NY Times prints a “useless, feel-good, if not a solipsistic meme”
In a recent post I stated that refusal to refer to Trump as President is a form of political resistance:
Apparently, I am not alone:
Trump Endorses Turkish Military Operation in Syria, Shifting U.S. Policy https://nyti.ms/2obcMSC
Including the headline, there are 17 references to Trump in this. New York Times article.
Only one of the 17 refers to him as President.
In recent interviews on MSNBC, both Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law and Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University were engaged in the practice of referring to Trump without a title and simply calling home Mr. Trump.
I’ll take being in the company of Pulitzer winners, Yale professors and Harvard lawyers over the acquiescence of the intellectually lethargic and rhetorically challenged…
Apparently, it is possible to be ‘a’ president without being ‘the’ president.
10/08/2019 @ 10:55 am
I took that position in Nov. 2016.
10/08/2019 @ 11:01 am
I don’t understand why anyone would undertake to criticize this rather mild, yet appropriate, form of resistance.
10/08/2019 @ 11:13 am
First, I dislike the word “meme” intensely. Not even Richard Dawkins, who coined the term, can adequately explain what “meme” means and there are at least two diametrically opposed definitions of the word:
In 1976, in the book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins proposed the idea that cultures develop small, self-contained instruction sets that suggest how people should act in specific situations, thus being the intellectual equivalent of a gene, which performs the same function in biology.
Wikiepedia defines meme as: MEEM),[1][2][3][4] is an activity, concept, catchphrase, or piece of media that spreads, often as mimicry or for humorous purposes, from person to person via the Internet.[5] (This is news to Dawkins. He never intended the word meme to be indicative of mimicry or satire.
Furthermore, In 2013, Dawkins characterized an Internet meme as being a meme deliberately altered by human creativity—distinguished from biological genes and his own pre-Internet concept of a meme, which involved mutation by random change and spreading through accurate replication as in Darwinian selection.[8] Dawkins explained that Internet memes are thus a “hijacking of the original idea”, the very idea of a meme having mutated and evolved in this new direction.[9]
While i UNDERSTAND what meme and solipsistic mean, this is probably the most opaque headline I’ve ever seen.
10/08/2019 @ 11:53 am
The title here is the product of this exchange:
“…I believe that the time has come for the media, and the rest of us, to stop referring to him as ‘the President’.
Ron Powell post at:
“I agree in the main though I have never been w the Not-My-President and Never Say He’s President folks. Oh, yes he is and that’s the issue: every form of denial is what would place us here four or more years hence. The denial is a largely useless, feel-good, if not a solipsistic meme and pledge and act.”
Jonathan Wolfman comment at: