For JS 34 [1] Mitch McConnell (R, KY) limited debate to 10 minutes--I'm unclear from the transcript exactly how this was allowed. Richard Blumenthal (D, CT) offered resistance to limiting debate, and Kamala Harris (D, CA) and Patrick Leahy (D, VT) requested the role be called several times as a delaying tactic, but the limiting of debate went through.
Just prior to the vote, Brian Schatz (D, HI) offered some debate, but this is cosmetic given the known votes.
My read there is little to be gained by trying to legislate implementation power that has been ceded to the executive branch and the various agencies that are run by appointment, and therefore a costly filibuster and fight was not worth the time, effort and political mud.
[0] https://www.senate.gov/CRSpubs/577d2a5e-2b47-4045-95fa-a7639...
[1] https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/2017/03/23/sen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Review_Act
Relevant section:
The law provides a procedure for expedited consideration in the Senate. If the committee to which a joint resolution is referred has not reported it out within 20 calendar days after referral, it may be discharged from further consideration by a written petition of 30 Members of the Senate, at which point the measure is placed on the calendar, and it is in order at any time for a Senator to move to proceed to the joint resolution.[7] If the Senate agrees to the motion to proceed, debate on the floor is limited to 10 hours and no amendments to the resolution or motions to proceed to other business are in order, and so the Senate may pass the joint resolution with a simple majority.[7] A joint resolution of disapproval meeting certain criteria cannot be filibustered.[8]
I haven't seen any reporting on a specific law that these rules were tied to, but I have seen references made to laws predating the public internet that mandate privacy on phone calls that.
Really interesting. Thanks for sharing.
In linguistics the illustrative analogy is that prescriptivism is akin to an anthropologist entering into a foreign culture and rather than simply observing, they instruct the members of this culture on how to cook, dress, cut their hair, etc. Most modern dictionaries (including the Oxford English dictionary) take a descriptive approach to the study of language.
By that argument, we should all just be able to say and write whatever we want however we want to, even if it's technically or factually incorrect, like Humpty Dumpty or Donald Trump.
Why bother hewing to "elitist" rules of grammar and accepted spellings, being that it's just prescriptivism?
How does one decide objectively if something is just plain wrong, or merely prescriptive?
Case in point: "premises". So many people treat this singular noun as a plural and use horrors like "on-premise", which is so utterly wrong that it is painful for me to look at. What's worse is that "premise" is a real word and an entirely different thing and is most definitely not the singular of "premises".
This word came about (as many English words do) as a corruption of the Latin "praemissus", meaning something like "the aforementioned", and was used often in legal agreements for properties, and so became a word in itself that meant "the property".
Now we are corrupting it yet again, this time without the excuse of it being a different language, on the basis that "I'll say it however I please." People I have mentioned this to have told me that it is so difficult to get people to use the right word that they've just gone with "on-prem".
Now readers can take this comment as the rant of a "grammar nazi" or a pedant, but it wasn't meant that way, and I'll respond in advance with this: why is it not ok to identify something that is wrong? Because it's mere nitpicking?
Maybe so - but that's how matters devolve, over the decades, back to widespread ignorance and intolerance: one little oversight at a time.
Sorry, I didn't mean to get on the soapbox - sometimes it's just frustrating for those of us who are perhaps overly detail-oriented. But the world needs "pedantic" people like us more than it likes to admit.
> write whatever we want
> however we want to
> being that it's just
> prescriptivism
> This word came about ... as a
> corruption ... without the excuse
> of it being a different language
I don't have an issue with every "error" on that page and I have no problem with style guidelines for writing, but the problem comes when the prescriptivists think that logic is on their side when they opine on subjective stylistic and dialectic issues. "Ice tea" is a perfect example. The author of that site argues that "iced tea is not literally made of ice, it simply is 'iced': has ice put into it.". Apparently he is unaware of English's enormous fondness for attributive nouns. By his reasoning, we should all be saying "appled pie", or "apple-infused pie", or something crazy like that.
I also have a more general problem with prescriptivism because frequently it is used to justify a certain type of racist and classist thought.
Apple is describing the type of pie. "ice" is not a type of tea.
No it's not. "Ice" or (more appropriately IMO) "iced" a state of tea. Find me 'ice' or 'iced' on this page: https://www.teasource.com/pages/types-of-tea
Nobody is making tea from ice. If they were, then you could call it 'ice tea'.
Ice algae are not made from ice, for example -- they are algae that are found in ice. The point is that in noun-noun compounding, the semantic relationship between the two nouns varies widely from case to case (far more widely than the distinction we are nitpicking over between "apple pie" and "ice(d) tea").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_algae
EDIT: one more example, is it also wrong to say "bubble tea"?
Which makes sense, because it's referring to a type of algae found in ice.
If there were a type of tea that only grew or were only found in ice, then it might make sense to call it 'ice tea'. However, that's not the case because it's regular tea that has been 'iced'.
The relationship between two nouns in a noun-noun compound is very flexible. Sometimes it means the head noun is made out of the attributive noun ("apple pie"), sometimes it means the head noun is found in the attributive noun ("ice algae"), sometimes it means something completely different (how about "ice axe"?). So, because that relationship is so flexible, it's just not absurd to consider that in the case of "ice tea" the relationship is that the head noun contains the attributive noun, as is exactly the case with "bubble tea" and many other NN compound examples.
And I will say again that the semantic relationship between "is made out of" and "contains" is so, so similar. Given the huge variety of acceptable semantic relationships between two nouns in a NN compound, it's really ridiculous to claim that "contains" is not acceptable whereas "is made out of" is, especially so when there are tons of examples of the "contains" relationship that staunch prescriptivists never object to (again, "bubble tea").
Apple pie:
- Pie found in apple(s)? Nope.
- Apple that is used to do something to pie! Hmm, no.
- Pie that is modified by an apple. No...
- Pie that is made with apple the primary ingredient? Yes
Ice algae:
- Algae found in ice? Bingo.
- Algae that is used to do something to ice? No.
- Algae that is modified by ice? Nope.
- Algae that is made with ice the primary ingredient? No again.
Ice axe:
- Axe found in ice? No.
- Axe that is used to do something to ice! Yes.
- Axe that is modified by ice? Definitely not.
- Axe that is made with ice the primary ingredient? No.
Finally...
Ice tea:
- Tea found in ice? No.
- Tea that is used to do something to ice? Not that I've heard of.
- Tea that is modified by ice? Mmm... it's not modified. It's still tea, only cold, not hot. Its temperature, a non-essential property of tea, has been modified. So wouldn't that be "iced tea", as in, "tea that is normally served hot but has been cooled down, namely, iced"?
- Tea that is made with ice the primary ingredient? No.
Bottom line: "ice tea" is ambiguous. "Iced tea" is not.
I regret I have honestly never heard of bubble tea (but I have heard of bubble gum), so I have no clue what it is, other than it has something to do with tea and bubble(s).
Is it tea with which one makes/blows bubbles?
Carbonated tea?
Tea served in a bubble?
Tea made from bubbles?
That is the relationship... "contains". There are many other examples in English of that relationship in NN compounds, and I guarantee you use them unconsciously without a second thought. You are also not getting my point, please reread my last post.
> Bottom line: "ice tea" is ambiguous. "Iced tea" is not.
This is how I know you and others in this thread have not spent a lot of time thinking about language. When has ambiguity ever prevented humans from using and understanding language? If you look at any piece of writing deeply, it is filled with an unimaginable amount of nuanced ambiguity. That's exactly why NLP is so hard.
I think you are making an unwarranted assumption about me. I have indeed spent a great deal of time thinking about language; I just have different thoughts, or points of view, about it. I have been very interested in etymology for a long time.
I neither claimed that natural language was capable of being entirely unambiguous, nor that people cannot communicate in the face of ambiguity. In fact, ambiguity in language allows for great artistic expression: humor, poetry, and other word play. So I agree with you on that point.
But holy crap, do we have to make it harder than necessary to communicate, when we aren't deliberately playing with words?
Surely you agree that much of the misery, pain, and suffering in this world of ours is due to avoidable language-related misunderstandings?
My work in linguistics and NLP is strongly related to ambiguity, so I tend to see things in those terms and I do not see resolving ambiguity as an impediment to understanding language (for humans at least, but for computers it is an enormous problem). We'll agree to disagree!
It's popular in Asia and Australia, and originates from Taiwan.
Also called boba tea or pearl tea.
Note that the prominent English dictionaries have usage panels that make judgements about whether the usage of a certain form of a word is sufficiently wide as their criteria for inclusion.
It's not that it is not ok to identify something as wrong, but you will need to accept that people will disagree with it, and that what is wrong to you now may very well have enough support in usage that the battle is already lost. When you then opt for comparisons to Trump, then it is not surprising that you get downvotes.
A lot of the "I'll say it however I please" is down to usage. I'll drag out my favourite example: "begs the question". It's my favourite because I didn't even know about the original meaning until I started seeing rants about how horrible the new meaning was. Do a search for it today, and the results are dominated by sites complaining about how awful the change is, and articles about it.
To date, I can recall only one instance where I've seen the original meaning used outside of such a rant. It's basically a lost battle, where people will often respond along the lines of "I'll say it however I please" for the simple reason that to most people the original meaning is entirely foreign because of its niche usage.
Usage panels, which often lags trends like this, for good reason, have in recent years started tipping towards the new usage for "begs the question", often marking the original form as "formal", because ultimately language is about communication, and you can not communicate effectively if you pretend the most common form doesn't exist. Here [1] is an article at Merriam Webster discussing the issue.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/beg-the-questi...
What I'm railing against is more that there appears to be little interest, in general, even to try to get things right. I see this not just in human language, but in business, software development, publishing, pretty much everywhere.
I'm really tired, so I'm not expressing myself as well as I should, so perhaps I should just wrap this up and get some sleep. An iPad is also not the best UI for writing on HN.
Thanks for your thoughtful and thought-provoking response.
Language is a means to an end. If my entire audience understands what I am saying, and is not put-off by how I say it, then I did, in fact, get things right.
You need to draw a line somewhere, or you will end up spending your life obsessing over unimportant details of what you write instead of actually communicating.
It may also happen that the one person who you felt was not "worth the trouble" turns out to be someone who will be very important to you one day, like a potential business partner or investor, and who interprets your misuse of language as ignorance.
There's a difference between obsessing over unimportant detail and being thorough, IMHO.
OMG u shuld see wat they do in germanny its so different their!
But at some point you do start to get diminishing returns, so there are practical limits to how worried one should be about pedants.
I didn't know that! Thanks!
However, I like tools in my arsenal that enable me to express myself precisely. Prescriptivist rants often open my eyes to subtle shades of possible meaning that I otherwise would not have seen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_State...
https://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/cloture_motions/...
Also, it's not even applied to 50% of resolutions:
roll
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/congress-sides-cable-a...
And the only reason Democrats voted against it was a tactic to save face for their constituents back home.
Why in the world would you think some politicians are magically sincere while others are not just by the little letter in parenthesis after their name?
Hyper partisan people that think this way are the reason political discourse has gone to shit and everything turns into some childish red team vs blue team ideology. As you keep propagating this mindset, people on both sides keep turning up the volume on their echo chamber and we get the most partisan congress (on both sides) in a hundred years[1].
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/13/he...
Say you have 54 democrats in the senate, and a democratic president 4 democrats that had difficult races can abstain or vote against the bill while 50 democrats can vote for it, with the vice president being the tiebreaker.
Two.
So Americans choose to agree with either EVERYTHING person A says, or EVERYTHING person B says.
That's what it boils down to. And it freaks me out that in a day and age where we're so educated and "free", we still think that this is a good solution.
Apologies for veering off topic. Had to get it off my chest for once, as I don't normally voice this stuff. (Because I'm sure others have said it better before.)
I'd like to see the GOP split into the 2-3 parties it shelters, and the Democrats go their 3 or so ways as well. I'd bet it'd significantly stabilize US policy and reduce the zero sum power plays that are becoming quite common.
If you go out and talk to these actual Democrats and Republicans, the bipartisan distinction seems more and more like a fraud.
Seriously, have you ever met a person who's "core driving force" is money and "all they care about"? Does that description fit about half the people your know?
Seems pretty cartoonish to me.
The people around me are not mega-rich. It is not a problem of that people being "bad people". It is a circumstance problem. The situation is that they have so much money that can change the laws.
Cut lobbing, redistribute wealth and you will stop this cartoon evil behavior. Keep people so rich that they don't understand what being middle class is, and they will continue pressing for ridiculous reductions on our rights.
Americans keep complaining about their politicians, then elect the same parties they complain about over and over again. I work with an American who explained it - she voted for a party she didn't like because she was desperate to do anything she could to prevent the other party winning. It turned out the other party won afterall so her efforts just went towards entrenching the two party system and discouraging anyone else from voting for what they actually want next time.
Approval voting is much simpler than ranked-choice, and more appropriate for the general public.
I did get the chance to flick through a Californian voter information guide for this last election and it seems like if your goal is to make voting simpler then looking at ballot initiatives would be far more useful.
http://scorevoting.net/WhatVotersWant
Maybe they think it's too complicated.
I think his points are pretty good ones. There was a lot of anger and unhappiness after the 2010 election and the role preferences played in it. I'm not going to change my mind entirely on one poll which hasn't ever been repeated when there are valid objections to the question and the signal isn't even that large. You could have polled people on if the electoral college should be gotten rid of after the last US election and you'd probably get a similar sort of polarised answer for the same reasons.
More importantly, I don't really care about what people prefer in their voting system. That probably sounds bad, and I think it's important that people trust it but it's a technical answer to the question of how we discover what people want. That's what I care about, which is why I support compulsory voting which ensures a more representative government at the cost of forcing everyone on the rolls to vote.
I'm also not some weird person who thinks we have it perfect here. Obviously optional preferential voting in all cases would be better, not just for the federal senate, and Hare-Clark nationwide would be even cooler than that. There's always improvements to be made.
http://www.fairvote.org/why-approval-voting-is-unworkable-in...
Later-no-harm is a silly "anti-criterion" that causes more harm than benefit. See explanation by a Princeton math PhD who co-founded the Center for Election Science.
http://scorevoting.net/LNH.html
He refutes similar FairVote FUD here.
http://scorevoting.net/RichieRV.html
FairVote lacks expertise and lies a lot.
https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/fact-check
Here's a layman friendly talk I gave to the Colorado League of Women Voters a few years back.
I suppose we'll see how Maine handers their newly-implemented ranked-choice scheme in the coming election cycles.
This can be objectively measured via metrics like ballot spoilage and precinct summability.
http://scorevoting.net/Lorenzo.html
Here's a read-through of a talk I gave on this.
True, but equilibrium is not the goal. The mere fact that a political system has been around long enough to approach equilibrium means that people have been sleeping at the wheel for a long time.
For example, I've heard from a small but non-trivial number of swing supporters that they would have voted for Sanders, but instead voted for Trump. Ranked voting might have allowed them to vote Sanders > Trump > Hillary in 2016. Others may have preferred Rand Paul, or Gary Johnson, etc.
FPTP is directly responsible for our dichotomous and increasingly unstable political system. We need more choice at the ballot box.
If there's a sizeable proportion of people like that, they'd be able to get their candidate in the primary. By and large you need far fewer votes to win the primary than to win the general.
It always surprises me that there are people who don't bother to vote in the first round of voting, and then complain about the quality of candidates that made it to the second round. Well, yeah; you can't sit things out and hope that other people will pick the person you like. Only 28.5% of eligible voters voted in the presidential primary in 2016 (and non-presidential primaries often have lower turnout).
This was the focus of my post, though I guess it wasn't clear...
What you're suggesting doesn't work across party lines. The Democrat primaries don't care whether Republicans would have voted for Sanders over Trump, and the Republican primaries have a similar problem. Primary systems acts to amplify the passionate voices within each party at the cost of bipartisan preferences.
Really, do people expect the public to be able to rank their candidates?
And what's the problem? Everyone wants to be a king. Government's job is to make sure no one is, with a social contract.
And, in a Democracy, the self-interest of government is the public's interests.
I guess you are too young to remember SOPA/PIPA - that was voted for by Democrats, against by Republicans.
As you mature you'll realize Republican vs Democrat is not as simple as you make it out to be.
The choice is extremely clear. Activism plus voting against the worst option.
Of course, since I live in California, both of "my" senators are Democrats, one of which has been in office since I started high school (24 years ago); it would have been both if the younger of the two (Boxer) hadn't retired.
Somehow, "my" representative is a Republican, though I still think most of the people in this district don't realize that he replaced his father (who held the office from 1981-2009). Maybe the DoJ investigation into his use of campaign finances for personal expenses will open some eyes, but it seems more likely that, if he is removed from office, whoever gets on the ballot with the R next to their name will get the seat (or maybe we'll get multiple people with an R next to their name, like most of the local races).
Not sure how you can hang this on the democrats. PIPA was introduced by Leahy. Still had some republican sponsors.
They didn't vote on either.
I'm really not sure why you had to be condescending about this. You could have made the same point by bringing up SOPA/PIPA. No need to start talking about other posters being young and immature.