December 18, 2011

Priest threatened with arrest for defending free speech in public meeting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MApjMm-I9_E

Fascism has arrived.

Council urges civility, threatens priest with police removal

Father Nathan Monk wasn’t laughing at last night’s City Council meeting. During the Boyd Forum, an open comment period named in honor of the late civic activist LeRoy Boyd, Father Monk chided the council members — and Council President Sam Hall in particular — for their actions at Monday’s Committee of the Whole meeting....
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At last night’s meeting, Monk told the council they had no right to dictate the content of their speech, and suggested that they instead examine any actions by the city that would prompt such comparisons.
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Council President Hall interrupted Monk at that point. “Your time is up, sit down,” he said.

“No, I have a minute and 12 seconds left,” Monk said, looking at the timer at the speaker’s lectern.

“I’m ruling you out of order,” Hall said.

When Monk refused to leave, noting that he had not violated any rules of conduct, Hall asked Police Chief Simmons and two other uniformed police officers in attendance to remove him. He refused to budge until his allotted time was up, after which he was escorted from council chambers by the officers.

more at the video link

December 17, 2011

The Assholocracy

ASSHOLOCRACY: Noun
assholocracy (plural assholocracies)
(slang) government by obnoxious multi-millionaires; rule by assholes
The whole Arab Spring has been a process of bringing down assholocracies.

A Cameron, a Trump, a Sarkozy.
unhappy world of assholocracy

THE ASSHOLOCRACY

Somewhat to my surprise, the Wall Street Journal didn't merely report that "Donald Trump wants a say in who gets the nomination, so he's hosting a presidential debate, holding out the prospect of his endorsement and threatening an independent run" (i.e., behaving like a kingmaker who expects to be honored and courted by the rival candidates); it even quoted candidate Jon Huntsman's remarkably lewd comment about why he's not going to attend the Trump "debate": Huntsman said, "I'm not going to kiss his ring, and I'm not going to kiss any other part of his anatomy."

That vivid and rather gross remark reminded me of how right my extremely cool son Calvin is about the word he wants to see win the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year contest. I had been talking to Calvin one day about the ghastly crew of obnoxious multi-millionaires who dominate the newspapers, and how they keep threatening to achieve success even in the political arena. Calvin pointed out to me both that we need a new political term for the concept of being ruled by such men, and that there already is such a term. We are living, he observed, in the age of the assholocracy.
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The thought of Trump having political power and influence convinces me that assholocracy is going to get my vote at the American Dialect Society's voting session. It's not just to make sure we don't find some stupid compositional phrase winning (I shudder at the thought of having to battle against my good friend Ben Zimmer over such a thing, but you can already see the way he's leaning on the phrase issue), no; it's because assholocracy is a terse and valuable addition to the vocabulary.

The whole Arab Spring has been a process of bringing down assholocracies. Italy suffered under one until recently. Russia and Syria are now protesting against their own crooked assholocracies, and the only reason North Korea and Zimbabwe don't do the same is that they daren't, they could be killed. We in the West are going to need a term for being ruled by assholocrats, because they continue to threaten to exercise power over huge parts of the earth's population even if not (yet) over us.

Update, 1 p.m. EST, 16 December: The spelling assholocracy alone now gets 7,950 Ghits. Language Log (for that is surely the mighty force behind this trend) has increased the web appearances of the word by two orders of magnitude (roughly multiplying them by 100).