Facebook & Twitter Notes, April 13, 2019

The President is inciting violence against a sitting Congresswoman—and an entire group of Americans based on their religion. It's disgusting. It's shameful. And any elected leader who refuses to condemn it shares responsibility for it.

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) April 13, 2019

Metonymy. Look it up.
Generally, metonymy is used in developing literary symbolism, meaning it gives more profound meanings to otherwise common ideas and objects. Texts exhibit deeper or hidden meanings, thus drawing readers' attention. In addition, the use of metonymy helps achieve conciseness.

Jay Rosen teaches journalism and direct the Studio 20 program at NYU.

This post from India reminds me of the sweet smiles and sincerity of our own extremists calling themselves pro-life, piously indifferent to the anguish of all involved -- pregnant mother, family & provider as well. True believers are an intractable lot no matter what their belief system may be. Anti-vaccine people and climate change skeptics are a couple more groups that come to mind.

Then there's George Carlin (whom I didn't link at Facebook). This is a bonus for blog readers.

“Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody..."

~~~

From the Grain of Salt department...

Conspiratorial pattern matching of the type that drives forward much of the extreme nuttiness we see today has now been rebranded as 'curatorial journalism.'https://t.co/YRzaqRDs4R@SethAbramson

— John Robb (@johnrobb) April 13, 2019

NPR Weekend Edition Saturday (not yet online) has a segment about this exhibit.

~~~

~~~

It's not yet noon and I'm signing off early today, but this morning has been pretty interesting anyway.
The web has become for me an echo of my first encounter with a good public library in my early teens. Having grown to that point only with whatever books my mother had, including an endless subscription to Reader's Digest, I never saw a really good library with an endless card catalogue, stacks and all that. It was better than a candy store and I spent endless hours there, including access to a pretty good array of LP records anyone could listen to with headphones.
In recent decades the web has become the world's library and the amount of reading is truly endless. It's an exercise of will to resist junk reading, too. It's worse than the temptations of gambling or drugs. And social media is the reading equivalent of both.
Today I get a break. I'm leaving shortly to have lunch with an old friend -- an hour's drive going and coming -- so a chunk of today will be listening to public radio...speaking of other drug-like temptations.