I'm sorry, but Trump's behavior is not just beneath the dignity of the Presidency…but that of any decent man.
— Jerry Springer (@jerryspringer) June 30, 2017
Take the word of an established professional in the Garbage field!
Fixed this headline. pic.twitter.com/V0CAHgnR7c
— OhNoSheTwitnt (@OhNoSheTwitnt) July 3, 2017
.
Meanwhile, the Very Respectable Grey Lady decides to “defend” the worst stereotypes of deer-hunting-wif-Jeebus Trump voters… again…
Conservative voters in the northernmost reaches of California feel alienated by the state's liberal urban majority https://t.co/N1McsLwq2x pic.twitter.com/bKSuLnFy8N
— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) July 3, 2017
Strange that you don't see many articles taking this angle on the large, black, liberal populations of red states. https://t.co/KTwDCmDp4U
— Mazel Tov Cocktail (@AdamSerwer) July 3, 2017
Symmetry. The other white meat. pic.twitter.com/7QsiAM5BWW
— shauna (@goldengateblond) July 3, 2017
The people publishing the NYTimes know that Trump voters are in the minority, and the Trump voters wallowing in this kind of revanchism are a minority of that minority. (None of whom are buying the NYTimes, literally or philosophically.) But highlighting the “poor, confused, forgotten” bigots gives the suits in the NYT corner offices an excuse to throw up their hands and assure each other that nothing can be done except to roll over for the Trump Crime Cartel’s every demand. It’s arseholes all the way down!
Trentrunner
Someone somewhere made the canny point that these all these anthropological WWC articles from MSM are really quite patronizing and insulting and reductive because they view these WWC lives to a single angle, the Trump ascendance.
Of course all the other reasons these articles are shit are valid, too.
Major Major Major Major
An established professional in the Garbage field, not to mention a politician who, if he were younger and a natural-born citizen… ??
p.a.
NYFT reminds me of The Onion headline “ACLU defends Nazis’ right to burn down ACLU headquarters”.
SiubhanDuinne
It is true his TV program was Established Garbage, but Jerry Springer himself, I believe, is a genuine compassionate and intelligent Democrat. I saw snippets of his show only occasionally — certainly never sat down to watch it — but back when Air America was on the radio, he had a daily (I think) broadcast, and I enjoyed and agreed with him very much.
Keith P.
Sweet jeebus, even Rachel Maddow’s clip replays go on forever and ever. I keep hearing these blockbuster headlines one-after-another, and finally I look up, and it’s basically the last 6 months of Breaking News. And she’s *still* going…she’s only at mid-May.
Turgidson
California’s rednecks should be grateful that Grandpa Jerry and the state’s urban liberal governing coalition will try to keep Hair Furor’s hands off their Medicaid and medicinal weed and protect the environment from the Pruitt led EPA.
But no, they prefer being butt hurt that CA Dems aren’t legalizing concealed carry in preschools etc. Whatevs.
Lapassionara
@Keith P.: This! Get to the point! Please. Please.
Jeffro
As I mentioned in a thread down below, I’m trying to get across to this *awesome* *thinking* person that he’s an asshole supporting an asshole. I normally abhor FB back-and-forths but this one just feels worth letting El Moron have both barrels.
Turgidson
@Keith P.:
She has the “say in 2000 words what could easily be said in 50” tic that St. Glenn of Greenwald has as a writer. The similarities between those two pretty much end there, but I can barely watch the first 20 minutes of her show anymore. Whenever I do, I’m muttering “get to the fucking point!” after minute 3 or so.
Mike in NC
NY Times employed an entire floor of ‘journalists’ to wage war against the Clintons, so now they need to recalibrate to endlessly celebrate Trump and the WWC.
Frankensteinbeck
Don’t forget that it also excuses their own racism. It is CRUCIAL to the media that the GOP not be motivated by bigotry, because so many of the people in media agree with the GOP on almost all issues.
david
Whatevs. While y’all #Resist and #Maga types keep tweeting yourselves into a collective frenzy,
Soros and Schumer and Jared and a Koch brother are partying away in the Hamptons.
They’re all laughing at you. Both sides. They all got theirs, you’re just providing them entertainment.
kindness
I still remember being told by many good and important progressives that we should be buying subscriptions to the NYT prior to this last election. Glad I didn’t. Bought a digital to the WaPo instead which has it’s own stable of posers and idiots, but is a better paper that the Times. I’ll buy it and read it when I go back to NYC visiting family but if I’m not in Gotham I ain’t giving them any of my coins.
FlipYrWhig
@Turgidson: Is that what you say? Is that the thing that you tell yourself? This thing you say to yourself, is it that? #maddowstyle
JerryRich
@SiubhanDuinne: @SiubhanDuinne: @SiubhanDuinne: Jerry Springer provided a great service by bringing modern Nazis and Klanspeople to the air so everyone could see how weak-minded they are.
Adam L Silverman
@Trentrunner: @Frankensteinbeck:And all of them, including Hillbilly Elegy, are empirically false!
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/uw-professor-got-it-right-on-trump-so-why-is-he-being-ignored/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=article_left_1.1
Adam L Silverman
@Turgidson: They have similar haircuts.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: How does that say anything about Hillbilly Elegy (which is even mentioned in the excerpt as “the mostly colorblind story of economic dead-end-ism” that “isn’t what really turned the election”)? I haven’t read it and have no interest in reading it, but it sounds like it’s supposed to be descriptive; it’s the media and interviews surrounding the book that try to paint it as the Trump ascendancy, and the kind approach it takes to its subjects (and the weak-willed author) are being pounced on by the right-wing media.
Frankensteinbeck
Yes. The longer Obama was in power, the more a majority of white Americans couldn’t handle it. Some of them even voted for him the first time. They didn’t know that when they actually saw a black man as their boss, it would rub their nerves raw.
THIS THIS THIS THIS.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@SiubhanDuinne: ISTR that he never watches his show on principle.
And FTFNYT will never get better until Pinch, Baquet & Bennet are all fed feet-first into a woodchipper, slowly.
Peale
@Trentrunner: yes. Plus it allows a certain subset of liberals who attended elite colleges to cover up the fact that the people who produced trump are actually from those same elite schools. Conservatism is not something that organically bubbled up from the WWC and there are an awful lot of educated white folks with money who share Trumps outlook and helped spread it and supported it.
Raven
Back from the LA whirlwind and I fell rode hard and put up wet. Our dear neighbor had a huge fucking pecan tree come down and just miss her house. She’s obviously lucky but it’s going to be costly.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Turgidson:
I’m in a NorCal U town, a pocket of blue in a sea of red. They like their big pick-em-up trucks with Rolling Coal, guns, and hating on “others” (those unlike them).
Keith P.
@Turgidson: Oh, jeez, she’s going backwards now…she’s at November.
opiejeanne
That guy, the deer hunter idiot, can just fuck off. They don’t like that the majority rules so they sulk and whine and threaten.
And fuck the fucking New York Times.
Frankensteinbeck
@Peale:
Our Progressive Betters are deeply invested in the idea of class war. They really, really do not want to face the fact that there is no revolution waiting to happen, and that race, not class, is the defining battle of our time.
Major Major Major Major
@opiejeanne:
In California, a 1/3 minority can royally fuck up legislative priorities because of our stupid budget amendment, and they can’t even muster that any more.
Sab
@Turgidson: I like the way she presents things, because she provides history and context.
I am in my 60s and have always been a political junkie. My step kids are now following politics and policy, but I have been following politics and policy for about forty more years than they have. I vividly remember events that my step kids have never heard of.
Rachel is much younger than me, but she is curious and very bright, and informs herself. She is presenting information that is probably new to much of her audience that I would have assumed they already knew. She doesn’t make that false assumption.
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: Basically the author of the book, and the book, have sold this treacly fable of rural communities in decline, which has led to desperation and the desire to see everything torn down and/or asunder because they’re out of hope and patience. The longitudinal data just released, and Parker’s work using it and other data, shows this is just not the case. This is being driven by fear of immigrants, specifically LatinX and Hispanic immigrants as embodied in Mexican undocumented immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ acceptance. His work on the Tea Party empirically demonstrated, and was completely ignored because everyone wanted to talk to and about Skocpol’s absolutely empirically bad work on the Tea Party (she used Putnam’s data set, which Putnam has acknowledged is cooked – he blamed it on his grad students). And since Skocpol is an endowed chair at Harvard and high muckety muck in the American Political Science Association and Parker is an African American associate professor at U Washington everyone bought Skocpol’s crap hook, line, and sinker and ignored his actually empirically validated and accurate work.
Mr Stagger Lee
I am so disgusted with this nation:
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/07/us-denies-visas-to-west-african-teen-robotics-team-after-families-scraped-together-fees-to-apply
efgoldman
@Adam L Silverman:
Yes, and?
Anybody with two brain cells to rub together knows this.
You don’t have to be a political scientist or even a professor to figure it out. Nor do you have to read the FNYT and the excuses they make for the assholes in their overlong, repetitive amateur anthropology.
Wonder how big a grant the professor wangled to report the obvious.
jl
NYT, like other news orgs, needs money bad, which mostly comes from ad revenue. So they need to appeal to people who will buy all sorts of nonsense. That explains the pitches to Trumpsters, maybe. Look soon for NYT ads non-hybrid seeds, quick-draw pistol holsters you can hide in your pants, and schemes to convert your retirement savings into gold bullion delivered right your damn door, with option of a custom safe. (edit: And custom do-it-yourself bunkers Fine work with cement and rebar!).
How San Joaquin Valley from Stockton down to Kern Basin turned purple and blue would be an interesting story. That is not just an African-American or Hispanic story, BTW. Read a news story about small farmers getting (relatively) libbed, or at least alienated from Trumpster GOP over immigration and global warming denial, and lack of constructive, (as opposed to obstructionist and symbolic BS) programs for water problems. Corporate farming is a different story, since they don’t care about anything beyond short run corporate ROI.
A lot of fuss among locals over water in use in San Joaquin was over short-run corporate farming scams, that planted, pumped, dumped and than ran.
It’s a mixed bag of course, I personally know a number of Trumpster farmers around my ancestral stomping grounds, but as many who have grown very willing to work with Jerry Brown’s DFHs.
geg6
@Frankensteinbeck:
And gender. And exponentially so if you look at minority women.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: I know how the author’s been spinning it, and how the RW media is trying really hard to sell it, but I thought it was more a descriptive work of some rural desperation, not anything scholarly or with numbers. I guess I was wrong!
Jeffro
@david:
They can keep laughing…it covers up the sound of pitchforks being sharpened, amigo.
Adam L Silverman
@efgoldman: Most likely he got no funding. The prevailing political science arguments, based on using a cooked data set, is that these things are not driven by racial attitudes and animus. Essentially a Harvard endowed chair, using bogus data cooked by another Harvard endowed chair, set the narrative in her work on the Tea Party. And since they’re Harvard endowed chair and high mucky mucks in the American Political Science Association that is that.
geg6
@Adam L Silverman:
This.
Major Major Major Major
@efgoldman:
One thing that this election and administration has shown me is just how many people on the right and the left evidently do not have multiple brain cells.
SiubhanDuinne
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
Didn’t know that, but the man has good taste.
geg6
@Adam L Silverman:
And this.
Adam L Silverman
@Mr Stagger Lee: My guess is that next year’s global robotics competition will be held in Toronto or London or Paris. And similar events will also start being held outside the US as well.
I’ve also edited your comment as your link had captured the reply button.
Frankensteinbeck
@efgoldman:
The vast majority of white Americans either do not know this, or do not want to admit it. National media especially.
raven
@Sab: You’re not from around here are you?
rk
@Frankensteinbeck:
The longer Obama was in power?? Most of them couldn’t handle it from day one. One of my neighbors says he hated him because socialism. I always knew “socialism” was interchangeable with the N-word. This economic anxiety is all white people (including the “liberal media”) telling each other lies.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mr Stagger Lee:
This both infuriates me ??? and breaks my heart ???
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: You are correct, it is not meant to be scholarly, but it is being taken that way. Essentially an epiphenomonology of his community that should be read to explain similar ones. It is qualitative, not that that is an issue, but it is certainly not scholarly, nor is it empirically verifiable or replicable.
schrodingers_cat
@Adam L Silverman: Sounds like the “mistake” made by two Harvard economists selling expansionary austerity, Rogoff and Rienhardt are their names for those that don’t remember.
Frankensteinbeck
@geg6:
You are absolutely correct, and I should not have left it out.
jl
@Mr Stagger Lee: @Mr Stagger Lee:
Trumpsters seem very scared of student robotics teams from around the world.
You are right, disgusting and heartbreaking. When I think about the trials and heroic efforts the Afghanistan team went through, only to be coldly denied, it breaks my heart and makes me ashamed of my country.
The Trump administration has been taking indefensible and deeply immoral and counterproductive actions in their BS immigration crack down that serves no public purpose, Only purpose is to satisfy the endless craving of the bigot Trumpsters for vengeance and spite.
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
I take it you’re back in GA safely, without incident, and happily reunited with the pups and the bride, not necessarily in that order.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: Right, and I was just responding to you saying it was “empirically false”.
raven
So I spelled anime wrong last night and got a raft of shit. I know there are many nerdy geeks here that know all about that shit but it’s new to me. This shot from the “conference” in downtown LA yesterday has me trippin.
p.a.
@Adam L Silverman: @efgoldman: Knowing it, and empirically proving it, are 2 distinct issues. Of course, knowledge, data, empiricism etc don’t seem to be pertinent values to one political party currently. We certainly made (helped make) Germany and Imperial Japan face their actions (more successfully with Germany, I believe.) Physician, heal thyself isn’t working here. Time will tell if it’s 2 steps forward one back, or 2 steps forward one leap back into the abyss.
There are some hurting rural areas where it is well understood that the influx of immigrants is actually saving those communities. Not in enough places, sadly.
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat: It is one of my major problems with peer review and merit based tenure and promotion. I think tenure is very important. I think producing peer reviewed social science is very important. I think the way we do both is badly in need of adjustment for 21st Century realities.
Frankensteinbeck
@rk:
A great deal of crazy was released immediately, you are correct. And yet, it built up more and more as his presidency went on.
Sab
@Frankensteinbeck: The longer Obama was president, the safer everyone felt, so that they could follow their baser impulses if they were so inclined. 2008 and the economic collapse was terrifying for many millions of Americans. They voted for competence. 2016 a lot more people felt secure if not comfortable. I am not buying this economic anxiety at all. If you’re voting economic anxiety you vote for the reasonable, competent candidate, not the entertaining lunatic.
J R in WV
@Major Major Major Major:
I read some of Hillbilly Elegy, and I live in Hillbilly country, born and raised here. I don’t thing the book, Hillbilly Elegy is worth the paper used in printing it. People are people, wherever they live.
Some are nice, some are mean. Some are lazy, some love working hard. None of these cultural artifacts are related to where you are from, what race you are, whether you are good to people or not.
Jeffro
@Adam L Silverman: @efgoldman: Also…both things can be true: there can be a WWC that’s feeling left out and economically left behind due to globalization, etc etc, while a majority of whites at all economic levels are hitting the racial panic button. Run a shameless campaign that manipulates both trends and voila, you get Orangemandias in the WH. Mostly due to the latter reason, but it doesn’t follow that the former doesn’t exist.
Would love to see some national Dem start to ask, “Where are the stories of the Clinton voters – you know, the majority, the folks that racked up almost 3M more votes than Trumpov voters? – and how they have been betrayed by the GOP’s 1%-Uber-Alles agenda?”
SiubhanDuinne
@Adam L Silverman:
I get all crazy and want a cigarette when you talk in sesquipedalianisms.
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: Okay.
raven
@SiubhanDuinne: Yea, got in @ 3:00 and traffic was pretty much a breeze. We went out to eat and surveyed the damage and there are a number of big trees that ate it. Our big fig tree seems to have just tipped over and I think I can right it with my log chains and come-a-long.
Adam L Silverman
@Jeffro: This is also true.
Adam L Silverman
@SiubhanDuinne: I’ll update your file.
Break
Did you get the email I sent you the other night?
Frankensteinbeck
@Jeffro:
The same people who don’t care what Clinton voters think don’t care what national Dems say – unless that Dem is attacking the party.
Major Major Major Major
@raven: You should see Akihabara in Tokyo!
raven
@Major Major Major Major: Um, what dat is?
eta Whoa!
Jeffro
@J R in WV: The only thing I got out of it was how the effects of intergenerational poverty look pretty much the same no matter what color the people in question are.
If you took “Hillbilly Elegy” and substituted other impoverished populations in our country, I doubt it would have raised even half an eyebrow. But because the author ‘made it’, it plays right into our national “bootstraps” myths and is just shocking, shocking that these white folks can’t somehow rise up.
Starfish
I want these people to start writing articles that pander to me.
Jeffro
@Frankensteinbeck: True. For now, anyway. Let’s see if someone wants to take a shot at it (and hopefully soon!)
Ohio Mom
@JerryRich: When I moved to Cincinnati in 1979, Jerry Springer was on City Council. He was a good Councilman but what he was most famous for was his political comeback.
He had paid for a prostitute with a check and was found out when the prostitute’s employer was busted. Why did he use a check you ask? Some have pointed out that this was in the days before ATMs and cash wasn’t easy to come up with on short notice. His wife stuck by him and he apologized, and the public forgave him.
I’m guessing he was in his late twenties or very early thirties when that happened, maybe I’ll google that. I remember driving down the interstate in Kentucky — Northern Kentucky is basically a Cincinnati suburb — and my friend who was driving, a Cincinnati native, pointing out the motel where the check was written.
I don’t remember exactly why he left politics (did he run for a higher office and lose?), but his next career was anchor on a local news station. He ended each broadcast with a one or two minute commentary. He was witty and insightful, and it is hard to imagine such regular liberal commentary on any network broadcast today.
I always thought his talk show was brilliant in the most cynical way possible. He figured out exactly what would work to make him as much money as possible. A modern day selling of soul to the devil, really.
ArchTeryx
@jl: Bastards. I’d have welcomed them with some baklava or maybe a nice plate of Gosh-e-feel (elephant ears).
(It’s my thing to make new immigrants (or international visitors) feel at home – look up a few desserts from their home and whip one up. Particularly in trying times as these are).
p.a.
@raven: my neighbor lost his 2 fig trees 2 winters ago: he let them get too big to box up. God I miss those free fresh figs.
efgoldman
@Adam L Silverman:
I lived within 10 minutes of Harvard for 30-ish years. Maybe that’s why I don’t have much respect for a lot of things that come out of those old buildings.
Henry Kissinger and Alan Dershowitz are Harvard professors. There’s two assholes for every Stephen Jay Gould.
weaselone
@david:
So because they were at the same party, both sides are the same, eh?
Hell, I didn’t even have the same politics as the people I spent Christmas Even and Christmas day with.
raven
@p.a.: Yea, the boss lady is not happy.
jl
@Adam L Silverman: I agree with Jeffro too. I’d note that the HRC/Trump vote, race and poverty maps in the NYT article don’t match up very well. I think Hillary Clinton had it right when she said it was about half economics and half racism (the ‘deplorables’) among the Trumpster voters.
In the US for the foreseeable future, winning elections is about getting past 50 percent. Even if half, or even two thirds, of Trump voters are die hard bigots, getting the salvageable Trumpsters would give the Dems landslide victories in next two elections.
But I agree that goofy stereotyping of, and patronizing catering to the white working class as a bloc is loser identity politics, and misses the real issues on the minds of the disgruntled white non-bigots.
Frankensteinbeck
@Jeffro:
No, I mean that Dem leaders say the stuff we want them to say all the time. The media has no interest in reporting it. I think the pure, platonic example is when people here were talking about how Obama needed to go out and aggressively sell the ACA and explain what it did, while Obama was on a tour doing just that. Here, in a forum for the politically engaged, most people didn’t even know.
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
I think a lot of people took the full four days, so traffic was pretty light today. When I worked for the Canadian Government and there was a work day or sometimes two between Canada Day and Independence Day, many of us would faire le pont — “make the bridge” — between the holidays, and just take the intervening day or days off as vacation days.
Sorry about the damage. Weather must have hit a lot harder in Athens than it did in Duluth.
The Simp in the Suit
@Adam L Silverman:
Parker’s research and conclusions align with everything I experienced, and continue to experience (not that that should carry weight). I know poor and wealthy Trump voters, people with enormous resources and people who don’t know whether they’ll make rent. They live in suburbs, in the city, and way out in the sticks. Smart, dumb, and in between. It’s a huge cross section. They have one thing in common:
They’re white and they want their privilege back.
Major Major Major Major
@Frankensteinbeck: Or, more recently, all of the “If Hillary would only come out with a positive agenda/stump speech/call for x/y/z” around here while she was literally doing that at the time.
Villago Delenda Est
The “State of Jefferson” is an old idea, goes back 80 years, disaffected rural types resentful of the urban centers that, naturally, tend to dominate the two respective states, California and Oregon. On the Oregon side, you’ve got the hopeless shithole that is Josphine County in the mix, and a bunch of sparsely populated counties in N California that simply don’t have the population density for anything but hardscrabble agriculture and extraction industries.
The NYT of course doesn’t care about them, it’s just more Broderistic bullshit by the champions of Broderism.
p.a.
Feral cat just walked by with something in its mouth. Guess the coyote didn’t get em all.
SiubhanDuinne
@Adam L Silverman:
Yeah, I did, thanks. Sorry for not responding. I am exceptionally stupid about things like filters and spam, but I’ve made note of your advice. Thank you.
Adam L Silverman
@efgoldman: Everyone who asks me, because I have a PhD, about where there kid should go to school gets the same answer: If your kid gets into Harvard or Yale or one of the other Ivies and you can afford it, they should go. Not because the education is really that much better – it isn’t*. But because there is a chance that their roomate’s dad is the President or the head of Goldman Sachs or Google or Apple, etc. And that connection is going to be invaluable for your child’s future.
*The big names at Harvard don’t actually teach undergrads unless forced to. They have graduate assistants to do it for them.
JMG
One thing about the Trump voter stories you have to remember is that reporters cannot write about people they don’t talk to. The people in these stories are volunteers, eager to tell their pathetic life stories and wallow in their resentments. Trump voters who have doubts are likely keeping that to themselves as they wrestle with admitting a big mistake, something no one likes to do.
efgoldman
@jl:
Assholes across the street are trying to blow their hands off. Maybe this year they’ll succeed.
@jl:
Of course it wouldn’t have anything to do with their skin color, would it?
The new daily, nightly, hourly refrain: Assholes gotta’ be assholes; it’s what they do.
Adam L Silverman
@The Simp in the Suit: Pretty much. More’s the pity.
The Simp in the Suit
@efgoldman:
Having a bad night?
You can go on about it being obvious, but apparently it’s not obvious, ’cause the “obvious” (and correct) explanation is not the one that is accepted. Hence the need to highlight what the data actually are and what they do support.
Adam L Silverman
@SiubhanDuinne: No worries. If you need assistance just shoot me an email back.
p.a.
@The Simp in the Suit:
They never lost it. They’ve just had a temper tantrum because they can only kick others in the balls instead of stomp on their necks. (And they actually still can stomp on their necks if they wear a badge.)
SiubhanDuinne
@p.a.:
Say that three times fast!!
jl
I don’t know about other ‘working class white’ areas of the US, but due to the history of CA, there is no really white bastion of lonely holdouts of the good old tighty whitey culture. Native Americans and Chinese were very important in Gold Rush and agriculture up there long ago. After several decades of legalized quasi-slavery in mining and agriculture in northern part of the state, CA Native American culture was almost obliterated and the population and culture was mixed with Hispanics, who were marginalized after CA went in a racist and nativist direction after 1879. Also a substantial Japanese population, mainly in farming, which like in Central Valley was removed during WWII internment, and never came back due to difficulty of re-establishing themselves after all their stuff was stolen by crooked whites.
There is a growing Hmong population in NW CA. They are great truck farmers, and legalization of weed will give them more opportunities.
It’s like some of my relatives coming from WV and SW PA and getting skeered by Sikhs, and wondering why I am not skeered by ‘all those people’ coming in. But, large community of Sikhs in CA for over 100 years.
Edit: anyway, my impression from reading the article is that the NYT writer made some assumptions about the area which are not accurate. Like reporters flying into Central Valley and reporting that it is ‘lily white’, etc. Some neighborhoods are, there is very bad housing segregation in some places, though big change there since I was a kid. But it ain’t some lily white working class bastion. Just not true.
SiubhanDuinne
@Adam L Silverman:
Nice of you, thanks.
efgoldman
@Jeffro:
Oh, those stories are out there, in whatever alternative weeklies still exist. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for them in any national media.
Adam L Silverman
@SiubhanDuinne: Please don’t tell anyone. You’ll ruin my already worthless reputation.
Thanks!
p.a.
@SiubhanDuinne: can you post a phonetic spelling of your screen name? If it’s Gaelic, I can imagine it has only a mild resemblance to the letters.
Peale
@Starfish: they have their pulse on what’s hep with the new generation, don’t they. Next up, an editorial decrying the faux angst of that new Seattle sound called plunge or something like that.
jl
@Adam L Silverman:
” my already worthless reputation. ”
Are front posters allowed to humble brag like that in the comments?
Peale
@efgoldman: I believe the conventional wisdom is that we’re intolerant sore losers.
jl
@Starfish:
‘ My fellow liberals hate Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” ‘
There is mighty fine politically reactionary music. I’ll listen to that instead.
chris
@raven: Anime? You live in the land of plenty. Even more on google, enjoy.
Ohio Mom
@J R in WV: @Jeffro: A tote-bagger friend gave me Hillbilly Elegy; she was very moved by it and was sure I would be too.
I’d already read too many critiques of it to actually want to read it but I did sorta scan it.
My take was that he thought there was something special and unique in his experience of growing up in a dysfunctional family. Because it happened to *him*, there must be great significance and meaning to it, and the book was his way of proving that. I thought it was an exercise in narcissism.
I’m pretty sure you can here the same sorts of stories at any AA meeting. Except nobody there would think their experiences proved anything beyond stinking thinking.
efgoldman
@Adam L Silverman:
Oh, yeah. In certain majors, it’s all about networking. And not just the rich country club set. Certainly in the B school and law school.
We knew several “triple H” doctors (Harvard undergrad, Harvard Med, and Residence in a Harvard teaching hospital). Good doctors, nice guys, so unworldly it’s a wonder they got to class every day.
Adam L Silverman
@jl: Apparently. No one deleted the comment and it didn’t automatically go into moderation.
Adam L Silverman
@efgoldman: It is what it is.
ThresherK
@SiubhanDuinne: Springer was elected mayor of a bigly city, Cincinnati, I think. He’d be a better pres than the current one.
jl
@Ohio Mom:
” same sorts of stories at any AA meeting. Except nobody there would think their experiences proved anything beyond stinking thinking. ”
That sums up, sadly, from my personal experience, sadly, the common thread among knucklehead and deplorable Trump voters.
A lot of stinking thinking, of the bigot-victim, economic-victim types or some mix of the two.
Nelle
@Adam L Silverman: A friend of mine got one of those McArthur genius grants. He said that the education he got in the Ivies wasn’t substantially better than what he got at a provincial university in Canada, but oh, my, the connections…..
efgoldman
@The Simp in the Suit:
There are things that are obvious to people that live in the actual world, not in academia where they look at the world as a petri dish.
Adam L Silverman
This explains a lot:
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
I’m sure Black people in Charleston, South Carolina feel like they’re outvoted in South Carolina, but I don’t see them calling to secede from the state.
jl
@Adam L Silverman:
“Apparently. No one deleted the comment and it didn’t automatically go into moderation.”
I’ll write a note to Alain the Site Fixer.
Adam L Silverman
@Nelle: Any decent student can get a good education at any decent school. Because they’re decent students. I would argue that the undergraduate programs at Harvard is actually not as good as some other places because the most senior faculty have almost nothing to do with the undergrads. But to be honest it is really all about the connections.
jl
@Adam L Silverman: We’ve been warned a long time about those guys. No one ever does anything.
” When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he:
“Cuckoo;
Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O, word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear! “
ThresherK
@p.a.: Other Siobhans (Gaelic, different spelling) I’ve known are pronounced
That’s how I’ve been imagining it for the one on this blog.
chris
Yer tweeter in chief has nothing better to do.
Via Drezner. North Korea just launched another missile.
jl
@chris: I would hope Trump is jammed by SK preferred policy approach, which I think makes more sense, and HIs Trumpness can’t do overly disastrous stuff. But who knows? Right now, wrt to foreign affairs, we are living out a huge and frightening gamble.
Jeffro
@Ohio Mom:
A little narcissism, perhaps. I took it more as a bad extrapolation – “My experience was moving from background X to outcome Y; therefore, all folks are capable of moving from X to Y”. Um, not so much. Some folks are browner than you and therefore face even more obstacles, sir. Some have additional health issues and then get to choose between eating or medicine (or bankruptcy). Some are in states with a relatively strong safety net; others get to REALLY get all bootstrappy and what not.
Plus what you’re noting: whether dysfunctional or dealing with poverty or both, these families are stuck, and with a little bit of resources (doesn’t just have to be $$$) they just might get unstuck.
Mike J
@chris: Meanwhile:
MOSCOW (AP) — The Kremlin says its patience with a U.S. plan to return the Russian Embassy’s compounds is running out
Timurid
Guys, he’s tweeting again…
Ohio Mom
@ThresherK: Back in the days Springer was Cincinnati’s mayor, we had a Council-Manager system: nine at-large councilmembers and a very strong city manager who ran all the day-to-day operations.
The mayor was not elected but one of the council members, chosen by the group. It was a ceremonial post, the big responsibilities included ribbon-cuttings and similar occasions when a figurehead was needed.
Still, to be chosen by your peers means something. Springer was very popular all around.
(Nowadays we have a strong mayor, directly elected by the public.)
Baud
@Mike J: You can’t spell patience without pee.
rikyrah
@Keith P.:
Yeah it’s annoying, but she does get to the point eventually.
Patience, grasshopper.?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Ah, California deer hunters, speaking of drunk idiots who shoot each other.
Well, why hasn’t Jefferson succeeded from California like us liberal urban elite have been asking for years?
eemom
@Adam L Silverman:
With due respect, that strikes me as some very weird advice. The “connection” world is not that simple. And hell, even if it was — if you are implying that a parent should be sending their kid off to college with cultivating “invaluable connections” as a first priority, that is some deeply fucked up shit.
I went to Yale. There were heirs and heiresses galore amongst my classmates. And one of my freshman roommates married another classmate of ours who went on to become the CFO of Microsoft. Guess I fucked up, because it never occurred to me either then or now to try to figure out how to use those “connections.”
p.a.
@jl: I believe a Dem introduced, and the R majority APPROVED, a rescind of the AUMF, in committee. Even the scum don’t want l’enfant to have that power.
jl
@Ohio Mom: Interesting history. But still, no doubt Springer would be a better president.
I guess the way things are going, it will have to be either Springer or Povich for competence and sanity. or Alex Jones or Limbaugh if we continue along the Trump crazy train.
Ohio Mom
@Jeffro: Plus some people aren’t all that smart, or energetic, or otherwise naturally endowed with the characteristics someone like Vance has and can leverage.
efgoldman
@Mike J:
What are they going to do, invade Maryland?
Fuckem
jl
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: George Miller, retured SF Bay uber lib Congressman is an avid deer hunter.
Why not a NYT story on liberal deer hunters.
I remember a comic did a skit a long time ago about the sadly neglected community of Jewish duck hunters. Forget who it was. NYT could do a story on that.
Why does the NYT have such a big rep. I joked a while back that it reminded me of a very mediocre Harvard academic department. A lot of it precious and pretentious trivia for the provincial aspects of our largest cultural and economic center.
efgoldman
@Jeffro:
There were and are plenty of poor and/or dysfunctional families, of all races, creeds and colors. in the cities and suburbs.
SiubhanDuinne
@Timurid:
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG
Jeffro
@Adam L Silverman:
Agree 110%. I’ve seen a few good takes on this. Frank Bruni had a pretty good book out a year or two ago, something like “Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be”, trying to get upper middle class high school students to stop stressing about where they’re going to go to college (meaning, ‘don’t fret about getting into an Ivy League school’). Lots of anecdotes from successful people who went to State U, worked hard, kept moving (via starting businesses or jockeying for internships, etc) and are now doing quite well. It is mostly about what the student does with their time while they’re there that determines their future success.
chris
@jl:
Yup, I look at the news every morning in fear expecting to see WAR!!! in giant capital letters. Please, nobody tell the shitgibbon about GWB’s “war president” remark.
Ohio Mom
@jl: Oh yes, Springer would be a much better president. He’s made some noises over the years about getting back into politics but he can’t get past the taint of that show.
If my mother was still alive, she’d be rolling her eyes saying, “Oh yeah, I bet he’s crying all the way to the bank.” But I think he does have regrets.
ETA: he could never be president though, he was born in England. His parents were Jewish refugees, IIRC, from Germany.
Mike J
@efgoldman: Trump’s already said he’s giving it back. Russia just wants to slap him around in public to humiliate the United States.
That’s what we get for electing a manbaby.
Jeffro
@efgoldman:
My bad for lack of clarity…when I said “these families”, I didn’t mean just the ones Vance cites in his hometown, I meant families in intergenerational poverty, wherever they might be. You are spot-on about the variety of locales and races and everything else.
jl
@efgoldman: Probably why sugar daddy Vlad might not have time to meet with Der Drumpfenfuhrer. Supposed to quietly lift sanctions for nothing, tried, but got strong armed by the Deep State. Nothing on some bogus Ukrainian ‘peace treaty’. Now Trump is late even springing a few lousy spy compounds. And low energy half-baked sabotage of NATO and EU.
Trump has been doing lousy work lately, and more and more people are noticing.
p.a.
@efgoldman:
Estonia
ETA: I’d consider a trade. SC, ‘Bama, Mississippi, etc for a case of caviar and some good vodka. i.e. potato vodka.
Sab
@p.a.: I am not her and I am guessing, but I know a smidge of Gaelic . Siubhan is “Shivon” or “Sheevon” or something slightly in between. Pretty standard Gaelic girls name. Diunne I think means she has brown hair. I think it’s pronounced sort of like it looks in English (doo-in, or doo-een.) I hope she corrects me if I am very wrong.
efgoldman
@Jeffro:
And actually, many (most? I haven’t counted) that I have known personally came from upper middle class to genuinely real money. It’s not really a function of poverty, although poverty can certainly exacerbate certain pathologies, notably drug use.
jl
@p.a.:
The contrast between Estonia, even the Russian east of Estonia around Narva, and Russia itself, is notable.
(Edit: and not to Russia’s benefit. Going from Russia to Estonia is like going from some weird dystopia to some place in the US, except shopping malls are smaller, and post office is way cooler and does more stuff for you. And like Canada, I think a lot of the junk food is better).
And I think a lot of older Russians would support such a disaster out of spite.
My impression was that majority of younger Russians would probably protest since, at least the ones I met, thought regaining Soviet glory was all insane BS, but I remember in Russia, many older Russians who would turn away or explode when confronted with some random Estonian going about their business.
sukabi
@SiubhanDuinne: I think there was an article the other day about a girls robotics team from Afghanistan also being denied entry…
This sucks on so many levels.?
Lurking Canadian
@Jeffro: In terms of the quality of the education (what the student actually learns), you’re right. It doesn’t matter and (as Adam S correctly points out) the education is probably better at a non-Ivy because you might get to see a faculty member teach a class now and then.
However, there is a kind of privilege that comes with the pedigree. Certain employers just don’t interview candidates from the “wrong” schools.
It’s not that it’s impossible to succeed with the wrong pedigree, just that (as with other types of privilege) it makes for a higher difficulty setting.
SiubhanDuinne
@p.a.:
It’s sorta kinda sheVONN DOOYneh.
But since it’s a made-up name, I’m not sure there’s a genuinely correct pronunciation.
*****
That was the tl;dr version. For those who want the entire background, here it is, and I am now going to out my real name for the first time.
My maiden name was Judith Mann. When I was a little girl (10 years old), around the time of Queen Elizabeth’s accession and coronation, I became besotted with everything British. One of my prized possessions was a silk-covered book of Scottish tartans, with a beautiful frontispiece photo of the Queen, and a Gaelic-English glossary at the end. Well, they showed “Siubhan” as a cognate of “Judith,” and “duine” as the word for “man.” To match my own surname, “Mann,” I doubled the “n” to make it “Duinne” (which is not actually a real word AFAIK) — but, you know, wordplay at age 10! — and have been using it as a nom de plume since 1952-53.
If you’re still awake after that, you may return to your regularly scheduled soporific.
jl
@sukabi: It’s cruel and senseless xenophobia and religious intolerance. It sucks on every level. They want to set a new and much lower standard for US behavior, and try to normalize it.
p.a.
@sukabi: I’m reminded of Gandalf’s quote, to Frodo I believe, “you can fence yourself in, but you can not forever fence the world out.”
Ohio Mom
@SiubhanDuinne: that is a very charming story.
joel hanes
@SiubhanDuinne:
I’ve loved your nym since I first saw it.
(I’ve known two Siubhans IRL, and they are both wonderful people)
I am honored by your confidence, and delighted to be introduced.
Thanks for explaining.
p.a.
@SiubhanDuinne: tks. Cool.
Gin & Tonic
@Jeffro: A book I recently finished more-or-less hate-reading, Everybody Lies made pretty much that point, but based on actual data, looking at life achievement for students who were accepted at Ivies but chose not to go, and found it was statistically indistinguishable from those who actually attended Ivies. Just as looking at students who missed the cutoff for Stuyvesant HS by one point as compared to those who made it by one point. No measurable difference in outcomes.
jl
I don’t have time or interest to follow the links, but from Josh Marshall’s twitter, Hannity is having a TV doctor explain why Trump is perfectly sane and stable.
Might be a nice project for a front poster to look into.
I see a pic of someone who looks like Melania in the tweet. Did they drag her on too? She might not be too helpful. I think she said during the campaign that Donnie was kind of a project for her, he was a child-man when she met him. If she made a little progress, I guess we owe her some thanks, despite her other drawbacks.
” Good sign when they have to bring on the tv doc for this stuff
@DrMarcSiegel: “There’s absolutely no evidence of any mental instability.” #Hannity ”
https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/882073144219062272
SiubhanDuinne
@Ohio Mom:
@joel hanes:
My family instilled in me, from a very early age, a love of puns and anagrams and all manner of wordplay.
Apart from Siubhan Duinne, my other go-to cryptic name for years was KVEZ NBOO (“Judy Mann” with each letter moved alphabetically forward one notch). It was pronounced just as you would expect “Kuh-VEZZ Nuh-BOO.”?
joel hanes
@Frankensteinbeck:
Repeated for truth.
efgoldman
@joel hanes:
mrs efg and I have had the pleasure of meeting her IRL a couple of times (we have, we found out, mutual friends), but I was damned if I would give it away.
p.a.
@Gin & Tonic: I believe Duncan Black made a point that one can do more good donating to the local community college than to your big rep alma mater. I follow his advice. Still give to Brown, but equal gift to RI Community College.
SiubhanDuinne
@p.a.:
It never occurs to me that anyone else would be remotely interested. Thank you for asking!
Sab
@SiubhanDuinne: In Scots Gaelic Julia would be Sileas ( Shee-las) . I didn’t know Siubhan was Julia. Happy for you, but that mildly sucks because it’s my sister’s name, and my Gaelic name is pretty close to the worst variant of my English nickname which no one is allowed to speak in my presence.
efgoldman
@p.a.:
Good for you.
I’ve never contributed to my college. They don’t and didn’t deserve it.
If I had money to give (I never have) I’d donate to the UMass Marching Band. Daughter is an alumna, and it was a real formative experience for her.
I might also (if I could afford to) contribute to the RIC music program.
p.a.
@Sab: my screen name is just my initials, but my middle initial is ‘j’. I have not, and never will, respond to anyone who calls me p.j.
Sab
@SiubhanDuinne: That’s cool. Duinne means “man” as a noun, and “brunette” as an adjective in Scots Gaelic. Are you a brunette?
joel hanes
@efgoldman:
Stephen Jay Gould
Peace be upon him.
I subscribed to Natural History all through the years when he wrote the monthly columns that were collected into The Panda’s Thumb et. seq.
He wasn’t always right, but he was always a distinctive voice, frequently insightful, and always interesting —
“Richard Mayhew”, I think, would have enjoyed Gould’s column on size-lineage data for American chocolate bars —
and Wonderful Life was my first introduction to the truly weird fauna of the Burgess Shale, and to the scientists who continue to describe it.
jl
@SiubhanDuinne: That was interesting and disappointing to me, since I thought SiubhanDuinne was some kind of cool real Gaelic name.
But, ‘how many of me’ says there are almost 150 of your real name out there, so looks like you are still an anonymous commenter.
I don’t want any more downer truthful family history stories out of you people. So it is a total and damned lie that most of my Union Civil War ancestor famous battle heroes where really 3 month enlistees who disappeared from the rolls after the first paycheck. A total damned lie. Not true.
Edit: also not true that my proud Scots clan heritage (royal family, Stewart don’t you know) is rather tenuous, and I’m not really descended from thieving border scum at all. Another damned lie.
joel hanes
@efgoldman:
I was damned if I would give it away
There are reasons you are sometimes called “beloved commenter efgoldman”
NoraLenderbee
@SiubhanDuinne: My cryptic name used the reverse alphabet (A=Z, B=Y, C=X, etc.). I got so I could actually write in it. If the fascists come after us I’ll be calling myself HGVOOZ again.
SiubhanDuinne
@Sab:
Not for many and many a year :-)
efgoldman
@joel hanes:
I learned many years ago, when somebody outed Obsidian Wings’ publius and nearly got him fired, that people chose blog/screen nyms for a reason.
joel hanes
@jl:
Clearly you are someone who needs to read Richard Brautigan’s A Confederate General From Big Sur
You remind me (in a good way) of a sentence from Doghouse Riley’s description of Mike Pence:
SiubhanDuinne
@NoraLenderbee:
Cool. I used to be pretty swift at mirror writing; haven’t used it in years, but if things start getting crunchy I’ll practice and bring it back up to speed. Bet it’ll come back pretty quickly, like riding a bike.
jl
@joel hanes: Nothing related to Pence has fallen out of my family tree yet. There has been enough disappointment there already, and I don’t want to deal with that blow.
SiubhanDuinne
@efgoldman:
Much appreciated. It’s not an issue now, but when I was working — especially for a (friendly) foreign government — I greatly preferred that my screen name not be linked to my real name. Probably wouldn’t have fooled a good CIA cryptographer for more than about 10 minutes, but I liked having that little buffer.
Now? Meh. I may even change my BJ nym to Judith Mann Costello one of these days and just drop all the mystery.
Sab
@SiubhanDuinne: I was born a fairly ambidextrous lefty. My lefty mother who was not ambidextrous (right hand as useful only as a primative flipper) begged my teachers to force me to be right-handed. I am ambidextrous with most tools, but not in anything else. However, I can write anything my right hand and my left hand writes in reverse (mirror image). With left hand cannot write forward to save my life, but can write anything backwards easily.
patrick II
@Adam L Silverman:
People were tribal for I 00,000 years, “civilized” for 10,000. It takes effort and education to avoid returning to a more primitive cultural state. That effort is being purposely undermined by media controlled by big money. It is to their advantage. to teach racism and intolerance to hide their own greed. People are racist in part because they are taught to be, whites blame others for their economic problems because they are taught to by the people actually taking all of the money. Yes its racism, but it is not a separate issue from the structure of our economy.
SiubhanDuinne
@Sab:
I am strongly right-handed, but learned very young that if I held a pen or pencil in each hand and wrote or drew with the right hand, the left would follow along mirror-fashion.
I can also read upside-down as easily as rightside-up (which has been a useful skill in any number of jobs!), and can recite the alphabet backwards as easily and rapidly as forwards (which I don’t think has any useful application).
Also too, I can hum and whistle duets with myself in harmony/counterpoint. A totally useless skill, but an amusing parkour trick.
SiubhanDuinne
@NoraLenderbee:
I’m picturing a young Marlon Brando….
opiejeanne
@West of the Rockies (been a while): Humboldt?
opiejeanne
@Major Major Major Major: I remember Curt Pringle and the other bomb-throwers in the Assembly. They voted “no” on every issue regardless of cost. I lived in Anaheim until the end of 2010; Pringle was the mayor and wasted many thousands of taxpayers’ dollars suing the Angels over the silly name change. The first go-round cost the city $85k and lost in court. Some fiscal conservative.
efgoldman
@opiejeanne:
Did the taxpayers have to fork over for those truly horrible “chips”?
SiubhanDuinne
@efgoldman:
You should really be ashamed of yourself.
You won’t be, of course. But you should.
The Lodger
@SiubhanDuinne: Thanks for the explanation. That was a fun read.
Frankensteinbeck
@patrick II:
If there is one thing I have seen eloquently demonstrated in my life, it’s that the super rich are slightly stupider than the poor. They’re hitching a ride on this animal because it was heading in their general direction. We didn’t need big money to create or even stoke racism at any other time in our history, so I see no reason to believe in a conspiracy now.
Gretchen
@SiubhanDuinne: I love the story of your name! I wish I could come up with a more interesting name, but love yours
Gretchen
@SiubhanDuinne: I am by nature a lefty, but my brother caught so much flak from the nuns in Catholic school that my mother strongly encouraged me to eat and write with my right hand. Since she didn’t attend to things like bowling and golf, I’m still a lefty in those pursuits. I had a hard time learning to knit since I could go as easily from left to right as right to left, so it took me awhile to understand that I needed to turn it around and keep going in the same direction to get the same results my Aunt Marcie had showed me.
opiejeanne
@efgoldman: What chips?
… oh, haha.
jl
@SiubhanDuinne:
” I may even change my BJ nym to Judith Mann Costello one of these days ”
You’d throw all that away? You fool! You crazy madcap little fool! Ahhh… but, you will always be SiubhanDuinne to me.
patrick II
@Frankensteinbeck:
While it builds on tribal instinct, racism in the U.S. always had a profit motive. Slavery was about profit, and while the Germans had to put a star on to identify jews, skin color was a convenient marker for slave/not slave in the South.
There are a lot of dumb rich f*cks, the Trump sons are two, but do not underestimate the intelligence and power of people like the Koch brothers, the late Roger Ailes, Murdoch, and Karl Rove, Sheldon Anderson, and many more.
Ladyraxterinok
@p.a.: @p.a.: clicking on your high-lighted name lead to FABULOUS photos!!
Johannes
@Turgidson: Yeah, me too, and I always hear it in my head as John Houseman.
TerryC
@p.a.: I had a “free ride” offer at Harvard and other schools for my graduate work. I visited it and several schools: officially and unofficially. The unofficial was the day before the official. After Day One at Harvard, visiting classes incognito and hanging around campus, I told my wife “there is no chance I am attending this school because they will turn me into an asshole.”
Another Scott
@Gretchen: My mom was left handed (as is my older brother). She loved bowling but broke a bone in her left elbow as a kid, so she bowled right handed.
Bilateral symmetry for the win! :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
John M. Burt
Excuse me, Anne Laurie, I believe you mean it’s turdholes all the way down….
luigidaman
So, I live in a rural area where me and my adult children & SO are the only liberal Democrats in a vast farm sea of red hattted tinfoil wearers. How come I don’t get an article asking me how I feel when it is obvious that zombies have eaten the brains of my neighbors and friends?