The NYTimes recently hired the “provocative” Bari Weiss (as far as I can tell, because Bret Stephens was getting screechy about being the punchline to every ‘reactionary FTFNYT columnist shows his arse in public again’ joke). Earlier this week, Weiss produced her longest, most provocative piece so far, and boy did it get the hate-clicks!
An alliance of heretics is making an end run around the mainstream — and finding enormous new audiences thirsty to discuss subjects that have become taboo. Meet the Intellectual Dark Web: https://t.co/iveK9LoXPd
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) May 8, 2018
What’s the name of this band? pic.twitter.com/0CE3XCnQcD
— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) May 8, 2018
The Monophonic Spree https://t.co/47hqqPF0z6
— laura olin (@lauraolin) May 8, 2018
This is, without question, the flat-out dumbest piece the NYT ever has published. Not even those Sunday style people about designer mayonnaise on the upper West Side come close. https://t.co/5scaYosAkQ
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) May 8, 2018
Lots of the responses are funnier, and far better thought out, than the original piece. I’ve been collecting links to share, but it was a twitter side-spat that sparked my chain of thought…
The troubling tribalism of Ta-Nehisi Coates. https://t.co/yJzIydLvM8
— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) May 11, 2018
Andrew, you’ve been troubling for decades now. https://t.co/QFfjsV4DeM
— jelani cobb (@jelani9) May 11, 2018
Andrew Sullivan, once again being cruelly repressed with a highly-compensated platform at a widely-read center-liberal print/media publication:
… I remember a different time — and it wasn’t so long ago. A friend reminded me of this bloggy exchange Ta-Nehisi and I had in 2009, on the very subject of identity politics and its claims. We clearly disagreed, deeply. But there was a civility about it, an actual generosity of spirit, that transcended the boundaries of race and background. We both come from extremely different places, countries, life experiences, loyalties. But a conversation in the same pages was still possible, writer to writer, human to human, as part of the same American idea. It was a debate in which I think we both listened to each other, in which I changed my mind a bit, and where neither of us denied each other’s good faith or human worth.
It’s only a decade ago, but it feels like aeons now. The Atlantic was crammed with ideological opposites then, jostling together in the same office, and our engagement with each other and our readerships was a crackling and productive one. There was much more of that back then, before Twitter swallowed blogging, before identity politics became completely nonnegotiable, before we degenerated into these tribal swarms of snark and loathing…
Yeah, as a long-time hate-reader of the Atlantic, I remember those days, too. The magazine was very much a playground for smug white male conservative/libertarians, with the rare token (genuinely!) provocative person of color and/or feminist showcased as proof that the Atlantic was something other than a playground for smug white male conservative/libertarians. Andrew Sullivan was emeritus editor of The New Republic, proponent of The Bell Curve, perennial guest on ‘important’ cable-news talk shows. Ta-Nehisi Coates was a young blogger hustling for a (much deserved) bigger platform.
Andrew Sullivan could afford, in those days, to let Coates respectfully disagree with him… because, if push came to shove, Sullivan’s position in the Very Serious Person Club was unassailable, and Coates was at the Atlantic on suffrage.
Thing have changed. Today, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a high-profile public intellectual, with a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius grant’ to prove it. Andrew Sullivan… is a guy with an overwritten column in an old-media publication, and the public ignominy of having promoted The Bell Curve.
Such change is all for the better, as I — and you, and I assume Ta-Nehisi Coates — see it. But to Deeply Serious Thinkers like Andrew Sullivan, and the ‘Dark Web Intellectuals’ Bari Weiss profiles, it means that expensively-educated white male conservatives and the hangers-on who support their status now have to compete with non-Ivy’d, not-white, gender-distinct Deeply Serious Intellectuals who no longer have to accept an implicitly lower status ranking.
Those of us outside “the club” see this as more people getting a place at the table. The people who ruled the table until very recently — and the young versions of themselves, who assumed they’d inherit seats by right of birth — see this as having “their” places debased, even stolen.
Which, stripped of the polysyllabic language, gives them much in common with Trump voters and similar Deplorables:
Con: The Left loves killing babies. They want to destroy the family & the West.
Serious Person: This is normal discourse. It is good, to me. I'd hire him.
Left: Saying blacks are less intelligent seems kinda rac-
SP: DO YOU WANT NAZIS? YOU'RE MAKING NAZIS, STOP MAKING NAZIS
— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) May 11, 2018
Second: When conservatives, classical liberals or libertarians are told by the progressive chattering class that they–or those they read–are alt-right, the very common response is to say: Screw it. They think everyone is alt-right. And then those people move further right.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) May 11, 2018
I'm talking here about an emotional response. What happens to you when you are called deplorable? Is the response to say to the accuser: Actually, hey, you're right! I hadn't realized that about myself. Or is it to maybe consider voting for Trump?
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) May 11, 2018
what happens to you when you are called the n-word? or a homophobic slur? or anti-semitic slur?
why should we care more about the feelings of abusive people than the people who are abused? https://t.co/82QVOvyFbf
— Barbara Smith (@nanaslugdiva) May 11, 2018
After 9/11, Andrew Sullivan warned that decadent liberals in their coastal enclaves might mount a fifth column against America so I went and joined al-Qaeda.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 12, 2018
Imagine if all this high-profile bravery and solidarity were applied against the excesses of the actual police rather than the P.C. police pic.twitter.com/tWcDfww4Dg
— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) May 12, 2018
j/k, Ben Shapiro and Andrew Sullivan are open cheerleaders for police brutality
— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) May 12, 2018
schrodingers_cat
Who the fuck is this woman? What are her credentials. I had never heard of her before she got this perch.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
kinda surprised Sully can still gin up this much attention, even if it is mostly mockery
he’s down to a once a month column in NYMag, no?
RepubAnon
Why can’t liberals be more tolerant of those with whom they disagree … like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and all the other conservative pundits?
(/snark)
Villago Delenda Est
Sully will never, ever achieve his goal: being a member of the English upper class.
Suffer, you vile little shit. Suffer.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@schrodingers_cat:
Your guess is as good as mine. This is her entire Wikipedia page:
Her credentials apparently are that she went to the right school, is white, and writes the contrarian alt-rightish opeds the NYT wants.
Some Guy
Nothing tribal about working to get a professor fired because he disagrees with yourtribe. Weiss city her start that way and she is still pushing the same wing nut claptrap.
geg6
I stupidly read both Weis’ and Sully’s latest. Neurons and pieces of my empathy for humanity were destroyed. Weis is such an idiot, I really can’t get too worked up by her stupid spewings, even this particular one. But Sully…what the fuck is the matter with this guy? He’s not fit to lick TNC’s boots, let alone criticizing how the guy is doing blackness wrong. I mean, what the ever loving fuck?!?!
Gator90
@schrodingers_cat: She made a name for herself as a Columbia University undergraduate by trying to get professors fired for expressing views unfriendly to Israel. She subsequently rose to fame as a media advocate for, um, free speech on campus.
ruemara
Hate these people.
germy
If you’re a conservative writer, your resume can be the sheerest gossamer. Leave college, work a year or two at some obscure publication, then jump into major news outlet.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@schrodingers_cat: That’s because you’re not an undercover Nazi in a normal human suit. She’s getting dragged in that thread and deservedly so.
SRW1
The IDW is named aptly. It really is intellectually dark.
I might have chosen the Intellectual Derp Web for a name, though.
SFAW
@schrodingers_cat:
We’ll find out after she FAXes Cole her credenza?
Although, it’s not clear that “Fucking moron” actually qualifies as “credentials.”
ETA: Although based on Sherparick’s comment below about her trollitude, perhaps it should be “Fucking asshole/moron.”
Sherparick
@schrodingers_cat: She is a graduate of Columbia & was an editorial writer at WSJ before joining TFNYT. Her talent is trolling Libs, which sadly she is good at. Charlie Pierce links a Guardian article on Rakem Balogun who just spent 5 months in jail on a trump up charge for being a Black activist & police critic. Read it if you want to see what real oppression looks like.
MisterForkbeard
That Sully approvingly cited Ben Shapiro of anything is an obvious indictment of him in any civilized company.
You know, if you want to ignore the previous 15 years of ridiculous shenanigans.
trollhattan
@Gator90:
Yeah, looks like she was repressed whilst at her tony university. Credentials enough for NYT, evidently.
If I send Andy a pic from my window will he STFU? I’m willing to do that. Tory git.
Villago Delenda Est
@ruemara: Moi aussi. If there is a tribe, it’s the “conservative” contrarians, who bask in their utter wrongness about everything.
Ella In New Mexico
When Andrew Sullivan retreated from the “mentally exhausting” work of his blog, he escaped the regular pushback and head slaps that actually forced him to rethink some of his more egregious “stupid first reactions” to things. Now that he’s safely cocooned in his tiny angry world, only sticking his nose out the door to mail in his latest boring and irrelevant column, he has nothing but the whiny, boring laments of an isolated sad sack.
Eljai
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: That Wikipedia page says she attended Shady Side Academy Prep. So I looked it up and discovered the tuition for a 1st grader is $20,000.
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat: She’s a highly self regarding “professional” Jew and Zionist. She has a bachelors from Columbia where she seems to have majored in insensitivity and privileged self absorption. While at Columbia she created a group called Columbians for Academic Freedom. She started this because she felt oppressed when Joseph Massad, a very distinguished Palestinian American and Christian professor wouldn’t let her turn his class into her personal forum to do or say whatever she wants. The group’s mission was in pointing out and trying to correct the fact that faculty were denying undergraduates, and, I suppose, grad students, their free speech rights by not letting them just take over their classes when the students didn’t agree with what the faculty were teaching. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of academic freedom. Only the actual academics – the teaching and research faculty, and to a certain extent graduate students working on their thesis, dissertations, and other advanced research projects, have academic freedom. Students in classrooms may make whatever points they like, but they aren’t covered under academic freedom. When I had students pull this crap with me I’d throw them out of my classroom. I had the chief instructor of the UF aikido dojo pull this crap about academic freedom regarding who we should bring in to teach seminars (until he flaked off and left me holding the bag completely). I told him, very publicly, that the only person in the dojo that had academic freedom was me as I was the only faculty member there. IT guys with 3rd degree black belts don’t have academic freedom!
Weiss was also a central player in going after Steven Salaita and ginning up the bulllshit umbrage that cost him the tenured position he’d accepted. And this was doubly bad as Salaita had resigned his previous position and already relocated when Weiss and the other academic freedom crusaders tried to destroy Salaita for exercising his academic freedom. In this case criticizing Israel on twitter.
Weiss has had a couple of bullshit right wing fellowships to prep her for the right wing sinecure pipeline and then worked at Tablet Magazine. Which can’t decide whether its going to be decent or a shonda for the goyim.
Somewhere there’s a rabbi in Pittsburgh telling people, like the one in LA who was Stephen Miller’s rabbi, that “we did the best we could”.
She’s a pseudo intellectual bigot with an over developed sense of her self worth, an Ivy league bachelors degree, and a lot of opinions that she thinks are facts and very few actual facts.
I am constantly amazed that there appear to be no actual requirements and no actual merit for these six figure sinecures on editorial pages.
Just One More Canuck
OT but some Republican strategist on CNN named Robert Cahaly has the worst facial hair in history. He looks like he’s going for a look that combines Hitler and Col. Sanders.
And he’s got a really big ugly bow tie
SRW1
I find it hilarious that Trump, and not Obama, crystallized for Kanye W that he could be President one day. Probably because Trump made Kanye realize that every derp can do it.
Mike in NC
Andrew Sullivan might be in a deep funk for not being invited to the upcoming royal wedding.
Adam L Silverman
@Just One More Canuck: Here you go. Also, what is it with these dipshits and bow ties. Unless you’re the 12th Doctor, bow ties are not cool and not appropriate. Not even with a tuxedo.
Villago Delenda Est
@Adam L Silverman: Intellectually dishonest shit remains so.
Film at 11.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike in NC: He longs to be knighted. He’ll never be. Ever.
Jeffro
@Adam L Silverman: I think the only two requirements are “generates clicks” and “pisses off liberals”
Maybe three: “inoculates us against criticism from the right that we’re too liberal”. It doesn’t work of course, but the NYT and similar sure keep trying…
(And yes there is significant overlap between one and two, and between two and three)
Jager
@Just One More Canuck: Jesus Christ how many republican “strategists” are there? 100’s, 1000’s….???? I just got home from the grocery store, there may have been a couple in the check out lane ahead of me.
On a happier note, the thick cut, uncured bacon I bought is in the pan and cooking slowly.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Jeffro:
And when they do that they end up pleasing no one.
SRW1
@Villago Delenda Est:
Prime minister Farage might make it happen.
Corner Stone
@Adam L Silverman: What would one suggest accompany a man wearing a tuxedo?
Matt
@Villago Delenda Est:
OTOH he’s a shoo-in for the House of Shitlords.
Jeffro
Really big picture: these RWNJ “pundits” or “thought leaders” desperately want to be intellectuals and revered as such, but since they are so prone to twisting facts to fit their twisted, spiteful ideologies…it’s impossible to see them as serious thinkers or revere them for, well, anything.
Progressives tend to follow the facts and are solution oriented. Conservatives already KNOW the solution, and oddly enough it’s always one that reinforces their power/worldview, usually while lining their pockets.
Jonny Scrum-half
@Adam L Silverman: I wish that you’d stop sugar coating your opinion and tell us how you really feel about her.
Jeffro
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: true, but…and I’m probably more guilty of this than most here…they got me to ‘click’, right? ?
Gator90
@Adam L Silverman: As Sherparick suggests above, trolling liberals is a marketable skill.
thewesson
How is it the IDW the “dark web” in any sense if it’s right out there on Youtube.
germy
@Just One More Canuck:
As weird as this year is, 1968 was also very strange.
clay
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?:
How much you wanna bet that GG himself added this line to Weiss’s page?
Adam L Silverman
I just want to make a quick note regarding “professional” Jew and Zionist. These are the folks that go out of their way to seek publicity to tell the rest of the US and the world what Jews are and aren’t supporting and to publicly police attitudes towards Jews and Israel and of Jews and their attitudes towards Israel. Dershowitz is a prime example. Adelson would be if he did more media. Norm Coleman has become one since he’s now running the Republican Jewish Coalition. William Kristol is another. As is Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic. Jennifer Rubin was for a long time until she had her recent epiphany. Jonah Goldberg and Ben Shapiro and that Pollack guy at Breitbart are all some of the most noxious, toxic, and obnoxious versions of this. There are others, but this list will do to make my point.
They have counterparts among other religions who seek to publicly delineate and enforce both internal boundaries for what it means to be a good member/member in good standing of that faith, as well as how everyone else must relate to members of that faith. That Donohue guy from the Catholic League. Pat Robertson, both Falwells, and Billy Graham’s kids – especially Franklin, etc. You also have this for ethnic groups. Bill Cosby comes to mind for African Americans.
Basically these people have been able to monetize being very public scolds.
MattF
@Adam L Silverman: Ah, I recall now that the Bartley of ‘Bartley Fellow’ fame was an editor-in-chief of the WSJ. So, yeah, RW barnacle.
Adam L Silverman
@Corner Stone: I go with a full length tie for formal wear combined with a waistcoat/vest. Unless you’re Little Lord Fauntleroy, one of Prince William’s young sons, or trying to save Gallifrey alongside David Tenant, you should not wear a bow tie!
germy
So she’s perfect for the New York Times, then.
Vhh
@Ella In New Mexico: i think he quit his blog because he had made enough money on it to retire, and just in time too, as his shtick had gone stale.
Adam L Silverman
@clay: In this case, even if he did, he was right. Happens every now and then. Unfortunately he takes these occasional lapses into being correct as a regular occurrence.
SRW1
@Adam L Silverman:
Every faith has keepers of the seal that police infidels.
ETA: And since the position is so elementary, these people don’t usually want for shit.
Adam L Silverman
The Schlapps have been busy. They’re going to have to dictate another puff piece to some credulous reporter!
Villago Delenda Est
@Adam L Silverman: I’m afraid that the Army, at least, insists on a bow tie for formal occasions in dress blues.
WereBear
@germy: Good to know it’s still possible, in this modern world, to sell one’s soul for filthy lucre and career advancement.
Adam L Silverman
@SRW1: Ayep.
trollhattan
@germy:
I would like a lot more examination of Wallace’s role in cleaving the southern Democrats away for Nixon to collect not in ’68 as many think but in ’72. Wallace is by far the most successful 3rd party candidate of my lifetime and he did it by not being a squishy middlegrounder but by openly being George Wallace.
Sound like anybody else we know?
The Lodger
@SRW1: With all the talk about Kanye, I don’t remember ever hearing anyone say any of his work was good. Is it just me being inattentive? Am I missing something significant or am I justified by not giving a rat’s ass?
MattF
@WereBear: I’ve heard that there’s some debate, though, over exactly where to place the ‘FOR SALE’ sign.
Baud
The NYT is garbage.
Leto
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?:
I thought that said Dorito Fellow at first glance… need more coffee.
@Villago Delenda Est: USAF still requires bow tie for mess dress. I’m pretty sure all the services mess dress are bow tie appearal.
Gator90
@Adam L Silverman: One thing the professional Zionists never tire of telling us is that American Jews are RIGHT ON THE VERGE of abandoning the Democratic Party en masse due to its allegedly insufficient fealty to Israel. That historic day is perpetually juuuuust around the corner.
Elizabelle
@Adam L Silverman: Robert Cahaly.
Looks like an incel to me. Got the celibacy style facial hair going. Mostly, guy looks like he missed his century.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@Adam L Silverman:
This especially rich given recent developments.
I can’t stand people who act like scolds, make money off of it, all the while doing heinous shit.
trollhattan
@Adam L Silverman:
I insist on Bill Nye’s inclusion. Nye rocks the bowtie!
SRW1
@The Lodger:
Sorry, can’t tell you. Don’t know his work as an artist and therefore don’t have an opinion on it. And I refuse to tell today’s kids that they’re gonna ruin ‘our culture’.
SRW1
@Gator90:
Well Jesus is holding out with his second
returncoming, too.trollhattan
@The Lodger:
That is essentially my stance.
I’m in the “Just go away” camp, a dream I will never have because he’s a Kardashian.
germy
@Elizabelle:
By several hundred years.
And I’m not convinced he isn’t someone in disguise. The facial hair looks unconvincing, like he applied it with spirit gum in the Green Room.
Adam L Silverman
@Villago Delenda Est: I’m aware.
Mandarama
This is only tangentially related, but has to do with public intellectuals and inexplicable conservatism. We here in Nashville lost our high-approval-rating progressive mayor to a sex/money scandal recently. Our vice mayor has taken over and is running for the seat permanently, but I am seeing signs all over my Trumpy area for his opponent, this woman: Carol Swain.
I remember not too long ago our students actually crusaded to have her removed from her teaching position because of her inflammatory statements on Islam. I’m just depressed and confused, because I want to vote for a brilliant woman of color, and she comes from a similar background to mine, and I have no idea how she could be a wingnut. How?
germy
@trollhattan:
Bill Nye and Robert Benchley. That’s about it.
Adam L Silverman
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?:
I’m pretty sure if you dig deep enough, every single one of them is doing heinous shit.
Elizabelle
@germy: Looks a tad like Roseanne Barr.
Leto
@trollhattan: People can pull off bowties, but it has to be a matching piece of the overall outfit. But shit stains like Fucker Carlson, and this dipshit here, ruin it for everyone. When your overall style is shit, well… ain’t nothing helping that.
germy
@Mandarama: Carol Swain retweeted this example of blatant conflict of interest
Baud
@Mandarama: Dr. Ben Carson isn’t the only Dr. Ben Carson out there. I’m sorry.
lgerard
@trollhattan:
That process started much earlier with Strom Thurmond and the Goldwater movement.
Wallace’s “contribution” to the cause was really bringing northern Democrats into the fold.
Ross Porot was the most successful third party candidate.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Radioactive waste, not garbage that you can compost or that will decompose by itself.
germy
@Leto:
True. I think these guys go for a retro look because they want to signal solid, “old fashioned” values, but they lack the taste or understanding of the period they’re emulating. Throwing on a random, loud bow tie (that doesn’t match) or donning a fedora (that doesn’t fit) doesn’t honor a bygone era, it just makes them look like they’re appearing in a high school production of “Our Town”.
Mandarama
@germy: Of course she did. ? It’s really hard to understand this phenomenon. Our chancellor and provost were defending her academic freedom and trying to reassure Muslim students and distance the school at the same time.
She probably has a good chance of being elected mayor, too. And that would be such progress for Nashville in so many ways, except that she is absolutely a Trumper.
boatboy_srq
emphasis mine.
She reads too much Jonah Goldberg.
JEC
So, is anyone taking bets on how long it will be before the “centrist” chattering class cottons on to the fact that the main problem with Nazis isn’t their lacklustre prose style?
condorcet runner-up
@boatboy_srq: she is basically confirming Cleek’s Law here.
rikyrah
@ruemara:
Come sit by me ?
oatler.
Not long until we hear of “The War of Leftist Agression” Come back Gen.Sherman
SRW1
@boatboy_srq:
She’s justifying herself. To herself.
Baud
For the love of god, don’t call them goat fuckers.
Another Scott
@Adam L Silverman: You won’t get in to a “black tie” or, especially a “white tie”, event in the USA without a bow tie.
Sorry.
Cheers,
Scott.
SRW1
@Baud:
Think of the innocent goats!
boatboy_srq
@Jager: They have to call themselves something, and “Fascist Opinionated Wankers” didn’t poll well.
Another Scott
@germy: Obama pulled the white tie look off very, very well.
Cheers,
Scott.
JR
Since when the fuck did Conservatives/Libertarians get to call themselves “Classical Liberals”? They can fuck the fuck right off. They are monarchists, royalists, tories, anti-enlightenment. In other words, “classical conservatives”.
Joey Maloney
As if all the other things Tucker Carlson has done to pollute the public discourse weren’t awful enough, his discrediting of the bowtie is unforgivable. Tying a bowtie properly is a skill to which I devoted a lot of time and effort when I was a younger man. All gone to waste now.
Frankensteinbeck
@trollhattan:
Nye does not look good in a bow tie. Bill Nye is so confident and happy in his role as King of Nerds that he makes his physically awkward look utterly charming. He is the poster child for ‘own it and turn it up to 11’ and I salute him.
boatboy_srq
@Elizabelle: Looks like he missed his millenium, and his politics likely match. I’d say the conscious, premeditated, offensive lack of style precludes procreation, but then I recall exactly how many idiots we’ve seen appear at the polls in the last few cycles. Wonder whether Kim Davis is in the market for Husbot #4/5.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: I’ve been to several with the formal regular tie rather than a bow tie.
JEC
That’s a pretty scating indictment of the intellectual quality of the not-alt-right. If true, this would demonstrate that conservatives, classic liberals and libertarians are childish, petulant whiners who have no place in adult conversations.
Villago Delenda Est
@JR: They’re neo-feudalists. They hate the idea of the state protecting the weak from the strong.
germy
@Another Scott:
You’re right. He was the Humphrey Bogart of presidents.
boatboy_srq
@condorcet runner-up: @SRW1: Makes you wonder, though, exactly what this apocalyptic Invincible Left is that the Reichwing is so terrified of, when the libprogs, classic liberals et al are all conservative just like them.
Another Scott
@Adam L Silverman: Not doubting you, just saying that they weren’t the formal “black” or “white” tie events. White tie is the most formal dress for a man in the USA and there are pretty strict rules and norms about it, when it’s done for official occasions.
As I’m sure you know. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
boatboy_srq
@JEC: I think you might have that kinda backwards.
EBT
By gender distinct do you mean non cis?
Michael Bersin
@Adam L Silverman:
Orchestral musician work clothing, required by contract:
1) White (bow) tie and tails,
2) Tuxedo and black bow tie,
3) Dinner jacket (white) and black (other colors, designated by management; commonly red) bow tie.
Mnemosyne
@germy:
You made me LOL and scare the cat. Shame on you. ?
trollhattan
@lgerard:
Kind of making my point. Wallace won five states! Perot didn’t win shit. There’s a collective memory hole wrt Wallace’s success.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: I always find it interesting when you tell me I’ve not done things that I’ve actually done. Especially when you weren’t there.
schrodingers_cat
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks for the info. I had never heard of her before her NYT gig.
Sloane Ranger
@SRW1: Unlikely to happen ever, thank God. UKIP’s vote collapsed in the recent local elections.
When questioned by journalists about this their new leader compared his own Party to the Black Death, which has been the cause of much merriment here.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
Sullivan is not even qualified to be a member of the English lower class.
He hasn’t got enough class to belong anywhere. He’s not pissed because the upper class won’t have him he’s pissed because no one wants him.
Mandalay
@Villago Delenda Est:
Being a member of the English upper class is a characteristic that comes with birth. Kate Middleton could never achieve that “goal”, let alone Sullivan.
It’s a settled matter the moment you leave the womb.
Roger Moore
@lgerard:
Ralph Nader and Jill Stein both managed to get their preferred candidates to win, which seems like the definition of success to me. Or do ratfucking third party candidates not count?
Mr Stagger Lee
@MisterForkbeard: Ben Shapiro, a little smug toddler who needs to be sent to South Central and get a smack. Hell Alex Jones hates him.
HumboldtBlue
Is it time for another bloggers ethics panel?
Adam L Silverman
@Michael Bersin: You all need to unionize. Having to wear a bow tie should lead to strikes, walk outs, and, if necessary, sabotage.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Ruckus: I don’t know from England, but socially speaking it seems like Sully couldn’t be more of a socialite than he is in the Beltway. He and Hitchens were drinking buddies, and no less a grandee than Joe Klein (who has faded from view in the last few years, happily) devoted millions of pixels on the old Time blog to telling us how thrilled he was to attend Andy’s wedding. Proof to all the silly liberals of how silly they were when they pointed out his support of rightwing causes like teacher-bashing, “entitlement reform” and the Iraq War.
germy
ny mag link
SRW1
@Sloane Ranger:
I was joking. I doubt Nigel is ever going to make the queens honors list.
That Black Death stuff was hilarious. A bit like that “professional” football dude they had before. Where do they find these guys?
Baud
@germy:
Hahaha.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
There actually are. They are able to piss off liberals so the people paying them like them. That is the only requirement for the six figure sinecure. Piss. Off. Liberals.
Conservative writers aren’t there to pontificate on conservative bullshit, they are there to piss off liberals. Full Stop.
She’s going to get a bonus for the creation of this post.
Elizabelle
@Adam L Silverman: You cannot parody these weasels.
RE Robt Cahaly missed his century. Here’s website for his company, The Trafalgar Group. Artwork: sailing vessels. Before the age of steam. To swords I say, gentlemen.
Interesting, though, re his polling company, from an article in The Washington Times linked on Trafalgar website:
How much might getting a poll call asking if a neighbor was going to vote for Trump help motivate the recipient to vote? “Hey you, you’re not alone in being deplorable.”
FWIW, Cahaly talks a LOT in the Cavuto clip about only sampling those who actually vote. Also wonder if he and his group had observed the bots’ work, and voter suppression. Or even helped focus efforts.
Another Scott
@Adam L Silverman: Please post a picture of any man who has been at a post (say) 1900 White Tie State Dinner at the White House who wasn’t in a bow tie.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Mr Stagger Lee
That one dude on the bottom right, is Sam Harris, for a while he was one of those on the Atheist Rubber Chicken circuit, but I guess he wants to be more big time, started doing the Islamo-Fascism thing and yes is fan of the Bell Curve.
schrodingers_cat
@Ruckus: So we should not let these professional highly paid trolls piss us off. They need to be ridiculed and ignored. They are dishonest and intellectually vacuous.
Roger Moore
Which is such self-serving bullshit. This isn’t about non-racists becoming racists because people insult them. This is about people who think they’re no longer racist because they gave up on the most overt signs of racism like using the N-word. As long as people accepted that and stopped calling them racists, they were fine. But being told they have to change their actions and opinions and not just their language is just too much; they figure there’s no point in bothering if people are going to call them racists anyway.
Baud
@Ruckus: The only way to win is not to click.
Ruckus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The people that celebrate Sullivan are the people whose sole point in life is to piss off liberals, actually anyone who can manage to enjoy life.
Ever notice how pissed off conservatives seem to be? How shallow their lives are? How useless they are as humans? One of the things that pisses them off is that we actually like living, enjoy what we have, want others to enjoy as well. Conservatives have none of that. Their total enjoyment capacity is to make everyone else as pissed off as they are. They feel entitled to be happy and they aren’t. They can’t see any way to be happy so they want everyone else to be as miserable as they are. Sullivan showed pictures out his window, trying to enjoy his day, but he could never manage to actually enjoy anything because he was spending the rest of his time trying to make liberals pissed off.
Conservatives are shallow little people who have found a tribe they can be part of, the haters. They can’t understand a tribe that is bigger than the shitty little singular world of hate that they have built around themselves.
WhatsMyNym
@Mandalay:
Sully can’t even do a good imitation of English upper middle class.
Ruckus
@Baud:
Don’t click, don’t pay, don’t play their game.
Ruckus
@schrodingers_cat:
Exactly.
Well there is one problem. They are still going to hate as long as someone is willing to pay them to. And there is plenty of money among the skillful haters, such as the kochsucker bros, the mercers, etc. And that hate is going to be spread far and wide. We can’t just not click, not pay, we also have to not play their game.
schrodingers_cat
@Ruckus: @Baud: Agreed. I gave up Vichy Times which was my daily read since their dishonest coverage of T’s immigration speech. I don’t miss it at all.
Mnemosyne
@Elizabelle:
This part sure sounds more like GOTV activity than polling to me:
Trump activated the white supremacist voters who had previously refused to participate in the system. We already knew this. The curious question is, how did the Republicans locate and identify these people in order to get them to vote? ?
ETA: In 2010, there was a small but significant upsurge of white supremacist voters who helped the Republicans win their majorities nationwide. Sounds like the Republicans have been quietly courting those voters ever aince.
lgerard
@trollhattan:
Strom Thurmond won four of those states in 1948. The movement of Democrats to the Republican party in national elections was already well underway before Wallace came along. His real impact was in exporting that movement to the Midwest and Northern states. Most of the voters who were referred to as “Regan Republicans” in the 80’s.were in fact “Wallace Republicans”
Perot didn’t need to win any electoral votes to impact the election. He was a small government republican who drew so many voters away from Bush and gave the election to Clinton.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
I had a bow tie to wear with my tux. But that was a work thing and I gave away the tux when I left that job. The tie was in the jacket pocket when it went away. What I’m saying is that I don’t wear a bow tie, or actually any kind of tie. Life is too short to have to do that.
Ruckus
@Elizabelle:
Is that the second or third century? You know years with only 3 digits.
Sloane Ranger
@SRW1: I knew you were. I just wanted a reason to mention the Black Death comment!
I suppose if you’ve got a party full of weirdos the biggest one rises to the top.
Baud
@lgerard:
I always thought this was a right wing myth to delegitimize Clinton.
JPL
Is this the intellectual dark place, or did I click on a blog about tuxes and ties?
Baud
@JPL: Some say they are one in the same.
zhena gogolia
@Adam L Silverman:
Wow, that’s depressing.
Mandalay
@Ruckus:
Why is everyone so hellbent on categorizing people into the “good guys” and the “bad guys”? And why ignore that Sullivan has been way ahead of many liberals on some liberal positions?
Sure Sullivan is pompous wannabe. But he also had outspoken views on gay marriage (see his essay from 1989) and torture in Iraq (see his essay from 2005) and the obligation of young adults to have health insurance (See his essay from http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/08/05/since-when-was-free-loading-a-conservative-value/).
And those essays were excellent. He explained why gay marriage should be a conservative position. He explained why torture was inherently wrong. He explained why requiring younger adults to pay for health insurance should be an obligation, and a conservative position. And he did all that as well as any “liberal” or “progressive” ever has.
So mock Sullivan all you want. He’s not my cup of tea either, and a person I find him odious; I’d sooner have a beer with Dubya. But why give him so much attention when there are far more deserving targets?
zhena gogolia
@Just One More Canuck:
Perfect description!
Roger Moore
@Baud:
Any place where the quality of your argument is judged by the cut of your suit or the shape of your tie (much less your accent or tone of voice) is an intellectual dark place. That makes the media the intellectual equivalent of a black hole.
Steve in the ATL
@JPL: Vogue: Balloon Juice Edition
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
White supremacists have always sought a home. They used to have a secure place in the Democratic Party decades ago. Some outside the South still voted for Democrats because the GOP was openly hostile to the working class.
Trump was openly racist and drafted advisors who were well known to white bigots. Foolish white liberals kept murmuring about dog whistles even as Trump used a racist megaphone to call his bigots home.
Steve in the ATL
@Mnemosyne: quietly?!?!?!
different-church-lady
“Ritualistic cannibalism: a valid alternative point of view that should not be repressed through social taboo.”
James Powell
@Adam L Silverman:
I agree that RW dorks in bow-ties are silly. I seem to recall John Stewart mocking Tucker Carlson for it.
But as far as bow-ties with tuxedos not being cool, well you couldn’t be more wrong.
El Caganer
@different-church-lady: Once cannibalism is outlawed, only outlaws will be cannibals. Jes’ sayin’
Baud
@different-church-lady: At least it’s an ethos.
different-church-lady
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say “Calling people who say Nazi-like things Nazis just makes them more Nazi” is not quite the hot take Weiss thinks it is.
zhena gogolia
@James Powell:
Bogart could wear John Cole’s overalls and still look cool.
different-church-lady
@zhena gogolia: Bogart is so cool he’d figure out a way to not do it.
West of the Rockies
@germy:
Maybe Branson, Missouri or Lincoln, NB?
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Those overalls are a fashion-don’t for anyone. Spare my eyes, ceiling cat!
lgerard
@Baud:
It certainly can be debated. I think most of the post election studies are pretty useless, where 75% of the voters claim to have voted for the guy who got 50%. But most of the ire against Bush came form the extreme right, the “read my lips people” and the evangelicals, who always disliked him..
schrodingers_cat
@different-church-lady: Agreed. They are hideous.
Roger Moore
@James Powell:
I think my namesake might have a word or two on the coolness of men in tuxes and bow-ties, also, too.
schrodingers_cat
BTW I am a quantum liberal. Classic liberal is so Newtonian.
B.B.A.
@West of the Rockies: I’ll go with National Harbor MD, which has already hosted CPAC for the past few years so it’s not like they don’t know how to handle Falangists.
Brachiator
@Elizabelle:
I’ve read a lot about most polls looking at “likely voters,” those who voted in previous elections. I haven’t seen much in the way of hard numbers about longtime non-voters who came out for Trump or Sanders or Clinton.
A very interesting question here about polls possibly influencing the outcome of an election. Don’t know the answer to this one at all.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: My cat has a bowtie, is that okay?
Baud
@schrodingers_cat: Being in two places at once does make it easier to vote early and often.
Roger Moore
@zhena gogolia:
He looks pretty cool in overalls AFAICS. Maybe those aren’t Cole’s overalls, but he’s still pretty cool.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mandalay: No, it’s possible to enter it by pure force of merit. Being raised by a knighthood or a peerage was not out of the question in the past.
Sully’s problem is his Irishness.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mandalay: Cripes you can be such an utter fucktard sometimes.
Amir Khalid
@Baud:
One and the same, saudara.
Brachiator
@germy:
What a fun comparison! Made me smile on a lazy Saturday afternoon.
jackmac
@Adam L Silverman: Small quibble here. It was the 11th Doctor (Matt Smith) who declared bow ties to be ‘cool’. Otherwise spot on.
zhena gogolia
@Roger Moore:
Is that from a movie or just on his day off? It’s not Sierra Madre, is it?
ETA: Definitely not Sierra Madre.
msb
Coates surppassed him.
Chyron HR
@Mandalay:
Probably because we’re fifth columnists scheming to destroy America.
oaguabonita
@Eljai: I have no specific knowledge about either of those schools, but their names are typical of upper/middle-class “white flight academies”. Which would also seem consistent with her undergrad claim-to-“conservative”-fame activities against muslim(-sounding-name) prof.
Roger Moore
@zhena gogolia:
That’s apparently from him relaxing on the set of Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
raven
@Roger Moore: On the oil derrick of of Tampico.
Mnemosyne
@Steve in the ATL:
The MSM still hasn’t managed to hear it, so it doesn’t exist no matter how loudly we scream about it. In fact, as explicated in the tweets above, the fact that we’ve been screaming about it is considered counterproductive by the MSM, because it just makes them turn back towards white supremacy.
Ruckus
@msb:
Along with a large portion of the world.
BruceFromOhio
Other than Pierce and Coates, I don’t pay any attention to any of them, and do not understand why any one else does, either.
oaguabonita
@<a href="#co@lgerard: mment-6871426″>Baud:
Oy, not this Zombie Lie again!
The only relevant data — exit polls (asking who the Perot voter’s second choice would have been without Perot in the race) — indicated he drew almost exactly equally from Clinton and Bush.
That Zombie Lie made a pleasing narrative, though, so the Worse-Than-Useless Corporate Media ran with it.
You could look it up! (Credit Bob Somerby/The Daily Howler for documenting that long, long ago.)
vhh
@germy: Columbia generally considered to be in the 2nd Division of the Ivy League.
Immanentize
@Another Scott: here’s one.
Hope Hicks wears a bow tie so the guy behind her doesn’t have to.
raven
@vhh: Whoop tee fucking dooo.
Mandalay
@Villago Delenda Est: Obama “evolved” on gay marriage in 2012, when the time was right. Sullivan was calling for it in 1989. Sullivan, despite supporting the Iraq invasion was calling out torture in 2005 while Democrats in Congress were painting their nails.
Yet folks here get dizzy and clutch their pearls and hurl insults because Sullivan said something. Without even addressing what he actually said.
zhena gogolia
@Roger Moore:
Oh, okay. The stills I found from that film have him in a different outfit. I’ve never been able to watch that whole film, to be honest. Too unpleasant.
OzarkHillbilly
I wonder how Betty’s cake is doing?
J R in WV
@Adam L Silverman:
We went to the symphony last weekend, nice concert, Liszt piano works, etc. There was a very young man wearing a sport coat and a little bow tie. Very nice looking, sleepy, maybe 8 or so.
I wore a nice shirt with a collar, relatively new jeans, and paid cash for a good seat. Two of them actually, one for the wife. I’m sure they were glad of the funds. It’s a small town, not very formal, which is a good thing.
Tenar Arha
@Adam L Silverman: I really really don’t like our fellow co-religionists sometimes. They’re either utterly ignorant of or blocking out all the history they ever learned.
Weiss seems to think that the 1920’s Immigration Laws (based on 19th c scientific racism), Father Coughlin, Jewish people picking up the Dearborn Independent just in case Ford was stirring up a mob etc. never freaking happened. Did she listen to no stories from her grandparents or parents on what it was like to grow up excluded, or how her great grandparents even had to pay straw purchasers in order to buy property? Creating our own banks & law firms because we couldn’t get loans or get hired? Is just one generation more removed from our origins & the Gentleman’s Agreement enough to fool so many, or were Jewish people like her as common in the 1920’s & 30’s?
Yeahh…I just answered my own question…even back then there were plenty who just hoped the fascists would go away if you asked nicely enough. Or spent a lot of their time telling other Jewish people how to behave “not too Jewish.”
(Is it my age or upbringing or what that makes me resistant to these folks? Not sure but my father, in his declining years, still held inherited grudges about Jewish authority figures from when he was growing up in the 1930’s. Clearly that disposition had more of an effect than I thought).
?BillinGlendaleCA
@lgerard:
That’s what the Bush folk would like you to believe; actually, according to exit polling, he pulled votes equally from Clinton and Bush.
Baud
@Mandalay: I don’t recall any Dems who were pro-torture. Maybe Leiberman but I don’t even recall that.
Given Sully’s self interest in LGBT equality, I’m not surprised to hear he was ahead of the pack on that. But his embrace of the Bell Curve eliminates any good karma he might otherwise have been due.
Emma
@Mandalay: Spare me. This is also the guy that popularized The Bell Curve. He bellows about gay issues because he’s gay and he doesn’t like it when the hammer hits his foot. He’s a pseudo intellectual upper-crust wannabe. His political crush is Maggie Thatcher and other than that he hasn’t seen a successful female politician that he’s not considered either shrill or incompetent.
And by the way, Obama did more for LGBT people after his “evolution” than this Tory-light has done in his whole life.
zhena gogolia
@Baud:
No, that’s one sin I don’t think we can accuse Lieberman of, unless my memory has totally failed me.
Another Scott
@Immanentize: Hey, why do all those guys look Japanese??!
Hehe.
:-)
Just to close the thread – again I’m not doubting Adam’s experience.
It’s just that as a general rule, “black tie” and “white tie” mean bow tie. Counter-examples that prove the rule can easily be found. ;-)
That is all.
Cheers,
Scott.
Major Major Major Major
@Emma:
This is… not a super accurate gloss of the history of gay rights circa 1985-present.
ETA sullivan was an early, contentious, and vocal advocate of the assimilationist policies Obama presided over implementing/was president during SCOTUS decisions for. And obviously there was much intervening wrangling that happened before Obama ever became politically relevant.
Gelfling 545
@Adam L Silverman: Saw the look you describe at a wedding that was taking place in an area of a restsurant at which we were lunching today. It was quite elegant.
Roger Moore
@msb:
There was a take-down I saw on Twitter that made excellent use of Coates’s recent comments during the Atlantic in-house talk about the Williamson mess to completely undermine Sullivan’s points. The quote from Coates was about how he always felt the need to bite his tongue around people like Sullivan when he started working at The Atlantic, even though he despised their intellectually vapid positions on race. So that feeling of openness Sullivan is praising from his time with Coates wasn’t a result of some kind of deep intellectual respect and camaraderie but of the suppression of contrary opinions.
Baud
@Roger Moore: Good call by Coates, or he might have had his career squashed early on. Somehow I doubt the NYT would have been interested in his version of intellectual diversity.
raven
@zhena gogolia: It’s a fucking great movie. Walter Huston is incredible!
zhena gogolia
@raven:
I’m sure it is. I’m just easily depressed.
Roger Moore
@Emma:
IIRC, it’s worse than that. ISTR he thought it was a mistake to push on Windsor and Obergefell based on the tired old logic about not wanting to push change too quickly on places that weren’t ready for it. Of course that was after his marriage was safe because his state had marriage equality. It was always about wanting to be married himself, and once he got what he wanted the rest of the LGBTQ people in the country could go hang.
Emma
@Major Major Major Major: Who was talking about 1985-present? Mandalay compared and contrasted Obama to Sullivan. And I still say that once Obama got religion he went full steam ahead.
Gelfling 545
@germy: They’ll have it at Mar a Loco.
J R in WV
@Ruckus:
I have many really nice long neckties, some in a line using a Jerry Garcia trademark, some Chinese silk, maybe 3 or 4 dozen. I no longer plan to wear them much. Maybe in order to get into a Michelin starred restaurant, I do like some good food. But even there casual seems to be acceptable now. If you’ve got the money, come on down!
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
How much of this do you think is nothing more than conservative being unused to being spoken back to? For the dirty fucking hippies who rioted in Chicago in 1968, it’s always been conservatives who have been nasty, and even savage, and the liberals who tried to behaved like they were civilized. It wasn’t Charles Sumner who beat Preston Brooks almost to death on the floor of the Senate. It wasn’t federal troops who fired on the seceding troops. It wasn’t Martin Luther King who blasted the police with fire hoses, or John Lewis who beat a police man almost to death at a protest. Only last year, it wasn’t an anti nazi protester who drove her car into a crowd of nazis in Charlottesville.
We haven’t done that. I think we’ve been mighty reasonable. Even now, for all the talk of how awful it was to call people deplorables, well, Mitt Romney said half of the U.S. are lazy deadbeats, and while lots of liberals slammed him for it, if we whined endlessly about how badly our feelings were hurt, well, I missed that. Maybe it happened, but I missed it.
Conservatives are having a tough time dealing with racism, sexism and any number of other isms now being poisonous politically and socially.
Look how they are with race. Time was, you could tell a nice n¡gger joke, and everybody would have a hearty laugh, and anybody who didn’t like it knew better than to say much. You could say anything you want, and nobody shunned you. Now they can’t do that. Saying “n¡gger!” will lose you friends. Businesses fire people for it. This change is to people who never had to think twice about what they said a shocking change, and a slap in the face.
The know now that racism is unacceptable, but they still don’t understand quite why it should be, or where the line is or what’s on which side. So they stumble along, trying to walk right up along the line without tripping over it onto the wrong side, as often as not getting on the wrong side without understanding which thing they said was wrong or why.
I think race was the first such cleavage in American society this happened with, but now it’s happened with sex, sexuality, gender, mental and physical disability and who knows how many other fault lines. There isn’t any longer only the race line. They got reasonably adept at keeping on the right side, but now there are lines all over the fucking place, and they cross each other, and they don’t have the first fucking clue where the lines are or what they mean or how to keep on the right side.
It’s like the lines are all red, all of them, and they’re marked quite clearly, right there on the ground, but the color deepens and brightens with time as society’s standards change. The newest ones are fainter, and the red is duller, and even those of us who try to keep aware of others’ dignity sometimes step over them, as we’re less used to them. But the conservatives are just colorblind. They don’t see them at all. They know the lines are there, but they can’t see them, and then when they blunder over them, people get all hot and bothered about it, and they feel aggrieved.
In a way, I can almost kind of feel for them. They don’t really care, but they’re kind of willing to try, not for the sake of the marginalized people they’d like to slam but for their own well being. They’re kind of willing to try, but they can’t see the lines, and when they go over one, they blame everybody else for their own mistakes.
I like this analogy, the analogy of the color blind trying not to step over red lines they can’t see, and I guess I’ll have to work with it a little…
lgerard
@oaguabonita:
I don’t have any faith in exit polling or any self reporting polling really. If exit polls had any validity John Kerry might have been elected in 2004.
I think it is a mistake to assume that the only way to discern Perot’s effect on the 1992 election is by counting the people who ultimately pulled the lever for him. Perot was a phenomenon of sorts and was pretty popular during the campaign. At perhaps the height of his popularity he endorsed Bill Clinton. His ultimate impact was persuading people not to vote for Bush. Is there a way to measure that impact or determine if it was consequential? Of course not.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
Yep. Giving Sully credit for his stance on gay marriage is like giving Condoleezza Rice credit for being in favor of civil rights for African-Americans. The surprise would be if they insisted that they didn’t need any rights, thanks.
Major Major Major Major
@Emma: Well, Sullivan’s ‘entire life’ started before 2012. I’m just saying that as much as we hate it, Sullivan is part of the, ah, intellectual underpinning of triumphant assimilationism. Obama was standing on the shoulders of giants, as well as the shoulders of terrible-but-still-important assholes like sully.
Gelfling 545
@msb: Yeah, by a lot. And he’s not even “the right sort”. Sullivan has TNC envy and the certainty that something is just not right about the situation.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I agree. The economy sucked, Bush was a terrible retail politician, and the religious right never really trusted him. And Bubba had his fast ball back then– I remember Mona Charen saying the slogan of Bush’s convention should’ve been “Only Four More Years”. I tend to think Clinton still would’ve won if Perot had never gotten in or completely dropped out, but Perot did real damage to Bush by running less for President than against Bush, in much the way Nader did to Gore and a certain other sanctimonious, klieg-light-seeking-missile of a candidate did to another decent, establishment politician with poor retail skills.
But I’m not one to derail a thread so I’ll just leave my point all vague and mysterious like that and not name names.
boatboy_srq
@different-church-lady: I’ll go further and say that calling the Left part of the Right makes her directionally challenged rather than insightful.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
To me, it highlights three things:
1) How much smarter Coates is than Sullivan. Coates’s spoken comments were smarter, more readable, and better thought out than Sullivan’s written column.
2) How ignorant Sullivan remains about race in America. Given how long he’s had to learn something about it, I can’t help but classify that ignorance as willful.
3) How the one little incident encapsulates so much of American race relations.
Major Major Major Major
@boatboy_srq: Where does she call the left part of the right?
James Powell
@Mnemosyne:
My memory is a little hazy, but I recall that Sullivan was against torture and for gay marriage, but he argued that people should vote for the party and the candidates that bragged that they would torture and made hatred of gays as a major campaign issue.
Kraux Pas
@James Powell: …until he saw reason with respect to the Iraq War. He since became an advocate for Obama especially and Democrats generally, with a few exceptions. I don’t know his position on Election ’16, but I have a hard time believing he was a Trumpette.
Major Major Major Major
@Kraux Pas: He supported Hillary but seemed astonished that he’d been reduced to it.
Kraux Pas
@Major Major Major Major: Sounds about right.
boatboy_srq
@Major Major Major Major: See her “classic liberals” comment.
Major Major Major Major
@boatboy_srq: classical liberalism hasn’t been part of the left since Keynes. It’s at this point more or less what they advocate at Reason (“Free minds, free markets”) plus some extra state-backed civil rights.
Kraux Pas
@boatboy_srq:
I believe the term refers to capitalists.
boatboy_srq
@Major Major Major Major: @Kraux Pas: The fact that she clearly sees anyone not Amy-Goodman-grade libprog as just as fascist as Fascists isn’t especially helpful to arguments about what part of the political spectrum she’s misrepresenting.
schrodingers_cat
These aggrieved conservatives can cry me a river. My sympathies go to those at the receiving end of Nazi medicine (bone scans and dental scan to prove your age) and Nazi like tactics of separating parents from their children and then boasting about it ( I am looking at you Kelly) not these pampered intellectually bankrupt moral lightweights.
Roger Moore
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
I think they key with the Bari Weiss stuff- and to be fair, the “calling me a racist made me a Nazi” stuff is getting to be a common talking point that she’s just repeating- is that it’s moved one step past that. It’s been a long time since you could expect to use the N-word in public without any negative consequences, and I think most people have internalized that. What’s happened recently is that it’s no longer enough to refrain from saying the N-word in public.
Now you can be called a racist just for advocating racist policies! How unfair is that? The Democrats are starting to call people racists for all kinds of crazy things, like advocating mass deportation of illegal immigrants, ending SNAP, and even adopting rural-friendly policies that just happen to predominantly benefit whites. If there’s no way to avoid being called a racist short of giving up on racist policies, then what’s the point of trying to cover it up? You might as well be an out-and-proud racist if speaking in dog whistles and carefully hiding the racist intent of your policies doesn’t work anymore.
Kraux Pas
@boatboy_srq: I get it. I have no love for media validation of right-wing crybaby antics. I was just trying to establish how the term “classical liberals” fits in among the right.
That said, both our major parties and pretty much all the minor parties with any visibility are “liberal” in this sense. This is why my real qualm with her statement is that she implies the broad left spectrum are generally out-and-out socialists, which would be laughable if it weren’t so prevalent an attitude and, thus, quite sad.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.)
@Roger Moore: Yeah, that’s kind of what I mean. They can’t see where the line is. They know where it wasbut they only know that because people told them often enough that they just memorized it. I don’t think they ever could see it. Now it’s somewhere else, and it’s as bright as it ever was, but they can’t see it and have no clue when they step over it, and so they blame everybody but themselves when they do.
NorthLeft12
@SRW1: Yes, even though President Obama made the job look easy and natural, it is obvious to anyone the he was intelligent, cool, completely in control, and just every kind of classy. Deadbeat Donald has just proven that a loathsome and ignorant bigot can become President. Who can’t follow in those footsteps?
Hoodie
@Roger Moore: The “out loud” parts were originally the public rationale for the policies, serving to dehumanize the victim and thus justify the treatment. The Bell Curve and its brethren simply replace them with poorly formed statistical arguments and bowtie punditry that fits modern tastes.
Dev Null
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): I like your rant. “Color-blind” is a useful metaphor.
catbirdman
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: Boom.
Dev Null
@Roger Moore:
This.
Mnemosyne
@Kraux Pas:
I think — but don’t quote me on this — that the right wing uses the term “classical liberals” to refer to libertarians so they can then claim that libertarians are the only true liberals, which means that actual liberals are wild-eyed Marxists calling for the execution of the rich.
James Powell
@Roger Moore:
It’s especially unfair when everyone knows that both you and Ivanka privately opposed them.
Roger Moore
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.): @Hoodie:
I think there’s a little bit more to it. Yes, a lot of the out-loud parts were originally created as rationales for racially discriminatory policies, but a huge part of the conservative project since WWII has been trying to move away from talking about race at all; that’s the point of the famous quote from Lee Atwater about changing messaging. So even if we get Conservatives to shut up about The Bell Curve, as long as they’re talking about cutting taxes and freeing up innovators and job creators, they’re still talking about policies that have racist outcomes.
I think part of what Liberals are doing, and that Conservatives are so angry about, is to try to refocus the discussion on policy outcomes rather than the way the policies are justified. That means when the Republicans try to sell a policy with racially discriminatory outcomes based on some superficially non-racist rationale, we can still call it racist. They’re naturally calling foul, because that covers practically everything they want to do that we object to. So we aren’t just changing the rules about when something can be called racist; by extension, we’re pushing on the Overton Window, and they really don’t like that.
Dev Null
@Kraux Pas:
That “liberal 5th column” statement Yglesias cites is typical of Sully’s Deep Thinking™. He’s a shallow narcissistic tribal fool. I give not two fks that he supported Hillary in 2016 (and he did). He didn’t evolve to a higher level of consciousness over the years, the GOP devolved. Sully is still the silly ignorant vain man he was in 2001.
Occasionally he gets off a good insight at NYMag, but immediately steps on it by whining about LIE-berals being too PC or whatever. David Frum has a similar shtick.
About the only topic on which I found his ruminations at The Atlantic useful was narcissism. I remember several times people mocked him (“narcissist opining on narcissism”) years ago, perhaps here at BJ.
Kraux Pas
@Mnemosyne: Potato, potatoe
Kraux Pas
@Dev Null:
This sort of thinking afflicts plenty of people with much stronger left credentials than Sullivan. This is one of my biggest problems with Bill Maher. Why don’t people treat right-wing speech taboos the same way?
Left Wing PC==respect people
Right Wing PC==accept our alt-facts
One is clearly more harmful than the other. In fact, left political correctness only ever does notional harm to the extent that a few people, people whom the media makes damn sure we know are out there, arguably go overboard in such a way as to undermine themselves.
No Drought No More
My guess has it that each charter member of this self-styled intellectual dark web* would be willing to work for half of Sean Hannitty’s salary, too.
*(The “dark web”- shee-it. As Count Floyd of SCTV would shudder and say, “Oooh, scary”).
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
I have two ties which are identical other than one red, one blue. And I have two Jerry Garcia ties that I wore whenever I thought I could get away with it. Which was about 99% of the time. But I’m a shorts and tee shirt type. If I have to get dressed up to go someplace it most likely isn’t worth it. I haven’t worn a suit and tie to a wedding or funeral services in at least 15 yrs. And funny thing, neither was anyone else. And I’ve been to about 8 services in the last 2 yrs.
Ruckus
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Selfish. That’s the word you are looking for. The reason they can’t see those lines is that they aren’t looking in any outward direction. And really humans have no lines that they haven’t learned, taught by parents, friends, school and their cultures. And because they are selfish they can only identify with people exactly like themselves, color, origin, language, religion, money. They live in a mostly closed loop system. Or they did not all that long ago. But modern
communications has changed that, has exposed them to things that they then have to question. And they haven’t be taught that. They don’t know who, what, when, why, how, they know me, me, me, me, me……….
Dev Null
@Kraux Pas:
Well, all people are equal, but some people are more equal than others.
At the risk of committing a long rant ([rant on]), it seems to me that the situation is worse than you suggest.
“Left Wing PC” is centered in a concern for fairness and justice and equality of treatment for everyone, but especially including the poor, the disabled, the discriminated against, and the like (but you knew that already.)
Yeah, OK, so a Good Thing can be taken too far, and sometimes is, news at 11.
“Right Wing PC” is (typically) centered in grievances over challenged privilege.
RWPC and LWPC are not remotely the same concept.
Yet LWPC is treated with (at best) polite disdain, while RWPC is, well, “exploring the boundaries of reasonable discourse”, or whatever.
The term “PC” itself is right-wing agit-prop – a term of abuse directed at LIE-berals who dare question privilege.
I’ll venture the possibility that the reason that “Left Wing PC” and “Right Wing PC” are treated so differently – why LWPC is damned while RWPC is greeted with “we must respect reasonable discourse” both-siderism – is simple: those with privilege get to decide whose views get promoted. Unsurprisingly, those with privilege are rarely invested in challenging privilege.
Srsly, does anyone who has followed FTF Vichy Times for the past 30 or 40 years doubt that they are invested in their privilege (and self-image) as America’s Paper of Record, Fk Yeah!™?
I’m not suggesting that that’s the only reason the Vichy Times has Bari Weis and Bret Stephens on the payroll … chances are that privilege is no more than a small contribution to their hirings.
But I do think that “We here at the Vichy Times know best, so STFU and eat your broccoli, you damn LIE-berals” is a factor, not just on the op-ed page, but in Vichy Times reporting as well.
[/rant]
Happy to learn from those more knowledgeable should I be wrong.
Kraux Pas
@Dev Null:
Which, naturally, includes everything right of center up to and including carefully worded statements from mainstream Democrats.
Dev Null
@Ruckus: Just spitballing this one, and haven’t gone back to look at sources, but I’ve seen multiple mentions of Altemeyer’s Authoritarians here over the years. His argument seems relevant / complementary / whatevs … selfish / narcissism, authoritarianism / closed loop.
Sorry, The Spousal Unit calls; I don’t have time to think this into a coherent point, just tossing it out so any rabid jackals who care can rip it to shreds.
Dev Null
@Kraux Pas:
Bingo!
Elizabelle
@Ruckus: I’m glad you all are still discussing the topic. Got to catch up with this thread.
jl
I think it is very unfair and undemocratic that mathematics has banned discussion of the theory that 1 – 1 = pi for many many years. I’m gonna have a talk show that allows people who believe that to come on and spout. “Hey, I have a show, people come on and spout, I broadcast it, that’s it!”
These people want to be taken seriously in serious discussion, but the names there that I recognize have turned into, or are sadly in the process of turning into, tendentious meretricious cranks, such as Sam Harris.
It is sad and very unfair to them that, for example the new model scientific racists make fatal mistakes in intermediate level statistics that, if they were my students, would result in doing their homework assignment over again and getting a remedial tutorial session. I guess soon a student will come up with a conceptual or numerical blunder in their regression or ANOVA homework and report me to the school brass for not being sufficiently open minded to new thinking.
I was surprised to agree with the comments that called this one of the saddest articles ever on an intellectual movement. I couldn’t find one sentence on the merits of their new out of the box thinking. It was hot and savvy, but those are not interesting criteria in the world in which they want to have influence. Silly article, but the likes of Kaus and Cillizza and company will eat it up I suppose.
Kraux Pas
@jl: I thought it was given any value of x where x is a real number, x-x=pi
jl
@Kraux Pas: I for one, welcome your new thinking that pi equals zero. I apologize.
Kraux Pas
@jl: No, no, no…where does everyone get this zero from? There’s no such thing.
jl
@Kraux Pas: I for one, welcome your new thinking that there is no such thing as zero. I apologize.
Edit: or maybe ‘no zero’ is good old fashioned thinking that we unwisely abandoned a couple of thousand years ago under the influence of liberal mathematicians and philosophers. It probably has damaged human progress and mislead our precious youth, leading them into error, ever since. I apologize for that too. I apologize for everything.
Kraux Pas
@jl:
…they always do…
schrodingers_cat
@jl: Even his equations are nonsense.
JR
@Major Major Major Major: Classic liberalism definitely exists on the left — freedom of speech, support for scientific inquiry, abolition of hereditary privilege, separation of church and state, these are all liberal values then and now. And each of those are today under attack by conservatives of one stripe or another. Do you really think Tom Paine, Ben Franklin, or Lafayette would be writing for fucking Reason?
Dev Null
@schrodingers_cat: Apologies in advance for silly snark, but surely schrödinger’s cat should be the first to assert that 1 – 1 is ℏ.
(And what’s with the absence of the umlaut?!? Inquiring minds wish to know!)
jl
@JR: Tom Paine was an early advocate of national social insurance policies. He’d fit right in at Reason. And Franklin, of paper money and flexible monetary policy to increase wages and business activity. As well as carefully crafted property rights policy that would respect individual right to retain the fruits of one’s efforts that respected individual dignity, balanced concern for social welfare and recognition that everyone’s return to investment and labor is heavily influenced by adequate provision of public services (that don’t work very well when privatized). He’d be right at home at Reason too.
No doubt about it.
/snarkism tag here.
Dev Null
@Ruckus: I am shocked … SHOCKED! … that Schrödinger’s Cat has yet to weigh in on this highly questionable invocation of “identical”.
This shall not stand!
(er, Schrödinger’s Cat, this is your cue …)
jl
@jl: Even crusty pessimistic old-school conservative John Adams was a fanatical advocate of public schools for everyone, from poorest to richest. He wanted the US to be saturated with public schools supported with public money and accountable to public organizations. He’d fit right in at Reason too.
Dev Null
@Dev Null: I mean … vacuum energy … amirite?!?
Finally, everything makes sense!!!
Dev Null
@jl: I know LIE-bertarians – smart, otherwise sensible LIE-bertarians – who believe that public schools are The TOOL OF THE DEVIL, because private enterprise and (*ZOMG*, where are the smelling salts?!?) unions …
… and we can’t have that, can we …
jl
@Major Major Major Major: Keynes thought he was defending the free market against the periodic self-destruction that free markets periodically produced, if left completely to themselves. These debates often exist in a ideal world. Some questions of fact need to be answered in order to see what philosophies are of any use in the real world we live in. So, I am solidly in favor of classical liberalism that pays attention to facts.
JaneSays
She’s not really a “recent” hire – she’s been at the FTFNYT for over a year now.
Nonetheless, she is still execrable. She’s just gotten noticed a lot more in recent months. She’s been pushing this sort of tripe since her days as an undergrad at Columbia ten years ago.
The Lodger
@Dev Null: By chance are you referring to the famous Hoover-Kirby-Roomba Conjecture?
Dev Null
@The Lodger:
No.
This has been another episode of SA2SQ. We now return you to …
PS. Whoah! You’re good!
PPS. I have read that physicists sometimes use natural units, which is to say, the system of units in which dimensions are defined such that h and c are dimensionless and h = c = 1.
In these units, if 1 – 1 = ℏ, then since ℏ = h/2π, 1 – 1 = 1/2π, so …
… much for your vaunted science, LIBs! P0wn3d!
PPPS. OK, so I’m a sucker for junior-level quantum physics jokes. I believe that Schrödinger’s Cat started it …
… by existing.
Or not, as the case might be.
tychay
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: I went to Shady Side Academy. I can say with certainty, it isn’t the “right school” at all. The stigma of being from Pittsburgh and being just a little out of step with the east coast is exactly why that school in the 2000’s turned out a toxic shit like Weiss just like Dartmouth did the same in the 90s. Maybe in 20 years it will catch up with whatever passes for intelligentsia today, but by then the world will have moved on.