Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

Reality always gets a vote in the end.

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

They spent the last eight months firing professionals and replacing them with ideologues.

In after Baud. Damn.

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night Open Thread: We Are What We Pretend to Be…

Late Night Open Thread: We Are What We Pretend to Be…

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… So we must be very careful what we pretend to be.”

Or at least (says someone who shares Vonnegut’s — and Abigal Adam’s, and Dostoyevsky’s — birthday) we should take a considered approach to how we choose to present ourselves. Between the Titan submersible and the Russian coup-or-whatever, I have done a certain amount of self-censorship this week, although perhaps not enough…



Dumb stuff we do in our twenties, but now it can be shared with the whole online world / be on the record forever…

Reader Interactions

74Comments

  1. 1.

    gwangung

    Hm. I noticed this a lot. A lot of socialist/leftists just aren’t interested in persuading others and recruiting to their side–they act like it’s beneath them. They’re more interested in imposing their views on others, and if it’s done through totalitarian means, it’d suit them just fine.

  2. 2.

    Calouste

    That all means as much to me as a QAnon rant. I.e. these people are so enclosed in their own terminology and phrasing that it’s incomprehensible to outsiders.

  4. 4.

    Citizen Alan

    I am reminded of a conversation I had a few years back with a friend who fancies himself a communist despite his high-paying job as head of IT for a major corporation. I noted that I’d taken one of those “What are your politics?” quizzes and it said that the best party for me would be the DSA, which I had 98% agreement. The problem was in that 2% difference, which I summed up with the the following question: “Is the DSA a legitimate political organization capable of achieving any of its stated goals? Or is it just a collection of cranks, malcontents, and bad faith actors financed primarily by rightwing oligarchs for the express purpose of sapping votes from the Democrats and in general making socialism seem ridiculous to the normies?” DSA supporters think it’s A. I think it’s B, and so I’ll stick with the Democrats, thank you.

  5. 5.

    HumboldtBlue

    This joint really needs a weekend night reprise, like a soda machine and a jukebox and maybe move the tables to the side, so there’s some room for dancing and yet youse can still sit down after a dance or whatever… let’s Pretend to have some fun!

  6. 6.

    Jerzy Russian

    I would appreciate it if someone provided an English translation of this post.  No rush, as I am probably going to bed now.  I can check back in in the morning.  Thanks.

  8. 8.

    SpaceUnit

    As happens so often, I have no idea what this post is about.

    Socialism?  Social media?  Tweets with bad grammar / spelling / etc?  Help.

     

    ETA:  Jerzy Russian, I’m with you.

    ETA2:  And I’m also going to bed.

  9. 9.

    different-church-lady

    “you won’t get a critical mass of people on your side if you’re a dick all the time to everybody.”

    “Oh. Well then screw the critical mass thing.”

  10. 10.

    different-church-lady

    @SpaceUnit: I know what most of the thread is about, but I’m confused by the tweet that kicked it all off. Who is the first guy (Williams) criticizing? And is Knight agreeing or rebutting?

  13. 13.

    Matt McIrvin

    @SpaceUnit: It’s an elaborate spinoff of the online arguments over leftists making bad-taste jokes about the OceanGate accident.

    (Over the past few days I’ve seen one person very insistent that people who make these jokes have psychopathic tendencies, and someone else on another forum insisting that people like that person “would rat you out to HUAC”. So it all gets very politically charged very fast.)

    Anyway, the above is a thing that spun off from that, into the question of whether socialists care about presenting an appealing image to most people at all, vs. the question of whether we should ethically even care about that, and it’s a lot of people talking past each other in largely unhelpful ways.

  14. 14.

    piratedan

    musing on the social interaction issues…. it is helpful to have our bubbles burst and to listen to people who’ve taken the time to actually tally the numbers and clue us in when we’re wrong.  The left is not perfect, but it’s also more sympathetic to science and proof and adjusting accordingly and I have no problem if people want to remind us of this.

     

    and while I do my best to stay in my lane and not get too far over my skis, I will readily admit that when matched with the positions espoused on the right, it’s hard to find too many faults when the other side is cruel, bigoted and refuses to listen to facts or even admit to the possibility that they could be wrong/misguided about damn near anything.

    there are times when I wish that the tone police would spend as much time clapping back to those on the right as they do trying to admonish the left when reciprocation takes place.

  15. 15.

    eclare

    @Calouste:

    Same here.  I just say that I’m a Democrat, because people generally know what that means, and it’s how I vote.  The other labels mean nothing to me.

  18. 18.

    different-church-lady

    “Eat the rich” is supposed to be a joke, not an actual slogan in-use.

  19. 19.

    Captain C

    @different-church-lady:

    “you won’t get a critical mass of people on your side if you’re a dick all the time to everybody.”

    “Oh. Well then screw the critical mass thing.”

    Sometime near the end of the Obama Administration I was at a rooftop party in Alphabet City, and I heard one cosplay revolutionary saying to his friend, “As revolutionaries, It’s not our job to risk our lives.  It’s our job to convince other people to risk their lives…”

    Which is a really good rallying call, “You die for my beliefs!”

    They had the vibe of kids whose parents paid full freight at a third-rate art school.

  20. 20.

    OzarkHillbilly

    GOLIKEHELLMACHINE
    @golikehellmachi
    unions: famously hostile and contemptuous toward the workers they need to win over.
    Quote Tweet

    Sam Knight
    @samknight1
    ·
    Jun 20
    Replying to @samknight1
    Your boss was about to give up unionbusting forever but now collective bargaining is associated with online meanness. I hope your happy.

    Hoo boy. How to say, “I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about but here is my opinion about it anyway.” without saying, “I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about but here is my opinion about it anyway.”

    To start with, Sam Knight has conjured up an imaginary being, one who does not and never has existed. Howard Schulz certainly never changed his stripes.

    GHM thinks a union’s job is to win over workers who aren’t in the union. In my ideal world unions would. Of course in my ideal world, non union workers would be receptive to the idea. But for all too many, better wages, guaranteed healthcare, pensions, etc etc, aren’t enough, they want a union to woo them, to whisper sweet nothings in their ear.

    Well, guess what? Screw that. A unions primary job is to represent their dues paying members. Full stop. If a nonunion worker wants to join, come on in, we’ll tell you how. If they want to take their nonunion shop union, hell yeah, the union will help with that effort. But failing that, a nonunion worker is taking a union man/woman’s job and no doubt for lesser wages, lesser healthcare (or as often as not, NO healthcare) and a lesser pension/401K (likely as not, NONE.)

    I’ve been on both sides of that fence and the union side was light years better for me and my family.

  21. 21.

    Matt McIrvin

    @eclare: I call myself a liberal, both because it’s quite accurate in a US context, but also as a thumb in the eye to everyone who spent the 1980s making “liberal” a dirty word, a process I vividly remember.

    I suspect that self-described American socialists are doing something similar–“socialist” was a way dirtier word than “liberal” in the US for a very long time, so there’s even more of a “fuck you” effect there. I kind of get it. Most of the people in this country who call themselves that don’t actually seem to wish for the government to nationalize all industry, which to me is what socialism means, but never mind.

    But… I also kind of suspect that a lot of the people on the left who refuse to identify as liberals are doing that because they subconsciously absorbed the 1980s right-wing propaganda that to be a liberal is to be a wuss.

  30. 30.

    Redshift

    @Matt McIrvin:

    But… I also kind of suspect that a lot of the people on the left who refuse to identify as liberals are doing that because they subconsciously absorbed the 1980s right-wing propaganda that to be a liberal is to be a wuss.

    Or they absorbed the more recent propaganda that liberal politics and neoliberal economics are the same thing.

  31. 31.

    Splitting Image

    @different-church-lady:

    I know what most of the thread is about, but I’m confused by the tweet that kicked it all off. Who is the first guy (Williams) criticizing? And is Knight agreeing or rebutting?

    Based on their timelines, Williams believes that it is equally inhuman to laugh at the dead billionaires in the sub and the dead migrants on the ship that sank in the Mediterranean. Knight believes that the billionaires earned their ridicule.

    Both timelines do a good job of proving that sarcasm is difficult to see reliably when the context is removed from a tweet that is intended to be funny.

  32. 32.

    Redshift

    We had a primary challenger to a local candidate who on being “more progressive” (and got referred to that way in quite a bit if coverage. I liked the incumbent (and thought they were pretty progressive/liberal) before I knew there was a primary challenger, but I wanted to learn more, and as far as I can tell, the claim was based on:

    1. Pledging not to accept corporate donations, and

    2. An anti-incrementalist belief that could have gotten done all the things “we” want instead of making progress on them, and the only reason they hadn’t was because they didn’t really want to.

    If that’s the difference between being a liberal and being a progressive, I’ll stick with being a liberal. (It does seem similar to the point mentioned above about leftists who succeed in getting elected.)

  33. 33.

    Redshift

    (Not that I’m a fan of corporate campaign donations, just that I’ll judge by the politician’s actions rather than their donations whether they’re a corporate shill, and I believe them when they say they’re for banning donations but until then they don’t want to be at a disadvantage.)

  36. 36.

    opiejeanne

    @Splitting Image: Thank you! Lacking context I couldn’t decide if one or both of them were being sarcastic, and without tone of voice and/or facial clues sarcasm can sound serious. .

  39. 39.

    NotMax

    @a href=”https://balloon-juice.com/2023/06/25/late-night-open-thread-we-are-what-we-pretend-to-be/#comment-8881164″>Amir Khalid

    Oh, I dunno. Would rate a Thatcher Way as more offensive than that.
    :)

  42. 42.

    Anne Laurie

    @piratedan: there are times when I wish that the tone police would spend as much time clapping back to those on the right as they do trying to admonish the left when reciprocation takes place.

    We don’t care how much the MAGAts irritate the normies, though.  In fact, we really can’t expect any better of them, can we?

  43. 43.

    NotMax

    Well, that’s a first.

    You know how Prime includes short categorical descriptions a title falls under? While perusing possibilities to watch came across one I was curious about tagged thusly:

    Suspense • Drama • Dark • Malicious

    Never seen that last category pop up before.   ;)

  47. 47.

    piratedan

    @Anne Laurie: true that, it’s just a half-step below being sea-lioned imho.  More bad faith applied in unequal quantities.  You bemoan the state of discourse and those on the right call for your death and to make illegal the principals that you hold most dear and when YOU clap back, the tone police is always there to take issue with the response but never the instigation.

  48. 48.

    mrmoshpotato

    @gwangung:

    A lot of socialist/leftists just aren’t interested in persuading others and recruiting to their side–they act like it’s beneath them. They’re more interested in imposing their views on others, and if it’s done through totalitarian means, it’d suit them just fine. 

    And ratfucking the Democratic party.

  49. 49.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Citizen Alan:

    I am reminded of a conversation I had a few years back with a friend who fancies himself a communist despite his high-paying job as head of IT for a major corporation. 

    Glad I wasn’t taking a sip of anything when I read that.  It would’ve gone up my nose.

  50. 50.

    dm

    @Matt McIrvin:

    But… I also kind of suspect that a lot of the people on the left who refuse to identify as liberals are doing that because they subconsciously absorbed the 1980s right-wing propaganda that to be a liberal is to be a wuss.

    Well, don’t forget Phil Ochs’ song from the 60s: “Love me, I’m a liberal”, or maybe even the Letter from Birmingham Jail, a examples of why “liberal” might have been a dirty word even without the Right’s help.

  52. 52.

    Baud

    @dm:

    Birmingham Jail doesn’t use the word liberal.

    ETA: it does mention the “white moderate.”

  53. 53.

    p.a.

    I remember years ago Atrios posting about a Philly transit strike and how many of the suit-and-tie liberals were livid about being inconvenienced by the legal strike.  A went into the issues and in no way was this a frivolous action.  (Not a lot of workers, union or not, can/will go without pay for frivolous reasons.)

  54. 54.

    TheMightyTrowel

    In case anyone’s interested, here’s an actual leftist (ie anarchist) argument against guillotines (literal and metaphorical) from Crimethinc.

    Speaking as someone who’s… let’s say a fellow traveler… the most powerful things i find in anarchist thought and politics are the related ideas (a) that we are the only ones who can save ourselves (ie, that we must constantly work to improve the world around us and not wait for politicians or institutions to act) and (b) that our actions should prefigure the world we want to create (ie, the ends never justify the means, three means ought to be the ends).

  55. 55.

    dm

    @Baud: no, but it can be taken as a description of a tendency among liberals at the time.

    Indeed, some of the “excessive tone policing” being decried in this thread is something I kind of associate with liberalism (though I guess people are probably talking about pearl-clutching fauxtrage, David Brooks, etc., instead).

  56. 56.

    Baud

    @dm:

    Liberals, like Democrats, are a diverse set.  There’s always going to be some variation to caricature and portray as representative of the whole.

  57. 57.

    bjacques

    Over on Facebook a “Recommended for you” group popped up during the sub search, called something like Meme Comrades For Eating The Rich, that posted the most mean-spirited memes and retweets about it. I could mocking the attitudes that led to that tragedy, but that was too much. The group disappeared as mysteriously as it came.

    It also happened I had a friend in common with two of the people aboard.

  59. 59.

    dm

    @Baud: oh, sure. I was just pointing out that “liberal” had long been a pejorative on the left, without needing to internalize Reagan-era rhetoric for it to happen.

    When a friend pointed out the dancing-on-grave aspect of some of the Oceangate talk, I was kind of glad that I’d kept my mouth shut, there having been a few things I’d been amused by (I saw a parody of “Yellow Submarine” that was pretty good).

  60. 60.

    dm

    @dm: (too late to edit) what I mean was, the friend decrying the ghoulishness had a point, and I felt a little ashamed of the amusement I’d felt at some of it.

  61. 61.

    Baud

    @dm:

    There will always be people who take things too far. I don’t mind tone policing so much. There has to be some internal check, or we end up like MAGA.

    The best “jokes” I’ve seen were focused on the glibertarian philosophy of sub owner (who at least had the decency to go down with the ship.)

  62. 62.

    Princess

    @Captain C: lots of trust-fund socialists who think socialism would mean they got to be in charge but mostly the last thing they would ever want is actual socialism, which depends for its success on deep-seated communitarian values, which are antithetical to them.

    This group forms a Venn diagram with the sort of young Catholics who are extremely conservative about sex and gender but claim to desperately want socialism. And the Bruenig sit in the exact center of that diagram.

  63. 63.

    evodevo

    @bjacques:  Yes…this. On one of my FB posts stating that the problems with the sub have been known for yrs and it was just a matter of time, a good friend replied that the wife of one of the deceased was a good friend of hers, and she really felt for the family.  I didn’t say anything, just “liked” her comment.   I also commented on a later post that I felt sorry for the teenager who was killed (he didn’t want to go, but it was FATHERS’ DAY!!) but the others were adults who signed on voluntarily to a death ship.  Haven’t gotten any replies to that… to me, it’s not snark to assess a situation realistically.  I on the other hand, wouldn’t be arguing my position at a funeral…you just shut up and sympathize.

  64. 64.

    SFAW

    @Calouste: @Jerzy Russian:

    Glad to see this, because I was starting to think that I might have had a stroke: I was reading a number of the tweets, but was unable to comprehend.

    I mean, that still might be true, but it seems unlikely that you guys did as well.

  65. 65.

    SFAW

    @TheMightyTrowel:

    My cousin’s daughter – who is actually pretty damned smart – was an anarchist. [She may still be, but I haven’t seen her in 15-or-so years, so …] She tried semi-proselytizing the rest of the family on Thanksgiving, in the sense of telling us the benefits of running a country in an anarchic manner. Interestingly, when pressed, she was unable to give us a single example from history when that was successful.

  66. 66.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Captain C:

    Which is a really good rallying call, “You die for my beliefs!”

    Which is effectively the rallying call of the gun nuts, which is a truth I think we need to make better use of.

  67. 67.

    Ohio Mom

    @evodevo: I also was only really sorry for the coerced teenager. I imagine he was tortured by deep anxiety and fright from the moment he saw he wasn’t getting out of it — days and days, maybe longer — up until the end.

    I’m remindeed of the feeling of waiting for biopsy results. It’s hard to distract yourself from the dread.

  68. 68.

    Gvg

    Another voter for not understanding what this post is about or the connection to the title or anything. Gibberish.

    I did know that there were people who call themselves socialist or leftist, who have more extreme political views than the actual Democratic Party or liberals. However my random encounters with them have led me to conclude they are not very like each other nor even related to the American Democratic Party or American Liberal thought. They are only related by a label and possibly a past. They do not say anything I have thought worth listening to so I don’t and evidently most of the voters agreed with me. They lost influence a long time ago. Conservatives like to bring them up, but that’s not even working on our voters anymore because we just don’t know what they are talking about and assume it’s more of their own gibberish.

    I think it is still riling up their base, but I am not sure how to counter what are basically lies.

  69. 69.

    JWR

    @Jerzy Russian:

    I would appreciate it if someone provided an English translation of this post.

    Tell me about it! There’s this weird, very online lingo coming into vogue these days which I don’t Grok at all. In such a case I’ll read through the comments, where a Tweet’s meaning might become clearer. Sorta like reverse engineering for meaning.

    As for the post itself, I like the third @golikehellmachi tweet: “it often feels like american socialists want the libs to do the work for them.” That sounds overly simplistic, but it’s the way I think a few of my @veryserious friends think about politics, as they absorb the latest Chris Hedges sermon. (Well, I’m not absolutely certain about that last bit. ;) )

  70. 70.

    kalakal

    @Origuy:

    You can also visit ( and I would heavily recommend it*) the home of the upmarket British porn actor: Studley Royal

    * Studley Royal & Fountains Abbey are quite simply one of the most beautiful places on earth. 650 acres of 18th century perfect parkland containing the largest & best preserved monastic ruins in the UK

    Here’s UNESCOs take on it

  71. 71.

    TheMightyTrowel

    @SFAW: human history has seen myriad societies organised in ways that we now understand as falling more or less within the umbrella of what we’d term anarchism today. In N America look to the precolonial pacific nw and to chacoan society in the sw. I’m an archaeologist and research this specifically. You might also look at Wengrow and Graeber’s excellent 2021 book “the dawn of everything” for a beautifully written and public-facing approach.

    Too few people study archaeology, so many people are sadly ignorant about the incredible diversity of human culture and social/ political organisation over our 300,000 years of existence as a species. I hope your family didn’t use her lack of knowledge to belittle her or shame her about her beliefs. Would have been a good excuse to go learn more…

  72. 72.

    AnonPhenom

    @Jerzy Russian: ​
     
    It’s the latest manifestation of the Centrist’s complaint of things moving too quickly (see: MLK’s critique of moderate allies. AKA “don’t scare the normies”) but done in left-hand/code so that instead of arguing substance they critique style.
    Back in the ‘aughts the blogosphere referred to this as The Civility Dodge (potty mouth bloggers were right, but for the wrong reasons, cause they said ‘fuck’ a lot …see Thers @ Whiskeyfire) . I don’t know what they call that BS these days.

  73. 73.

    Origuy

    @kalakal: I actually learned about the Studleys from watching The Great British Dig on channel4.com. I’ve got a thing for British archaeology shows.

  74. 74.

    dnfree

    @SFAW: Ursula K Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed” does the best job I know of portraying an anarchist society contrasted with a society resembling the United States and one like the Soviet Union.  All three societies have flaws that are noted.  The physicist who is the main character is modeled somewhat on Oppenheimer, who was a friend of her family.  The book was written in the 1970s, but I re-read it recently and thought it held up pretty well.

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