As a member of the right, I refuse any definition of Andrew Sullivan on what is, or is not, sane: http://minx.cc/?post=297814 (flagrant NSFW language, but stay with it: this should be enough to discredit Sullivan as any authority on anything ever.)
gahrie
Is Ryan one of Sullivan’s new heroes, or is Ryan the hero of one of the guy who actually does the writing?
Jazz
Mike,
That linked Ace of Spades post put a little smile on my face of the type you might have if you were in a high school speech class, and ‘Todd’ from the crowd hanging out behind the Gas-N-Sip, working on their Camaros, was proudly giving his final speech about muscle cars.
So the ol’ Ace of Spades thinks that Sully is a moron for thinking that Palin may have named her child Trig because of Down Syndrome being Trisomy G? She was obviously motivated rather by “Norse mythology”? (Little smile. Sure buddy….)
One matter of fact: Ace of Spades suggested that there was “no” Google indication of Trisomy G referred to as Tri-g. I just checked it myself, because, you know, I’m not a sycophant. Ace of Spades must have a different Google than I do.
BTW – for what its worth, any random idiot can name their child whatever they want. But I try to discriminate – even just a little – in whom I call my presidential hopeful…
Jazz
Also, Mike, if Ace of Spades were so confident in Palin’s forthrightness (and Sully’s horrible-ness), wouldn’t it be much better for maintaining your dignity to ask your heroine to just release the kid’s birth certificate, as opposed to debasing your team via slurs like calling Andrew Sullivan a cum-guzzler, as a proxy for him having no right to ask the question? Wouldn’t it be nicer for everyone, yourself included, if Palin simply answered it, a rather simple way to get that offensive man to stop his speculation, and help those such as Ace of Spades channel their better angels?
Jazz
Actually, the most remarkable thing about that Ace of Spades post is the conclusion that Andrew Sullivan chases the Trig birth story NOT because he’s hyper and over-the-top and obsessive-compulsive in pursuit of the fact that
– its weird to leave a conference of your peers to go give birth to a child and not tell any of said peers (who, by the way, frequently have to answer to the media) –
– its weird to travel 18 hours across the planet, once in labor, to give birth to a child with a known birth complication that frequently requires immediate NICU care – definitionally unavailable during the trip
– its weird to make such a trip without warning anyone what risk you are absorbing,
no, Andrew Sullivan chases that down because he’s a crazy gay man who – get this – just doesn’t understand what its like to be pregnant.
I’m not sure how bright the Ace of Spades is, but sake of argument, let’s say he has a modicum of understanding that his position implies that women think Gov. Palin’s birth story makes perfect sense. IOW, since Sully chases it down because he is a feverish, insane gay man, if he had been a breeder, it all would have made sense to him.
You’d think the Ace of Spades, having discovered (apparently) Google enough to have searched the tri-g naming thing, would also be competent enough to search Do women believe Sarah Palin Trig birth story?
What amazing things he might have learned.
(On the off chance you don’t follow that link, there are two – TWO! – obvious links in defense of Palin on the first two pages of that search: one from a blog called “Right Pundit” and another from a lady called Celtic Diva whose narrative makes it look like she was howling at the moon last night. Solid Palinite, there).
Alasdair
Jazz #3 – care to offer some reason why you couldn’t give one or two of the many URLs supporting Sully’s (and *your*) perspective on Palin, that show tri-g as “often used” ?
Cuz a search argument of “Tri-g” trisomy didn’t find references in medical sources to “tri-g” even though it found many references to “trisomy g” … it found lots of references on the non-medical traditional anti-Palin sites, of course, as that VLIE did its thing …
So, how about pulling up that ole Google of yours and post the URLs you find here …
Inquiring minds want to know, and all that …
Vast Leftwing Echochamber = VLIE
Brendan Loy
Not to be pedantic, but I believe that spells VLE.
Jazz
Alasdair, I certainly wasn’t suggesting that Palin was finding that usage for Trisomy-g in JAMA or something like that. I’m pretty hopeful that I never gave the impression of someone who thought Palin was referring to The New England Journal of Medicine when she told Couric that she reads “all the magazines”.
FWIW – the funniest part of the Ace of Spades piece is the suggestion, central to his post, that Sullivan is little more than a histrionic commenter pushing gay-special-interests. That’s all you get from Sullivan, gay this and gay that. Its all gay gay gay gay gay, all day pushing for special treatment of all things gay. So says the Ace of Spades.
Its certainly true, given how hyper and prolific he is, that Sullivan occasionally ventures into the pro-gay-sympathy rant. Such posts probably wouldn’t be too hard to find. However, as far as recurring gay-related themes, Sullivan’s biggest one is his opposition to the Human Rights Commission, in particular their pushing of gay grievances for the sake of filling their coffers, and not actually helping gays. Similarly, he is constantly pushing for an end to hate crimes. Finally, and related, he is notable for pushing – constantly – for his wish to end the gay movement, he is consistent in saying that he looks forward to the day when there is no more gay movement, when gays are fully integrated into normal society. He even wrote (at least) one book on the topic.
That the Ace of Spades, writing from the perspective of the raging homophobic Palin rump of the Republican party, sees Sullivan as little more than a pusher of gay-as-special-interest, shows how brain dead that fellow is. Its things like this that make you question the intelligence of the bloggy right – regardless of your view on evangelical homophobia, practitioners ought to at least be smart enough to recognize that Sullivan, in his opposition to special treatment for gays, is a friend, among openly gay commenters. Sigh. Stupid.
Alasdair
(grin) We agree on that … (sigh) … for whatever reason, just after I hit Enter, I realised that I was missing the I part, for which I apologise … and it has taken me until now to get back in, for whatever reason … (mutter,grumble)
Here’s what it should have been …
Vast Leftwing Incestuous Echochamber = VLIE
(Any chance of a Preview function being made available here ?)
Alasdair
Jazz #8 – I specifically referenced Jazz #3 because I have not found medical-related references to “tri-g” anywhere around the date of Trig’s birth or prior to that …
There are a lot of VLIE-mutual references to “tri-g” in the past few days, in the context of Palin-bashing …
Sullivan-now, sadly, is not anywhere near as rational as Sullivan-past … when I first encountered his blog, it was a breath of fresh air … and then he got sucked into flaming BDS … at that point, he became painful to read, precisely because he had used to be so rational … the Daily Dish used to be witty gratuitous insult, well-crafted … (sorta like elder Loy at his best) … now, unfortunately, Sullivan is mostly (well, the past few times I read him (cuz I go back, hopefully, about each quarter)) shrill and repetitious and unoriginal … I don’t know if it’s his meds that are no longer working or what, but I wish he’d get back to where he was when I first encountered him … he used to be one of the few who consistently championed *human* rights, not gay rights, not women’s right, not left-handed albino vertically-challenged persons-of-color’s rights … you get the idea …
David K.
Jazz, i’d like to thank you for your well argued, well reasoned critique. Its something that is all to often lacking around here in the comments section.
Jazz
Alasdair, maybe you’re right about the trisonomy-g thing. Meh. Who am I kidding. I obviously don’t read JAMA either.
Re: Sullivan – the interesting thing about that guy is everyone hates him because Sullivan pissed them off. Count me among that crowd. I’ve written Sullivan a half dozen angry emails; he published a photo of a girl receiving a cliterodectomy several months ago that still haunts this father of young daughters. He’s quite an ass sometimes.
That said, he’s a really great blogger. Probably the best from a sheer quality of bloggy journalism perspective. Glenn Reynolds or Matt Drudge isn’t bad, but neither has the same provocative commentary, and both fall into partisanism way too much. Sullivan is interesting – on a wider range of topics than other famous bloggy news sources. For comparison, I am investigating an investment opportunity in a city with which I am unfamiliar. I’ve been going through recent issues of their newspaper to learn more about the city. Its not a famous newspaper, but its not bad.
And its nowhere near as interesting as Sullivan’s blog. Not just because its “old media”; the whole thing is online, after all. Its just boring. Really, except for when Sully is perseverating on Palin, Cheney or whatever – which can seem like a lot of the time – damn do he and his team do a good job of keeping it moving, keeping their blog interesting. Very impressive.
Jazz
David @11: thanks for the kind comments, but frankly taking credit for making well-reasoned arguments in this stream-of-consciousness, fly-by-the-seat format would be like Obama taking credit for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe someday I’d be worthy of such an accolade. But there’s a ways to go between here and there.
Jazz, @#3: So the ol’ Ace of Spades thinks that Sully is a moron for thinking that Palin may have named her child Trig because of Down Syndrome being Trisomy G? She was obviously motivated rather by “Norse mythology”? (Little smile. Sure buddy….)
Why not? You can pull names from baby books out of anywhere. I once worked with a girl named “Porsche” who was not, in fact, a car.
Jazz, @#4: Also, Mike, if Ace of Spades were so confident in Palin’s forthrightness (and Sully’s horrible-ness), wouldn’t it be much better for maintaining your dignity to ask your heroine to just release the kid’s birth certificate
Dare to ask that question of the president, despite citizenship being an actual qualification of his office, and you’re blackballed as a crackpot lunatic un-American racist cracker. But I suppose it’s a perfectly legitimate demand for the infant child of the Vice Presidential candidate.
How does this still have life? Trig was born on April 18, 2008. Tripp, Bristol’s son, was born on December 27. Bristol was already pregnant when Trig was born. So where, exactly, did this child come from? Willow?
Sullivan’s continued belief in such a patently absurd idea should have been Exhibit A that his Palin Derangement Syndrome had made him take leave of his senses. But this nonsense that Palin deliberately named her child after the mental disability he would carry for the rest of his life, an act nearly as heinous as naming a kid “Cystic Fibrosis Jones” or “AIDS McGee,” is not just noxious vitriol directed at someone he doesn’t like, but as Alasdair has pointed out, a goddamn lie. Which is ironic considering one of Sullivan’s entire underpinnings for that post is that he believes Sarah Palin to be incapable of telling the truth.
Jazz, @#8: FWIW – the funniest part of the Ace of Spades piece is the suggestion, central to his post, that Sullivan is little more than a histrionic commenter pushing gay-special-interests. That’s all you get from Sullivan, gay this and gay that. Its all gay gay gay gay gay, all day pushing for special treatment of all things gay. So says the Ace of Spades.
It’s no secret that Sullivan began his turn against the modern right when the same-sex marriage argument heated up and he found himself at odds with most of his then-brethren.
Jazz, @#12: He’s quite an ass sometimes. That said, he’s a really great blogger. Probably the best from a sheer quality of bloggy journalism perspective.
True. Most people don’t know this, but many moons ago I was, briefly, moonlighting as a writer for RealClearPolitics way way WAYYYY before they got famous. When I asked how they wanted me to present my pieces, they gave me the URL to the Daily Dish and said “Like that.” Sullivan practically invented the format, and everyone in the blogosphere owes him a huge debt for helping make the medium accessible to the masses.
For years I’d read his stuff, perhaps not faithfully as clockwork, but in the same category as guys like Mickey Kaus at Slate — iconoclasts whose opinions were always relevant even if I didn’t agree. But somewhere he lost a great deal of the intellectual edge that separated him from his peers. He, like Charles Johnson today, is so obsessed with proving the right wrong that he’s become every bit the partisan he’s forever claimed not to be. Come on: read his masthead and try not to giggle.
I can even accept his sometimes hyper-reactionary-to-the-point-of-silly responses on the gay front — after all, we all have buttons we don’t like getting pushed (Sarah Palin’s, clearly, is “retarded”) — but he’s clearly not as good, or as fair, as he once was, and this episode proves it.
Sandy Underpants
I think Jazz has the stronger passion for Palin, but I love her immensely as well. Trig is not Bristol’s son, he’s the son of one of Palin’s relatives who found out he was going to be born with Tri-G and was going to abort him and Palin convinced her not to and blah blah blah, I could go on, but we don’t have the time.
It’s really an astronomical coincidence to believe that Trig was NOT named for the disease he was diagnosed with before birth Trisomy-G. That’s right up there with that fold the 20 dollar bill up into a hundred directions and get the blueprint for 9/11 shit.
It truly is not only impossible to believe the Trig birth story with the flight from Texas to Alaska, AFTER her water broke, it’s not even legal, it would never happen and if it did happen there would be charges filed because nobody can fly when they’re 9 months pregnant… you can’t fly when you’re 7 months pregnant… I’m pretty sure flying after your water broke is against FAA regulations.
Jazz
Sandy Underpants is right, of course, to suggest that believing that someone randomly named their son “Trig” when the child suffers from the syndrome “Trisomy G” requires belief in astronomical coincidence. Er, maybe. To Alasdair’s earlier point that the Google entries only show recent, post-Sullivan comments: that’s either because Sullivan made it up, or because Google aggregates recent comments, and people are reacting to the Sullivan kerfuffle. I’m not really interested enough to parse that debate, since I trust my lying eyes more than pages 10-12 of any Google search.
Mike Marchand’s characterization of the naming of a child after their syndrome as a noxious, impossible lie…do you base this on your years of familiarity with Palin? Are you and the Palins old buddies? Do you know anything about her beyond what has been filtered through sympathetic media? How do you know she wouldn’t do something pathologically unfeeling toward her handicapped son?
Keep in mind that, whatever the source of the early part of the kid’s name, the latter half of his name is definitionally unseemly! He’s Trig Paxson Van Palin. Van Palin, Mike. Those cheesy idiots love Van Halen, which Todd is on record as the source of the Van Palin ridiculousness. Maybe naming your handicapped son after tight-pants, late 70s Diamond Dave and friends is complimentary, but I know for sure you wouldn’t think so, Mike, since you originated the Pete-Townsend-as-older-than-dust meme during the Super Bowl. Maybe your kid can go to school with T. P. Van Palin and make fun of him someday. Someone’s kid will.
And you think the Palin’s are above saddling their kid with a laughingstock name?
Why in the world would you think that, when they empirically did?
gahrie
Look…movie stars give their kids absurd names all the time. Freaking Apple?
The Palins have already shown a tendancy to give thir kids unusual names.
As a teacher you would not believe the weird names and variant spellings I have to deal with.
The Palins have not done anything that is nearly out of today’s ordinary.
Brendan Loy
Okay, I’ve been trying to stay out of this fight — in fact, I haven’t even read all the comments on the thread — but, gahrie, did you seriously just say that Palin isn’t “out of today’s ordinary” because she acts in a way that’s similar to… commie leftist pinko HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITIES?!?!?
Seriously?!?!?! That’s your argument in defense of this populist conservative icon, this ardent defender of Joe Sixpack’s real-American values against the evil coastal elites?
Okay. I look forward to the Streisand-Penn GOP presidential ticket in 2012.
Brendan Loy
P.S. I’m not saying Jazz is right — I’m not convinced that baby names matter, at all, as a presidential qualification — but your chosen line of argument is… well, just really odd, considering the source and the topic. Given that you’re grasping at Hollywood naming practices to defend Palin, it’s not hard to imagine you being on the other side of the argument if we were talking about, say, John Kerry’s daughter Apple Ruby-violet Kerry (and laughing your head off if any Kerry defender dared to use the “Hollywood defense” you just used — “it’s not ‘out of the ordinary’ if celebrities do it!!” AHAHAHAHAHA)
gahrie
Read the rest of my comment Brendan….I said EVERYONE is giving their kids weird names and names with weird spellings today to show that the palins are NOT out of the mainstream. I mentioned the Hollywood people for the benefit of the commie leftist pinkos on this site.
gahrie
P.S. I definitely have no problems with anyone naming their kid after one of the greatest rock bands of all time, Van Halen.
Jazz
Gahrie, the point is not whether “Running With the Devil” rocks more than “D’yer Maker”, for example. Nor is it whether lots of folks are giving their kids names with weird alternative spellings these days. (Both are true, by the way).
A child with Down Syndrome goes through life with an unusual dose of self-consciousness (I once spent a semester doing research with an elementary school Down Syndrome population, thus I speak from experience). Naming a child after Van Halen in 2008 is an open invitation for ridicule, particularly from that part of the elementary school population which doesn’t get misty-eyed from memories of David Lee Roth in spandex, which, come to think of it, is probably the entire elementary school population.
That Team Palin thought that such a moniker was “no big deal” is a pretty good suggestion that the Trisomy-G/Trig connotation was surely not beneath them. This is a vastly different issue than some trendy parents naming their daughter Mysty.
Jazz
The thing about the Trisomy-G/Trig thing that is so annoying is that the Palinbots, in their cultish devotion to Queen Sarah, have lost their capacity for embarassment.
I mean, if you told me that someone I don’t know had a kid with the unfortunate medical condition Trisomy G and they named that child “Trig” and you asked me if I thought there was something unseemly about that, I’d say it sure looks that way. Maybe we would talk a bit more and you would explain that the person had some Paul Bunyan-esque figure in their family named Trig. And I’d be like, oh, well, isn’t that interesting, and then make some comment about how unfortunate it was to have some beloved family member with a name that was disturbingly close to a callous invocation of the kid’s condition.
With Palin, there is no Paul Bunyan-esque figure in their family’s past, there’s no indication of anything beyond, well, she just kind of liked it, and even if – by some bizarre chance – the weird-naming Palins just happened to randomly like a name that is (or is not?) shorthand for their kid’s disability, that apparently doesn’t bother them enough to be self-conscious about it!!!
And you Palin-bots, it doesn’t bother you either.
I find that profoundly odd. Gahrie, are you unable to recognize that, best case scenario, giving your kid with Trisomy-G a Trisomy-G-ish name is a terribly unfortunate coincidence? That having done so requires some sort of display of public remorse at the unfortunate coincidence, rather than the typical Palin-ish well we just like weird names so don’t get on our case?
Is Palin really so beloved that she never has to say she’s sorry, for fuckups like her disabled kid’s Trisomy-G-ish name, whether accidental or otherwise?
What does it take to get you Palinbots to be my groupies? I’ll never be as sexy as Sarah, but I might be able to sweeten the pot a little money-wise….
Jazz
Actually, on that weird name meme:
The Palins had a son, and they named him Track, which apparently was the sport that Todd and Sarah were involved in when they met. Then they had a daughter, and they named her Bristol, the home of ESPN, where Sarah wanted to work. Then they had a second daughter, and named her Willow, after the bay where Todd actually worked and raced. Then a third daughter, and they named her Piper, Todd’s plane. Finally, a son, named Trig, which happened to be a reference to his disability, though that is mere coincidence, as they just picked his name at random, out of a book or something.
I am not a lawyer, but isn’t there some sort of principle in the law that says that precedence implies intent? That if you have done something intentionally four times, and you do that same thing a fifth time, and claim it was accidental, that the law will tend to infer intent? I could be wrong on this.
Sandy Underpants
I’m not a judge, but…guilty!
I don’t know what the big deal is with Palin naming her baby after the chromosomal deficiency he suffers from. When I told my closest of all confidant’s of the origins of Trig’s name she said that was extremely cruel and became visibly upset about it. I put my hand on her knee and said, that’s okay he’s a retard he doesn’t even know what his name is.
Unfortunately, someone apparently advised Palin to not come out and admit the origin of Trig’s name, because I’m positive she would have no problem being honest about it, she’s not ashamed of that. I watched her with Chris Wallace on Fox on Sunday and she said that it would be no problem beating Obama in 2012… unless he decides to attack Iran, then it would be difficult. And Chris Wallace almost swallowed his teeth, it was hillarious. He says, “If he starts a war with Iran that will help get him re-elected!?!?” and she was so non-chalant about what a great campaign idea that was I bet she wrote it down on her hand when they turned the off the camera for 2016.
Alasdair
Jazz #24 – I don’t know how many kids *you* have, but as a parent of 4 daughters, finding names for the first couple of daughters was easy – my lady wife and I were able to find a couple of names we both liked … and we also shot down a lot of names the other one liked … by daughter #4, we were down to the last name we could agree upon pretty much …
In terms of what folk having kids nowadays are choosing as names, with all due respect to our blog-host, his daughters risk being known in their primary school classes as Loyette and Loycita – all it will take is one of their classmates making the connection …
Jazz #16 – I didn’t say “that the Google entries only show recent, post-Sullivan comments” – I said that my Google search didn’t support the assertion that “tri-g” is a common scientific way to express “trisomy g” – and I asked you where *you* (Jazz) had found it ? So far, it seems that you found it in the VLIE … and that is sad …
I have to admit that it continues to fascinate me how easily the VLIE can obsess over “tri-g” and, for whatever reason, give Obama/Pelosi/Reid an amazing pass on the Federal Budget and the economy …
Brendan Loy
his daughters risk being known in their primary school classes as Loyette and Loycita
It is for precisely this reason that, when coming up with the girls’ blog nicknames, one of the rules was: “if it were to become a ‘real-life’ nickname, it wouldn’t be horribly embarrassing.” I think “Loyette” and “Loyacita” pass that test. I mean, a middle-school kid can use anything to taunt a peer, but those names aren’t uniquely catchy or amusingly humiliating, so far as I can tell.
Brendan Loy
P.S. There is also a direct relationship between your point and the near total dearth of baby/toddler pictures on the blog since I relaunched last June. 🙂
Jazz
Back to the topic not-exactly-at-hand: I’m a guy who loves a good conspiracy as much as the next guy (unless that next guy is Sandy Underpants). As such, mine is a sympathetic ear when those on the right suggest that Obama might be a Socialist/Marxist/Internationalist traitor.
Unfortunately, that same crowd is apparently unable to connect the dots between Sarah Palin’s first four childrens’ “offbeat, but topical” names, and her fifth child’s “offbeat, but topical” name. Asking that crowd to suss out Obama’s sinister Socialist/Marxist intentions feels a little bit like asking a toddler to do your taxes.
One has this sense that any day now, Obama is going to register a new small business, “Obama’s Socialist/Marxist Snow Removal Service and Lemonade Stand”. Soon thereafter Rush Limbaugh will be lamenting how Obama’s business is anti-competitive in attempting to wrap up the winter and summer marketplaces. Sean Hannity will point out that Obama’s unionized workers put unreasonable time demands on how often they come shovel.
And Bill O’Reilly will add that you have to admit the lemonade is pretty good.
gahrie
It’s the Kool Aid that Pres. Obama’s supporters crave, not lemonade.
Jazz, @#16: Sandy Underpants is right, of course, to suggest that believing that someone randomly named their son “Trig” when the child suffers from the syndrome “Trisomy G” requires belief in astronomical coincidence.
No kidding. Poor Lou Gehrig had the same problem.
Mike Marchand’s characterization of the naming of a child after their syndrome as a noxious, impossible lie…
The “lie” was Sullivan’s assertion that the condition trisomy-g is “often” shortened to tri-g “in medical slang,” when that should be “rarely” at the absolute best, far closer to “never.” You refuse to do the legwork on this for the same reason he does: it’s easier to believe the absolute worst about someone you do not like than admit that in this one, minor instance, you may be wrong, and perhaps Sarah Palin is a generally decent person even if you might disagree with her on energy policy or some other arcane topic.
do you base this on your years of familiarity with Palin? Are you and the Palins old buddies?
No, I base this on the fact that Sarah Palin — who, let’s not forget, is dumb as a stump, and not even a fresh stump that a tree’s just been cut off of, but an old, gnarled, termite-ridden stump — is unlikely to have got the tests from her ultrasound and thought, “Well, this child is going to have special needs and require special care, but I refuse to abort him — I’m going to carry him to term, then cruelly name him after the very cross he’s going to bear for the rest of his life to reinforce that yes, I have a mongoloid retard baby, in the hopes that it will boost the political career I only barely have, being the governor of a state that nobody cares about for less than a year. But, even though I’m a backwards rube hick who can’t make a speech without having to write on her hand, like a dummy who has to write ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ on her shoes, instead of naming the baby ‘Down’ and claiming it’s for soft, embracing goose feathers, I’m going to take the clinical name that’s rarely used, then shorten it to a form “often” used “in medical slang,” even though I ain’t no doctor and thus probably never even hear medical slang, and look, lucky me, that happens to be a legitimate name in this here baby book! Why, I’m so happy I’m gonna kill me a caribou tonight, hyuk hyuk hyuk.”
Somehow I find that more improbable than sheer unfortunate luck that the child’s name happens to be the same as his disease, minus four letters and a hyphen. Also, this just in — the parents of actress Rhea Pearlman obviously named their child after gonorrhea, just because they have to have, ’cause, come on. That can’t be a coincidence.
Do you know anything about her beyond what has been filtered through sympathetic media?
Please tell me you’re not using “Sarah Palin” and “sympathetic media” in the same argument. Christ, she’s getting flack for having notecards at a speech except without the cards when our current president can’t pick up his dry cleaning without having a TelePrompter stapled to his head.
How do you know she wouldn’t do something pathologically unfeeling toward her handicapped son?
How do you know she would? I think the burden of proof is still on you, and the mere fact that their names are similar, and all the Palin’s other kids have strange names, and then employing the age-old persuasion tactic of nodding and winking is not conclusive. Or, on the other hand, you have a constant critic of hers who, by your admission, is occasionally an ass — might maybe he be so desperate to smear her because nothing else has stuck that he either made something up or ran with a tip without checking it?
But, you know, that’s just me, and I own five Van Halen albums, so obviously I’m biased in this area.
There’s a difference between giving a kid a weird, dorky name — I have one myself — and being deliberately malicious to the point that it’s just repulsive to even consider. I realize that many on the right harbor similar irrational hatred of President Obama, as they did President Clinton before him. That doesn’t make it any less becoming.
I should probably go ahead and note that the first part of my comment above is facetious.
Jazz
Mike Marchand, I find it odd that you think the burden of proof is on me to prove Palin’s un-fitness, rather than on Palin to rebut suspicion of unfitness, considering that Palin is seriously positioning herself to have, among other things, access to the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Among other expressions of extreme power. Its pretty disturbed to put the onus on me (a randomly nobody) rather than Palin (an aspirant to having her finger on the button).
Not being a doctor, I can’t really comment on how frequently Trisomy-G is shortened to Tri-g, nor can I judge between Andrew Sullivan’s verdict of “often” or yours of “almost never”, since I find no good reason to trust either of you. What I can say – with certainty – is that the Palins gave each of their first four children names that are both
a) offbeat, and
b) topical
which criteria Trig as a shortening of Trisomy G rather obviously fits.
It disturbs me that seemingly intelligent folk such as yourself think I am “shaking down poor Palin”. Again, she wants to be the President. The nuclear arsenal. All the rest. I could be totally wrong, but wouldn’t it be better if she established that fact, rather than you just asserting it? Again, ol’ Jazz is nowhere near the nuclear arsenal, so it doesn’t matter much how crazy I am.
Please keep in mind that one of the main things I’ve argued that “doesn’t stick” is that her story of the circumstances around her fifth child’s birth are way beyond belief. That hasn’t stuck, Mike, because she produced the child’s birth cert-
– no wait a second it doesn’t stick because you’re a feverish irrational partisan.
Jazz
I pointed out to David K., several days ago, that the main enjoyment of this blog was the pushback from folks like Sandy Underpants that opens one’s mind to ideas such as why the Apollo program is definitively real (i.e. because the Soviets never called our bluff).
As enjoyable as it is to discuss things like the moon landing, so too is it grueling enduring the moonbattery that comes about in threads like this, in the form of “ha ha Jazz don’t you feel stupid suggesting that the Trig birth story is suspicious…because…uhhh…don’t you feel stupid?” Yes. I feel stupid. Threads like this make me feel extremely stupid. But surely not for the reasons the Palinbots think.
Good luck to all – catch you on the other side….
Joe Mama
I’ve been greatly enjoying this thread while also trying to stay out of this fight, but I can’t resist commenting on the following:
Mike Marchand, I find it odd that you think the burden of proof is on me to prove Palin’s un-fitness, rather than on Palin to rebut suspicion of unfitness, considering that Palin is seriously positioning herself to have, among other things, access to the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Among other expressions of extreme power. Its pretty disturbed to put the onus on me (a randomly nobody) rather than Palin (an aspirant to having her finger on the button).
This is complete and utter crap from Jazz. Palin’s fitness for office is not the issue here. Rather, the issue is whether she purposely gave her disabled child a name specifically to mock that child’s unfortunate condition. The vile and ugly nature of the accusation leveled at Palin by Sullivan, Jazz, and any other Palin-obsessed Trig-truthers should be enough for any fair-minded person to put the onus squarely on the accusers. But let’s say arguendo that it’s not. The name in question definitely has a meaning that supports Mike. It may also have a meaning that supports Jazz and Sullivan, depending on how frequently Trisomy-g is shortened to Tri-g “in medical slang.” Sullivan and Jazz say “often,” Mike and Ace of Spades say it’s closer to “never.” Placing the burden on Mike and Ace of Spades to prove a negative is obviously untenable. Thus, the burden falls on Jazz to, as Mike says, “do the legwork on this.” So far he has not. Burden not met.
Oh, and contra Jazz, according to the story I found from the campaign addressing the Palin children’s names, it says that Bristol was named for Bristol Bay where the family fishes, not anything at all having to do with ESPN.
Jazz
A few final thoughts:
There is only one question of interest here: does the Trisomy G/Trig connection represent a continuation of a pattern of “offbeat, but topical” names used by Team Palin for their first four children?
That Marchand and Mama drag it over into some sort of referendum on the frequency of Tri-g is deeply depressing in how badly it misses the point: as a friendly suggestion, fellas, google “offbeat”, read a bunch of entries for it, and then think about how relevant it is whether: a few/some/a lot of people follow the Trisomy G/Trig convention. Or to be more clear: when I suggest that the Palins named their child Piper after a plane, it is certainly not because I googled “Piper+plane+child’s name” and found multiple instances of that. Duh.
The lack of intellecual firepower faced in this discussion is profoundly depressing. The suggestion that there is some relevance to Palin making the Trisomy G/Trig connection by the frequency with which others do, when its a given that the Palins are offbeat, but topical, namers, is but one example. Marchand’s pained attempt at humor in the Lou Gehrig case is another: Gehrig was rather obviously diagnosed with what was exclusively known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, later coming to be referred to as “his” disease, while in Alaska a child was born with what had for a long time been known as Trisomy G, and was subsequently named Trig. Its asking too much, probably, for you to see that distinction. It surely isn’t good for my blood pressure.
Finally, I wish to publicly thank Joe Mama for defeating the “Palins give their children offbeat, but topical names” meme by pointing out that their oldest daughter was not named for the city of Sarah’s dream job, but rather for the place where the family enjoys their fishing vacation. Very helpful. I think I’ll now go to my daughter’s day care and get into some disputes with two-year olds, as at least with the kids you get a bit of laughter to go with the heaping sense of depression from arguing with intellectual toddlers.
Once more, and for real this time, good luck to one and all. Catch you later.
gahrie
Well Jazz, I am deeply distressed at the Left’s obsessive need to personalize politics and attack those they oppose as both evil and stupid.
It is perfectly acceptable to question the parentage of Gov. Palin’s youngest child, but to question the birthplace of Pres. Obama makes you a crazy extremist.
It is perfectly acceptable to attack Gov. Palin for attending multiple colleges and universities, while allowing Pres. Obama to refuse to release his college transcripts or papers. (and even allow him to restrict access to his wife’s college papers)
Vice – President Quayle is destroyed for his speaking gaffes, Vice- President Biden is chuckled at for his.
President Bush is an idiot for mispronouncing words, President Obama is not.
It is perfectly acceptable to attack Pres. Bush with fake National Guard records, but allow Sen. Kerry to withhold his service records.
It is perfectly acceptable to attack Sen. McCain with spurious allegations of an affair, while refusing to cover the affair of Sen. Edwards.
Jazz
When I say I’m signing off, its not in the petulant, I’m-taking-my-ball-and-going-home manner. At least I don’t think so. Its more in the sense that threads like this one are pretty grueling, and there’s no way I’m disciplined enough – obviously – to steer clear of Palin mania in the 2+ years to come.
FWIW, I agree with a fair bit of Gahrie’s sentiment in the post just above, that while the fishy details of Trig’s birth story are more egregious than the examples in Gahrie’s post, its also true that that fish(picker) story gets a lot more heat than the examples Gahrie mentions, which get almost none. While Palin is not answering for the most bizarre story on the political landscape, she’s catching a fair bit of flak for it, and though the other examples are somewhat less bizarre, they are associated with virtually no flak whatsoever.
Oh, and, inspired comparison between Biden and Quayle. From a sheer executive leadership perspective, Quayle was pretty much a young Biden. I like that.
Joe Mama
There is only one question of interest here: does the Trisomy G/Trig connection represent a continuation of a pattern of “offbeat, but topical” names used by Team Palin for their first four children? That Marchand and Mama drag it over into some sort of referendum on the frequency of Tri-g is deeply depressing in how badly it misses the point: as a friendly suggestion, fellas, google “offbeat”, read a bunch of entries for it, and then think about how relevant it is whether: a few/some/a lot of people follow the Trisomy G/Trig convention.
LOL…but if Tri-g is not in fact used as shorthand for Trisomy-g, then how exactly is the name “topical?!” The answer, of course, is that it would not be, except for the fact that the four letters in the child’s name also appear in the term Trisomy-g (which is no doubt more than enough for the crackpots in the fever swamps to triumphantly proclaim “Coincidence? I THINK NOT!”, but so what). In other words, there may be no “Trisomy G/Trig connection” to begin with, which, far from “badly miss[ing] the point,” would in fact undercut Jazz’s entire argument! Jazz obviously knows this, which is why he tried at first to argue the point in his first comment on this thread. When his Google search presumably did not prove up his/Sullivan’s theory, he merely made the incredibly limp and unsupported claim that “Ace of Spades must have a different Google than I do” and then dutifully tried to change the subject with a WHOLLY IRRELEVANT Google search on “Do women believe Sarah Palin Trig birth story?” and then even went so far as to try to explain away the adverse results. Then when Mike Marchand correctly called him on the lack of support for this key premise of his argument, Jazz retreated to “it’s not my burden,” which is an absurd position, as I explained above. Jazz has now resorted to questioning the “intellectual firepower” of Mike and I, and insulting me as an “intellectual toddler,” which basically means he has conceded the point.
Jazz
Joe Mama, you suggest that thinking there is some correlation between “Trig” and “Trisomy-G” is the stuff of crackpots in fever swamps. Let’s unpack that assertion.
If we take the names of the first four Palin children as a reasonably good indication that the Palins were of the habit of providing their children with offbeat, yet topical names, then the question becomes, what is the probability that, with their fifth child, the Palins
a) quit the pattern of topical names, while retaining the offbeat theme, and
b) randomly landed on a name for their fifth child that nevertheless looks like it might be sorta topical?
The odds of any consecutive four letter combination is, of course, 1 in 26^4. That’s 1 in 456,976. Now many four letter combinations would be immediately rejected (four consonants, for example). However, nothing says the name has to be four letters; the name Bristol suggests it could be as many as seven letters. For simplicity, let’s say that the reduction in possibilities (from nonsense four letter strings) is roughly offset by the greater number of possibilities from three, five, six, seven – or more – letter strings, such that the actual probability of accidentally landing on a topical-sounding name might be somewhere in the ballpark of 1 in 400,000.
We also need to meet the criteria of the Palins stopping the pattern of topical, offbeat names, which they apparently used for their first four children, and instead just switching to offbeat names. Of course I have no way of knowing – no way of googling – what the likelihood of people switching from “topical, offbeat” to just “offbeat” is after four kids. As a complete SWAG, I’m gonna say that there’s about a 10% chance that a family who has followed the “topical, offbeat” method switches to “offbeat” for their fifth kid. I could be completely incorrect here. I cop to it being just a guess.
As a result, the probability that the Palins a) switched away from their strategy of topical names and b) accidentally landed on a letter string that happened to look topical, is simply the product of the two above probabilities. That would be 1/10 X 1/400,000, or somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 in 4 million.
I do wish you well, Joe Mama, but I really can’t see myself spending the next two and a half years listening to characterizations of those who suspect that 1- in-4-million probabilities don’t typically occur as having “fever-swamp” obsessions with coincidence. You’re certainly welcome to believe whatever you wish. It doesn’t do much for my mental health hearing about it.
Joe Mama
Joe Mama, you suggest that thinking there is some correlation between “Trig” and “Trisomy-G” is the stuff of crackpots in fever swamps.
Wrong. I am suggesting that thinking a mother would purposely gave her disabled child a name specifically to mock that child’s unfortunate condition is the stuff of crackpots in fever swamps. Whether there is some correlation between Trig’s name and Trisomy-G very much remains to be seen, even taking into account whatever statistical analysis you were trying to perform above.
Jazz
To put it slightly differently, there were something like 400,000 usable letter combinations that the offbeat-naming Palins could have randomly landed on for their fifth child (assuming they followed a random road), and they landed on a particular one that happens to be used – with some unknown frequency – to refer to their child’s disability.
It was uncalled-for, and a violation of blog protocol, for me to use terminology like “intellectual toddler”. I apologize. As I said over on the Derbyshire thread, I’m a dour pessimist conservative, who believes that society needs to protect us from our worst demons. One of my worst demons is keeping cool in response to arguments such as the one described in the paragraph above. Surely it is better not to expose myself to the risk.
Joe Mama
Or even another way of putting it is that the Palins didn’t choose Trig’s name at random. BFD, we already know that. They said they chose the name for its Norse meaning. You just choose not to believe that because, c’mon, what are the odds that a name could have both a Norse meaning and consist of four letters that are used (or, you know, not used) to refer to the child’s disability!! Probably the same or shorter odds that an even longer name could be both the bay where the family fishes and the town of Sarah’s purported dream job. I accept your apology, but your analysis is meaningless.
Jazz
Probably the same or shorter odds that an even longer name could be both the bay where the family fishes and the town of Sarah’s purported dream job.
As a response to the question, what are the odds that Sarah Palin randomly landed on a name that identifies her son’s disability, this is surely a candidate for one of the stupidest things in the history of the blog.
Why is that Joe Mama? Because no one denies that the daughter named after the ESPN town/fishing spot’s name is intentional.
However, you are arguing, now derisively, that Trig’s name is obviously not intentional wrt his condition, and to prove that it is not intentional, you are bringing up the example of the daughter’s name, which, you know, was intentional.
When I apologized earlier, it was to the internet gods and right behavior, not particularly to you, since while it might have been too harsh to call you an intellectual toddler, your efforts here, and elsewhere, leave a lot more to be desired than you apparently believe.
Jazz
Wait a second – I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention, your argument Joe is that while the odds of the Palins randomly landing on a name that references their child’s condition are one in several million, they didn’t randomly land on that name, they intentionally landed on that name, only it happened to randomly have some other meaning with some other culture that they are otherwise totally disconnected with, which fully settles the matter.
Chances of the Palin family choosing their names by random letter combination are not high … even your own statistical method, while probably as taught at East Anglia, lacks something … surely such aleatory decision-making would have to include something like rolling a die for the number of letters to use in the name … after all, Track is 5 letters, is it not, as is Piper ?
If there was randomness of choice, it *might* plausibly have happened in the selection of a book of baby names from amongst the many available books of baby names, and, then, in the choice of page from which to choose a name, and then in the choice of specific name from that page …
Me, I would bet small amounts of cash that *something*, pre-delivery, caught the Palin’s attention about the name Trig and they agreed that that would be it …
Hmmm … is this sufficient sado-masochistic necrophiliac bestiality, perhaps ?
Joe Mama
And how do you know that the Palins are “totally disconnected” with the culture that they say spawned the name? Are you now an expert on Sarah Palin’s ancestral history as well as her medical history? Are you now adding etymologist to your resumé? I eagerly await some half-baked statistical analysis that purports to show how unlikely it is that immigrants with the surname Palin are of Scandinavian descent.
Joe Mama
Jesus H. Christ…both of my wife’s parents are 100% off-the-boat Italian immigrants and they gave my wife a French name despite being “totally disconnected” to French culture. They just friggin’ liked the name! Even if Jazz is correct that the Palins are “totally disconnected” to Norse culture, that proves ABSOLUTELY FRIGGIN’ NOTHING about the veracity of their account of how they came up with the name Trig.
Jazz
Let me try science.
We have no idea, beyond their attestation, whether the Palin’s Norse-based explanation is true. The scientist would evaluate their claim net of their credibility – if their credibility is unimpeachable, then science is irrelevant; for the rest of this post I’m going to assume the source of the name is an open question, despite what they say.
So. Our null hypothesis is that the name they chose was motivated by something random, not particularly topical to the child being born.
Our experimental hypothesis is that they were following the family’s pattern of choosing names that had some context or meaning related to their child or life.
There are several million names they might have chosen, assuming the null hypothesis is correct. It turns out that the actual name they chose is, apparently, one that satisfies the experimental hypothesis of a name with some contextual meaning.
Conventionally, a scientist would say that there has to be less than a 5% probability of a phenomenon occuring by chance before the scientist said that it didn’t occur by chance. In this case, if there were somewhere on the order of 4 million names that could have been randomly found, then there have to be somewhere north of 200,000 of those random names that would have been a “fit” before you conclude that landing on a “fit” name might have happened by chance, and not intentionally.
You could argue, I suppose, that Alaska is a rather largish place, and if we include all the bays and lakes and mountains and what-not, and then we throw in all the activities the busy family is involved in, and stretch our minds thusly, we might get to 200,000 names in the universe of nameable words that would make a fit, in which case the Palins landing on one of them is not necessarily noteworthy.
However, if there are only 10 or so (let’s say) of those 4 million words that are arguably a fit, then it wouldn’t matter what the Palins said, statistics tell you to reject the null hypothesis and say that the name fits the pattern of contextual names. Their testimony would be irrelevant.
Just to be clear: I am not suggesting that the set of topical names for the boy is limited to 10. It is obviously much much larger than 10. But you surely need to get the number up into the 100,000’s before you are confident that the Palins landed on one of them by chance. The set of plausible, contextual names might be a pretty big number. 100,000 seems like a stretch, but I could be wrong.
Jazz
Actually, I am sure you noticed the flaw in my argument above, in which I carried forward the 4 million number, when that earlier had incorporated the probability of the Palins veering away from their contextual naming strategy. Earlier I had said there were only 400,000 total possible names.
Whatever the universe of potential names, be it 4 million, 40 million or 40,000, you need to believe that more than 5% of them were a “fit” before you can conclude that the Palins accidentally landed on a “fit” name in the process of randomly choosing a name from said universe. 5%? Seems a bit high to me. As always, YMMV.
Alasdair
But Jazz – what about the 9 billion names of G-d ?
(as theologically sound as comments #49 abd #50 are scientifically sound)
Andrew Sullivan: “Paul Ryan is my new hero” http://bit.ly/aoPUHT
As a member of the right, I refuse any definition of Andrew Sullivan on what is, or is not, sane: http://minx.cc/?post=297814 (flagrant NSFW language, but stay with it: this should be enough to discredit Sullivan as any authority on anything ever.)
Is Ryan one of Sullivan’s new heroes, or is Ryan the hero of one of the guy who actually does the writing?
Mike,
That linked Ace of Spades post put a little smile on my face of the type you might have if you were in a high school speech class, and ‘Todd’ from the crowd hanging out behind the Gas-N-Sip, working on their Camaros, was proudly giving his final speech about muscle cars.
So the ol’ Ace of Spades thinks that Sully is a moron for thinking that Palin may have named her child Trig because of Down Syndrome being Trisomy G? She was obviously motivated rather by “Norse mythology”? (Little smile. Sure buddy….)
One matter of fact: Ace of Spades suggested that there was “no” Google indication of Trisomy G referred to as Tri-g. I just checked it myself, because, you know, I’m not a sycophant. Ace of Spades must have a different Google than I do.
BTW – for what its worth, any random idiot can name their child whatever they want. But I try to discriminate – even just a little – in whom I call my presidential hopeful…
Also, Mike, if Ace of Spades were so confident in Palin’s forthrightness (and Sully’s horrible-ness), wouldn’t it be much better for maintaining your dignity to ask your heroine to just release the kid’s birth certificate, as opposed to debasing your team via slurs like calling Andrew Sullivan a cum-guzzler, as a proxy for him having no right to ask the question? Wouldn’t it be nicer for everyone, yourself included, if Palin simply answered it, a rather simple way to get that offensive man to stop his speculation, and help those such as Ace of Spades channel their better angels?
Actually, the most remarkable thing about that Ace of Spades post is the conclusion that Andrew Sullivan chases the Trig birth story NOT because he’s hyper and over-the-top and obsessive-compulsive in pursuit of the fact that
– its weird to leave a conference of your peers to go give birth to a child and not tell any of said peers (who, by the way, frequently have to answer to the media) –
– its weird to travel 18 hours across the planet, once in labor, to give birth to a child with a known birth complication that frequently requires immediate NICU care – definitionally unavailable during the trip
– its weird to make such a trip without warning anyone what risk you are absorbing,
no, Andrew Sullivan chases that down because he’s a crazy gay man who – get this – just doesn’t understand what its like to be pregnant.
I’m not sure how bright the Ace of Spades is, but sake of argument, let’s say he has a modicum of understanding that his position implies that women think Gov. Palin’s birth story makes perfect sense. IOW, since Sully chases it down because he is a feverish, insane gay man, if he had been a breeder, it all would have made sense to him.
You’d think the Ace of Spades, having discovered (apparently) Google enough to have searched the tri-g naming thing, would also be competent enough to search Do women believe Sarah Palin Trig birth story?
What amazing things he might have learned.
(On the off chance you don’t follow that link, there are two – TWO! – obvious links in defense of Palin on the first two pages of that search: one from a blog called “Right Pundit” and another from a lady called Celtic Diva whose narrative makes it look like she was howling at the moon last night. Solid Palinite, there).
Jazz #3 – care to offer some reason why you couldn’t give one or two of the many URLs supporting Sully’s (and *your*) perspective on Palin, that show tri-g as “often used” ?
Cuz a search argument of “Tri-g” trisomy didn’t find references in medical sources to “tri-g” even though it found many references to “trisomy g” … it found lots of references on the non-medical traditional anti-Palin sites, of course, as that VLIE did its thing …
So, how about pulling up that ole Google of yours and post the URLs you find here …
Inquiring minds want to know, and all that …
Vast Leftwing Echochamber = VLIE
Not to be pedantic, but I believe that spells VLE.
Alasdair, I certainly wasn’t suggesting that Palin was finding that usage for Trisomy-g in JAMA or something like that. I’m pretty hopeful that I never gave the impression of someone who thought Palin was referring to The New England Journal of Medicine when she told Couric that she reads “all the magazines”.
FWIW – the funniest part of the Ace of Spades piece is the suggestion, central to his post, that Sullivan is little more than a histrionic commenter pushing gay-special-interests. That’s all you get from Sullivan, gay this and gay that. Its all gay gay gay gay gay, all day pushing for special treatment of all things gay. So says the Ace of Spades.
Its certainly true, given how hyper and prolific he is, that Sullivan occasionally ventures into the pro-gay-sympathy rant. Such posts probably wouldn’t be too hard to find. However, as far as recurring gay-related themes, Sullivan’s biggest one is his opposition to the Human Rights Commission, in particular their pushing of gay grievances for the sake of filling their coffers, and not actually helping gays. Similarly, he is constantly pushing for an end to hate crimes. Finally, and related, he is notable for pushing – constantly – for his wish to end the gay movement, he is consistent in saying that he looks forward to the day when there is no more gay movement, when gays are fully integrated into normal society. He even wrote (at least) one book on the topic.
That the Ace of Spades, writing from the perspective of the raging homophobic Palin rump of the Republican party, sees Sullivan as little more than a pusher of gay-as-special-interest, shows how brain dead that fellow is. Its things like this that make you question the intelligence of the bloggy right – regardless of your view on evangelical homophobia, practitioners ought to at least be smart enough to recognize that Sullivan, in his opposition to special treatment for gays, is a friend, among openly gay commenters. Sigh. Stupid.
(grin) We agree on that … (sigh) … for whatever reason, just after I hit Enter, I realised that I was missing the I part, for which I apologise … and it has taken me until now to get back in, for whatever reason … (mutter,grumble)
Here’s what it should have been …
Vast Leftwing Incestuous Echochamber = VLIE
(Any chance of a Preview function being made available here ?)
Jazz #8 – I specifically referenced Jazz #3 because I have not found medical-related references to “tri-g” anywhere around the date of Trig’s birth or prior to that …
There are a lot of VLIE-mutual references to “tri-g” in the past few days, in the context of Palin-bashing …
Sullivan-now, sadly, is not anywhere near as rational as Sullivan-past … when I first encountered his blog, it was a breath of fresh air … and then he got sucked into flaming BDS … at that point, he became painful to read, precisely because he had used to be so rational … the Daily Dish used to be witty gratuitous insult, well-crafted … (sorta like elder Loy at his best) … now, unfortunately, Sullivan is mostly (well, the past few times I read him (cuz I go back, hopefully, about each quarter)) shrill and repetitious and unoriginal … I don’t know if it’s his meds that are no longer working or what, but I wish he’d get back to where he was when I first encountered him … he used to be one of the few who consistently championed *human* rights, not gay rights, not women’s right, not left-handed albino vertically-challenged persons-of-color’s rights … you get the idea …
Jazz, i’d like to thank you for your well argued, well reasoned critique. Its something that is all to often lacking around here in the comments section.
Alasdair, maybe you’re right about the trisonomy-g thing. Meh. Who am I kidding. I obviously don’t read JAMA either.
Re: Sullivan – the interesting thing about that guy is everyone hates him because Sullivan pissed them off. Count me among that crowd. I’ve written Sullivan a half dozen angry emails; he published a photo of a girl receiving a cliterodectomy several months ago that still haunts this father of young daughters. He’s quite an ass sometimes.
That said, he’s a really great blogger. Probably the best from a sheer quality of bloggy journalism perspective. Glenn Reynolds or Matt Drudge isn’t bad, but neither has the same provocative commentary, and both fall into partisanism way too much. Sullivan is interesting – on a wider range of topics than other famous bloggy news sources. For comparison, I am investigating an investment opportunity in a city with which I am unfamiliar. I’ve been going through recent issues of their newspaper to learn more about the city. Its not a famous newspaper, but its not bad.
And its nowhere near as interesting as Sullivan’s blog. Not just because its “old media”; the whole thing is online, after all. Its just boring. Really, except for when Sully is perseverating on Palin, Cheney or whatever – which can seem like a lot of the time – damn do he and his team do a good job of keeping it moving, keeping their blog interesting. Very impressive.
David @11: thanks for the kind comments, but frankly taking credit for making well-reasoned arguments in this stream-of-consciousness, fly-by-the-seat format would be like Obama taking credit for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe someday I’d be worthy of such an accolade. But there’s a ways to go between here and there.
Jazz, @#3: So the ol’ Ace of Spades thinks that Sully is a moron for thinking that Palin may have named her child Trig because of Down Syndrome being Trisomy G? She was obviously motivated rather by “Norse mythology”? (Little smile. Sure buddy….)
Why not? You can pull names from baby books out of anywhere. I once worked with a girl named “Porsche” who was not, in fact, a car.
Jazz, @#4: Also, Mike, if Ace of Spades were so confident in Palin’s forthrightness (and Sully’s horrible-ness), wouldn’t it be much better for maintaining your dignity to ask your heroine to just release the kid’s birth certificate
Dare to ask that question of the president, despite citizenship being an actual qualification of his office, and you’re blackballed as a crackpot lunatic un-American racist cracker. But I suppose it’s a perfectly legitimate demand for the infant child of the Vice Presidential candidate.
How does this still have life? Trig was born on April 18, 2008. Tripp, Bristol’s son, was born on December 27. Bristol was already pregnant when Trig was born. So where, exactly, did this child come from? Willow?
Sullivan’s continued belief in such a patently absurd idea should have been Exhibit A that his Palin Derangement Syndrome had made him take leave of his senses. But this nonsense that Palin deliberately named her child after the mental disability he would carry for the rest of his life, an act nearly as heinous as naming a kid “Cystic Fibrosis Jones” or “AIDS McGee,” is not just noxious vitriol directed at someone he doesn’t like, but as Alasdair has pointed out, a goddamn lie. Which is ironic considering one of Sullivan’s entire underpinnings for that post is that he believes Sarah Palin to be incapable of telling the truth.
Jazz, @#8: FWIW – the funniest part of the Ace of Spades piece is the suggestion, central to his post, that Sullivan is little more than a histrionic commenter pushing gay-special-interests. That’s all you get from Sullivan, gay this and gay that. Its all gay gay gay gay gay, all day pushing for special treatment of all things gay. So says the Ace of Spades.
It’s no secret that Sullivan began his turn against the modern right when the same-sex marriage argument heated up and he found himself at odds with most of his then-brethren.
Jazz, @#12: He’s quite an ass sometimes. That said, he’s a really great blogger. Probably the best from a sheer quality of bloggy journalism perspective.
True. Most people don’t know this, but many moons ago I was, briefly, moonlighting as a writer for RealClearPolitics way way WAYYYY before they got famous. When I asked how they wanted me to present my pieces, they gave me the URL to the Daily Dish and said “Like that.” Sullivan practically invented the format, and everyone in the blogosphere owes him a huge debt for helping make the medium accessible to the masses.
For years I’d read his stuff, perhaps not faithfully as clockwork, but in the same category as guys like Mickey Kaus at Slate — iconoclasts whose opinions were always relevant even if I didn’t agree. But somewhere he lost a great deal of the intellectual edge that separated him from his peers. He, like Charles Johnson today, is so obsessed with proving the right wrong that he’s become every bit the partisan he’s forever claimed not to be. Come on: read his masthead and try not to giggle.
I can even accept his sometimes hyper-reactionary-to-the-point-of-silly responses on the gay front — after all, we all have buttons we don’t like getting pushed (Sarah Palin’s, clearly, is “retarded”) — but he’s clearly not as good, or as fair, as he once was, and this episode proves it.
I think Jazz has the stronger passion for Palin, but I love her immensely as well. Trig is not Bristol’s son, he’s the son of one of Palin’s relatives who found out he was going to be born with Tri-G and was going to abort him and Palin convinced her not to and blah blah blah, I could go on, but we don’t have the time.
It’s really an astronomical coincidence to believe that Trig was NOT named for the disease he was diagnosed with before birth Trisomy-G. That’s right up there with that fold the 20 dollar bill up into a hundred directions and get the blueprint for 9/11 shit.
It truly is not only impossible to believe the Trig birth story with the flight from Texas to Alaska, AFTER her water broke, it’s not even legal, it would never happen and if it did happen there would be charges filed because nobody can fly when they’re 9 months pregnant… you can’t fly when you’re 7 months pregnant… I’m pretty sure flying after your water broke is against FAA regulations.
Sandy Underpants is right, of course, to suggest that believing that someone randomly named their son “Trig” when the child suffers from the syndrome “Trisomy G” requires belief in astronomical coincidence. Er, maybe. To Alasdair’s earlier point that the Google entries only show recent, post-Sullivan comments: that’s either because Sullivan made it up, or because Google aggregates recent comments, and people are reacting to the Sullivan kerfuffle. I’m not really interested enough to parse that debate, since I trust my lying eyes more than pages 10-12 of any Google search.
Mike Marchand’s characterization of the naming of a child after their syndrome as a noxious, impossible lie…do you base this on your years of familiarity with Palin? Are you and the Palins old buddies? Do you know anything about her beyond what has been filtered through sympathetic media? How do you know she wouldn’t do something pathologically unfeeling toward her handicapped son?
Keep in mind that, whatever the source of the early part of the kid’s name, the latter half of his name is definitionally unseemly! He’s Trig Paxson Van Palin. Van Palin, Mike. Those cheesy idiots love Van Halen, which Todd is on record as the source of the Van Palin ridiculousness. Maybe naming your handicapped son after tight-pants, late 70s Diamond Dave and friends is complimentary, but I know for sure you wouldn’t think so, Mike, since you originated the Pete-Townsend-as-older-than-dust meme during the Super Bowl. Maybe your kid can go to school with T. P. Van Palin and make fun of him someday. Someone’s kid will.
And you think the Palin’s are above saddling their kid with a laughingstock name?
Why in the world would you think that, when they empirically did?
Look…movie stars give their kids absurd names all the time. Freaking Apple?
The Palins have already shown a tendancy to give thir kids unusual names.
As a teacher you would not believe the weird names and variant spellings I have to deal with.
The Palins have not done anything that is nearly out of today’s ordinary.
Okay, I’ve been trying to stay out of this fight — in fact, I haven’t even read all the comments on the thread — but, gahrie, did you seriously just say that Palin isn’t “out of today’s ordinary” because she acts in a way that’s similar to… commie leftist pinko HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITIES?!?!?
Seriously?!?!?! That’s your argument in defense of this populist conservative icon, this ardent defender of Joe Sixpack’s real-American values against the evil coastal elites?
Okay. I look forward to the Streisand-Penn GOP presidential ticket in 2012.
P.S. I’m not saying Jazz is right — I’m not convinced that baby names matter, at all, as a presidential qualification — but your chosen line of argument is… well, just really odd, considering the source and the topic. Given that you’re grasping at Hollywood naming practices to defend Palin, it’s not hard to imagine you being on the other side of the argument if we were talking about, say, John Kerry’s daughter Apple Ruby-violet Kerry (and laughing your head off if any Kerry defender dared to use the “Hollywood defense” you just used — “it’s not ‘out of the ordinary’ if celebrities do it!!” AHAHAHAHAHA)
Read the rest of my comment Brendan….I said EVERYONE is giving their kids weird names and names with weird spellings today to show that the palins are NOT out of the mainstream. I mentioned the Hollywood people for the benefit of the commie leftist pinkos on this site.
P.S. I definitely have no problems with anyone naming their kid after one of the greatest rock bands of all time, Van Halen.
Gahrie, the point is not whether “Running With the Devil” rocks more than “D’yer Maker”, for example. Nor is it whether lots of folks are giving their kids names with weird alternative spellings these days. (Both are true, by the way).
A child with Down Syndrome goes through life with an unusual dose of self-consciousness (I once spent a semester doing research with an elementary school Down Syndrome population, thus I speak from experience). Naming a child after Van Halen in 2008 is an open invitation for ridicule, particularly from that part of the elementary school population which doesn’t get misty-eyed from memories of David Lee Roth in spandex, which, come to think of it, is probably the entire elementary school population.
That Team Palin thought that such a moniker was “no big deal” is a pretty good suggestion that the Trisomy-G/Trig connotation was surely not beneath them. This is a vastly different issue than some trendy parents naming their daughter Mysty.
The thing about the Trisomy-G/Trig thing that is so annoying is that the Palinbots, in their cultish devotion to Queen Sarah, have lost their capacity for embarassment.
I mean, if you told me that someone I don’t know had a kid with the unfortunate medical condition Trisomy G and they named that child “Trig” and you asked me if I thought there was something unseemly about that, I’d say it sure looks that way. Maybe we would talk a bit more and you would explain that the person had some Paul Bunyan-esque figure in their family named Trig. And I’d be like, oh, well, isn’t that interesting, and then make some comment about how unfortunate it was to have some beloved family member with a name that was disturbingly close to a callous invocation of the kid’s condition.
With Palin, there is no Paul Bunyan-esque figure in their family’s past, there’s no indication of anything beyond, well, she just kind of liked it, and even if – by some bizarre chance – the weird-naming Palins just happened to randomly like a name that is (or is not?) shorthand for their kid’s disability, that apparently doesn’t bother them enough to be self-conscious about it!!!
And you Palin-bots, it doesn’t bother you either.
I find that profoundly odd. Gahrie, are you unable to recognize that, best case scenario, giving your kid with Trisomy-G a Trisomy-G-ish name is a terribly unfortunate coincidence? That having done so requires some sort of display of public remorse at the unfortunate coincidence, rather than the typical Palin-ish well we just like weird names so don’t get on our case?
Is Palin really so beloved that she never has to say she’s sorry, for fuckups like her disabled kid’s Trisomy-G-ish name, whether accidental or otherwise?
What does it take to get you Palinbots to be my groupies? I’ll never be as sexy as Sarah, but I might be able to sweeten the pot a little money-wise….
Actually, on that weird name meme:
The Palins had a son, and they named him Track, which apparently was the sport that Todd and Sarah were involved in when they met. Then they had a daughter, and they named her Bristol, the home of ESPN, where Sarah wanted to work. Then they had a second daughter, and named her Willow, after the bay where Todd actually worked and raced. Then a third daughter, and they named her Piper, Todd’s plane. Finally, a son, named Trig, which happened to be a reference to his disability, though that is mere coincidence, as they just picked his name at random, out of a book or something.
I am not a lawyer, but isn’t there some sort of principle in the law that says that precedence implies intent? That if you have done something intentionally four times, and you do that same thing a fifth time, and claim it was accidental, that the law will tend to infer intent? I could be wrong on this.
I’m not a judge, but…guilty!
I don’t know what the big deal is with Palin naming her baby after the chromosomal deficiency he suffers from. When I told my closest of all confidant’s of the origins of Trig’s name she said that was extremely cruel and became visibly upset about it. I put my hand on her knee and said, that’s okay he’s a retard he doesn’t even know what his name is.
Unfortunately, someone apparently advised Palin to not come out and admit the origin of Trig’s name, because I’m positive she would have no problem being honest about it, she’s not ashamed of that. I watched her with Chris Wallace on Fox on Sunday and she said that it would be no problem beating Obama in 2012… unless he decides to attack Iran, then it would be difficult. And Chris Wallace almost swallowed his teeth, it was hillarious. He says, “If he starts a war with Iran that will help get him re-elected!?!?” and she was so non-chalant about what a great campaign idea that was I bet she wrote it down on her hand when they turned the off the camera for 2016.
Jazz #24 – I don’t know how many kids *you* have, but as a parent of 4 daughters, finding names for the first couple of daughters was easy – my lady wife and I were able to find a couple of names we both liked … and we also shot down a lot of names the other one liked … by daughter #4, we were down to the last name we could agree upon pretty much …
In terms of what folk having kids nowadays are choosing as names, with all due respect to our blog-host, his daughters risk being known in their primary school classes as Loyette and Loycita – all it will take is one of their classmates making the connection …
Jazz #16 – I didn’t say “that the Google entries only show recent, post-Sullivan comments” – I said that my Google search didn’t support the assertion that “tri-g” is a common scientific way to express “trisomy g” – and I asked you where *you* (Jazz) had found it ? So far, it seems that you found it in the VLIE … and that is sad …
I have to admit that it continues to fascinate me how easily the VLIE can obsess over “tri-g” and, for whatever reason, give Obama/Pelosi/Reid an amazing pass on the Federal Budget and the economy …
his daughters risk being known in their primary school classes as Loyette and Loycita
It is for precisely this reason that, when coming up with the girls’ blog nicknames, one of the rules was: “if it were to become a ‘real-life’ nickname, it wouldn’t be horribly embarrassing.” I think “Loyette” and “Loyacita” pass that test. I mean, a middle-school kid can use anything to taunt a peer, but those names aren’t uniquely catchy or amusingly humiliating, so far as I can tell.
P.S. There is also a direct relationship between your point and the near total dearth of baby/toddler pictures on the blog since I relaunched last June. 🙂
Back to the topic not-exactly-at-hand: I’m a guy who loves a good conspiracy as much as the next guy (unless that next guy is Sandy Underpants). As such, mine is a sympathetic ear when those on the right suggest that Obama might be a Socialist/Marxist/Internationalist traitor.
Unfortunately, that same crowd is apparently unable to connect the dots between Sarah Palin’s first four childrens’ “offbeat, but topical” names, and her fifth child’s “offbeat, but topical” name. Asking that crowd to suss out Obama’s sinister Socialist/Marxist intentions feels a little bit like asking a toddler to do your taxes.
One has this sense that any day now, Obama is going to register a new small business, “Obama’s Socialist/Marxist Snow Removal Service and Lemonade Stand”. Soon thereafter Rush Limbaugh will be lamenting how Obama’s business is anti-competitive in attempting to wrap up the winter and summer marketplaces. Sean Hannity will point out that Obama’s unionized workers put unreasonable time demands on how often they come shovel.
And Bill O’Reilly will add that you have to admit the lemonade is pretty good.
It’s the Kool Aid that Pres. Obama’s supporters crave, not lemonade.
Jazz, @#16: Sandy Underpants is right, of course, to suggest that believing that someone randomly named their son “Trig” when the child suffers from the syndrome “Trisomy G” requires belief in astronomical coincidence.
No kidding. Poor Lou Gehrig had the same problem.
Mike Marchand’s characterization of the naming of a child after their syndrome as a noxious, impossible lie…
The “lie” was Sullivan’s assertion that the condition trisomy-g is “often” shortened to tri-g “in medical slang,” when that should be “rarely” at the absolute best, far closer to “never.” You refuse to do the legwork on this for the same reason he does: it’s easier to believe the absolute worst about someone you do not like than admit that in this one, minor instance, you may be wrong, and perhaps Sarah Palin is a generally decent person even if you might disagree with her on energy policy or some other arcane topic.
do you base this on your years of familiarity with Palin? Are you and the Palins old buddies?
No, I base this on the fact that Sarah Palin — who, let’s not forget, is dumb as a stump, and not even a fresh stump that a tree’s just been cut off of, but an old, gnarled, termite-ridden stump — is unlikely to have got the tests from her ultrasound and thought, “Well, this child is going to have special needs and require special care, but I refuse to abort him — I’m going to carry him to term, then cruelly name him after the very cross he’s going to bear for the rest of his life to reinforce that yes, I have a mongoloid retard baby, in the hopes that it will boost the political career I only barely have, being the governor of a state that nobody cares about for less than a year. But, even though I’m a backwards rube hick who can’t make a speech without having to write on her hand, like a dummy who has to write ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ on her shoes, instead of naming the baby ‘Down’ and claiming it’s for soft, embracing goose feathers, I’m going to take the clinical name that’s rarely used, then shorten it to a form “often” used “in medical slang,” even though I ain’t no doctor and thus probably never even hear medical slang, and look, lucky me, that happens to be a legitimate name in this here baby book! Why, I’m so happy I’m gonna kill me a caribou tonight, hyuk hyuk hyuk.”
Somehow I find that more improbable than sheer unfortunate luck that the child’s name happens to be the same as his disease, minus four letters and a hyphen. Also, this just in — the parents of actress Rhea Pearlman obviously named their child after gonorrhea, just because they have to have, ’cause, come on. That can’t be a coincidence.
Do you know anything about her beyond what has been filtered through sympathetic media?
Please tell me you’re not using “Sarah Palin” and “sympathetic media” in the same argument. Christ, she’s getting flack for having notecards at a speech except without the cards when our current president can’t pick up his dry cleaning without having a TelePrompter stapled to his head.
How do you know she wouldn’t do something pathologically unfeeling toward her handicapped son?
How do you know she would? I think the burden of proof is still on you, and the mere fact that their names are similar, and all the Palin’s other kids have strange names, and then employing the age-old persuasion tactic of nodding and winking is not conclusive. Or, on the other hand, you have a constant critic of hers who, by your admission, is occasionally an ass — might maybe he be so desperate to smear her because nothing else has stuck that he either made something up or ran with a tip without checking it?
But, you know, that’s just me, and I own five Van Halen albums, so obviously I’m biased in this area.
There’s a difference between giving a kid a weird, dorky name — I have one myself — and being deliberately malicious to the point that it’s just repulsive to even consider. I realize that many on the right harbor similar irrational hatred of President Obama, as they did President Clinton before him. That doesn’t make it any less becoming.
I should probably go ahead and note that the first part of my comment above is facetious.
Mike Marchand, I find it odd that you think the burden of proof is on me to prove Palin’s un-fitness, rather than on Palin to rebut suspicion of unfitness, considering that Palin is seriously positioning herself to have, among other things, access to the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Among other expressions of extreme power. Its pretty disturbed to put the onus on me (a randomly nobody) rather than Palin (an aspirant to having her finger on the button).
Not being a doctor, I can’t really comment on how frequently Trisomy-G is shortened to Tri-g, nor can I judge between Andrew Sullivan’s verdict of “often” or yours of “almost never”, since I find no good reason to trust either of you. What I can say – with certainty – is that the Palins gave each of their first four children names that are both
a) offbeat, and
b) topical
which criteria Trig as a shortening of Trisomy G rather obviously fits.
It disturbs me that seemingly intelligent folk such as yourself think I am “shaking down poor Palin”. Again, she wants to be the President. The nuclear arsenal. All the rest. I could be totally wrong, but wouldn’t it be better if she established that fact, rather than you just asserting it? Again, ol’ Jazz is nowhere near the nuclear arsenal, so it doesn’t matter much how crazy I am.
Please keep in mind that one of the main things I’ve argued that “doesn’t stick” is that her story of the circumstances around her fifth child’s birth are way beyond belief. That hasn’t stuck, Mike, because she produced the child’s birth cert-
– no wait a second it doesn’t stick because you’re a feverish irrational partisan.
I pointed out to David K., several days ago, that the main enjoyment of this blog was the pushback from folks like Sandy Underpants that opens one’s mind to ideas such as why the Apollo program is definitively real (i.e. because the Soviets never called our bluff).
As enjoyable as it is to discuss things like the moon landing, so too is it grueling enduring the moonbattery that comes about in threads like this, in the form of “ha ha Jazz don’t you feel stupid suggesting that the Trig birth story is suspicious…because…uhhh…don’t you feel stupid?” Yes. I feel stupid. Threads like this make me feel extremely stupid. But surely not for the reasons the Palinbots think.
Good luck to all – catch you on the other side….
I’ve been greatly enjoying this thread while also trying to stay out of this fight, but I can’t resist commenting on the following:
Mike Marchand, I find it odd that you think the burden of proof is on me to prove Palin’s un-fitness, rather than on Palin to rebut suspicion of unfitness, considering that Palin is seriously positioning herself to have, among other things, access to the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Among other expressions of extreme power. Its pretty disturbed to put the onus on me (a randomly nobody) rather than Palin (an aspirant to having her finger on the button).
This is complete and utter crap from Jazz. Palin’s fitness for office is not the issue here. Rather, the issue is whether she purposely gave her disabled child a name specifically to mock that child’s unfortunate condition. The vile and ugly nature of the accusation leveled at Palin by Sullivan, Jazz, and any other Palin-obsessed Trig-truthers should be enough for any fair-minded person to put the onus squarely on the accusers. But let’s say arguendo that it’s not. The name in question definitely has a meaning that supports Mike. It may also have a meaning that supports Jazz and Sullivan, depending on how frequently Trisomy-g is shortened to Tri-g “in medical slang.” Sullivan and Jazz say “often,” Mike and Ace of Spades say it’s closer to “never.” Placing the burden on Mike and Ace of Spades to prove a negative is obviously untenable. Thus, the burden falls on Jazz to, as Mike says, “do the legwork on this.” So far he has not. Burden not met.
Oh, and contra Jazz, according to the story I found from the campaign addressing the Palin children’s names, it says that Bristol was named for Bristol Bay where the family fishes, not anything at all having to do with ESPN.
A few final thoughts:
There is only one question of interest here: does the Trisomy G/Trig connection represent a continuation of a pattern of “offbeat, but topical” names used by Team Palin for their first four children?
That Marchand and Mama drag it over into some sort of referendum on the frequency of Tri-g is deeply depressing in how badly it misses the point: as a friendly suggestion, fellas, google “offbeat”, read a bunch of entries for it, and then think about how relevant it is whether: a few/some/a lot of people follow the Trisomy G/Trig convention. Or to be more clear: when I suggest that the Palins named their child Piper after a plane, it is certainly not because I googled “Piper+plane+child’s name” and found multiple instances of that. Duh.
The lack of intellecual firepower faced in this discussion is profoundly depressing. The suggestion that there is some relevance to Palin making the Trisomy G/Trig connection by the frequency with which others do, when its a given that the Palins are offbeat, but topical, namers, is but one example. Marchand’s pained attempt at humor in the Lou Gehrig case is another: Gehrig was rather obviously diagnosed with what was exclusively known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, later coming to be referred to as “his” disease, while in Alaska a child was born with what had for a long time been known as Trisomy G, and was subsequently named Trig. Its asking too much, probably, for you to see that distinction. It surely isn’t good for my blood pressure.
Finally, I wish to publicly thank Joe Mama for defeating the “Palins give their children offbeat, but topical names” meme by pointing out that their oldest daughter was not named for the city of Sarah’s dream job, but rather for the place where the family enjoys their fishing vacation. Very helpful. I think I’ll now go to my daughter’s day care and get into some disputes with two-year olds, as at least with the kids you get a bit of laughter to go with the heaping sense of depression from arguing with intellectual toddlers.
Once more, and for real this time, good luck to one and all. Catch you later.
Well Jazz, I am deeply distressed at the Left’s obsessive need to personalize politics and attack those they oppose as both evil and stupid.
It is perfectly acceptable to question the parentage of Gov. Palin’s youngest child, but to question the birthplace of Pres. Obama makes you a crazy extremist.
It is perfectly acceptable to attack Gov. Palin for attending multiple colleges and universities, while allowing Pres. Obama to refuse to release his college transcripts or papers. (and even allow him to restrict access to his wife’s college papers)
Vice – President Quayle is destroyed for his speaking gaffes, Vice- President Biden is chuckled at for his.
President Bush is an idiot for mispronouncing words, President Obama is not.
It is perfectly acceptable to attack Pres. Bush with fake National Guard records, but allow Sen. Kerry to withhold his service records.
It is perfectly acceptable to attack Sen. McCain with spurious allegations of an affair, while refusing to cover the affair of Sen. Edwards.
When I say I’m signing off, its not in the petulant, I’m-taking-my-ball-and-going-home manner. At least I don’t think so. Its more in the sense that threads like this one are pretty grueling, and there’s no way I’m disciplined enough – obviously – to steer clear of Palin mania in the 2+ years to come.
FWIW, I agree with a fair bit of Gahrie’s sentiment in the post just above, that while the fishy details of Trig’s birth story are more egregious than the examples in Gahrie’s post, its also true that that fish(picker) story gets a lot more heat than the examples Gahrie mentions, which get almost none. While Palin is not answering for the most bizarre story on the political landscape, she’s catching a fair bit of flak for it, and though the other examples are somewhat less bizarre, they are associated with virtually no flak whatsoever.
Oh, and, inspired comparison between Biden and Quayle. From a sheer executive leadership perspective, Quayle was pretty much a young Biden. I like that.
There is only one question of interest here: does the Trisomy G/Trig connection represent a continuation of a pattern of “offbeat, but topical” names used by Team Palin for their first four children? That Marchand and Mama drag it over into some sort of referendum on the frequency of Tri-g is deeply depressing in how badly it misses the point: as a friendly suggestion, fellas, google “offbeat”, read a bunch of entries for it, and then think about how relevant it is whether: a few/some/a lot of people follow the Trisomy G/Trig convention.
LOL…but if Tri-g is not in fact used as shorthand for Trisomy-g, then how exactly is the name “topical?!” The answer, of course, is that it would not be, except for the fact that the four letters in the child’s name also appear in the term Trisomy-g (which is no doubt more than enough for the crackpots in the fever swamps to triumphantly proclaim “Coincidence? I THINK NOT!”, but so what). In other words, there may be no “Trisomy G/Trig connection” to begin with, which, far from “badly miss[ing] the point,” would in fact undercut Jazz’s entire argument! Jazz obviously knows this, which is why he tried at first to argue the point in his first comment on this thread. When his Google search presumably did not prove up his/Sullivan’s theory, he merely made the incredibly limp and unsupported claim that “Ace of Spades must have a different Google than I do” and then dutifully tried to change the subject with a WHOLLY IRRELEVANT Google search on “Do women believe Sarah Palin Trig birth story?” and then even went so far as to try to explain away the adverse results. Then when Mike Marchand correctly called him on the lack of support for this key premise of his argument, Jazz retreated to “it’s not my burden,” which is an absurd position, as I explained above. Jazz has now resorted to questioning the “intellectual firepower” of Mike and I, and insulting me as an “intellectual toddler,” which basically means he has conceded the point.
Joe Mama, you suggest that thinking there is some correlation between “Trig” and “Trisomy-G” is the stuff of crackpots in fever swamps. Let’s unpack that assertion.
If we take the names of the first four Palin children as a reasonably good indication that the Palins were of the habit of providing their children with offbeat, yet topical names, then the question becomes, what is the probability that, with their fifth child, the Palins
a) quit the pattern of topical names, while retaining the offbeat theme, and
b) randomly landed on a name for their fifth child that nevertheless looks like it might be sorta topical?
The odds of any consecutive four letter combination is, of course, 1 in 26^4. That’s 1 in 456,976. Now many four letter combinations would be immediately rejected (four consonants, for example). However, nothing says the name has to be four letters; the name Bristol suggests it could be as many as seven letters. For simplicity, let’s say that the reduction in possibilities (from nonsense four letter strings) is roughly offset by the greater number of possibilities from three, five, six, seven – or more – letter strings, such that the actual probability of accidentally landing on a topical-sounding name might be somewhere in the ballpark of 1 in 400,000.
We also need to meet the criteria of the Palins stopping the pattern of topical, offbeat names, which they apparently used for their first four children, and instead just switching to offbeat names. Of course I have no way of knowing – no way of googling – what the likelihood of people switching from “topical, offbeat” to just “offbeat” is after four kids. As a complete SWAG, I’m gonna say that there’s about a 10% chance that a family who has followed the “topical, offbeat” method switches to “offbeat” for their fifth kid. I could be completely incorrect here. I cop to it being just a guess.
As a result, the probability that the Palins a) switched away from their strategy of topical names and b) accidentally landed on a letter string that happened to look topical, is simply the product of the two above probabilities. That would be 1/10 X 1/400,000, or somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 in 4 million.
I do wish you well, Joe Mama, but I really can’t see myself spending the next two and a half years listening to characterizations of those who suspect that 1- in-4-million probabilities don’t typically occur as having “fever-swamp” obsessions with coincidence. You’re certainly welcome to believe whatever you wish. It doesn’t do much for my mental health hearing about it.
Joe Mama, you suggest that thinking there is some correlation between “Trig” and “Trisomy-G” is the stuff of crackpots in fever swamps.
Wrong. I am suggesting that thinking a mother would purposely gave her disabled child a name specifically to mock that child’s unfortunate condition is the stuff of crackpots in fever swamps. Whether there is some correlation between Trig’s name and Trisomy-G very much remains to be seen, even taking into account whatever statistical analysis you were trying to perform above.
To put it slightly differently, there were something like 400,000 usable letter combinations that the offbeat-naming Palins could have randomly landed on for their fifth child (assuming they followed a random road), and they landed on a particular one that happens to be used – with some unknown frequency – to refer to their child’s disability.
It was uncalled-for, and a violation of blog protocol, for me to use terminology like “intellectual toddler”. I apologize. As I said over on the Derbyshire thread, I’m a dour pessimist conservative, who believes that society needs to protect us from our worst demons. One of my worst demons is keeping cool in response to arguments such as the one described in the paragraph above. Surely it is better not to expose myself to the risk.
Or even another way of putting it is that the Palins didn’t choose Trig’s name at random. BFD, we already know that. They said they chose the name for its Norse meaning. You just choose not to believe that because, c’mon, what are the odds that a name could have both a Norse meaning and consist of four letters that are used (or, you know, not used) to refer to the child’s disability!! Probably the same or shorter odds that an even longer name could be both the bay where the family fishes and the town of Sarah’s purported dream job. I accept your apology, but your analysis is meaningless.
Probably the same or shorter odds that an even longer name could be both the bay where the family fishes and the town of Sarah’s purported dream job.
As a response to the question, what are the odds that Sarah Palin randomly landed on a name that identifies her son’s disability, this is surely a candidate for one of the stupidest things in the history of the blog.
Why is that Joe Mama? Because no one denies that the daughter named after the ESPN town/fishing spot’s name is intentional.
However, you are arguing, now derisively, that Trig’s name is obviously not intentional wrt his condition, and to prove that it is not intentional, you are bringing up the example of the daughter’s name, which, you know, was intentional.
When I apologized earlier, it was to the internet gods and right behavior, not particularly to you, since while it might have been too harsh to call you an intellectual toddler, your efforts here, and elsewhere, leave a lot more to be desired than you apparently believe.
Wait a second – I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention, your argument Joe is that while the odds of the Palins randomly landing on a name that references their child’s condition are one in several million, they didn’t randomly land on that name, they intentionally landed on that name, only it happened to randomly have some other meaning with some other culture that they are otherwise totally disconnected with, which fully settles the matter.
I guess, buddy.
Jazz – Occam’s Razor applies in this situation …
Chances of the Palin family choosing their names by random letter combination are not high … even your own statistical method, while probably as taught at East Anglia, lacks something … surely such aleatory decision-making would have to include something like rolling a die for the number of letters to use in the name … after all, Track is 5 letters, is it not, as is Piper ?
If there was randomness of choice, it *might* plausibly have happened in the selection of a book of baby names from amongst the many available books of baby names, and, then, in the choice of page from which to choose a name, and then in the choice of specific name from that page …
Me, I would bet small amounts of cash that *something*, pre-delivery, caught the Palin’s attention about the name Trig and they agreed that that would be it …
Hmmm … is this sufficient sado-masochistic necrophiliac bestiality, perhaps ?
And how do you know that the Palins are “totally disconnected” with the culture that they say spawned the name? Are you now an expert on Sarah Palin’s ancestral history as well as her medical history? Are you now adding etymologist to your resumé? I eagerly await some half-baked statistical analysis that purports to show how unlikely it is that immigrants with the surname Palin are of Scandinavian descent.
Jesus H. Christ…both of my wife’s parents are 100% off-the-boat Italian immigrants and they gave my wife a French name despite being “totally disconnected” to French culture. They just friggin’ liked the name! Even if Jazz is correct that the Palins are “totally disconnected” to Norse culture, that proves ABSOLUTELY FRIGGIN’ NOTHING about the veracity of their account of how they came up with the name Trig.
Let me try science.
We have no idea, beyond their attestation, whether the Palin’s Norse-based explanation is true. The scientist would evaluate their claim net of their credibility – if their credibility is unimpeachable, then science is irrelevant; for the rest of this post I’m going to assume the source of the name is an open question, despite what they say.
So. Our null hypothesis is that the name they chose was motivated by something random, not particularly topical to the child being born.
Our experimental hypothesis is that they were following the family’s pattern of choosing names that had some context or meaning related to their child or life.
There are several million names they might have chosen, assuming the null hypothesis is correct. It turns out that the actual name they chose is, apparently, one that satisfies the experimental hypothesis of a name with some contextual meaning.
Conventionally, a scientist would say that there has to be less than a 5% probability of a phenomenon occuring by chance before the scientist said that it didn’t occur by chance. In this case, if there were somewhere on the order of 4 million names that could have been randomly found, then there have to be somewhere north of 200,000 of those random names that would have been a “fit” before you conclude that landing on a “fit” name might have happened by chance, and not intentionally.
You could argue, I suppose, that Alaska is a rather largish place, and if we include all the bays and lakes and mountains and what-not, and then we throw in all the activities the busy family is involved in, and stretch our minds thusly, we might get to 200,000 names in the universe of nameable words that would make a fit, in which case the Palins landing on one of them is not necessarily noteworthy.
However, if there are only 10 or so (let’s say) of those 4 million words that are arguably a fit, then it wouldn’t matter what the Palins said, statistics tell you to reject the null hypothesis and say that the name fits the pattern of contextual names. Their testimony would be irrelevant.
Just to be clear: I am not suggesting that the set of topical names for the boy is limited to 10. It is obviously much much larger than 10. But you surely need to get the number up into the 100,000’s before you are confident that the Palins landed on one of them by chance. The set of plausible, contextual names might be a pretty big number. 100,000 seems like a stretch, but I could be wrong.
Actually, I am sure you noticed the flaw in my argument above, in which I carried forward the 4 million number, when that earlier had incorporated the probability of the Palins veering away from their contextual naming strategy. Earlier I had said there were only 400,000 total possible names.
Whatever the universe of potential names, be it 4 million, 40 million or 40,000, you need to believe that more than 5% of them were a “fit” before you can conclude that the Palins accidentally landed on a “fit” name in the process of randomly choosing a name from said universe. 5%? Seems a bit high to me. As always, YMMV.
But Jazz – what about the 9 billion names of G-d ?
(as theologically sound as comments #49 abd #50 are scientifically sound)
(grin)