(Untitled)

[felis_ultharus]

"Stories are equipment for living."This is my new favourite quote, gleaned from CBC today. I looked up the quotee, and discovered it was a literary theorist I'd never heard of named Kenneth Burke -- and by coincidence, today would've been 110th birthday if he were still alive

Comments

[jenjoou]

While the idea of new punctuation marks is neat, I worry. Most people have trouble using the ones we have already. -_-

[felis_ultharus]

That's exactly what the show was about -- misuse of punctuation in the internet age. I think it was slanted towards "it's not so bad."

They had the guy who started "punctuation week" in the US. He sang his "pronunciation rap" for the CBC show. I swear I could hear the laughter of schoolchildren -- that special laugh reserved for adults humiliating themselves with desperate, misguided attempts to be cool.

They also had a scholar of Arabic tell us that Arabic uses no punctuation, and writers in that language consciously make use of the deliberate ambiguity that creates.

Then they had a medieval scholar who described haphazard medieval punctuation -- and said she has her students try to read some Chaucer without punctuation and try to come up with alternate interpretations of the lines.

All in all, punctuation took a beating on that show.

[yumemisama]

Completely random fact: In Spanish, which pairs punctuation at the beginning and end of interrogatives and declarations, the internet-equivalent of the interrobang is to mix-'n'-match. So they type--

¡Hay las naranjas en tus pantalones?

where in English one might use the interrobang to end--

There are oranges in your pants?!

[felis_ultharus]

Thank you! Now if I'm ever in the situation where I need that particular Spanish phrase, I'm all prepared :p

It's very Transitive Vampire.

[sorceror]

Not just is it a numbed emulation of the American system

There are plenty of countries that have fixed-term elections. France, for example. Ontario passed a bill on it in 2004. The European Parliament has them to. Why are you singling out the United States? To appeal to Canadian anti-American bigotry?

for no reason,

Not so. The impetus behind it is to prevent the government of the day from manipulating elections by calling them when they're high in the polls, even when they currently still have a mandate. That's exactly what Chretien did for years.

There may be other problems that come with a fixed-date system; but I don't see how the current way of doing things is so infinitely superior.

it also means that we've made it illegal to call an early election.

As I understand it, there are still provisions for a new election if the government falls on a vote of confidence.

The senate once forced Mulrouney to shelve free trade unless he got a new mandate from the people in the form of an electionDid they? I wasn't aware that the

[felis_ultharus]

"Not so. The impetus behind it is to prevent the government of the day from manipulating elections by calling them when they're high in the polls, even when they currently still have a mandate. That's exactly what Chretien did for years."

That's the stated impetus, but not the real one. Harper's a real player, who's not above complete hypocrisy in using the rules he claims to detest to his advantage.

If it were really an honest attempt at election reform, it wouldn't come from the man who put Michael Fortier in the Senate after years of criticizing the Senate.

Harper was also at the forefront of the unite-the-right movement, which aimed to manipulate a flaw in our system of democracy (the first past-the-post system of voting) to get his party into power.

It worked -- the Conservatives got the lowest share of the popular vote of any ruling party in Canadian history. About 61% of the country voted farther to the left.

"As I understand it, there are still provisions for a new election if the government falls on a vote of

[sorceror]

If it were really an honest attempt at election reform, it wouldn't come from the man who put Michael Fortier in the Senate after years of criticizing the Senate.

He also accepted whassisname crossing the floor immediately after the election.

But those two instances of hypocrisy (or giving the Liberals a taste of their own medicine) don't automatically mean that any reform proposed by the Conservatives is necessarily insincere.

Harper was also at the forefront of the unite-the-right movement, which aimed to manipulate a flaw in our system of democracy (the first past-the-post system of voting) to get his party into power.

Oh, come now. There's nothing inherently sinister, or evil, or manipulative, or underhanded about tryng to get all parties right of center under one umbrella. Under our current system, it was in fact politically necessary (or so the party leaders said).

Didn't somebody in the NDP suggest a similar 'unite-the-left' drive not so long ago?

Not into another region-based body, since the House of Commons already

[sorceror]

Whoops! I just saw something on cbc.ca indicating that there are more seats in Parliament than I thought. Does this mean they withdrew Mulroney's law while I wasn't looking? Or was I just wrong about the number of seats?