Blog favorite chewtoy Megan McArgleBargle made a strong move for the Worst Historical Commentary of the past week…
Lol, "our jobs"? What is your job exactly? You think sitting in an unearned opinion sinecure & cranking out glib opinions that reinforce the priors of the powerful is threatening to the kids? You think that's what bothers them?
— David Roberts (@drvolts) February 22, 2024
This is like saying, 'well Wander Franco has gotten almost 40% more negative coverage than any other MLB all-star.'
Of course Trump has gotten more negative coverage than the others. He's an irredeemable liar, racist, rapist, awful person, etc etc. This graph proves nothing. https://t.co/G1XmWt7gTK
— Centrism Fan Acct ?? (@Wilson__Valdez) February 23, 2024
Get ready for more of this type of whining as people keep calling BS on their bad faith coverage of Biden Harris. Their crap reporting is getting called out and they're butthurt about it.
The Obama administration got extra gentle treatment. Okay ??
We saw everything Megan. https://t.co/TjidyburOT
— Hope Restored In DFW (@Kennymack1971) February 23, 2024
… But board-certified GOP-owned historian Jonathan Turley would not be overlooked…
His “great-great grandfather”? This is so infinitely embarrassing for The Hill, Jonathan Turley, and George Washington University Law School, who should seriously consider rescinding his diploma. pic.twitter.com/T4ya5M4mGK
— Andrew—Author of America Rises On Substack—Wortman (@AmoneyResists) February 25, 2024
I can’t wait to see this guy’s law course syllabus on Inherited Criminality https://t.co/xEXFlVjsLe
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) February 25, 2024
The Hill really going “The criminal disposition of the Irish” in 2024 is something else. https://t.co/6iTT4fOFdE
— Flight Director, Basque Space Program (@mountainherder) February 25, 2024
Jonathan Turley couldn't convince anyone to indict Joe Biden so he built a time machine to take the GOP back to the 19th century to indict Joe's great great granddaddy. https://t.co/zanwcFv6Rn
— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) February 25, 2024
Maybe Mike Johnson will call Congress back into session early so they can impeach Joe Biden's great great grandfather.
— Kid Phantasm (@cbbruuno) February 25, 2024
War for Ukraine Day 732: A Brief Sunday Night Update
Rusty
Turley’s article is thinly veiled eugenics. It’s not surprising that a conservative goes there, racists, antisemitics, all try to find some scientific justification for their bigotry. Trump likes to ramble about his great blood (he was again this week talking about his MIT professor uncle), that’s eugenics too. For a group of people that roundly reject science, they sure love to latch onto bad science to reinforce their bigotry.
Telsiree
99.9999% of Americans do not know their great great grandfather’s name, let alone their criminal record.
If this is the strongest attack against Biden that super elite Constitutional law brain Turdley can come up with, I say bring on November.
Lacuna Synecdoche
Jonathan Turley via Anne Laurie @ Top:
Instead of reaching so far back as Joe Biden’s father’s father’s father’s father, Jonathan, maybe you could focus – not on some distant and dubious eugenic speculation – but on a stronger, more recent, and more direct teaching influence, like Donald Trump’s father (arrested twice, plus a record of repeated housing and tax violations) or his father’s father (draft-dodger and whore-monger).
206inKY
I can top Megan McArdle with an even worse take on Obama that I sometimes wonder if it’s true: An entire generation was trained to hate Democrats due to Michelle Obama’s healthy school lunch program, since Republican cafeteria workers personally blamed her whenever students whined for more burgers and fries. They brought this formative rage into college and it’s only recently fading into the past.
VeniceRiley
Mary L. Trump’s “Now do my family.” Back at Turley just now was *chef kiss
K-Mo
I feel like Harvey Weinstein has received more negative coverage than other Hollywood producers.
Chetan Murthy
@Rusty: And when called on it, apparently Turley resorts to “can’t you take a joke?” Fascists, kidding on the square, same as it ever was.
Chetan Murthy
@Lacuna Synecdoche: And then there’s Paul Manafort’s tainted blood: https://medium.com/@petergrant_14485/sins-of-the-father-the-manafort-family-and-the-gambling-syndicate-f257bba1e772
AlaskaReader
Jack Posobiec at CPAC: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on Jan. 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.”
Chetan Murthy
Since it’s an open thread, I thought I’d ask for some help. A few nights ago I wrote some comments about a friend who …. well, he started off as pretty progressive, but over the last few years, he’s been drifting slowly toward what I’d call a “Tory voter” (lives in London). He spouts what I’d call pre-programmed socially conservative talking points about stuff like feminism, affirmative action, Gaza, and transgenderism. He’s convinced that “we” won the culture war, and now we’re stifling all dissent. etc.
For many of these things, I can adequately rebut them. But specifically for his allegations about feminists being called TERFs and such, I don’t have the arguments to hand. I wondered if anybody knew where there were cogent arguments against the TERFs’ positions, and if possible, specifically addressing the UK situation.
Also, more generally, I wondered if there was stuff about the UK and whether, in fact, in fact, “we” have won the culture war over there. I mean, I know we haven’t won it here in America (FFS, FFS, sigh). And so, I wondered what the status was of LGBTQ folks in the UK. I’ve read about police brutality and impunity in the UK, so, well, I think I have that covered. And for sure, what I read about the status of women’s rights in the UK isn’t great either. But for LGBTQ folks, and for trans folks in particular, I wonder what it’s like in the UK. Again, I know what it’s like here, and the idea that “we’ve won, LGBTQ folks are full Americans” is some …. well, that’s a sick joke.
Does anybody know where I might look for these things?
EireIAm
Extra gentle: Like when Fox called for his impeachment over wearing a tan suit? JFC, McArdle is McAddled.
As for the whole “criminality is inherited” … Wasn’t Papa Kennedy a rum runner during prohibition and that’s where all the money for their swanky compound was ‘earned’?
Chetan Murthy
@EireIAm: And we’re all old enough to remember https://www.theonion.com/after-obama-victory-shrieking-white-hot-sphere-of-pure-1819595330
Citizen Alan
I’m old enough to remember when garbage human Megan McArdle blogged under the name Jane Galt, which is all anyone needs to know about the vile bitch. One of my proudest moments online was when I got banned from the comments section on The Atlantic for a month for accusing her of being a sociopath, a position I still stand by almost twenty years later.
Chetan Murthy
@Citizen Alan: You diagnosed her right. FFS, anybody who is actually willing to say that little kids should charge a shooter en masse …. has something wrong in the head. Badly wrong.
NotMax
@EireIAm
Note to self: Avoid pink Himalayan salt.
//
Chetan Murthy
@NotMax: Also: don’t get a Thermomix, get an Instant Pot.
Jay
@Chetan Murthy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Brianna_Ghey#:~:text=On%2011%20February%202023%2C%20Brianna,Jenkinson%2C%20Ghey%20wa
Chetan Murthy
@Jay: I was going to reply “but this is one murder, and my friend will make that argument” but in that page, I found a link to this ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_violence_against_LGBT_people_in_the_United_Kingdom#2010_onwards ) which I think is what I need.
Thank you!
P.S. One of his blindnesses is a presentism bias: he assumes that if things are OK right at this moment, then hey, the problem’s solved. Of course, they’re not OK, but if he hears from someone that they’re OK, then he assumes “done and dusted”.
BethanyAnne
@Chetan Murthy: I don’t have a UK source specifically. What I do have is a link to Julia Serano’s site. https://www.juliaserano.com/writings.html
She’s amazing, and I don’t know where she keeps finding the energy to fight the TERFs. Has a Ph.D in biology, so their pseudoscientific blabber doesn’t impress her. She pretty much keeps a current set of arguments against their bad faith attempts at papering over TERFy bigotry with bad logic.
NotMax
@Chetan Murthy
Wise counsel, that.
Subsole
@Chetan Murthy:
Can’t help you there, mate. Sister Golden Bear would likely be able to point you right.
I wish you luck. I tried talking some friends ’round, years ago. Realized I was trying to speak to the intellect of people who were thinking entirely with their emotions. Gave it up after about a decade trying to bridge the gap. I’m not good at arguing emotions.
One thing I have noticed is that Trans panic seems focused on trans-fems a lot more than trans-mascs. For men AND women. All the TERFs I’ve seen obsess over “creepy pervert men disguised as women!”
Which Is to say, they obsess over trans-fems (trans presenting as feminine). I don’t see near the same vitriol directed at trans-mascs (presenting masculine). Not entirely sure why.
Now I think on it, it reminds me a bit of Joe Rogan blathering on about “men competing in women’s sports”. Which is just a different angle on the whole “creepy pervert etc” horseshit.
They frame it as “deviant men taking advantage of weak and defenseless women”. They say it isn’t fair to women to let trans-fems compete in womens’ sports, because men are stronger and faster and all that bullshit.
The funny thing is, by their logic, a trans-masc who wins bronze should actually get silver, right? Because they competed at a harder level, against men. Right? Hell, they ought to get extra points just for being in a man’s event, with their physically limited little feeeemale biology. Right?
Ask them that and watch the neurons fizzle, because they never worried about “women lying about their gender to compete as men”.
Know why?
Because JoRo and his Crotch-Police Crudsaders ain’t worried about fucking a chick that looks like a dude. They are scared to death of fucking a dude that looks like a chick. That emotional manipulation/vulnerability might be why their arguments resonate with your friend. Maybe not. Just a thought.
Chetan Murthy
@BethanyAnne: Oh, nice! Thank you so much! This is what I needed for the TERF issue.
He throws up a veritable stream (Gish Gallop) of things he thinks we’re doing wrong. My plan is to first discuss with him what would convince him that he’s on the wrong path, and to propose that if he selects the two *strongest* points he thinks he has, I’ll do the research and come back and refute them, if he thinks that that would change his mind.
Of course, if it won’t then I won’t bother trying.
At the least, he does say that he won’t vote for authoritarians. So there’s that, I guess. But honestly, I don’t expect that if he keeps evolving, he’ll stay in that spot. Sigh. I’ve known him since he was a college student, so I just don’t want to abandon him to this descent into madness. And until recently, he’s been so …. well, so decent. Again, sigh.
Chetan Murthy
@Subsole:
I’ve contemplated discussing the “disgust” response with him. It’s hard to do, b/c I don’t want to trigger it. I’ll come clean and note that (as you might expect of a typical red-blooded Texas boy raised in a lily-white small town in the 1970s), I also have a good bit of a disgust response to all thoughts of LGBTQ stuff. But I also understood long ago that you don’t make moral decisions based on such idiocy, not to mention political decisions. And of course, after living in SF for 17 years, that disgust response has worn off a lot. [But I understand it: it’s not alien to me.] I can and do find the bedazzled kids partying during Pride to be quite cute (OK, I’m too old to party myself, but I see ’em on the train, wot).
Shorter: not sure I’m ready to deal with causing him to think about his disgust response. That would take a delicacy and skill of which I doubt I’m capable.
BethanyAnne
@Chetan Murthy: I hope it helps. Fundamentally, this is an issue of human dignity for everyone. And we are like 3 tenths of a percent of the population by the best estimates I’ve seen. That’s it. Why is it fair to spend insurance money on our surgeries? Beyond human dignity, it’s because they aren’t that expensive, and at half of .3% wanting the surgery, it’s damn rounding error.
I spent the time working on a US example last year. Fascists object to us in women’s sports. Well, the NCAA started letting us compete on a collegiate level in 2010.
600,000 college kids compete each year. Conservatively, that at least 10 million sporting events over the last decade. Trans women have gotten trophies in what, 2 of them? You might as well worry about tasting urine in the Atlantic of someone pissing off a boat at Australia. Dose makes the poison, and there aren’t enough of us to bother making laws about even if we were monsters.
Chetan Murthy
@BethanyAnne: A few years ago, I posted over at Unfogged about hijabs, and primitive religions generally (I’m of Hindu descent, and …. well, to make a long story short, growing up with “It’s America out there, but it’s India in here” left me with what we might call an massvie allergy to religions that have a “traditional” view of family life and structure). I was pretty clear on my intolerance for any religion that assigned a restricted role in public life to women, and e.g. hijabs, etc. I felt it was perfectly OK to ban them from public life.
It was pointed to me (rightly) that I was a gaping asshole, and I learned from this. It’s never right to kick down: you should always kick *up*. So if (as I do) you believe that these religious practices are bad for women’s rights, then don’t restrict the hijab: instead make sure that the daughters of these families get excellent educations, the women in these families get business grants to open and run their own businesses, and force their temples and mosques to be run under female-majority governing boards. Do that over time, and you’ll solve the problem, whatever it is.
So I’ve tried to have that conversation with him, about “don’t kick down”. We’d just finished a few days before, having a conversation wherein he felt that if the Dems had only just agreed to fund Trump’s wall, then immigration would have been a solved problem (yeah, I know, I know, I know). At the time, I tried to point out that that wouldn’t work, and that what *would* work is making it a a felony to emplly an undocumented immigrant (with automatic green card to the immigrant and their immediate family). He simply didn’t understand it. But what was more telling, is that last night, when I raised the “kick up, not down” topic, he didn’t connect it to his previous rant on immigration.
I suppose this is what parents go thru: watching their children slip away in the clutches of some crazed ideology.
Jay
@Chetan Murthy:
It’s a hard spiral. Robert Picton is both up for parole, and the Government has applied to destroy the evidence they have in his case. And yet, 30 years on “The Highway of Tears”, is still the “Highway of Tears”.
I bailed on my Brother, because amongst other reasons, he was convinced that the Masqui Band was going to seize his multi million dollar house in Burnaby, because of “land claims”. My wife is Metis, Burnaby is in the Salishan territory, not the Masqui, and they ain’t seizing nothing. Went full racist.
Then off on a tangent about “immigrants”. FFS, he, my sister and I are “natural born Canadians”, Dad, Immigrant, Mom, Immigrant, his wife, Immigrant.
Sometimes, there is nothing you can do to stop the spiral.
Chetan Murthy
@Jay: Yeah, my friend (like me) is an immigrant: born in Brazil, came here sometime in middle school. Sigh. “I came here the right way.” What rubbish.
brantl
Why does everyone keep misspelling “Turdly”?
bjacques
Like I said downstairs, a boisterous “BULLSHIT!” in your best Penn Jillette voice, delivered with a guffaw directly in the face of a bullshitter beats sexism all hollow. The tone policing and ignoring of double standards masquerading as civility are the only rules Democrats need to break, and we can have fun doing it. From the reaction of the likes of McMegan, it seems to be working already.
Has anyone looked into Turley’s ancestry? There ought to be a lot of jackasses (and the odd Kallikak) perched in his family tree.
BethanyAnne
@Chetan Murthy: what moved me from the R side in the early 90s was realizing they hated my (almost entirely gay) group of friends. Nothing to do with logic. Just pure protectiveness of a group of amazing people. These friends were and are my family, and it turns out even as a liberal, threaten my family and all of a sudden I’m just another Texan.
Shalimar
@AlaskaReader: Fun fact: CPAC used to have maybe half the attendance Trump got on Jan. 6. This year it was more like 5%. I have seen high school basketball games with more people.
Posobiec couldn’t overthrow shit with the pathetic crew he spoke to.
Jay
@BethanyAnne:
over 30 years ago, working in Tech, HR came to us. One of our Managers had transitioned and was coming back to work. They suggested the guidelines, (eg. no “deadnaming” although that wasn’t a thing back then). It was no big deal. Markus was now Maria. Same job, same duties, same skills.
When I got divorced, I came “out” as a Dom, Poly as well. Met a lot of lovely Trans folk because BDSM “munches” and Poly meetings were a “safe space”. When I met T, well, it just got expanded.
Nukular Biskits
Good early mornin’, y’all!
Ref Turley’s flapdoodle: Seriously? How can I get a job like that? On second thought, I have some modicum of self-respect so there’s no way I’d churn out a piece of utter bullshit like that.
As for “Blog favorite chewtoy Megan McArgleBargle” (love that), does she not recall, for example, the TYRANNY OF THE BROWN SUIT?!?!?!?!?!?!
BethanyAnne
Gah, hit clear comment by mistake. Too tired. Gotta sleep
Jay
@Chetan Murthy:
ask him if he want’s to give up his curries.
Moved to Vancouver as a young tween, the food was horrific.
As immigration moved in, the food got way better,
By my late teens and into my 20’s, we would scour the Georgia Straight free paper for the “Cheap Eats” column and try to match it up with the Vancouver Coupon book, for a group eat, (feast).
No more boiled meat and mushy peas.
And 50% on pecoras, Dim Sun and borsch. Congee with Snow Crab.
Taco’s.
You get my drift.
Baud
Ironically, there’s actually a provision in the Constitution against punishment for Corruption of Blood. I’m half tempted to click on Turley’s article to see if he addresses it.
hells littlest angel
Turley is offended because people don’t realize he was just kidding, just writing a funny bit for noted humor magazine The Hill.
p.a.
“The liberal biased* MSM is once again showing its true colors with the overly negative coverage of covid compared to the common cold.”- Have your next online eruption on me Meagan!
*remember that one?
Jay
@Baud:
Not what I saw Nazi coming.
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-iii/clauses/39#:~:text=%E2%80%9CCorruption%20of%20blood%E2%80%9D%20is%20a,the%20person%20convicted%20of%20treason.
Gregory
McArdle says “we” as if she’s a journalist. No sale, Megan.
Baud
Via reddit
satby
My reply re: Turley (a fine Irish name itself):
@sbarrt.bsky.social
Turley better pray no one looks up his great-greats and finds a few rebels or worse.
hueyplong
Normally, the reaction to this absurd stuff would be to note that it reeks of desperation and constitutes an objective indicator that things are fixing to go against them in a big way.
But these aren’t normal times, so the reaction is more like “surely this won’t be the winning meme, right? Right?”
satby
@Baud: Nothing will bring home to the red states better how they’ve fucked themselves over. But for those rugged individualists who pride themselves on living like it’s 1890, it’ll be fine. Their women and babies, not so much.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: I remember reaading in Adam Tooze’s _Wages of Destruction_ about how the Nazis at several key points in their reign both before and during the war diverted resources from crucial rearmament and wartime production, to providing housing, clothing, and food for their Base (the “good” German population). Hitler understood that he needed to provide for his people, or they simply would not stay onside. I read these stories of hospitals shutting down, and …. I marvel at the kind of own-goal these people are willing to suffer, in order to harm their enemies. Just stunning.
lowtechcyclist
@Chetan Murthy:
And boy howdy, did they ever nail that one!
Balconesfault
“They frame it as “deviant men taking advantage of weak and defenseless women”. They say it isn’t fair to women to let trans-fems compete in womens’ sports, because men are stronger and faster and all that bullshit.”
Unfairness and deviancy are two different things that don’t need to be conflated.
That said if there isn’t a legitimacy to the men being faster stronger bullshit then most of the justification for separate female sports is eliminated. What’s the point? Just so they can wear different uniforms?
lowtechcyclist
@Chetan Murthy:
Hell, we can’t even get the cops to do that!
Princess
@Chetan Murthy: One of the schools of feminism of the 70s and 80s was the school of radical feminism. Radical feminism doesn’t mean “feminists who are super extreme”, it was a specific theory of feminism very popular in the UK that saw women as essentially different from men in their biology — kinder, more cooperative etc. They were big into goddess worship. My cousin lived in a radical feminist commune where they wouldn’t even allow male pets. As an aside, I’ll say this feminism was always nonsense in my view. Anyway, since they thought being a woman was so bound up with biology, many? All? have tended to be very hostile towards transwomen refusing to accept them as women. The most famous of them is JK Rowling. They are literally trans exclusionary radical feminists, TERFs, in the plain meaning of those words. I don’t know why they’re so butt hurt about the name . The label is right on the tin. Is that helpful? Your friend is a Tory.
Jay
@Balconesfault:
so that various “sport orgs” can mandate clothing to compete with Porn Hub.
Baud
@satby:
@Chetan Murthy:
Idaho’s population has actually been growing because of California transplants, but I assume those people are older. It’ll be a while before they feel any pain.
smith
I don’t know about TERFs, but I think one reason male transphobes are so upset over trans women’s existence is that they are horrified that someone would voluntarily give up their “superior” status as a male to live as a mere woman. It would be the way a white racist would react if someone were able to give up being white to live as a Black person. It violates their assumptions about the hierarchy of human value.
Certainly these guys aren’t primarily interested in protecting women and girls. You don’t see them on the forefront of combating domestic violence or sexual assault. In fact, some of the most prominent among them were also the ones most vociferously butthurt about #metoo.
RevRick
@EireIAm: Paraphrasing Balzac, “Behind all great wealth lies a great crime.”
RevRick
@Lacuna Synecdoche: Heck, if we’re going to assign guilt by what our ancestors did, then I’m sure that indigenous Native Americans and African Americans would like a word with all of us.
Turley now has given us the “conservative” rationale for reparations.
Princess
FWIW radical feminists don’t like trans men either because they’re afraid all the lesbians will become trans men.
Jay
@smith:
Donno.
In my post divorced days, met a lovely woman.
Was pre full transition, did not know that.
Sex was offered, but,………….
Weirded me out, a bit.
Still friends.
There is a hetro binary thing there. Attraction. Attraction is complex.
As I have said once before M, whom I love deeply , as a sort of nephew, his partner for 6 years, has last year, become Sam, not Samantha.
No big deal. Not for anybody who loves M, or has spent time with Sam.
They are okay with that, I am okay with that.
Not my business.
MomSense
@Chetan Murthy:
Not specifically those things, but I read Vicky Smith @byVickySmith on Instagram. She also has a substack. She covers news, culture and even royals. She worked for newspapers and is now independent and covering stories when her young children are in school. Cost of living is a big issue as is NHS funding for doctors and nurses. There was a horrible Tory plan to ship migrants to Rwanda – not a joke. It hasn’t happened yet because of legal challenges.
Matt McIrvin
@Subsole: A similar pattern applies to homophobia: gay men are way more threatening to homophobes than gay women.
And I think a lot of this is because homophobic men are so profoundly terrified of having gay feelings. That explains the transphobic and anti-drag focus too: a “man dressed as a woman” (by their definitions) might awaken what they define as gay feelings in them.
But that’s not the whole story, though, because the women share in the same focus. Probably because, in a society like ours, women bigoted or not are more worried about being victims of sexual violence whereas men are more worried about their fragile masculinity being damaged.
And they all correctly identify men as the main perpetrators of sexual violence (but then add trans women to that category). The general mistake here is to assume that being sexually violent has something to do with being “other” in some way.
Baud
The next episode of Henry Gates’s Finding Your Roots is going to be lit.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That what I though when I read that too. But if they want to bring that up, what about Trump’s grandfather being a deserter from the German army and running a brothel?
lowtechcyclist
@smith:
While things have certainly improved a lot over my lifetime, the reality is that women still have to put up with a lot of shit in our culture that men don’t. And I’m sure that’s obvious to anyone AMAB who is considering transitioning to female.
So the way I figure it, anyone who is transitioning from male to female really sees herself as a woman, and the stress of being in a male body is sufficiently great that they’re willing to take on all that crap in order to be who they see themselves as being. IOW, they aren’t just doing it for shits and giggles.
Mind you, I assumed that was the case all along, but if anyone needs to help someone else think it through, there it is.
Marmot
@Chetan Murthy: Right after the election, Repub voters interviewed on NPR were casting about wildly for reasons to fear and hate Obama. “What does he even want?We just don’t know!”
And remember the interview NPR did with the CEO of Whole Foods, who plainly said Obama was a fascist?
Good times.
Matt McIrvin
@Princess: I’ve always wondered why feminism in the UK seems to have continued in that gender-bio-essentialist direction, while in the US, while that was definitely a strain in 1960s-70s feminism (many of the leading figures were American, weren’t they?), it’s not nearly as strong as it used to be.
RevRick
@Baud: Yeah, Bills of Attainder are forbidden. Twice!
lowtechcyclist
@RevRick:
Good point!
The other thing I keep coming back to is, OK, assume for sake of argument that this eugenics crap were true. How many great-great-grandparents do you have? Sixteen of them! So that great-great-grandparent is 6.25% of your genetic heritage, and that somehow trumps the other 93.75%? I would ask Jonathan Turkey exactly why he would expect that.
Oh that’s right, he was just joshing us. Uhhuh.
Jay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
TWIDFG’s “Grandpaw” bailed the draft in Germany, fled to Canada, (sorry), went to the Klondike during the Gold Rush, and opened a bar, hotel, and brothel.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/trump-canada-yukon-1.3235254
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Stronger emphasis on individualism here?
Matt McIrvin
@Marmot: “He hasn’t been vetted!” was a big thing, even though Obama’s complicated and unusual personal biography was an object of media fascination to such a degree that we heard about it in minute detail.
So many people seem to have been convinced that the point of Obama’s presidency was to take the great racial revenge on the whites, and if nothing whatsoever about Obama openly indicated that, it just had to be a more deeply buried secret.
Kathleen
@hells littlest angel: He also said his article was written to prove how “The Left” has no sense of humor. This from a guy whose favorite political party thinks Le Mis is a musical comedy (I just made that up to make a point).
Geminid
This morning’s Politico Playbook tells me that President Biden has invited Senators Schumer and McConnell as well as Representatives Jeffries and Johnson to the White House tomorrow. They will discuss Congress’s efforts to do its duty and keep the federal government functioning past Thursday.
The morning Playbook discussed some of the matters at issue in the ongoing Congressional negotiation, and also reported that a Koch network spokeswoman said they’re pulling their financial support from Nikki Haley’s campaign.
Princess
@Matt McIrvin: It’s a great question. I think the culture in North America is so rights-based that rights-based feminism (“liberal feminism”) was a very natural fit. Liberal feminism has no trouble with trans people because the right of the individual to know themself and to pursue their own flourishing is so key.
Baud
@Kathleen:
I can’t speak to what’s in his heart, although I don’t believe him. But even assuming that’s correct, why is The Hill publishing that crap?
MagdaInBlack
@lowtechcyclist: It’s his own special “one drop rule” that applies only to the Biden family.
Chris Johnson
Wait, that was REAL? I thought it was like a DougJ pitchbot thing.
That was the real guy?
OzarkHillbilly
They are terrified they might pick up a trans woman at the local tavern and fck her. That will make them gay, right?
They can’t even depend on the ol’ ball check any more.
The horror!
Matt McIrvin
@Princess: @Baud: While American hyper-individualism comes in for a lot of critique from the left, in the way it makes is allergic to any kind of collective action, I’ve wondered if we should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater here, and this kind of thing is an example.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Everything has trade-offs, unless you’re an amateur online pundit. The hard part is finding the right balance that works for us.
Subsole
@Chetan Murthy:
Gotcha. It’s a delicate thing indeed.
Hopeful your work will pay off. If nothing else, it’s damn decent of you to try.
Matt McIrvin
@Kathleen: This “can’t you take a joke?” tactic, where you express the most farcically extreme version of yourself as a sort of trial balloon and claim you were just joking if the reaction is bad, is a favorite of online Nazis and white supremacists. That Turley is going there doesn’t speak well for him.
It seems to be what right-wingers use instead of irony, though. It’s interesting (and I’m not the first to observe this): the left’s irony is to behave like exaggerated right-wingers, and the right’s “irony” is… to behave like exaggerated right-wingers.
Geminid
@Chris Johnson: Yes, that was law professor Jonathan Turley, allegedly channeling satirist Jonathan Swift.
Princess
@Matt McIrvin: Liberal feminism has won us a lot of rights. When it has failed (eg to be more intersectional) it is because it hasn’t fully lived up to the implications of its principles not because those principles are wrong. It, along with all our attention to the individual, needs to be balanced by an awareness of our common good as communities.
Kathleen
@Baud: The same reason the Beltway Political Propatainment Complex gleefully and consistently keeps churning out stories that undermine and lie about Biden/Harris administration and Democratic Party. 1) Democratic Party is last line between full blown fascism and democracy and 2) Black people wield a lot of power as voters and officials in party apparatus and government.
In my best NPR voice, “some say” it’s only due to desire for clicks, eyeballs, ratings and revenue. I say that is definitely a factor. I also say the a large segment of the corporate media as an institution wants fascism. Of course there are news orgs and individual reporters/editors who do not. I can go from 0 to hyperbolic in .6 nanoseconds.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s by design. If we do it, then under the laws of status, they can do it.
Subsole
@Balconesfault:
Take it up with the TERFs. They’re the ones making the arguments.
Kathleen
@Matt McIrvin: “Satire” was always Ann Coulter’s go to after she made some egregious accusation or statement.
You’re right. The right wingers and I include many “journalists” who whine about pushback they get have no sense of humor, irony or nuance. Their idea of humor is to say something they think PitchBot would say while having no comprehension of the underlying joke.
sab
@Chetan Murthy: Finn MacKay is a UK sociologist (and a trans man) who specializes in trans issues. Also has had experience in counseling rape survivors so he is not indifferent to those concerns.
TBone
Thanks for the first thing in the A.M. laughter, a great way to start the day 😊 I love giggling with coffee.
NorthLeft
To be heard at the next MAGA rally; DIG HIM UP! DIG HIM UP! DIG HIM UP!
Kay
Political media is terrible. It’s lavishly funded and profitable and it pays individual “celebrities” within it very well but it’s low quality garbage. The now month – long “Joe Biden is old” narrative they are all currently indulging in does nothing to add to public knowlege.
People have to get around the political media professionals to learn anything – they add no value.
It’s also funny as hell (and shows how low the bar is) that McCardle thinks she’s a journalist.
Show me one of them who writes something different- who goes off in a different direction than the NYTimes, who actually uses their own judgment and does their own thinking and doesn’t follow the mob.
Kay
If they want to appear to be real journalists they could try to not cover Biden as if he has already lost and Trump as if he has already won. That sucks. It’s unprofessional and undemocratic and they should stop doing it. We all know they’re pulling for the local NYC media favorite, Donald Trump. At least appear to not have called the race already.
Suzanne
My great-great-grandfather lied about his age to join the Army and fight for the Union when he was 17. What do I win?!
Ironic side note: he was the first child born to his parents, in Boston, and his parents were German Jews. He converted to Christianity, changed his name, and ended up becoming one of the first white families to go up to Alaska to live there. Other family members were instrumental in creation of the territorial government and eventually its statehood.
I have always thought the people who talked about “blood” were creepy as fuck.
Brit in Chicago
@EireIAm: As Balzac is often quoted (ok, misquoted) as saying: behind every great fortune lies great crime.
Kay
@Suzanne:
Agree. I realized at some point I reject the whole line of thinking, “ancestral land”, personality or character traits tied to ethnicity, all of it.
It’s a huge part of conservatism, though. The “apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”, “from a good family”, etc comes up in legal practice in Right wing jurisidictions constantly. They really did love the Bell Curve.
One of the reasons Right wing investors in and around Stanford invested in Elizabeth Holme’s fraudulant blood testing business is because her grandfather was a physician who founded a hospital – they were relying on magical “science genes”.
Balconesfault
@Subsole:”Take it up with the TERFs. They’re the ones making the arguments.”
In the World of sports I would guess that it’s a lot of women who are now labeled TERFS who fought really hard during the ’60s and ’70s to get Title IX applications toward equal access to sports for women … and who are currently kind of appalled by a mentality that says all that work was an artificiality and they should have been happy with the male bigots who at the time would joke that if women wanted to play sports they should try out for the men’s team.
mrmoshpotato
@Suzanne:
Agreed. Vampires are creepy too.
Suzanne
@Princess:
Yes, this, thank you,
It’s also internally consistent.
I also find that the lowercase-L-libertarian position is almost always the right one on matters involving people’s rights in public life. I remind myself that my feelings about other people’s lives usually do not matter, and thus I usually don’t make an effort to form any opinions about them.
But I think it’s an important distinction: I can feel any way I want about other people, for any reason, really. There’s no thoughtcrime. I can decide I dislike someone because I hate their shoelaces or their car or any damn reason. That freedom is absolutely mine. But they still have rights in public life. I don’t have the right to make the public square conform to my expectations.
lowtechcyclist
@Balconesfault:
Maybe high school and college sports should be primarily about exercise and teamwork and building character and all that stuff, in which case it shouldn’t matter that much if you’re a AFAB woman competing against an AMAB woman. If you finish fourth instead of third in a track meet event, well that’s life.
evodevo
@Baud:
IF that is so, then his attempt to successfully pull off a Stephen Colbert failed dismally. Wingers have NO sense of humor or comedy or satire, or anything other than fifth grade locker room humor, so I’m calling bullshit on Turley’s excuse lol.
Suzanne
@Kay:
And they say it about the dumbest shit, too.
Example: my, uhhhhhh, whatever he is….BioDad? I posted a funny thing on my social media about winning a $25 gift card at Trader Joe’s last week. I made some completely innocuous statement about entering the raffle every week “because, GODDAMNIT, I am DETERMINED to win some time”. And this motherfucker, who bailed on my mother when I was a year old and literally has not seen me since, this motherfucker who never gave me even a $5 bill in a birthday card……. That same idiot posted a comment about how I got my competitive nature “from my old man”!
Not how it works, dude.
Ohio Mom
@Chetan Murthy: Well there’s no licensing bureau determining who gets to call themselves a feminist so some portion of feminists probably are TERFs. An analogous situation is porn — you can find feminists who are strongly against it, some who embrace it, and everything inbetween.
I’m going to guess it’s a small proportion of feminists who are TERFs and that some TERFs proclaimed themselves feminists after they adopted TERFism. I would also guess there is a large portion of feminists who see promoting trans rights as a deeply feminist position.
I don’t know of that helps your argument any, it just shows your friend’s argument is based on faulty and incorrect assumptions. Which you already knew.
Suzanne
@Balconesfault: I think the bathroom “debate”, which is really more of a bathroom freakout, has similar germination. It wasn’t until right around 2000, when the I-series of building codes were adopted, that equal numbers of restrooms (really fixture count) for men and women were required in most types of public spaces. And that code introduced a formula for an overall total of fixtures that provided a lot more than had been present in the past.
So a subset of people feels like they just fought for “potty parity” and now “the dudes are trying to find a loophole to come into the women’s!”.
Ohio Mom
@Suzanne: Your bio-dad is following/stalking you on social media? Ick.
ETA: Congrats on winning the free groceries.
Balconesfault
@lowtechcyclist: and that is the sentiment my son expresses when we discuss the issue.
Those who seem most sympathetic to the argument that trans women should be allowed to participate in women’s sports seems to have a high correlation with those who think that there’s way too much emphasis placed on sports in our society in the first place.
My 33 year old son finds my lifelong passion for sports to be peculiar, and just wishes I would be more willing to play computer games with him.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Drawing the line at harm to others always made sense to me. And then we get into complicated debate about what constitutes harm– do psychological harms count? What kinds? These questions aren’t easy. There are all kinds of subtleties. But this is the foundation.
This really seems to be alien to the right-wing conception of freedom and responsibility. Harm is way down the list and some concept of conforming to your inborn role is at the top. And they explicitly claim the right, even the duty, to cause some types of harm.
Ohio Mom
@Kay:
“… I realized at some point I reject the whole line of thinking, “ancestral land”, personality or character traits tied to ethnicity, all of it.”
You even reject “ancestral land” for Native Americans?
Marmot
@Matt McIrvin:
That was probably the core of it. I often think they freaked out in this way because, if the situation were reversed, that’s what they would do.
And McArdle is convinced Obama got lenient coverage! Shit, they were constantly inventing outrages, often out of straight-up projection. So I guess it’s up to Obama to mollify his critics by appointing Repubs to his cabinet!
I cannot get over this revisionism.
Geminid
@Ohio Mom: When I see this topic on social media, almost all the people that I see complaining about trans athletes in women’s sports are men. Very few are women. I know about TERFs and I’m sure they are out there, but I have to wonder why it’s women who are so often being singled out in this debate.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Agree. They want to cause harm to get others to conform. They know that, if they allow some degree of nonconformity…. some of their children will choose it.
Which is, of course, a position you only come to if you feel secure in your position in the social hierarchy.
One of the enduring mysteries for me in the TFG years (and before) is why the “white working class” feels like they have lost status, relative to POC, college-educated professional class people, etc. They very clearly feel this way. But I’m struggling to really understand what they’ve lost in measurable terms. I do think there’s a qualititative loss of positive representation, probably in popular media, and that is powerful.
Suzanne
Another enduring mystery is why WordPress puts a full hard return after a quote in my comments, even when I explicitly delete it. And then I have to go back and edit the comment to take it out…. again.
FYWP.
Marmot
@Matt McIrvin:
Perfect. No notes.
Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
@Notmax She is why I only use pink Andean Salt from Peru (although I do like Bolivian pink sat too!)
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: They keenly feel the loss of the unmarked case– the unstated assumption that they are the normal people. That’s why things like the word “cisgender” terrify them so much– someone is labeling them as not “just regular folks” in some new way.
It’s interesting because we have this idea that everyone wants to be special, the hero of their own story. And I think we do. But they want their hero role to be Everyman, the normal fellow who made good. There’s an attraction to it, certainly.
I think part of it comes from being brought up in a world in which people who are not normal get violently repressed. If someone is labeling them as not normal they expect the fist to follow.
Chris
Yeah, this is massive gaslighting. Like Biden in 2020, Obama in 2008 benefited from a Republican president fucking up so badly that the media was temporarily shell-shocked into not doing their usual swiftboating. In his case there was the extra hope and change from the fact that A Black President Might Mean We Never Have To Talk About Racism Again! … but as with Biden, the honeymoon period ended about ten minutes after he was inaugurated, and stories about Obama’s “blue collar problem,” Obama’s tan suit, and why he hadn’t fixed the economy yet started proliferating.
To the extent that they didn’t do their usual ButterEmailz/BidenzOld! bullshit in 2012, it’s because they didn’t think they had to. Go back to 2012 and read pretty much anything put out by almost any major pundit, and all you see is people serenely convinced that Romney’s going to win. They were as shocked as he was when his Unskewed Polls turned out not to reflect reality, and they spent the next four years milking the ever-living shit out of Benghazigate and whatever came from it (which is where ButterEmailz actually originated) because they were for damn sure not going to repeat that mistake.
Glidwrith
@Balconesfault: Because the women can outcompete the men in some sports and the poor little dears can’t deal with it.
Chris
Yep.
This, also, was a repeated issue in the Obama era, and has been for a while before that. Despite a thoroughly favorable media environment, Mitt Romney could not keep his foot out of his mouth for all of 2012, and since he kept making his gaffes into live microphones (or, in the 47% case, a place where they could easily be recorded for later rebroadcasting), the public got to see, again and again, that he was just a scaled-up version of the dickbag boss who’d just fired them. Add in the fact that he had all the charisma of a beached jellyfish, and yeah, that’s a lost election.
Sarah Palin. Same thing. The media kept throwing her the most ludicrous softball questions; where Dukakis was once asked “but wouldn’t you support the death penalty if your wife was raped,” poor little Sarah Palin got “what newspapers do you read?” … It’s just that she was such an utter fucking moron, she couldn’t even answer that question.
Over and over, Republicans keep coming off badly in the voters’ eyes because what they’re doing reflects badly on them, as it would reflect badly on anybody. And over and over we keep being told that this is only happening because the media is trying to make them look bad, when in reality the media is desperately slamming their thumb on the scale to make them look good; it’s just that the media isn’t an Infinity Gauntlet, there’s a limit to what you can do to make you look good when you yourself insist on working against them.
Chris
@Suzanne:
Honestly, this is why I’ve always stayed away from those Ancestry websites that so many people (regardless of politics, in my experience) are fascinated by. There’s something deeply creepy about seeing a report about yourself categorizing right down to the percentages how much of you is Russian, Italian, Jewish, Welsh, Arab, etc. Would be even if I didn’t know that the country was already full of people salivating at the thought of using these factoids to determine whether or not you should be shipped “home.”
Ohio Mom
@Geminid: I admit I don’t follow this. I care nothing about sports. I was in my thirties until I learned it’s “runs” not “points” in baseball (went to a ball game on a first date and gobsmacked the fellow with my question about which team was ahead).
So — are the reporters asking cis men and women in equal numbers about their feelings about trans participation in various sports competition? Or are they putting their fingers on the scale?
Even typing that question out is a stretch for me because sports, feh.
Balconesfault
@Glidwrith: I don’t think people are fixating on the uneven parallel bars when considering sports opportunity and equity.
They’re considering that while an outlier female might occasionally make a varsity and even score in a track or swimming meet … there would never be another female State Champion or NCAA Champion in those competitions were the genders merged for competition.
Ohio Mom
@Chris: When this topic comes up, I usually answer that my people come from Ur (as in, “Abraham left Ur”). This generally ends the conversation because it makes obvious I don’t care what your genealogical studies have unearthed.
UncleEbeneezer
@Chetan Murthy: This one, from the link BethanyAnne posted, is a really great one to start with.
https://juliaserano.medium.com/transgender-people-and-biological-sex-myths-c2a9bcdb4f4a
StringOnAStick
I realised when I was reading some now long forgotten book that there were very likely slaveholders on my dad’s side of the family. Yeah, I felt bad about it for some time until it became clear to me that their guilt is not mine. I wasn’t alive or in the decision loop, and the way people amplify the fun stuff (based on current standards/fashions) but ignore the now perceived as bad in their ancestors is just so much wanking about the past. Turdly and Arglebargle probably think their ancestors we’re all heroic supermen; I’d love it if someone did the work and pointed out where there’s “issues” , because of course there are.
Uncle Cosmo
That bunch should be sued into bankruptcy for false advertising – they want us to believe they’re referring to Capitol Hill, when in fact the high country of their deepest desires is the Obersalzberg (or maybe the Kehlstein).
Geminid
@Ohio Mom: I don’t follow this very closely myself, but while looking into other subjects I’ll stumble into some guy griping about trans atheletes taking over women’s sports and the other people chiming in are usually men also.
This is also a hot topic on conservative talk radio and it’s usually men affecting a concern for woman athletes in order to vent their animus towards trans people and their liberal supporters.
Here I often see people complaining about “TERFs” like they are central to the problem of transphobia. But these are only a subset of Radical Feminists who in turn are only a subset of Feminists. TERFs are indeed destructive, but they have just a tiny fraction of the political clout wielded by the much more numerous transphobic men.
glc
I caught that quotation from Turley the other day but I thought it was intended as either parody or a somewhat exaggerated account of the tone. I still haven’t gone on to look at the details but I take it that’s what he has to say, in fact.
My grandfather was a bootlegger – for the most part, a very successful one. Which of course accounts for any and all mistakes I may have made over the years. I find this a constant solace. I hope for his sake that Turley has a similar excuse.
(Obligatory internet notation: TJIAJ – the joke is a joke.)
Balconesfault
One of every 200 men is a descendant of Ghengis Khan.
Paul in KY
@Chetan Murthy: He oughta like ‘TERFs’.
Paul in KY
@Subsole: Most of your post is right on, but this is not going to happen (outside of chess or music competition or something like that):
‘The funny thing is, by their logic, a trans-masc who wins bronze should actually get silver, right? Because they competed at a harder level, against men. Right? Hell, they ought to get extra points just for being in a man’s event, with their physically limited little feeeemale biology. Right?’
That’s because we are a sexually dimorphic species (one sex is noticeably larger than the other). Other species like this are Tigers, Lions, Gorillas, Spotted Hyaenas, etc. Species that are not this way include Horses, baleen whales, dogs, moose.
JAFD
@EireIAm: The appendix to DANIEL OKRENT’s _Last Call: The rise and fall of prohibition_ (2011) debunks the ‘Joe Kennedy bootlegger’ accusations pretty throughly. Notes that he went thru Senate hearings for his appointments to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Maritime Commission, and Ambassador to England, with no mention of those claims. Indeed, there was no record of them until the 1960 campaign.
Geminid
@JAFD: On the other hand, Jerry Falwell’s father and uncle were well-known Campbell County, Virginia bootleggers back in the day.
Chris
@JAFD:
I remember learning that a while back and thinking it was revealing. In the same way that much of the country in the 2000s was incapable of looking at a successful black man from Chicago without thinking “machine politics street thug,” much of the country circa 1960 was incapable of looking at a successful Irish-Catholic family without thinking “bootleggers.”
(Not that Joe Kennedy wasn’t a gigantic piece of shit in other ways, of course).
AlaskaReader
@Shalimar: Don’t imagine a smaller attendance at CPAC means Republican Party policy is similarly not a threat.
Q adherents aren’t likely a real large demographic but the threat they pose goes far beyond their small numbers and their ‘message’ is regularly mimicked on the US House floor by your average run of the mill Republican.
The threat to democracy is very real and that threat is a feature of today’s standard Republicanism.
Don’t go thinking it’s not a threat. They’re saying it out loud.
You should know that it’s not a threat to dismiss or minimize.
Quadrillipede
@Chris: This thread has indubitably joined the choir invisible, but I just wanted to mention this is probably the best summary of the last 15-20 years of the mainstream press I’ve read in recent memory. ⭐️ 👍
(ETA also #115, which I cannot link to from my stupid phone…)
Quadrillipede
I think this was in reference to sports, but it occurred to me that we already categorize competitors by physical characteristics in some sports (e.g. horse racing, boxing), so it’s at least theoretically possible that gender-inclusive sortings for competition balance exist more generally, if people are willing to put the time into building them.
Balconesfault
@Quadrillipede:
You’d probably start with testosterone level … which gender is functionally a surrogate for.
Quadrillipede
@Balconesfault: we can start there, sure. I’m withholding judgement for the time being on whether we need to end there…
Subsole
@Balconesfault:
Including Illinois’ very own ilKhan, J. B. Pritzker!