is at least as offensive) but have not yet announced their new moniker. Edmonton is in the same situation, with no new name yet decided upon:

“Edmonton eskimos wordmark” by Pabstheiniker is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

I said an anticipatory farewell to the name of the Edmonton Eskimos football club in this space in 2017; on Tuesday the team’s front office executed the sentence, announcing that the team’s nickname, in use for Edmonton sports clubs for over 110 years, will be retired. (Note that the Canadian Football League is only 62 years old.)

But there is always some kind of minor surprise on the scaffold, and in this case it was that the team has not yet decided on a new name. This, I see, is where I made a mistake back in 2017.

I saw that getting rid of “Eskimos” was a relatively simple problem with an affordable cost that would have to be paid eventually. In the event, the final push was supplied, unsurprisingly, by corporate sponsors — themselves all in a state of vulnerability and panic in conditions of pandemic disease. The CFL team had played public-relations defence whenever the issue was raised aggressively before; they were, self-evidently, playing for time.

I noted in 2017 that the same P.R. apparatus was obviously trying to propagate “Empire” as an alternative by-word for the team, and it filed a trademark application for “Edmonton Empire” in 2018. The team can start selling new green-and-gold gear to fans as soon as it settles on something, and a new nickname beginning with “E” would preserve the team’s stylish double-E logo. “Empire” might even work well with the team colours if “gold” were interpreted more literally in the uniform, rather than serving as sales talk for “yellow.”

[…]

Speaking as an Edmonton-born fan of Edmonton Ellipsoidal Ball Sport Sodality, I see now that I may have prepared adequately for the end of the Eskimos, but my heart didn’t anticipate the dual nature of this decision any more than my brain did. I know — hell, my friends and my readers know — that I will dislike whatever they pick. Contests and polls of the public produce embarrassments like “The Toronto Raptors,” so the mere thought of any such exercise plunges me into despond.

July 20, 2020

How They Did It – Baby Names in Ancient Rome (Tria Nomina)

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Invicta
Published 9 Apr 2016

The Romans took great pride in setting themselves apart from foreigners and even themselves. The tria nomina naming convention was one such way of achieving this and can tell us much about an individual.

Literary Sources:
Caesar: Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldsworthy
Who’s Who in the Roman World by John Hazel

Game Engine:
Total War: Rome II

Music:
Cinematic Music – “Beneath the Sun”
Cinematic Music – “Fade Away”

April 3, 2020

“And what are your personal pronouns?”

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last week, Amy Alkon considered the demands of “pronoun authoritarians”:

Personally, I’m disturbed by the whole notion that we “include” people through calling them the right pronoun, which requires all this “homework” about a person before you say one word to them.

This new requirement for doing this seems to be a sort of religion that allows people to have power over others — to push them around and deem them thought and speech criminals, even if they simply forget to use somebody’s requested “pronoun.”

This also seems to be a way for people to feel special without earning it — to require people to find out all sorts of information about them, on penalty of being accused of a thought or speech crime and then cancelled.

It seems outrageous to me that some stranger would be required to prep for conversation by investigating my history — that my family are Eastern European Jews, that old friends call me “Flamey” or “Flame-o,” that I eat keto, that I blah, blah, blah, blah, blah — and that they would be seen as disrespectful and even bigoted for failing to find out all the ways I’m (heh) unique and special.

But that’s what we’re requiring people to do with this notion that we have to ask “what is your preferred pronoun?”

And again, this is done now with threats embedded — with the threat that you will lose your job and be deemed a bigot if you don’t make this “What’s your pronoun?” business a priority.

Oh, and I will be very clear on this again: If you want me to call you “zhe” or “they” or “lemon pie with a slight dusting of confectioner’s sugar on top,” I will do my best to remember that and do it, because it’s kind.

But I think the considerations above are important, and I think it’s too easy to just accept the demand to ask people for their “pronouns” as a requirement for being considered decent — with the possible penalty of losing everything as the penalty for failing in some way, even by forgetting.

July 20, 2009

I’ve always been really bad with names

Filed under: Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 20:42

. . . so this xkcd webcomic really hits me where I live:

Difficulties with remembering names

For those of you who don’t normally read xkcd . . . hover over the image: the hidden joke is often as good (or better) than the one in the base comic.

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