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Rob Ford's Toronto

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jusbokeh said:
Hello UT community

Your forum came up as a popular traffic hit for rob ford so I decided to investigate.

I am a 4th year politics student at ryerson and will be writing a research paper in regards to 'Rob Ford' machine.
I will be outlining various topics such as demographic voting patterns, suburbs vs core, populism vs. Left/right and media failure.

I have gone through a few of the last pages but still not familiar with how to do a global search on the entire thread to seek out key terms.

I will also like any input on how I can get data for demographic breakdown of the votes.

Thank you and I will be following this thread closely.
Please excuse any errors as I typed this up on my phone. I will properly update this post when I arrive back at home.
Click to expand...


unfortunately, its pretty impossible to do within the forum. pm me and will let you know a google trick that lets you search any UT thread using keywords...
 
guitarchitect said:
Hey, people were talking about Ford and strokes some time ago, something about him having the symptoms of a stroke victim. What was that discussion about again? I had a thought - there was that one time he was hospitalized, right? Something about not being able to catch his breath. I wonder if that might've been something related to a minor stroke - obviously the Fords wouldn't be honest about it, as it might jeopardize Robbie's job. But yeah, it came to mind and I don't remember it being discussed...
Click to expand...

Well, the "football injury" argument has been offered on occasion. Strokes can relate to such trauma.
 
4 posts, 4000 posts, who cares? We're all human. If there's one thing a forum doesn't need, it's elitism.

All this infighting makes me think that evvabeing had a hidden agenda. He comes on here, spews a lot of, mostly, useless stuff but stuff that is related to the topic so he wouldn't get banned, as opposed to someone coming on here and spreading spam about hair products or something. Anyway, his mission was to annoy people to the point where a) attention is diverted from the Ford issue, and b) people who normally have relevant things to say stop coming here. Perhaps his goal was to ruin this forum? Then again, there hasn't been Ford news in a week hence the slow feeling and lack of information on the board. I guess my conspiracy theory is flawed. or maybe evvabeing is David Price?
 
I think evvabeing was just obsessed with the Ford story. I have been lurking around on various sites and noticed the name months ago. He/she was seriously involved in the Gawker fundraiser, as well as started a Ford Forum, which had very few followers.
 
kicked it in the sun said:
this is crazy, who cares? even at work people don't capitalize internal mails and that, it's just something that people don't really bother with anymore except in formal situations. how old are you, like 40? 50?
Click to expand...

yeah, bro, bad punctuation rulez, lol

Seriously, though, there are probably a lot of people over 40 on this board. I don't know how good an idea it is to try to alienate them all right off the bat.
 
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dforthandbview said:
4 posts, 4000 posts, who cares? We're all human. If there's one thing a forum doesn't need, it's elitism.

All this infighting makes me think that evvabeing had a hidden agenda. He comes on here, spews a lot of, mostly, useless stuff but stuff that is related to the topic so he wouldn't get banned, as opposed to someone coming on here and spreading spam about hair products or something. Anyway, his mission was to annoy people to the point where a) attention is diverted from the Ford issue, and b) people who normally have relevant things to say stop coming here. Perhaps his goal was to ruin this forum? Then again, there hasn't been Ford news in a week hence the slow feeling and lack of information on the board. I guess my conspiracy theory is flawed. or maybe evvabeing is David Price?
Click to expand...

dave_from_scarbrough@hotmail.com is the email he used to sign up. :rolleyes:

(I'm being sarcastic)
 
kicked it in the sun said:
this is crazy, who cares? even at work people don't capitalize internal mails and that, it's just something that people don't really bother with anymore except in formal situations. how old are you, like 40? 50?
Click to expand...

You could do as the ancient Romans did?

USECAPITALSONEVERYTHINGANDIGNORESPACESBETWEENTHELETTERS

BTW. We've past number 20,000 posts on this thread.
 
kicked it in the sun said:
this is crazy, who cares? even at work people don't capitalize internal mails and that, it's just something that people don't really bother with anymore except in formal situations. how old are you, like 40? 50?
Click to expand...

Who cares? Most people who wish to be taken seriously (and not appear to be a teenager).

What would be the reason to not user proper capitalisation? Laziness, pure and simple. And then in that case, why even use commas and periods? And to take it a bit further, how about shortening words like 'you' to simply 'u'. I think you can see where I'm going with this line of thought.

The best case as to why one should care is that we are judged by what we project onto the world. On the internet, it's mostly the words we type (or don't type). When someone sees another not using proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling, we first assume that the person isn't aware or doesn't know how (i.e. 'lacks knowledge') and not that the person knows how but they just don't care. It's a basic dumbing-down of your communications with the world at large. And remember, your communications are direct reflection on you.


Signed, someone in their third decade on this planet.
 
kicked it in the sun said:
this is crazy, who cares? even at work people don't capitalize internal mails and that, it's just something that people don't really bother with anymore except in formal situations. I care.
Click to expand...

I don't see people not capitalizing sentences in internal e-mails, even on portable devices. And if they do ... they won't work there long. Extremely unprofessional. If one doesn't care enough to do as something as simple as capitalize a sentence, then they shouldn't be working there ... or posting here.

It's not like it takes any longer to capitalize a sentence! But it does make it easier and quicker to read. Why should someone read something that the person writing cares so little about?

kicked it in the sun said:
how old are you, like 40? 50?
Click to expand...
WHAT? What's with the ageism? I don't see the need for that kind of vile bigotry!
 
jusbokeh said:
Hello UT community

Your forum came up as a popular traffic hit for rob ford so I decided to investigate.

I am a 4th year politics student at ryerson and will be writing a research paper in regards to 'Rob Ford' machine.
I will be outlining various topics such as demographic voting patterns, suburbs vs core, populism vs. Left/right and media failure.

I have gone through a few of the last pages but still not familiar with how to do a global search on the entire thread to seek out key terms.

I will also like any input on how I can get data for demographic breakdown of the votes.

Thank you and I will be following this thread closely.
Please excuse any errors as I typed this up on my phone. I will properly update this post when I arrive back at home.
Click to expand...

Welcome. Great topic. I brought up this issue back on post #18410.

Most of the writing I've seen on Ford's victory has been based on neighbourhood-level data (of which the best example is probably Zack Taylor's work). The big weakness with neighbourhood-level data is that it leads to ecological fallacy. Since voting is an individual act, neighbourhood data doesn't tell us exactly who in the neighbourhood voted for Ford.

I also found an opinion poll that broke down approval of Rob Ford by certain demographic characteristics such as gender, income, education, etc. The sample size is much smaller, but it's at least based on individual-level data.

More generally, I think it's very important to get past all of the politically-charged stereotypes of both Ford's supporters and detractors that have dominated public discussion. Good data would be a way to do this.

I also found it interesting that you used the term "machine" to describe Rob Ford. If you're referring to the political science concept of a political machine (which is generally used to explain the dominance of the Democratic party in US cities), then I don't think it really fits in this case. Canadian cities have tended not to have the same machine-based politics that occur in the US. Having almost zero support among the traditional "establishment", Ford is about as un-machine like as you can get. Not even the leadership of the Ontario PCs and Federal Conservatives are willing to stick their neck out for him.
 
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