The writer’s perpetuation of model-minority and black-deficiency myths is pretty boring at this point.
By Jamelle Bouie
Writing for New York magazine last week, Andrew Sullivan posed a question for those who see racism as the primary obstacle to equality and prosperity for nonwhite Americans: What about Asians?
Riffing off of the recent incident on a United Airlines plane, where an elderly Asian American man was forcibly removed from his seat to make room for United employees, Sullivan presented a question about the strength of racism and white supremacy.
Asian-Americans, like Jews, are indeed a problem for the “social-justice” brigade. I mean, how on earth have both ethnic groups done so well in such a profoundly racist society? How have bigoted white people allowed these minorities to do so well — even to the point of earning more, on average, than whites? Asian-Americans, for example, have been subject to some of the most brutal oppression, racial hatred, and open discrimination over the years … Yet, today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America.
What gives? It couldn’t possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it? It couldn’t be that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?
……………………….
Even as he avoids the words black or African American, that charge—that black deficiency (or even pathology) drives black disadvantage—is the core of Sullivan’s inquiry. And his argument, unstated but clear as the blue sky, is that black Americans have only themselves and their culture to blame for continued racial inequality. That this flies in the face of what we know about structural and institutional disadvantage—of ongoing discrimination in jobs and housing, of the long and enduring effects of past discrimination and bias, of racial disadvantage among well-educated, two-parent black families, of the half-hearted efforts to remedy those accumulated burdens—is, at most, a minor obstacle in Sullivan’s narrative. It also flies in the face of what we know about Asian American gains, which followed that aforementioned—often politically motivated—mid-century decline in anti-Asian racism. Even still, Asian Americans face continued discrimination; among the highly educated, for instance, Asian men earned significantly less than their white counterparts.
Yesterday Martin raised some important questions about the findings outlined by Thomas Wood in an article titled, “Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism.” On the same day, Philip Klinkner wrote, “Immigration was central to the election, and hostility toward immigrants animated Trump voters.”
It is important to note that this kind of analysis has been triggered by the release of data from the American National Election Study (ANES). That was also the basis for an article by Mehdi Hasan that I referenced previously titled, “Top Democrats Are Wrong: Trump Supporters Were More Motivated by Racism Than Economic Issues.”
Some of the questions that arise from the reviews of this data might have to do with the need to revisit what we mean by words like “racism.” We have traditionally used that to describe some of the attitudes White Americans have about Black Americans. The questions Wood relies on to identify racism are all based on that formulation. But does “racism” also apply to attitudes about Mexican Americans? How about immigrants more generally? The survey questions from ANES on which Klinkner relies are a completely different set of inquiries.
The fact of the matter is that many Mexican Americans are not immigrants. They lived here long before European Americans came to these shores. And yet they have been subjected to much of the same kinds of racism directed towards African Americans. Is that because white people assume they are immigrants or because they are not white? Perhaps a combination of both.
Of course, we can’t talk about the role that anti-immigration played in the election without discussing Islamophobia. Based on what I have seen and read, that was a huge factor in many rural communities, especially where evangelical churches and community groups hosted presentations by the fear-mongers. That brand of discrimination is primarily based on religious beliefs. But there are also a lot of stereotypes about Muslims being “brown” and Islamophobia is often linked to fears about immigration in general.
6.
trollhattan
Heh. :-)
Someone this a.m. mentioned an Silicon Valley spousal abuse case that looked as though the husband may be getting away with a slap on the wrist. Now that I’ve read the full story, the presiding judge had best overrule the plea deal when she gets back.
Less than 1/5 of Asian-American voters supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, according to new exit poll data https://t.co/1ILarOX2C7 pic.twitter.com/b83TKUvlfy
And you can add to the list the mohels who mutilate little boys in honor of their vicious fucking god and shitty cultural traditions as well.
15.
kindness
Trump is thankful he wasn’t up on the balcony with a Shitgibbon, because no one would be able to tell them apart then.
16.
Frankensteinbeck
@rikyrah:
Good lord, that’s offensive, but it fits my view of Sullivan so far.
17.
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
Maybe you have seen this, but remember when Trump sent the Carl Vinson to scare the North Koreans….
Today the New York Times reports that even though this “big deterrent signal” was reported all over Asia and greatly increased tensions between the US and lots of other nations (not just North Korea), in the real world the carrier Carl Vinson was actually sailing in the opposite direction — to the Indian Ocean, for scheduled exercises with the Australian Navy.
WASHINGTON — As worries deepened last week about whether North Korea would conduct a missile test, the White House declared that ordering an American aircraft carrier into the Sea of Japan would send a powerful deterrent signal and give President Trump more options in responding to the North’s provocative behavior.
The problem was, the carrier, the Carl Vinson, and the four other warships in its strike force were at that very moment sailing in the opposite direction, to take part in joint exercises with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula.
It’s Andrew fucking Sullivan, who is still tickled fucking pink he was the guy that got the Bell Curve some exposure. I have never seen bullshit exposed like Stephen Gould did in the Mismeasure of Man.
One of my proudest moments in journalism was publishing an expanded extract of a chapter from “The Bell Curve” in the New Republic before anyone else dared touch it. I published it along with multiple critiques (hey, I believed magazines were supposed to open rather than close debates) – but the book held up, and still holds up as one of the most insightful and careful of the last decade. The fact of human inequality and the subtle and complex differences between various manifestations of being human – gay, straight, male, female, black, Asian – is a subject worth exploring, period.
Liberalism’s commitment to political and moral equality for all citizens and human beings is not and should not be threatened by empirical research into human difference and varied inequality. And the fact that so many liberals are determined instead to prevent and stigmatize free research and debate on this subject is evidence … well, that they have ceased to be liberals in the classic sense. I’m still proud to claim that label – classical liberal. And I’m proud of those with the courage to speak truth to power, as Murray and Herrnstein so painstakingly did.
@Tilda Swintons Bald Cap: I’ve heard conflicting reporting on whether this (“The Carl Vinson is heading to Japan”) was an intentional lie or an honest-to-God bit of incompetence from the Trump folks. I’m not sure which is better, since even the LIE is basically incompetent.
22.
TenguPhule
@Humboldtblue: I comfort myself by remembering that he’s gay and on the religious right’s list of people to burn at the stake once he’s no longer needed by them. Which increasingly looks like its going to be sooner then later.
23.
hovercraft
@rikyrah: Sully is and has always been a racist shit, who ascribed to the Bell Curve and all that other right wing racist drivel. He may have been anti-Twitler, but lets not pretend that he suddenly woke up and became a rational person. He goes in the same category as Rick Wilson, Charlie Sykes and David Frum, reprehensible people who aren’t quite depraved enough to embrace Twitler, but by no means our friends, after all they all believe that it was Obama’s fault that the GOP lost it’s mind, he along with Pelosi and Reid were just so mean! Jennifer Rubin on the other hand seems to be emerging from the fog that enveloped her after September 11th and is assigning the blame for the GOP implosion where it belongs.
Sully can just go fuck himself with a rusty rake.
24.
Yarrow
@schrodingers_cat: Probably missed the attention he was getting before he “retired.”
25.
Barbara
@rikyrah: Slavery, Andrew. That’s the main difference. But a detour:
1. Lumping Asian-Americans together as a single group is a sign of your overarching bias against anyone who isn’t European. Indian-Americans by and large came to America beginning in the 60s either as students or already educated professionals in their own country. This trend has more or less kept up so that by and large it would be an utter scandal if they did not make a higher than average income.
2. If you isolated other groups of Asian-Americans, for instance, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian and Hmong you would get a very different profile of income and education.
3. Most Asian-Americans live in blue states with thriving economies. That helps to fill out the income picture.
4. Chinese and Japanese immigrants from prior to the act that prohibited any more of them from coming were discriminated against but they came here voluntarily, and like Koreans today, hung together economically in ways that were not available to many African-Americans living in the South.
Andrew Sullivan sometimes has interesting ideas but his complete ignorance of American history and his insistence on seeing everything in terms of his Catholic schoolboy conservatism is ugly and stupid.
26.
The Moar You Know
The latest entry into the “world’s most punchable faces” and someone who dearly needs to be fucking punched in the face is Dr. Jumana Nagarwala.
@Humboldtblue: Knew she was going to go with a First Amendment defense on this. Problem for her, there’s a specific federal law against what she’s done, and she’s not in a court district that’s going to even possibly listen to a 1st argument. I hope she gets the maximum, and frankly, I’d like for the Feds to get her patient list and go after the parents who bought their kids in to this monster.
27.
TenguPhule
@The Moar You Know: Baud/Rabbit 2020, When you’re already in the hole, dig yourself out.
28.
LurkerNoLonger
The devil on Trump’s shoulder has taken the form of a bunny. Notice there’s no angel anywhere to be seen.
29.
hovercraft
@schrodingers_cat:
Probably needed the money. I mean him needing money is noble and scrappy, not like when Hillary and Bill go out and earn money, they are grasping and coarse.
30.
Frankensteinbeck
@hovercraft:
I like to say that Frum is an old-school Republican: A racist asshole who likes hurting people as policy, but not actually shriekingly insane. The Teabaggers’ demands to burn the country down embarrass him. Kicking the weak is supposed to be mature and responsible!
31.
Booger
Wait…my left or your left?
32.
Thoughtful David
@rikyrah:
Sullivan noticeably lumps all Asians together. I haven’t seen statistics, but I’m willing to bet that darker-skinned Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis have faced huge racism as well.
His is a very pure racism.
For some reason, a book review from last year in the New Yorker about the history of racism against Asian-Americans popped up in my Facebook feed. Perhaps Mr. Sullivan could read it and relieve his ignorance rather than talking out of his ass about shit he doesn’t understand. Again.
(For the sensitive, the article starts with a very poignant story about an Indian-American man who committed suicide in the early 1900s because of the official racism directed towards him and his family.)
34.
trollhattan
Attention, California red-district congress critters: Just because your seat is safe as milk don’t go thinking your townhalls are going to be butter-smooth. I’ll add a postscript via the article’s closing graf: why are you afraid of your own constituents?
About 40-50 police officers were at the event, stationed at the doorway and along the sides of the theater. The hall holds 550, and when people left, others in line were allowed in. Oroville Police Lt. Gil Zarate estimated the crowd at about 600 over the evening.
I will almost certainly say something stupid in formulating this theory, but here goes:
I think that, because Asian-Americans were so isolated into tiny communities for decades, there is much more of a support network. African-American communities have been split up and scattered many more times, so it’s been made harder for them to work together on purpose. It’s the difference between most large cities having a Chinatown and black communities like Roseville being violently attacked and broken up.
36.
rp
@Humboldtblue: Equating male and female circumcision is stupid and offensive. There are perfectly reasonable arguments against male circumcision, but it’s not remotely comparable to female genital mutilation.
37.
Barbara
@Humboldtblue: They should get her under 18 U.S.C. 1001, making a false statement and associated crimes of obstruction of justice. The state could also prosecute for practicing surgery in an unlicensed facility and take away her medical license. I am just thinking of things that cannot even arguably be considered a manifestation of religious practice. Also, while it might be part of the parents’ religious practice for the procedure to occur it is not part of her religious practice to do it on their behalf. She should not be able to maintain their religious rights as a defense to her own criminal conduct. I would be lying if I said that there is nothing meritorious in her position. People get their boys circumcised all the time. There is a difference, I get it, because male circumcision preserves the function of the organ while female genital mutilation is intended to destroy the function of the tissue.
ETA: I see somebody beat me to it regarding male circumcision. The two cannot be equated but that is not necessarily a sound argument. Saying it does not make it so.
Plus he needs to keep his health insurance, which he needs because he has the pre-existing condition of having AIDS, unlike all those other people with pre-existing conditions who don’t deserve insurance.
I must say I’m dumbfounded by the extent to which Rubin has become relatively lucid. Her Mittens worship and batshit unhinged hatred of Obama was so demented, I thought she was irredeemable. I’m still not ready to say she is cured of her dipshitteryitis (which I suspect will come roaring back once a Democrat is in office and not licking Netanyahu’s boots with enough zeal for her) but she’s come a long way in this age of the Trumpocalypse.
The writer’s perpetuation of model-minority and black-deficiency myths is pretty boring at this point
Much, much shorter rikyrah and Sully:
Charles Murray is right; African Americans are inferior; all women not named Margaret Thatcher are filthy, trashy, stupid harridans, especially one named Clinton.
————————————————-
Isn’t that easier than reading all that crap?
@Turgidson: Unlike lickspittle Jared Kushner, she knows anti-semitism when she sees it and it scares her. Plus, she is clearly a neo-con of the purest variety — more or less socially liberal but willing to align with social conservatives for the good of Israel.
Perhaps Mr. Sullivan could read it and relieve his ignorance rather than talking out of his ass about shit he doesn’t understand. Again.
Talking out of his arse is all Sully has ever known how to do. It’s his raison d’être
47.
Lizzy L
@trollhattan: Wow, that is totally fucked.
@TenguPhule: Fuck you too.
@rp: @Barbara: Agree. But if the practice of male circumcision were to be abandoned, that would be equally fine with me. I speak as a Jewish woman all of whose male relatives are/were circumcised.
Less than 1/5 of Asian-American voters supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, according to new exit poll data
Count me completely unsurprised. Republican bigotry has been driving away AAPI voters for a while. Now they know to listen for it, and there was plenty of it to hear this election. People talk about Prop 187 driving Latino voters away from the Republican party as the defining factor in turning California bright blue, but the Republicans’ recent moves that have driven away AAPI voters have cemented that transition.
49.
Barbara
@Yutsano: Along with lumping all ethnicities together based on their continent of origin.
50.
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne: Which is why seeing him lose it and panic is going to be one of the few little joys left when the GOP destroy American Healthcare.
51.
TenguPhule
@Lizzy L: What? I can’t enjoy a Judas goat finding out that in the end, he’s still just a goat for the butcher?
I saw a really interesting article one time that traced FGM back to the ancient Egyptians, which means that it’s a cultural practice of a specific region, not something intrinsic to Islam. It was continued by Muslims in North Africa in decreasing circles out from Egypt and was imported into a few other areas, but it’s basically unknown in majority-Muslim countries like Indonesia except where it’s been imported by immigrants from North Africa. Pretty interesting.
53.
Barbara
@Lizzy L: I am vehemently anti-mutilation. I wouldn’t let my daughters get their ears pierced until they turned 18 and did it without my permission. My son is not circumcised and my husband agreed with me that it was not necessary for the two of them to “look” alike (the worlds’ dumbest argument). I witnessed a ritual circumcision of a baby in the NEONATAL INTENSIVE CARE UNIT where my firstborn was also hospitalized and I was shocked at its brutality. The doctor didn’t like doing it anymore than the premature tiny baby liked getting it. And every year, there are baby boys who die of complications. I really wish it would go away.
Asian-Americans, like Jews, are indeed a problem for the “social-justice” brigade. I mean, how on earth have both ethnic groups done so well in such a profoundly racist society? How have bigoted white people allowed these minorities to do so well — even to the point of earning more, on average, than whites? Asian-Americans, for example, have been subject to some of the most brutal oppression, racial hatred, and open discrimination over the years … Yet, today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America.
What happens, when U.S. immigration policy, for the past 50 years, has been slanted to only allow engineers, doctors, businessmen (and women), and IT guys in from Asia.
In other words, take a cross section of college educated Americans, who have enough drive to leave their life behind and travel half-way around the world in search of something better, and I bet they’ll also be high achievers.
You know why Asians do well here? That’s why. The U.S. only lets in the motivated college educated professionals.
Goddamn – I listened to the audio. Makes me want to fly to Cali and have a little man to man talk with that fucking guy, so he could interact with somebody who could punch him back.
Writing for New York magazine last week, Andrew Sullivan posed a question for those who see racism as the primary obstacle to equality and prosperity for nonwhite Americans: What about Asians?
Speaking about reverse discrimination, let’s talk about the stereotype among white managers that ALL Asian subordinate employees are bright, intelligent hard workers and how ALL white subordinate employees are lazy, dumb, slackers with bad attitudes. It is pretty interesting in the Valley how most management positions are white males, most skilled labor are Asians and most unskilled are blacks and Hispanics. I wonder how that happens Mr Sullvan?
@Mnemosyne: Yep. It’s most prevalent in the Horn of Africa, where nearly 90% of women and girls are subjected to it, but it is virtually unknown in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. There are also levels of invasiveness. In some countries the clitoris is just “nicked” and it is like a rite of passage. But in other countries, women are subject to what is called infibulation, where all of the external genitalia are removed and the vagina is sewn shut. There are indigenous efforts to combat it in many places where it has become prevalent.
59.
TenguPhule
@gene108: Historically, they had the shit jobs and worked their way up. Because back then, even racist America was better then back home. Unfortunately, high motivation combined with strong work ethic meant that they succeed more then many poor whites, which fed racism, which led to quotas and bans. The educational elite thing is actually fairly recent.
60.
hitchhiker
Since this is an open thread, I’m going to just go ahead and say that I don’t think I have the stomach for all the HRC-was-terrible-and-Bernie-woulda-won stories that are going to be part of the frekking diet for the next who knows how long.
One thing that utterly galls me is the assumption that every single person who supported her would of course have been delighted to fill in the box by his name. It’s taken for granted that all the women (me!) who found a measure of vindication in her candidacy would just get over it if she lost to Bernie, because we’re like that. Responsible. Reasonable. Reliable.
Of course, given the Sanders/DT choice, we would have. The problem is that THEY DIDN’T. They stayed home, or wrote in Bernie, or voted 3rd party.
What do you call a person who gets to be spiteful and selfish BECAUSE they’re surrounded by people who aren’t?
In other words, take a cross section of college educated Americans, who have enough drive to leave their life behind and travel half-way around the world in search of something better, and I bet they’ll also be high achievers.
You know why Asians do well here? That’s why. The U.S. only lets in the motivated college educated professionals.
The most educated immigrants?
Africans.
62.
Barbara
@gene108: Yes, that’s similar to the point I was trying to make above. However, it is also true that in many countries where endemic discrimination exists, many low income people in their own societies thrive when they are not affirmatively oppressed, and are able to achieve their potential. Imagine if American society had taken that approach with African-Americans.
@Thoughtful David: Yes, in practice “Asians” usually refer to (most of) the easternmost part of the continent and the (non-Muslim) inhabitants of the subcontinent.
And Sully’s stewardship of TNR is the Chuck Austen of editorial runs.
64.
patroclus
Sullivan’s “blacks are stupid” shtick is really getting old. If he were publishing in the 1920’s, he would have been a pro-eugenics guy and someone who was proud of his bringing “phrenology” into the mainstream. If he were a pre-1978 Mormon, he would have been all over the “curse of Cain” nonsense. He writes well, but can’t see over his biases.
The general election in the U.K. is a huge development! With Labour disarray under the incompetent Corbyn, this gives a major boost to the Lib Dems to gain traction and vastly improve their total of 9 MP’s. They are the only national anti-BREXIT party and could make major gains in what will probably be treated as a 2nd BREXIT referendum. The Tories will probably win is the conventional wisdom, but it’s possible that their margin could be reduced and a much more sane U.K. could result.
Asian-Americans, for example, have been subject to some of the most brutal oppression, racial hatred, and open discrimination over the years … Yet, today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America.
Sullivan is so tiresome. He loves to work that “Bell Curve” bone back from when he was associated with The New Republic. But his reverie certainly doesn’t say anything meaningful about white racism.
It would be as if someone said, “You know, on average homosexual households earn more than heterosexual households, so homophobia must not exist and all gays are living the American Dream.”
Charles Murray is right; African Americans are inferior; all women not named Margaret Thatcher are filthy, trashy, stupid harridans, especially one named Clinton.
Yep. Sullivan’s misogyny doesn’t get as much attention as his racism, but it’s just as virulent. His Thatcher fixation is the exception that proves the rule. He doesn’t just think she was a good and competent leader, he reveres her. It’s weird.
@Mnemosyne: That was 2004. And it also brings to mind a Soviet-era Armenian joke:
Man on his deathbed: “My children, remember to protect the Jews.”
“Why?”
“Because once they are gone, we will be next.”
@Barbara: Not surprised (Alex Wagner noted as much in The Atlantic); my impression was that Filipinos were the generally cited exception to the model minority stereotype.
68.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@rikyrah: It’s not just racism, they are also up in arms about post-ironic Hipsters and their skinny ties. It’s anything differant than them they see as a personal attack.. I think one could make a good arguement they hated Obama because he was youngish, skinny, thinks logically and has a good relationship with his wife as much as his skin color.
With Labour disarray under the incompetent Corbyn, this gives a major boost to the Lib Dems to gain traction
Hah hah no. The Lib Dems are shit and they just cheerleaded Trump’s bombings as their latest play into stupid. Labor is in trouble because Britain has shit media standards on par with ours and the Labor MPs are shit at working together. If they spent half the energy that they wasted on trying to knife their leader in the back on actually attacking the Tories instead, they’d be ahead in the game. They make our Democratic party look like a paragon of fellowship by comparison.
I’m going to just go ahead and say that I don’t think I have the stomach for all the HRC-was-terrible-and-Bernie-woulda-won stories that are going to be part of the frekking diet for the next who knows how long.
Yep. And if you challenge their narrative, they start whining about how Hillary’s voters need to get over it and stop re-fighting the primary.
You guys go first for once, K? I’m sick of listening to all of the things Hillary’s campaign did wrong without one single acknowledgement that Sanders’s campaign had even more fuckups, which is why he fucking lost the primary.
71.
patroclus
@Thoughtful David: Indeed. It depends on the “Asian.” Japanese-Americans generally do well because we certainly aren’t demonizing them the way we did when we sent them to concentration camps and many from other countries do too, but you just can’t generalize across the whole huge continent. Muslims from Asian countries are currently suffering what non-Muslims aren’t. It just depends on who white Americans aren’t racially targeting in any particular decade as to who does well. Unfortunately, African-Americans are pretty much always targeted – it never really lets up for them.
72.
Lizzy L
@TenguPhule: I cannot be happy about the literal burning of people, even people I despise. And your willingness to, in your imagination at least, permit my death and the death of a lot of my friends in order to remove Sullivan from view doesn’t sit well with me.
ETA: This should not be construed as a defense of Sullivan. Not at all.
73.
Aleta
Asian Americans were immigrants. Sullivan’s comparison to African Americans is despicable.
Asian Americans were badly discriminated against, mistreated as workers, stolen from, yes. Individuals were worked to death, kept against their will, and murdered because of race. US law didn’t protect them. But some of the time, when money could be saved or valuables brought to the US, they were allowed in some areas to own property and choose a place to live or a type of work. They could choose whom to marry and they could pass things down to their children.
They were not kidnapped into slavery, expected to die in great numbers in transport, legally raped to produce children who were sold away or inherited. All of which was written into the legal code and enforced by state and federal governement agents.
74.
Barbara
@Lizzy L: I agree that the nearly automatic resort to violent imagery is disturbing.
And your willingness to, in your imagination at least, permit my death and the death of a lot of my friends in order to remove Sullivan from view doesn’t sit well with me.
So I get a fuck you from you for just imagining the natural consequences of Sully’s own actions and having the audacity to enjoy the black humor of it?
Don’t tell me you’re not familiar with the metaphor.
Well fuck off yourself as imagining I’m “permitting your death and the deaths of your friends” when its in your head, not mine.
76.
Tokyokie
@Barbara: Years ago, Larry Flynt started a magazine aimed at hip Asian-American youth (the name of which I don’t recall). I was talking about it with a Chinese-American journalist, who thought it was pretty cool, until I pointed out that it was based on the assumption that all Asian-Americans shared the same cultural background, whether they’re Buddhist Koreans, Roman Catholic Filipinos, or Muslim Indonesians. (And the magazine was clearly aimed at those whose ancestors didn’t come from places in Asia west of Burma.) At which point he realized he was being played by Flynt. I think the magazine only lasted a couple of issues, and deservedly so. Fuck Sullivan if he thinks illiterate Hmong refugees from Cambodia are doing as well as professionals who’ve immigrated from Taiwan. Asian cultures are just as diverse as European cultures, even if Sully is too racist to tell them apart or even think that it matters.
77.
TenguPhule
@Barbara: Are you sure you’re on the right blog? This is BJ, metaphor gets taken all over the place here.
78.
patroclus
@TenguPhule: I disagree. There are a lot of anti-Brexit voters in much of England that the Lib Dems could pick up – Labour has forfeited them due to Corbyn’s pro-Brexit stance (he actually ordered all Labour MP’s to support it). This election won’t be fought on Trump’s useless bombing – it’ll be fought on hard-Brexit, soft-Brexit or no Brexit. No Brexit got 48% in the referendum and the Lib Dems are the only national party that wholeheartedly takes that position. They will do much better than 2015 – the only question will be whether it’s enough to staunch all the expected Labour losses and stop the Tories from gaining a bigger majority.
@patroclus: Also (h/t Peter Beinart, The Week): Note how the operating ethnoracial perception for the Tsarnaevs was “Muslim tur’rists,” even though they were literally from the Caucasus.
I spent a half-hour sitting out on the deck in this glorious weather with my removable cast removed, and my bare arm enjoying the sun and the breeze. It was fantastic.
Count me as a supporter of the right to bare arms.
I saw a documentary recently about Chinese-American artist Tyrus Wong (who died at the age of 106 last year) and there actually was a strong pan-Asian movement among artists in Southern California, with Japanese, Chinese, and Korean-American artists collaborating on art shows. But that all got split up when Japanese-Americans were interned in WWII.
A 71-year- old church volunteer received a 10 year federal prison sentence for trying to bribe a 14-year- old girl to have sex with him.
He needs to contact president Littescrotum to find out how to get away with it.
85.
trollhattan
@efgoldman: Same here. His shark grand jeté was “yes-indeeding” McMegan AFTER they no longer shared an employer.The scales fell from my eyes, never to return.
86.
Barbara
@Tokyokie: Seriously, anyone who sees India, China and Japan as essentially the same is an idiot. The diversity of language, culture and religion within India is astounding.
Yep. Sullivan’s misogyny doesn’t get as much attention as his racism, but it’s just as virulent. His Thatcher fixation is the exception that proves the rule. He doesn’t just think she was a good and competent leader, he reveres her. It’s weird.
Sullivan wanted Maggie Thatcher to spank him. Theresa May will do nicely, now.
89.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne: I don’t think it’s stupid. I’d have to say the realities of black community success being a target for extremely violent white retaliation had an even bigger effect than just being scattered. One of the key foundations of white economic success is property in the family. All those country folk with nothing but public assistance, but they have homes & land. Where were black americans supposed to develop this from, when the very communities that became prosperous were torn down? Compound that with the myths of black tendency towards failure and violence and you have a pretty potent cocktail.
they are also up in arms about post-ironic Hipsters and their skinny ties.
Aw damn. I threw out all my skinny ties in the 70s or 80s.
93.
TenguPhule
@patroclus: As I recall, the Lib-dems were shit last time they were in Coalition and nobody has yet forgotten or forgiven them for it.
As for Corbyn, he’s made goofs, but the media on him is Fox level bonkers. As I’ve said earlier, he’s the Hillary Clinton of Britain. All of his policies and positions keep getting twisted by what people assume rather then what he’s actually saying a lot of the time. Or outright lying.
FFS, This whole “pro-brexit all along” is complete BS. He campaigned for remain, got ignored by the media while he was doing it, then everyone and their uncle suddenly is claiming he did nothing and was working for leave in secret. Then when he points out that labor’s best option is to try and salvage what the country can from the Tory Brexit, he gets slammed as “Pro-brexit” when its not like he has a CHOICE about whether Britain leaves or not, because the Tories are going to do it anyway.
You’d think after the Rememberance day non-scandal fiasco that people would figure out that something about the coverage of Corbyn stinks.
94.
amygdala
@Barbara: All of this, or as I’m fond of saying, “just ’cause you can’t tell us apart doesn’t mean there aren’t important distinctions.” I have relatives, coworkers, and parents of good friends who were interned during WWII, and I seriously doubt any of them would compare their experiences, awful as they were, with what has been inflicted on African-American and Native American people in the US for centuries.
@Roger Moore: I laugh and laugh when conservatives complain about why API and Jewish folks so reliably vote for Democrats. “But… but… they’re wealthy… why don’t they like us?” Uh, because your haterade is visible from the International Space Station and speaking for my API peeps, we know where that leads… to “relocation centers.” Just a guess, but I’m thinking people whose history includes, you know, the Holocaust, do too.
Would also add, as for as the API community goes, that Obama did a lot to strengthen our sense of connection to Democrats. Even though he was thwarted in naming Godwin Liu to the federal bench, he was successful in appointing other Asians as federal judges. We do tech and health care, but law, not so much. When an API judge gets appointed to SCOTUS, I won’t be surprised if it’s one of Obama’s nominees to the federal bench. And Governor Brown, bless him, appointed Liu to the California Supreme Court, so he could still eventually be appointed to SCOTUS.
I think it’s Obama’s having grown up in Hawaii and the time he spent in Indonesia. He understands, unlike Sully, that we’re not a monolith, and that being third or fourth generation Chinese or Japanese is very different than being a first generation SE Asian immigrant. We’re a relatively small minority group, but growing. Unless and until Republicans lose the race-baiting, I can’t see the API community migrating to the right in any great numbers.
In a weird way, I think African-Americans and Native Americans were treated in a very similar way to each other, in that they were driven off any land they were able to improve as soon as it started looking good to white people.
Possibly because they were mostly concentrated in cities, that was less likely to happen to Jewish-Americans and Asian-Americans, at least until Japanese-Americans were interned and their property stolen from them without compensation.
And Sully’s stewardship of TNR is the Chuck Austen of editorial runs.
Ouch. C’mon now, at least Sully can produce well-written passages, even if his underlying premises and logic are severely lacking.
99.
TenguPhule
@Barbara: I look forward to your clutching of pearls the next time someone else uses a particularly colorful metaphor.
100.
ruckus
@MattF:
I can’t remember for sure but I think I found BJ through Andy but I stopped paying attention to him a very long time ago. And I’m far better off for it.
101.
Lizzy L
@TenguPhule: This is BJ, in which FU is a perfectly appropriate response to how you use metaphor, how you respond to a comment, and how and if you wear your shoes.
@efgoldman: I am sure Tangerino would advise him that he should have offered her more money. (Not PAY it, mind you — just offer it.)
102.
JPL
Another quick update. the lines are scary long in Roswell. I didn’t go in to the polling place but I have hopes that it’s because of not enough machines. There are too many old white guys here. ugh
103.
mai naem mobile
Sullivan forgets that with a few exceptions non white immigrants to this country were either wealthy in their countries so had a better education and all the other accroutrements that go along with being rich,or were exceptionally smart or talented. They already had a huge head start. And it’s not just Asians. It’s West Indians and South Americans. Also, when you immigrate you’re self selecting people who are more willing to take a risk. You have to have an inner strength in you to just leave everything you’re comfortable with and move to a new place. Slaves didn’t self select to come here and that’a before you start talking about the effects of slavery.
You know why Asians do well here? That’s why. The U.S. only lets in the motivated college educated professionals.
I suppose if you’re just limiting yourself to the legal Asian immigrants I would have to say, going by what these guys from Asian I’ve worked with for over thirty years at four companies now; for the majority their relatives got them a job at the current place they are working. After that, since they will happily will work 12 hours a day forever and won’t take off the sick, their employers think they are fantastic since number of hours in the building is the one true metric for American business (one of the guys at work dropped dead at his station last December from cancer because he didn’t want to take off an see a doctor about the persistent cough he had)
105.
TenguPhule
@Lizzy L: And an FU is well deserved when you throw one out based on what you think I said instead of what I actually said. I prefer to be insulted for things I’ve actually done or said, not the vivid fantasies of someone else’s warped logic.
106.
Barbara
@TenguPhule: No one asked for your comment to be removed. They just told you what they thought of it. So, basically, you have trouble digesting what you expect others to eat. Get over it.
This may be a dumb question, but what’s the difference between “trying to bribe for sex” and “soliciting a prostitute”?
The age of the girl involved should have given you a big clue.
110.
patroclus
@TenguPhule: Corbyn mildly campaigned against Brexit, skipping all the important events, refusing to campaign with other anti-Brexiteers and then switched on a dime and has been for it since last June, even going to the trouble of ordering a three-line whip forcing Labour front-benchers to either vote for it or resign and extinguish their careers. Making some “goofs” is a vast understatement – he completely changed Labour’s 4-decade-long pro-EU policy in a nanosecond and abandoned every single Labour voter who didn’t want it, especially in the London area, in Scotland and throughout all major metropolitan areas of the U.K. This major policy shift is why the media is after him and they should be. He’s a terrible leader and his policies would drive the U.K. into the ground. My Labour-voting relatives certainly feel this way; my SNP voting relatives do too and my Tory voting relatives are just chortling at his obvious incompetence. May clearly called this election (technically, it requires a 2/3 vote, but she’ll get it) to take advantage of his dearth of political skills – it’s as if Jill Stein and the Wilmer bros had taken over the Democrats. The Lib Dems will clearly gain – the problem is that they were so destroyed in 2015 that they have so far to go. Like I said, the question is whether their gains can overcome all the Labour losses.
111.
TenguPhule
@Barbara: You explain to me how someone interprets “Sully is a useful idiot for the very people who would love to people like him suffer and die and he’s working hard to make it happen.” as “I wish you and yours to die so that Sully gets what’s coming to him” in a way that actually makes sense.
@clay: Austen, at least, has done mostly solid work in TV. And for verbally skilled shitbirds, Sully is no Taibbi (or even Maher).
113.
Barbara
@TenguPhule: I’m not playing. You defend your own comment.
114.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne: Possibly. Although, case in point, gentrification in SF & NYC. It used to be Crooklyn, when no one wanted it. Now it’s $2000 for a studio and that’s a bargain.
115.
The Moar You Know
Hah hah no. The Lib Dems are shit and they just cheerleaded Trump’s bombings as their latest play into stupid. Labor is in trouble because Britain has shit media standards on par with ours and the Labor MPs are shit at working together. If they spent half the energy that they wasted on trying to knife their leader in the back on actually attacking the Tories instead, they’d be ahead in the game. They make our Democratic party look like a paragon of fellowship by comparison.
@TenguPhule: 100% accurate. Labour has just about fucked themselves out of existence, and Corbyn is just the guy to make sure they do a complete job of it. Worst party ever.
There are a lot of anti-Brexit voters in much of England that the Lib Dems could pick up
We shall see, but I think the Lib Dems could appear in a variation of the Monty Python “Dead Parrot” sketch. I think that the Lib Dems are defunct.
BTW, in a recent interview, the actor Peter Mullan talked about how Labour became dead to him (from the Guardian)
Mullan is switched-on, though. A socialist since his early teens, he was a vocal supporter of Scottish independence and attacked the BBC for what he called “horrendous bias” in its coverage against the Yes campaign. He voted for the SNP in the last election and still has plenty of spite for Labour and Jeremy Corbyn.
“He’s a unionist, so I don’t have a lot of time – no offence,” he says. “He’s no different from the Labour party that told us [before the independence vote]: ‘If go your own way we’re going to destroy you economically.’”
“Every Scot’s got a story to tell about how lethargic and corrupt the Labour party got in Scotland, even though we good as created it. They were always the ones saying ‘You’re going to vote for us anyway, so why should we give a flying fuck?’ They got bluer and bluer under Blair and then Brown. Then you were voting for red Tories.
Corbyn mildly campaigned against Brexit, skipping all the important events, refusing to campaign with other anti-Brexiteers and then switched on a dime and has been for it since last June, even going to the trouble of ordering a three-line whip forcing Labour front-benchers to either vote for it or resign and extinguish their careers.
This is what I mean. He campaigns for remain, all of his efforts are dismissed even when Labor delivered a remain majority from their voters (and his worst critics in labor didn’t do half the job he did). He’s damned if labor votes against the final leave bill and damned if they don’t, but made the reasonable political calculation that a futile feel good protest vote will not actually do any good and that labor MUST try to keep the leave labor voter support if they are to stand any chance in the polls (and that they’re more fickle and conservative then the remain voters). And throughout it all, you seem to refuse to acknowledge that Labor’s MPs have been acting like a bunch of drunken Starscreams with plots to sabotage and oust him within MINUTES of his first election victory. And those leaders then try to split the party, change the rules in midstream during a failed attempt to oust him, can’t find a plausible alternative to this “loser” who seems to keep beating them black and blue (so what does that say about them?) when it comes to actual labor voters.
119.
TenguPhule
@Barbara: You’re the one who chimed in defense of the crazy person, not me.
Well you do have to take into consideration that most of these morons, and I sadly have include the “media” in that, don’t know what the Caucasus are. Seriously just ask a few random people, it will depress you.
“He’s a unionist, so I don’t have a lot of time – no offence,” he says. “He’s no different from the Labour party that told us [before the independence vote]: ‘If go your own way we’re going to destroy you economically.’”
“Every Scot’s got a story to tell about how lethargic and corrupt the Labour party got in Scotland, even though we good as created it. They were always the ones saying ‘You’re going to vote for us anyway, so why should we give a flying fuck?’ They got bluer and bluer under Blair and then Brown. Then you were voting for red Tories.
Of course completely forgotten is that Corbyn wasn’t responsible for this change for the worst and actively rebelled against it (as his critics love to complain about him breaking with the party on voting).
And yet he still gets blamed for it.
Britain’s Hillary Clinton with a side of Obama and a double helping of British media laziness.
122.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@TenguPhule: It ain’t crazy to respond to another of your sadistic fantasies with a hearty FU!
123.
TenguPhule
@The Moar You Know: It was the equivalent of Obama winning and Harry Reid declaring that he was going to work to get rid of the black guy who’d stolen the election. That’s how insane the Labor leadership was and still is.
@hovercraft: I also noticed that non-Muslim Arabs (e.g., Kathy Najimy, Helen Thomas, the Naders) are universally treated as white.
128.
patroclus
@Brachiator: They were defunct in the 1920’s and came back. They were defunct in the 1950’s and came back. They were defunct in the 1970’s and came back. Each instance occurred when Labour started acting stupidly, which is clearly happening now. As the only party (well, the Greens and the SNP and Plaid Cymru too) opposing Brexit in a general election focused on that, they’ll make gains. Will it be a handful? Or 50 or more? That’s what we don’t know. It depends on whether Corbyn begins to veer back towards an anti-Brexit position – it’s clearly in in his political interest, but he’s probably so incompetent not to be able to see it. His behavior in the past 10 months has been abominable – can he execute yet another policy shift? I think it’s more likely that Corbyn won’t even address Brexit very much during the campaign – just like he did when he was “purportedly” against it during the referendum; thereby presenting somewhat of a soft-Brexit position. No Brexit will be owned by the smaller parties but the SNP and Plaid don’t even run candidates outside of Scotland and Wales, so the default of the anti-Brexit voters will be the Lib Dems. Maybe individual Labour MP’s will be able to exploit their disagreement with Corbyn in individual constituencies and skate by. Like you said, we’ll see. But this is the biggest opportunity for the Lib Dems in over 30 years – I think they’ll do well. How well is the question.
129.
TenguPhule
But this is the biggest opportunity for the Lib Dems in over 30 years
Except for the last time they won. Remember that? Remember what happened when they gave the Tories a coalition?
@amygdala:
At least among the Asian Americans I know, a huge part of it is that they’ve started to pay more careful attention to Republican race baiting. They didn’t used to notice it, but now they’re clear on the idea that when the Republicans talk about us and them, Asian Americans are clearly them, not us.
I think I’ve told the story before, but Bristol Palin’s appearance on DWTS was an eye opening experience for a whole group of my coworkers. They weren’t very political and were big fans of the show. When Palin kept getting votes from Teabaggers* who weren’t otherwise fans of the show just because they liked her mom, it really upset them. More importantly, it convinced them that the Republicans were going to vote for people like them and to hell with what it did for the system during elections, too.
*I mentioned to one coworker that she might prefer to call them tea partiers because teabagger had a crude sexual connotation, and it just made her more eager to call them teabaggers.
They were defunct in the 1920’s and came back. They were defunct in the 1950’s and came back. They were defunct in the 1970’s and came back. Each instance occurred when Labour started acting stupidly, which is clearly happening now.
The Lib Dems wrecked themselves most recently when they joined up with the Conservatives. You cannot blame Labour for that act of self-destruction on the part of the Lib Dems.
133.
TenguPhule
@clay: Well soliciting a prostitute would require that the girl in question actually is one. She wasn’t. She was a girl who attended his church. And yes, he tried “the devil made me do it” defense. Which the judge ridiculed.
134.
Brachiator
@clay: RE: The age of the girl involved should have given you a big clue.
Prostitutes can’t be underage? Huh, news to me…
Is sexual exploitation of children news to you?
135.
patroclus
@TenguPhule: They haven’t “won” since 1905. Since then, they’ve only been in coalitions (with the Irish, with the Tories during WWI and thereafter, in the 1930’s “National” coalition, during WWII, during a brief “Lib-Lab” pact in the late 70’s and from 2010-15). Usually, they end up getting blamed for the bad policies enacted at the impetus of their coalition partners and go back to being defunct. Then, they come back under new leadership. They’re on an upswing in the pendulum now. In the recent coalition, they got marriage equality enacted, they phased out hereditary peers, they got the Fixed Term Parliament Act implemented, they further extended devolution to the regional parliaments, they ended male primogeniture for the Crown and they stopped the Brexit referendum efforts. But Osborne pushed through student tuition increases and an austerity budget and everyone blamed the Lib Dems for it. They are much more likely to form a coalition with Labour and the SNP now – I assure you, the voters will note that.
@rikyrah: And the so-called model minority can go from being model to being referred to as unhinged and lacking reading comprehension when they question the prevailing views, as I have found out myself.
137.
Barbara
@clay: Minors cannot consent to sex. Arresting underage girls for prostitution is ridiculous. It is the buyer who should be charged with statutory rape.
Bullshit, you’re just excusing religious and cultural tradition and condemning the cultural tradition of others. Jews weren’t mutilating baby boys because of medical concerns but because of their covenant with that fucking monster of a god they introduced to the world.
You can pretend there is some substantive difference between the same practices but we both know that mutilating the genitals of babies is fucking absurd and done only in honor of “tradition”.
140.
Villago Delenda Est
@rikyrah: With white redneck trash, “racism” means anyone but white folk. Period. They diss on African Americans, of course, but they’ve been doing it to Asian Americans, to anyone vaguely Hispanic, anyone vaguely Middle-Eastern/Arab/Berber/Iranian what have you. It’s about the white people. Period.
141.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore: They picked “teabaggers” as their identity initially. Then someone pointed out that it has sexual connotations. That’s when they tried switching to “tea party”. The whole thing was bullshit to begin with…it was about the blah guy in the White House.
They are forever “teabaggers”. Fuck these retrograde shits.
Well soliciting a prostitute would require that the girl in question actually is one. She wasn’t.
I know. I explicitly said that in my original post. I’m just curious about the distinction — in general, not necessarily related to this case — between “attempting to bribe for sex” and “attempting to solicit a prostitute”. From the perspective of the hypothetical attempter, it’s the same act — trying to give money for sex. I’m just curious as to what the legal and/or moral distinction is.
I asked the difference between “bribing for sex” and “solicitation”. You said it was the age of the bribee/solicited. Either you’re claiming that only minors can be bribed for sex, or that only non-minors can be solicited. In which case, it’s very ironic that you’re accusing me of being unaware of sexual exploitation of children.
Why? Jews gave us monotheism and the god they worship is the same god Christians and Muslims chose to worship as well.
And if you’re agnostic about the Abrahamaic god what about Thor? Are you agnostic about the pantheon of Greek and Roman gods, or, because you live in a world where billions take imaginary beings seriously, are you just agnostic about the god your neighbors worship?
So if you have a problem you can go seek some fucking religious history lessons to clear that shit right up.
146.
notoriousJRT
@MattF:
Done – years ago. Sullivan has no understanding of the world outside his own navel.
Minors cannot consent to sex. Arresting underage girls for prostitution is ridiculous. It is the buyer who should be charged with statutory rape.
I’m not sure how you got from my comment that I disagree with any of this. For the record, I fully agree that underage girls should not be arrested for prostitution. I was asking about the criminality of the solicitor. The girl did nothing wrong.
Actually, I’ll go further — I don’t believe ANY girl/woman should be arrested for prostitution. If it’s to be a crime (and I don’t know that it should be), then prosecution should only focus on the buyers, as you termed.
148.
Monala
@rikyrah: and the most educated Millennial group: black women.
pk
Frankly I’d rather the bunny were president.
Feebog
Is it November 2020 yet?
rikyrah
Andrew Sullivan’s Pathology
The writer’s perpetuation of model-minority and black-deficiency myths is pretty boring at this point.
By Jamelle Bouie
Writing for New York magazine last week, Andrew Sullivan posed a question for those who see racism as the primary obstacle to equality and prosperity for nonwhite Americans: What about Asians?
Riffing off of the recent incident on a United Airlines plane, where an elderly Asian American man was forcibly removed from his seat to make room for United employees, Sullivan presented a question about the strength of racism and white supremacy.
……………………….
Even as he avoids the words black or African American, that charge—that black deficiency (or even pathology) drives black disadvantage—is the core of Sullivan’s inquiry. And his argument, unstated but clear as the blue sky, is that black Americans have only themselves and their culture to blame for continued racial inequality. That this flies in the face of what we know about structural and institutional disadvantage—of ongoing discrimination in jobs and housing, of the long and enduring effects of past discrimination and bias, of racial disadvantage among well-educated, two-parent black families, of the half-hearted efforts to remedy those accumulated burdens—is, at most, a minor obstacle in Sullivan’s narrative. It also flies in the face of what we know about Asian American gains, which followed that aforementioned—often politically motivated—mid-century decline in anti-Asian racism. Even still, Asian Americans face continued discrimination; among the highly educated, for instance, Asian men earned significantly less than their white counterparts.
GoodDoc01
Donnie Dorko!
rikyrah
Beyond Black and White, the Role Xenophobia Played in the Election
by Nancy LeTourneau April 18, 2017 2:47 PM
Yesterday Martin raised some important questions about the findings outlined by Thomas Wood in an article titled, “Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism.” On the same day, Philip Klinkner wrote, “Immigration was central to the election, and hostility toward immigrants animated Trump voters.”
It is important to note that this kind of analysis has been triggered by the release of data from the American National Election Study (ANES). That was also the basis for an article by Mehdi Hasan that I referenced previously titled, “Top Democrats Are Wrong: Trump Supporters Were More Motivated by Racism Than Economic Issues.”
Some of the questions that arise from the reviews of this data might have to do with the need to revisit what we mean by words like “racism.” We have traditionally used that to describe some of the attitudes White Americans have about Black Americans. The questions Wood relies on to identify racism are all based on that formulation. But does “racism” also apply to attitudes about Mexican Americans? How about immigrants more generally? The survey questions from ANES on which Klinkner relies are a completely different set of inquiries.
The fact of the matter is that many Mexican Americans are not immigrants. They lived here long before European Americans came to these shores. And yet they have been subjected to much of the same kinds of racism directed towards African Americans. Is that because white people assume they are immigrants or because they are not white? Perhaps a combination of both.
Of course, we can’t talk about the role that anti-immigration played in the election without discussing Islamophobia. Based on what I have seen and read, that was a huge factor in many rural communities, especially where evangelical churches and community groups hosted presentations by the fear-mongers. That brand of discrimination is primarily based on religious beliefs. But there are also a lot of stereotypes about Muslims being “brown” and Islamophobia is often linked to fears about immigration in general.
trollhattan
Heh. :-)
Someone this a.m. mentioned an Silicon Valley spousal abuse case that looked as though the husband may be getting away with a slap on the wrist. Now that I’ve read the full story, the presiding judge had best overrule the plea deal when she gets back.
TenguPhule
And of course Trump moves on H1-Bs, because its the only thing he can be sure he’s safe from attack on.
Of course with Trump’s law in effect, I expect the changes are just going to make the system even worse for all parties except the hiring companies.
And remember, Republicans are in control. So an actual fix is out of the question.
MattF
I suspect that the decision to add a specifying identifier to the chyron was made at a rather high level. It looks funnier the other way, though.
rikyrah
Less than 1/5 of Asian-American voters supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, according to new exit poll data https://t.co/1ILarOX2C7 pic.twitter.com/b83TKUvlfy
— NPR (@NPR) April 18, 2017
TenguPhule
@Feebog: We’re not all radioactive ash, so no.
hueyplong
Hope the shade was intentional.
TenguPhule
@rikyrah:
Fixed that for you. That’s all that British dick does.
MattF
@rikyrah: People have always made excuses for Sullivan’s racism. Maybe it’s just time to stop paying attention to him.
Humboldtblue
The latest entry into the “world’s most punchable faces” and someone who dearly needs to be fucking punched in the face is Dr. Jumana Nagarwala.
And you can add to the list the mohels who mutilate little boys in honor of their vicious fucking god and shitty cultural traditions as well.
kindness
Trump is thankful he wasn’t up on the balcony with a Shitgibbon, because no one would be able to tell them apart then.
Frankensteinbeck
@rikyrah:
Good lord, that’s offensive, but it fits my view of Sullivan so far.
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
Maybe you have seen this, but remember when Trump sent the Carl Vinson to scare the North Koreans….
Humboldtblue
@rikyrah:
It’s Andrew fucking Sullivan, who is still tickled fucking pink he was the guy that got the Bell Curve some exposure. I have never seen bullshit exposed like Stephen Gould did in the Mismeasure of Man.
The Moar You Know
Rabbit 2020.
“I truly could not do a worse job.”
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: One wonders why he didn’t stay retired.
MisterForkbeard
@Tilda Swintons Bald Cap: I’ve heard conflicting reporting on whether this (“The Carl Vinson is heading to Japan”) was an intentional lie or an honest-to-God bit of incompetence from the Trump folks. I’m not sure which is better, since even the LIE is basically incompetent.
TenguPhule
@Humboldtblue: I comfort myself by remembering that he’s gay and on the religious right’s list of people to burn at the stake once he’s no longer needed by them. Which increasingly looks like its going to be sooner then later.
hovercraft
@rikyrah: Sully is and has always been a racist shit, who ascribed to the Bell Curve and all that other right wing racist drivel. He may have been anti-Twitler, but lets not pretend that he suddenly woke up and became a rational person. He goes in the same category as Rick Wilson, Charlie Sykes and David Frum, reprehensible people who aren’t quite depraved enough to embrace Twitler, but by no means our friends, after all they all believe that it was Obama’s fault that the GOP lost it’s mind, he along with Pelosi and Reid were just so mean! Jennifer Rubin on the other hand seems to be emerging from the fog that enveloped her after September 11th and is assigning the blame for the GOP implosion where it belongs.
Sully can just go fuck himself with a rusty rake.
Yarrow
@schrodingers_cat: Probably missed the attention he was getting before he “retired.”
Barbara
@rikyrah: Slavery, Andrew. That’s the main difference. But a detour:
1. Lumping Asian-Americans together as a single group is a sign of your overarching bias against anyone who isn’t European. Indian-Americans by and large came to America beginning in the 60s either as students or already educated professionals in their own country. This trend has more or less kept up so that by and large it would be an utter scandal if they did not make a higher than average income.
2. If you isolated other groups of Asian-Americans, for instance, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian and Hmong you would get a very different profile of income and education.
3. Most Asian-Americans live in blue states with thriving economies. That helps to fill out the income picture.
4. Chinese and Japanese immigrants from prior to the act that prohibited any more of them from coming were discriminated against but they came here voluntarily, and like Koreans today, hung together economically in ways that were not available to many African-Americans living in the South.
Andrew Sullivan sometimes has interesting ideas but his complete ignorance of American history and his insistence on seeing everything in terms of his Catholic schoolboy conservatism is ugly and stupid.
The Moar You Know
@Humboldtblue: Knew she was going to go with a First Amendment defense on this. Problem for her, there’s a specific federal law against what she’s done, and she’s not in a court district that’s going to even possibly listen to a 1st argument. I hope she gets the maximum, and frankly, I’d like for the Feds to get her patient list and go after the parents who bought their kids in to this monster.
TenguPhule
@The Moar You Know: Baud/Rabbit 2020, When you’re already in the hole, dig yourself out.
LurkerNoLonger
The devil on Trump’s shoulder has taken the form of a bunny. Notice there’s no angel anywhere to be seen.
hovercraft
@schrodingers_cat:
Probably needed the money. I mean him needing money is noble and scrappy, not like when Hillary and Bill go out and earn money, they are grasping and coarse.
Frankensteinbeck
@hovercraft:
I like to say that Frum is an old-school Republican: A racist asshole who likes hurting people as policy, but not actually shriekingly insane. The Teabaggers’ demands to burn the country down embarrass him. Kicking the weak is supposed to be mature and responsible!
Booger
Wait…my left or your left?
Thoughtful David
@rikyrah:
Sullivan noticeably lumps all Asians together. I haven’t seen statistics, but I’m willing to bet that darker-skinned Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis have faced huge racism as well.
His is a very pure racism.
Mnemosyne
@rikyrah:
For some reason, a book review from last year in the New Yorker about the history of racism against Asian-Americans popped up in my Facebook feed. Perhaps Mr. Sullivan could read it and relieve his ignorance rather than talking out of his ass about shit he doesn’t understand. Again.
(For the sensitive, the article starts with a very poignant story about an Indian-American man who committed suicide in the early 1900s because of the official racism directed towards him and his family.)
trollhattan
Attention, California red-district congress critters: Just because your seat is safe as milk don’t go thinking your townhalls are going to be butter-smooth. I’ll add a postscript via the article’s closing graf: why are you afraid of your own constituents?
Mnemosyne
@Thoughtful David:
I will almost certainly say something stupid in formulating this theory, but here goes:
I think that, because Asian-Americans were so isolated into tiny communities for decades, there is much more of a support network. African-American communities have been split up and scattered many more times, so it’s been made harder for them to work together on purpose. It’s the difference between most large cities having a Chinatown and black communities like Roseville being violently attacked and broken up.
rp
@Humboldtblue: Equating male and female circumcision is stupid and offensive. There are perfectly reasonable arguments against male circumcision, but it’s not remotely comparable to female genital mutilation.
Barbara
@Humboldtblue: They should get her under 18 U.S.C. 1001, making a false statement and associated crimes of obstruction of justice. The state could also prosecute for practicing surgery in an unlicensed facility and take away her medical license. I am just thinking of things that cannot even arguably be considered a manifestation of religious practice. Also, while it might be part of the parents’ religious practice for the procedure to occur it is not part of her religious practice to do it on their behalf. She should not be able to maintain their religious rights as a defense to her own criminal conduct. I would be lying if I said that there is nothing meritorious in her position. People get their boys circumcised all the time. There is a difference, I get it, because male circumcision preserves the function of the organ while female genital mutilation is intended to destroy the function of the tissue.
ETA: I see somebody beat me to it regarding male circumcision. The two cannot be equated but that is not necessarily a sound argument. Saying it does not make it so.
SatanicPanic
@Humboldtblue:
ARRRRGGGGH FUCK YOU SULLY. yeah, people of color have ALL THE POWER.
Sorry, this shit drives me up the wall.
Mnemosyne
@Yarrow:
Plus he needs to keep his health insurance, which he needs because he has the pre-existing condition of having AIDS, unlike all those other people with pre-existing conditions who don’t deserve insurance.
Turgidson
@hovercraft:
I must say I’m dumbfounded by the extent to which Rubin has become relatively lucid. Her Mittens worship and batshit unhinged hatred of Obama was so demented, I thought she was irredeemable. I’m still not ready to say she is cured of her dipshitteryitis (which I suspect will come roaring back once a Democrat is in office and not licking Netanyahu’s boots with enough zeal for her) but she’s come a long way in this age of the Trumpocalypse.
efgoldman
@rikyrah:
Much, much shorter rikyrah and Sully:
————————————————-
Isn’t that easier than reading all that crap?
Mnemosyne
@rikyrah:
Chris Rock called it way back in 2008: anti-immigrant rhetoric quickly turns to racism and anti-Semitism, because it’s all the same continuum.
Barbara
@Turgidson: Unlike lickspittle Jared Kushner, she knows anti-semitism when she sees it and it scares her. Plus, she is clearly a neo-con of the purest variety — more or less socially liberal but willing to align with social conservatives for the good of Israel.
efgoldman
@MattF:
I did, many many years ago. I don’t think I’ve missed anything.
les
@SatanicPanic:
No, silly, don’t you know liberals have all the power and that’s why racist conservatives get called racist.
Yutsano
@Mnemosyne:
Talking out of his arse is all Sully has ever known how to do. It’s his raison d’être
Lizzy L
@trollhattan: Wow, that is totally fucked.
@TenguPhule: Fuck you too.
@rp: @Barbara: Agree. But if the practice of male circumcision were to be abandoned, that would be equally fine with me. I speak as a Jewish woman all of whose male relatives are/were circumcised.
Roger Moore
@rikyrah:
Count me completely unsurprised. Republican bigotry has been driving away AAPI voters for a while. Now they know to listen for it, and there was plenty of it to hear this election. People talk about Prop 187 driving Latino voters away from the Republican party as the defining factor in turning California bright blue, but the Republicans’ recent moves that have driven away AAPI voters have cemented that transition.
Barbara
@Yutsano: Along with lumping all ethnicities together based on their continent of origin.
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne: Which is why seeing him lose it and panic is going to be one of the few little joys left when the GOP destroy American Healthcare.
TenguPhule
@Lizzy L: What? I can’t enjoy a Judas goat finding out that in the end, he’s still just a goat for the butcher?
Mnemosyne
@Barbara:
I saw a really interesting article one time that traced FGM back to the ancient Egyptians, which means that it’s a cultural practice of a specific region, not something intrinsic to Islam. It was continued by Muslims in North Africa in decreasing circles out from Egypt and was imported into a few other areas, but it’s basically unknown in majority-Muslim countries like Indonesia except where it’s been imported by immigrants from North Africa. Pretty interesting.
Barbara
@Lizzy L: I am vehemently anti-mutilation. I wouldn’t let my daughters get their ears pierced until they turned 18 and did it without my permission. My son is not circumcised and my husband agreed with me that it was not necessary for the two of them to “look” alike (the worlds’ dumbest argument). I witnessed a ritual circumcision of a baby in the NEONATAL INTENSIVE CARE UNIT where my firstborn was also hospitalized and I was shocked at its brutality. The doctor didn’t like doing it anymore than the premature tiny baby liked getting it. And every year, there are baby boys who die of complications. I really wish it would go away.
gene108
@rikyrah:
What happens, when U.S. immigration policy, for the past 50 years, has been slanted to only allow engineers, doctors, businessmen (and women), and IT guys in from Asia.
In other words, take a cross section of college educated Americans, who have enough drive to leave their life behind and travel half-way around the world in search of something better, and I bet they’ll also be high achievers.
You know why Asians do well here? That’s why. The U.S. only lets in the motivated college educated professionals.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@trollhattan:
Goddamn – I listened to the audio. Makes me want to fly to Cali and have a little man to man talk with that fucking guy, so he could interact with somebody who could punch him back.
I’d even grant him first hit.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@rikyrah:
Speaking about reverse discrimination, let’s talk about the stereotype among white managers that ALL Asian subordinate employees are bright, intelligent hard workers and how ALL white subordinate employees are lazy, dumb, slackers with bad attitudes. It is pretty interesting in the Valley how most management positions are white males, most skilled labor are Asians and most unskilled are blacks and Hispanics. I wonder how that happens Mr Sullvan?
hovercraft
FLO-RI-DAH
Florida man, 71, gets10years for trying to bribe teen to have sex.
A 71-year- old church volunteer received a 10 year federal prison sentence for trying to bribe a 14-year- old girl to have sex with him.
Barbara
@Mnemosyne: Yep. It’s most prevalent in the Horn of Africa, where nearly 90% of women and girls are subjected to it, but it is virtually unknown in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. There are also levels of invasiveness. In some countries the clitoris is just “nicked” and it is like a rite of passage. But in other countries, women are subject to what is called infibulation, where all of the external genitalia are removed and the vagina is sewn shut. There are indigenous efforts to combat it in many places where it has become prevalent.
TenguPhule
@gene108: Historically, they had the shit jobs and worked their way up. Because back then, even racist America was better then back home. Unfortunately, high motivation combined with strong work ethic meant that they succeed more then many poor whites, which fed racism, which led to quotas and bans. The educational elite thing is actually fairly recent.
hitchhiker
Since this is an open thread, I’m going to just go ahead and say that I don’t think I have the stomach for all the HRC-was-terrible-and-Bernie-woulda-won stories that are going to be part of the frekking diet for the next who knows how long.
One thing that utterly galls me is the assumption that every single person who supported her would of course have been delighted to fill in the box by his name. It’s taken for granted that all the women (me!) who found a measure of vindication in her candidacy would just get over it if she lost to Bernie, because we’re like that. Responsible. Reasonable. Reliable.
Of course, given the Sanders/DT choice, we would have. The problem is that THEY DIDN’T. They stayed home, or wrote in Bernie, or voted 3rd party.
What do you call a person who gets to be spiteful and selfish BECAUSE they’re surrounded by people who aren’t?
A child.
rikyrah
@gene108:
The most educated immigrants?
Africans.
Barbara
@gene108: Yes, that’s similar to the point I was trying to make above. However, it is also true that in many countries where endemic discrimination exists, many low income people in their own societies thrive when they are not affirmatively oppressed, and are able to achieve their potential. Imagine if American society had taken that approach with African-Americans.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Thoughtful David: Yes, in practice “Asians” usually refer to (most of) the easternmost part of the continent and the (non-Muslim) inhabitants of the subcontinent.
And Sully’s stewardship of TNR is the Chuck Austen of editorial runs.
patroclus
Sullivan’s “blacks are stupid” shtick is really getting old. If he were publishing in the 1920’s, he would have been a pro-eugenics guy and someone who was proud of his bringing “phrenology” into the mainstream. If he were a pre-1978 Mormon, he would have been all over the “curse of Cain” nonsense. He writes well, but can’t see over his biases.
The general election in the U.K. is a huge development! With Labour disarray under the incompetent Corbyn, this gives a major boost to the Lib Dems to gain traction and vastly improve their total of 9 MP’s. They are the only national anti-BREXIT party and could make major gains in what will probably be treated as a 2nd BREXIT referendum. The Tories will probably win is the conventional wisdom, but it’s possible that their margin could be reduced and a much more sane U.K. could result.
Brachiator
@rikyrah:
Sullivan is so tiresome. He loves to work that “Bell Curve” bone back from when he was associated with The New Republic. But his reverie certainly doesn’t say anything meaningful about white racism.
It would be as if someone said, “You know, on average homosexual households earn more than heterosexual households, so homophobia must not exist and all gays are living the American Dream.”
Yarrow
@efgoldman:
Yep. Sullivan’s misogyny doesn’t get as much attention as his racism, but it’s just as virulent. His Thatcher fixation is the exception that proves the rule. He doesn’t just think she was a good and competent leader, he reveres her. It’s weird.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Mnemosyne: That was 2004. And it also brings to mind a Soviet-era Armenian joke:
Man on his deathbed: “My children, remember to protect the Jews.”
“Why?”
“Because once they are gone, we will be next.”
@Barbara: Not surprised (Alex Wagner noted as much in The Atlantic); my impression was that Filipinos were the generally cited exception to the model minority stereotype.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@rikyrah: It’s not just racism, they are also up in arms about post-ironic Hipsters and their skinny ties. It’s anything differant than them they see as a personal attack.. I think one could make a good arguement they hated Obama because he was youngish, skinny, thinks logically and has a good relationship with his wife as much as his skin color.
TenguPhule
@patroclus:
Hah hah no. The Lib Dems are shit and they just cheerleaded Trump’s bombings as their latest play into stupid. Labor is in trouble because Britain has shit media standards on par with ours and the Labor MPs are shit at working together. If they spent half the energy that they wasted on trying to knife their leader in the back on actually attacking the Tories instead, they’d be ahead in the game. They make our Democratic party look like a paragon of fellowship by comparison.
Mnemosyne
@hitchhiker:
Yep. And if you challenge their narrative, they start whining about how Hillary’s voters need to get over it and stop re-fighting the primary.
You guys go first for once, K? I’m sick of listening to all of the things Hillary’s campaign did wrong without one single acknowledgement that Sanders’s campaign had even more fuckups, which is why he fucking lost the primary.
patroclus
@Thoughtful David: Indeed. It depends on the “Asian.” Japanese-Americans generally do well because we certainly aren’t demonizing them the way we did when we sent them to concentration camps and many from other countries do too, but you just can’t generalize across the whole huge continent. Muslims from Asian countries are currently suffering what non-Muslims aren’t. It just depends on who white Americans aren’t racially targeting in any particular decade as to who does well. Unfortunately, African-Americans are pretty much always targeted – it never really lets up for them.
Lizzy L
@TenguPhule: I cannot be happy about the literal burning of people, even people I despise. And your willingness to, in your imagination at least, permit my death and the death of a lot of my friends in order to remove Sullivan from view doesn’t sit well with me.
ETA: This should not be construed as a defense of Sullivan. Not at all.
Aleta
Asian Americans were immigrants. Sullivan’s comparison to African Americans is despicable.
Asian Americans were badly discriminated against, mistreated as workers, stolen from, yes. Individuals were worked to death, kept against their will, and murdered because of race. US law didn’t protect them. But some of the time, when money could be saved or valuables brought to the US, they were allowed in some areas to own property and choose a place to live or a type of work. They could choose whom to marry and they could pass things down to their children.
They were not kidnapped into slavery, expected to die in great numbers in transport, legally raped to produce children who were sold away or inherited. All of which was written into the legal code and enforced by state and federal governement agents.
Barbara
@Lizzy L: I agree that the nearly automatic resort to violent imagery is disturbing.
TenguPhule
@Lizzy L:
So I get a fuck you from you for just imagining the natural consequences of Sully’s own actions and having the audacity to enjoy the black humor of it?
Don’t tell me you’re not familiar with the metaphor.
Well fuck off yourself as imagining I’m “permitting your death and the deaths of your friends” when its in your head, not mine.
Tokyokie
@Barbara: Years ago, Larry Flynt started a magazine aimed at hip Asian-American youth (the name of which I don’t recall). I was talking about it with a Chinese-American journalist, who thought it was pretty cool, until I pointed out that it was based on the assumption that all Asian-Americans shared the same cultural background, whether they’re Buddhist Koreans, Roman Catholic Filipinos, or Muslim Indonesians. (And the magazine was clearly aimed at those whose ancestors didn’t come from places in Asia west of Burma.) At which point he realized he was being played by Flynt. I think the magazine only lasted a couple of issues, and deservedly so. Fuck Sullivan if he thinks illiterate Hmong refugees from Cambodia are doing as well as professionals who’ve immigrated from Taiwan. Asian cultures are just as diverse as European cultures, even if Sully is too racist to tell them apart or even think that it matters.
TenguPhule
@Barbara: Are you sure you’re on the right blog? This is BJ, metaphor gets taken all over the place here.
patroclus
@TenguPhule: I disagree. There are a lot of anti-Brexit voters in much of England that the Lib Dems could pick up – Labour has forfeited them due to Corbyn’s pro-Brexit stance (he actually ordered all Labour MP’s to support it). This election won’t be fought on Trump’s useless bombing – it’ll be fought on hard-Brexit, soft-Brexit or no Brexit. No Brexit got 48% in the referendum and the Lib Dems are the only national party that wholeheartedly takes that position. They will do much better than 2015 – the only question will be whether it’s enough to staunch all the expected Labour losses and stop the Tories from gaining a bigger majority.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@patroclus: Also (h/t Peter Beinart, The Week): Note how the operating ethnoracial perception for the Tsarnaevs was “Muslim tur’rists,” even though they were literally from the Caucasus.
Barbara
@TenguPhule: Not playing.
Gin & Tonic
I spent a half-hour sitting out on the deck in this glorious weather with my removable cast removed, and my bare arm enjoying the sun and the breeze. It was fantastic.
Count me as a supporter of the right to bare arms.
Elizabelle
@Gin & Tonic: Great to hear. Progress.
Where is Baud?
Mnemosyne
@Tokyokie:
I saw a documentary recently about Chinese-American artist Tyrus Wong (who died at the age of 106 last year) and there actually was a strong pan-Asian movement among artists in Southern California, with Japanese, Chinese, and Korean-American artists collaborating on art shows. But that all got split up when Japanese-Americans were interned in WWII.
efgoldman
@hovercraft:
He needs to contact president Littescrotum to find out how to get away with it.
trollhattan
@efgoldman: Same here. His shark grand jeté was “yes-indeeding” McMegan AFTER they no longer shared an employer.The scales fell from my eyes, never to return.
Barbara
@Tokyokie: Seriously, anyone who sees India, China and Japan as essentially the same is an idiot. The diversity of language, culture and religion within India is astounding.
trollhattan
@Gin & Tonic: Howzabout arming bears?
Brachiator
@Yarrow:
Sullivan wanted Maggie Thatcher to spank him. Theresa May will do nicely, now.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne: I don’t think it’s stupid. I’d have to say the realities of black community success being a target for extremely violent white retaliation had an even bigger effect than just being scattered. One of the key foundations of white economic success is property in the family. All those country folk with nothing but public assistance, but they have homes & land. Where were black americans supposed to develop this from, when the very communities that became prosperous were torn down? Compound that with the myths of black tendency towards failure and violence and you have a pretty potent cocktail.
efgoldman
@Yarrow:
Yup. He talks about her the way most RWNJ Republiklowns talk about Sanctus Ronaldus Magnus.
trollhattan
@Yarrow:
That’s because she’s a man, baby!
/A. Powers
efgoldman
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Aw damn. I threw out all my skinny ties in the 70s or 80s.
TenguPhule
@patroclus: As I recall, the Lib-dems were shit last time they were in Coalition and nobody has yet forgotten or forgiven them for it.
As for Corbyn, he’s made goofs, but the media on him is Fox level bonkers. As I’ve said earlier, he’s the Hillary Clinton of Britain. All of his policies and positions keep getting twisted by what people assume rather then what he’s actually saying a lot of the time. Or outright lying.
FFS, This whole “pro-brexit all along” is complete BS. He campaigned for remain, got ignored by the media while he was doing it, then everyone and their uncle suddenly is claiming he did nothing and was working for leave in secret. Then when he points out that labor’s best option is to try and salvage what the country can from the Tory Brexit, he gets slammed as “Pro-brexit” when its not like he has a CHOICE about whether Britain leaves or not, because the Tories are going to do it anyway.
You’d think after the Rememberance day non-scandal fiasco that people would figure out that something about the coverage of Corbyn stinks.
amygdala
@Barbara: All of this, or as I’m fond of saying, “just ’cause you can’t tell us apart doesn’t mean there aren’t important distinctions.” I have relatives, coworkers, and parents of good friends who were interned during WWII, and I seriously doubt any of them would compare their experiences, awful as they were, with what has been inflicted on African-American and Native American people in the US for centuries.
@Roger Moore: I laugh and laugh when conservatives complain about why API and Jewish folks so reliably vote for Democrats. “But… but… they’re wealthy… why don’t they like us?” Uh, because your haterade is visible from the International Space Station and speaking for my API peeps, we know where that leads… to “relocation centers.” Just a guess, but I’m thinking people whose history includes, you know, the Holocaust, do too.
Would also add, as for as the API community goes, that Obama did a lot to strengthen our sense of connection to Democrats. Even though he was thwarted in naming Godwin Liu to the federal bench, he was successful in appointing other Asians as federal judges. We do tech and health care, but law, not so much. When an API judge gets appointed to SCOTUS, I won’t be surprised if it’s one of Obama’s nominees to the federal bench. And Governor Brown, bless him, appointed Liu to the California Supreme Court, so he could still eventually be appointed to SCOTUS.
I think it’s Obama’s having grown up in Hawaii and the time he spent in Indonesia. He understands, unlike Sully, that we’re not a monolith, and that being third or fourth generation Chinese or Japanese is very different than being a first generation SE Asian immigrant. We’re a relatively small minority group, but growing. Unless and until Republicans lose the race-baiting, I can’t see the API community migrating to the right in any great numbers.
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
In a weird way, I think African-Americans and Native Americans were treated in a very similar way to each other, in that they were driven off any land they were able to improve as soon as it started looking good to white people.
Possibly because they were mostly concentrated in cities, that was less likely to happen to Jewish-Americans and Asian-Americans, at least until Japanese-Americans were interned and their property stolen from them without compensation.
zhena gogolia
@hitchhiker:
Excellent comment.
efgoldman
@Elizabelle:
Napping
clay
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
Ouch. C’mon now, at least Sully can produce well-written passages, even if his underlying premises and logic are severely lacking.
TenguPhule
@Barbara: I look forward to your clutching of pearls the next time someone else uses a particularly colorful metaphor.
ruckus
@MattF:
I can’t remember for sure but I think I found BJ through Andy but I stopped paying attention to him a very long time ago. And I’m far better off for it.
Lizzy L
@TenguPhule: This is BJ, in which FU is a perfectly appropriate response to how you use metaphor, how you respond to a comment, and how and if you wear your shoes.
@efgoldman: I am sure Tangerino would advise him that he should have offered her more money. (Not PAY it, mind you — just offer it.)
JPL
Another quick update. the lines are scary long in Roswell. I didn’t go in to the polling place but I have hopes that it’s because of not enough machines. There are too many old white guys here. ugh
mai naem mobile
Sullivan forgets that with a few exceptions non white immigrants to this country were either wealthy in their countries so had a better education and all the other accroutrements that go along with being rich,or were exceptionally smart or talented. They already had a huge head start. And it’s not just Asians. It’s West Indians and South Americans. Also, when you immigrate you’re self selecting people who are more willing to take a risk. You have to have an inner strength in you to just leave everything you’re comfortable with and move to a new place. Slaves didn’t self select to come here and that’a before you start talking about the effects of slavery.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@gene108:
I suppose if you’re just limiting yourself to the legal Asian immigrants I would have to say, going by what these guys from Asian I’ve worked with for over thirty years at four companies now; for the majority their relatives got them a job at the current place they are working. After that, since they will happily will work 12 hours a day forever and won’t take off the sick, their employers think they are fantastic since number of hours in the building is the one true metric for American business (one of the guys at work dropped dead at his station last December from cancer because he didn’t want to take off an see a doctor about the persistent cough he had)
TenguPhule
@Lizzy L: And an FU is well deserved when you throw one out based on what you think I said instead of what I actually said. I prefer to be insulted for things I’ve actually done or said, not the vivid fantasies of someone else’s warped logic.
Barbara
@TenguPhule: No one asked for your comment to be removed. They just told you what they thought of it. So, basically, you have trouble digesting what you expect others to eat. Get over it.
clay
@hovercraft:
This may be a dumb question, but what’s the difference between “trying to bribe for sex” and “soliciting a prostitute”?
(I’m not trying to claim the girl WAS a prostitute of course, but that he was attempting to treat her like one.)
Mnemosyne
@clay:
IANAL, but I’m guessing it’s the difference between whether you’re asking an amateur or a professional.
Brachiator
@clay:
The age of the girl involved should have given you a big clue.
patroclus
@TenguPhule: Corbyn mildly campaigned against Brexit, skipping all the important events, refusing to campaign with other anti-Brexiteers and then switched on a dime and has been for it since last June, even going to the trouble of ordering a three-line whip forcing Labour front-benchers to either vote for it or resign and extinguish their careers. Making some “goofs” is a vast understatement – he completely changed Labour’s 4-decade-long pro-EU policy in a nanosecond and abandoned every single Labour voter who didn’t want it, especially in the London area, in Scotland and throughout all major metropolitan areas of the U.K. This major policy shift is why the media is after him and they should be. He’s a terrible leader and his policies would drive the U.K. into the ground. My Labour-voting relatives certainly feel this way; my SNP voting relatives do too and my Tory voting relatives are just chortling at his obvious incompetence. May clearly called this election (technically, it requires a 2/3 vote, but she’ll get it) to take advantage of his dearth of political skills – it’s as if Jill Stein and the Wilmer bros had taken over the Democrats. The Lib Dems will clearly gain – the problem is that they were so destroyed in 2015 that they have so far to go. Like I said, the question is whether their gains can overcome all the Labour losses.
TenguPhule
@Barbara: You explain to me how someone interprets “Sully is a useful idiot for the very people who would love to people like him suffer and die and he’s working hard to make it happen.” as “I wish you and yours to die so that Sully gets what’s coming to him” in a way that actually makes sense.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@clay: Austen, at least, has done mostly solid work in TV. And for verbally skilled shitbirds, Sully is no Taibbi (or even Maher).
Barbara
@TenguPhule: I’m not playing. You defend your own comment.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne: Possibly. Although, case in point, gentrification in SF & NYC. It used to be Crooklyn, when no one wanted it. Now it’s $2000 for a studio and that’s a bargain.
The Moar You Know
@TenguPhule: 100% accurate. Labour has just about fucked themselves out of existence, and Corbyn is just the guy to make sure they do a complete job of it. Worst party ever.
bystander
@efgoldman:
Yes, but Sully went to Harvard and visited the Land of Derrida where he became fluent in obfuscatory mumbo jumbo.
Brachiator
@patroclus:
We shall see, but I think the Lib Dems could appear in a variation of the Monty Python “Dead Parrot” sketch. I think that the Lib Dems are defunct.
BTW, in a recent interview, the actor Peter Mullan talked about how Labour became dead to him (from the Guardian)
TenguPhule
@patroclus:
This is what I mean. He campaigns for remain, all of his efforts are dismissed even when Labor delivered a remain majority from their voters (and his worst critics in labor didn’t do half the job he did). He’s damned if labor votes against the final leave bill and damned if they don’t, but made the reasonable political calculation that a futile feel good protest vote will not actually do any good and that labor MUST try to keep the leave labor voter support if they are to stand any chance in the polls (and that they’re more fickle and conservative then the remain voters). And throughout it all, you seem to refuse to acknowledge that Labor’s MPs have been acting like a bunch of drunken Starscreams with plots to sabotage and oust him within MINUTES of his first election victory. And those leaders then try to split the party, change the rules in midstream during a failed attempt to oust him, can’t find a plausible alternative to this “loser” who seems to keep beating them black and blue (so what does that say about them?) when it comes to actual labor voters.
TenguPhule
@Barbara: You’re the one who chimed in defense of the crazy person, not me.
hovercraft
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
Well you do have to take into consideration that most of these morons, and I sadly have include the “media” in that, don’t know what the Caucasus are. Seriously just ask a few random people, it will depress you.
TenguPhule
@Brachiator:
Of course completely forgotten is that Corbyn wasn’t responsible for this change for the worst and actively rebelled against it (as his critics love to complain about him breaking with the party on voting).
And yet he still gets blamed for it.
Britain’s Hillary Clinton with a side of Obama and a double helping of British media laziness.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@TenguPhule: It ain’t crazy to respond to another of your sadistic fantasies with a hearty FU!
TenguPhule
@The Moar You Know: It was the equivalent of Obama winning and Harry Reid declaring that he was going to work to get rid of the black guy who’d stolen the election. That’s how insane the Labor leadership was and still is.
TenguPhule
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: It is when its all in your own head.
hedgehog the occasional commenter
@The Moar You Know: Baud!/Rabbit 2020
Roger Moore
@efgoldman:
So you liked them before they were cool?
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@hovercraft: I also noticed that non-Muslim Arabs (e.g., Kathy Najimy, Helen Thomas, the Naders) are universally treated as white.
patroclus
@Brachiator: They were defunct in the 1920’s and came back. They were defunct in the 1950’s and came back. They were defunct in the 1970’s and came back. Each instance occurred when Labour started acting stupidly, which is clearly happening now. As the only party (well, the Greens and the SNP and Plaid Cymru too) opposing Brexit in a general election focused on that, they’ll make gains. Will it be a handful? Or 50 or more? That’s what we don’t know. It depends on whether Corbyn begins to veer back towards an anti-Brexit position – it’s clearly in in his political interest, but he’s probably so incompetent not to be able to see it. His behavior in the past 10 months has been abominable – can he execute yet another policy shift? I think it’s more likely that Corbyn won’t even address Brexit very much during the campaign – just like he did when he was “purportedly” against it during the referendum; thereby presenting somewhat of a soft-Brexit position. No Brexit will be owned by the smaller parties but the SNP and Plaid don’t even run candidates outside of Scotland and Wales, so the default of the anti-Brexit voters will be the Lib Dems. Maybe individual Labour MP’s will be able to exploit their disagreement with Corbyn in individual constituencies and skate by. Like you said, we’ll see. But this is the biggest opportunity for the Lib Dems in over 30 years – I think they’ll do well. How well is the question.
TenguPhule
Except for the last time they won. Remember that? Remember what happened when they gave the Tories a coalition?
Because I assure you, the voters still do.
clay
@Brachiator:
Prostitutes can’t be underage? Huh, news to me…
Roger Moore
@amygdala:
At least among the Asian Americans I know, a huge part of it is that they’ve started to pay more careful attention to Republican race baiting. They didn’t used to notice it, but now they’re clear on the idea that when the Republicans talk about us and them, Asian Americans are clearly them, not us.
I think I’ve told the story before, but Bristol Palin’s appearance on DWTS was an eye opening experience for a whole group of my coworkers. They weren’t very political and were big fans of the show. When Palin kept getting votes from Teabaggers* who weren’t otherwise fans of the show just because they liked her mom, it really upset them. More importantly, it convinced them that the Republicans were going to vote for people like them and to hell with what it did for the system during elections, too.
*I mentioned to one coworker that she might prefer to call them tea partiers because teabagger had a crude sexual connotation, and it just made her more eager to call them teabaggers.
Brachiator
@patroclus:
The Lib Dems wrecked themselves most recently when they joined up with the Conservatives. You cannot blame Labour for that act of self-destruction on the part of the Lib Dems.
TenguPhule
@clay: Well soliciting a prostitute would require that the girl in question actually is one. She wasn’t. She was a girl who attended his church. And yes, he tried “the devil made me do it” defense. Which the judge ridiculed.
Brachiator
@clay: RE: The age of the girl involved should have given you a big clue.
Is sexual exploitation of children news to you?
patroclus
@TenguPhule: They haven’t “won” since 1905. Since then, they’ve only been in coalitions (with the Irish, with the Tories during WWI and thereafter, in the 1930’s “National” coalition, during WWII, during a brief “Lib-Lab” pact in the late 70’s and from 2010-15). Usually, they end up getting blamed for the bad policies enacted at the impetus of their coalition partners and go back to being defunct. Then, they come back under new leadership. They’re on an upswing in the pendulum now. In the recent coalition, they got marriage equality enacted, they phased out hereditary peers, they got the Fixed Term Parliament Act implemented, they further extended devolution to the regional parliaments, they ended male primogeniture for the Crown and they stopped the Brexit referendum efforts. But Osborne pushed through student tuition increases and an austerity budget and everyone blamed the Lib Dems for it. They are much more likely to form a coalition with Labour and the SNP now – I assure you, the voters will note that.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: And the so-called model minority can go from being model to being referred to as unhinged and lacking reading comprehension when they question the prevailing views, as I have found out myself.
Barbara
@clay: Minors cannot consent to sex. Arresting underage girls for prostitution is ridiculous. It is the buyer who should be charged with statutory rape.
Manyakitty
@Gin & Tonic: Full of win
HumboldtBlue
@rp:
Bullshit, you’re just excusing religious and cultural tradition and condemning the cultural tradition of others. Jews weren’t mutilating baby boys because of medical concerns but because of their covenant with that fucking monster of a god they introduced to the world.
You can pretend there is some substantive difference between the same practices but we both know that mutilating the genitals of babies is fucking absurd and done only in honor of “tradition”.
Villago Delenda Est
@rikyrah: With white redneck trash, “racism” means anyone but white folk. Period. They diss on African Americans, of course, but they’ve been doing it to Asian Americans, to anyone vaguely Hispanic, anyone vaguely Middle-Eastern/Arab/Berber/Iranian what have you. It’s about the white people. Period.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore: They picked “teabaggers” as their identity initially. Then someone pointed out that it has sexual connotations. That’s when they tried switching to “tea party”. The whole thing was bullshit to begin with…it was about the blah guy in the White House.
They are forever “teabaggers”. Fuck these retrograde shits.
clay
@TenguPhule:
I know. I explicitly said that in my original post. I’m just curious about the distinction — in general, not necessarily related to this case — between “attempting to bribe for sex” and “attempting to solicit a prostitute”. From the perspective of the hypothetical attempter, it’s the same act — trying to give money for sex. I’m just curious as to what the legal and/or moral distinction is.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
Agnostic on both fronts (and not ethnically Jewish), but does anyone else have a fucking problem with this shit right here?
clay
@Brachiator:
….. No?
I don’t really know what you’re arguing, here.
I asked the difference between “bribing for sex” and “solicitation”. You said it was the age of the bribee/solicited. Either you’re claiming that only minors can be bribed for sex, or that only non-minors can be solicited. In which case, it’s very ironic that you’re accusing me of being unaware of sexual exploitation of children.
HumboldtBlue
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
Why? Jews gave us monotheism and the god they worship is the same god Christians and Muslims chose to worship as well.
And if you’re agnostic about the Abrahamaic god what about Thor? Are you agnostic about the pantheon of Greek and Roman gods, or, because you live in a world where billions take imaginary beings seriously, are you just agnostic about the god your neighbors worship?
So if you have a problem you can go seek some fucking religious history lessons to clear that shit right up.
notoriousJRT
@MattF:
Done – years ago. Sullivan has no understanding of the world outside his own navel.
clay
@Barbara:
I’m not sure how you got from my comment that I disagree with any of this. For the record, I fully agree that underage girls should not be arrested for prostitution. I was asking about the criminality of the solicitor. The girl did nothing wrong.
Actually, I’ll go further — I don’t believe ANY girl/woman should be arrested for prostitution. If it’s to be a crime (and I don’t know that it should be), then prosecution should only focus on the buyers, as you termed.
Monala
@rikyrah: and the most educated Millennial group: black women.
J R in WV
.@Brachiator:
“Sullivan wanted Maggie Thatcher to spank him. Theresa May will do nicely, now.”
I’m willing to spank him, if I can use a board. I don’t want to touch the bastard!
TenguPhule
@clay:
Acceptance of the offer generally comes to mind first.
TenguPhule
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): Yes, unfortunately though I can also see his point.
Old testament is a self declared bastard of a deity in supposedly its own words.
TenguPhule
@patroclus:
Voting for it tends to have that effect.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@TenguPhule: It’s not that Angry Desert God isn’t a popular/justified perception among the faithless.
But the specific imputation– so much, fuck him, and he’d do just as well to lay blame at the Zoroastrians.
HumboldtBlue
Because that’s relevant today. Hell, Zorro was a hugely popular TV series, right?
TenguPhule
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): Which is why I agreed with you.