Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

I really should read my own blog.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

The willow is too close to the house.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Bless His Heart

Bless His Heart

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Mr. Chait has taken up cudgels against political correctness again. An excerpt:

Outraged Twitter mobs can spring up on behalf of any political view, and many nonpolitical ones. But only the p.c. left has worked out a rigorous set of norms that explicitly justify the suppression of heresy.

Oh my god. He can’t possibly mean that, can he? Another:

My essay describes p.c. ideology as a form of Marxist thought, substituting race and gender identities for economic ones, and assigning political rights on the basis of class identity rather than individuality.

How conveeeeeeeeeenient!

Oh well. I’ve got a ball game to attend. I’ll leave it to you jackals to pick over that stunted, diseased gazelle of a column.

Reader Interactions

121Comments

  1. 1.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    Oh well. I’ve got a ball game to attend. I’ll leave it to you jackals to pick over that poor diseased gazelle of a column.

    Do we have to? I was going to have a frozen dinner instead.

  4. 4.

    eemom

    you jackals to pick over that poor diseased gazelle of a column.

    You are a treasure, Mrs. Cracker, an absolute treasure.

  5. 5.

    Baud

    Looks like someone really enjoyed the attention he got from his last article on the subject. Is Chait on board the train to wingnut welfare? Or is it too Marxist to even ask that question?

  6. 6.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Dear god, man. Let it go.

    Bill Hader tells the story of the Vincent Price skit he used to do on SNL. It made it past all the screening processes and on to the show, and as he was walking on stage, in costume, to do it live, Lorne Michaels stopped him and said “Why are we doing this now?” Whenever I see Chait tweeting on this subject (I’m not even gonna bother with the longer post) I hear Hader imitating Michaels “Why are we doing this now?”

    But I have a very strong hunch that it’s all about someone being mean to “school reformer” Mrs Chait in the toobz.

  7. 7.

    trollhattan

    As with HODOR!, if you can’t sell a pack of DFHs on your ideas after serially trying, maybe the problem is not your audience after all.

  8. 8.

    Iowa Old Lady

    Mr IOL is due home from CA tonight. He takes two flights. One has an ontime rate of 46% and the other 34%. I guess I’ll see him when I see him.

  9. 9.

    rk

    My essay describes p.c. ideology as a form of Marxist thought, substituting race and gender identities for economic ones, and assigning political rights on the basis of class identity rather than individuality.

    I actually don’t understand what this means. I recognize that these are words in English, but put together they don’t mean anything.

  10. 10.

    Baud

    Since this is an open thread, that new policy of not making any unnecessary arrests in NYC is really paying dividends (Guardian, via Reddit)

    A new record was set in New York City at 12.01am on Thursday: no murders had been reported in the city in 10 days. The milestone broke a nine-day record set in 2013, when none were reported during the same time of year, in the chill of January.

  11. 11.

    Tenar Darell

    So he’s just completely forgotten the past week or less of rage against the President over the National Prayer Breakfast. Man is apparently trying out to be a baby Sullivan/Broder/Brooks. I’m really not sure who is a more apt metaphorical parent at this time.

  12. 12.

    GregB

    Chait’s in the latter stages of performing a reverse Cole.

    Looking forward to his posts on Islamofascism, intelligent design and homosexual weddings.

  15. 15.

    jl

    I was going to read it, but it’s way too long. Skipped ahead and it ends with some brave and stirring rhetoric about the failures of Marxism and importance of a free society (wait, let me double check that it’s the same column? …. why, yes it is). However he got to that point, it will take too much time and energy to figure it out.

    I’m exhausted from the first round. The great lefty PC debate will have to go on without me. I am very sorry I can contribute no more to this important debate, even though Chait seems to think some people using the term micro-aggression will bring down civilization. and end the Enlightenment.

    I cannot even figure out what he is talking about. Sounds like he’s been stewing over it way too much, which seems unhealthy.

    Only point I got is that reactionaries misrepresent and distort lefty debates over PC for dishonest propaganda and sloganeering. And how does that make it any different from anything else liberals and left talk about? Like, say, recycling, solar power, passenger trains, non-competitive sports in public school PE, and kids should eat some fruits and vegetables once in a while, cops shouldn’t beat up on minorities so much for no good reason.

    Edit: Chait could make himself useful by doing a compare and contrast between reactionary and liberal/lefty PC issues.

  16. 16.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    In a way, it’s more overwrought than the first column. Now they’re “assigning rights”! Next they’ll be conducting trials and filling prisons with the offenders!

    You have to remind yourself halfway through that he’s (mostly) describing “people saying things to other people”.

  20. 20.

    Pogonip

    @rk: He’s saying that you get brownie points for being in a protected class, rather than for being a Party member as under Communism.

  24. 24.

    SRW1

    My essay describes p.c. ideology as a form of Marxist thought, substituting race and gender identities for economic ones, and assigning political rights on the basis of class identity rather than individuality.

    Whut? If them Marxists thoughters really are substituting economic identities by ones based on race and gender, shouldn’t the assignment of political rights need to be based on something other than class identity?

    Also, too: at what godforsaken place did he catch a glimps of Marxists in the American wild?

  28. 28.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    substituting race and gender identities for economic ones,

    This is a common complaint, or refrain. To me, it’s just a variation of “stop talking about what interests you! Talk about what interests me!”

    What’s weird about it is how it’s always framed around “free speech” when it’s so often just another way to direct the conversation.

    What happens if we talk about race or gender for a while? What’s the worst thing that could happen? All debate on economic issues stops, forever? “Well, that’s dead. Liberals will never again discuss economic issues now that the race and gender people are on Twitter!”

    I just don’t see it as that sort of existential threat :)

  29. 29.

    jl

    But thank you, Ms. Cracker. This post reminds me that I forgot to follow-up read one of the people Chait was criticizing in his initial piece. She was a snappy writer, I could figure out what she was trying to say, and she could write a short column that did not seem like an extended version of Atlas Shrugged.

  30. 30.

    opiejeanne

    @jl: it has been 15 years since I flew through or out of SFO; I really had no idea that either the airline or the airport were that bad now. When we lived in the East Bay we mostly used Oakland but SFO was not bad

  33. 33.

    trollhattan

    Don’t know whether this was swept aside in the days’ other news, but an important new study on smoking’s health effects demonstrates yet another reason the tobacco industry needs to be crushed out in the ashtray of history, angry zombie Ayn Rand notwithstanding. And take those fvcking electronic cigarettes along with them.

    The U.S. surgeon general lists 21 deadly diseases that are caused by smoking. Now, a study in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine points to more than a dozen other diseases that apparently add to the tobacco death toll.

    To arrive at this conclusion, scientists from the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute and several universities tracked nearly a million people for a decade and recorded their causes of death.

    As expected, the researchers found that smokers were much more likely to die of lung cancer, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, esophageal cancer, mouth cancer and a long list of other diseases that health officials have previously linked to smoking.

    But author Eric Jacobs, strategic director of pharmacoepidemiology at the American Cancer Society, found other causes of death that were also more common in smokers — “things like kidney failure, infections and certain types of heart and respiratory diseases that weren’t previously counted,” he says.

  34. 34.

    BGinCHI

    If he brought this shit argument into my classroom I’d eat him alive.

    Dear Pundits,

    You did not go to graduate school, nor have you read and thought hard enough about the history of ideas, so don’t talk about shit you don’t know about.

    Maybe look up “dilettante” in the dictionary.

    BG

  37. 37.

    Pogonip

    @Baud: I didn’t get through the whole thing–too long–but he didn’t in the first half. I used it to summarize what I thought he was saying.

  38. 38.

    Peale

    I’m still trying to figure out the end game here. What is it that he wants to debate? I mean, usually the things that PC folks are said to prevent us from debating are fairly offensive slurs masking as debate points to justify harassment.

  39. 39.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    I suppose it could be an existential threat if one’s income depended on one’s ability to gather a following on Twitter.

  40. 40.

    Botsplainer

    @aimai:

    You have matching socks? I only have a drawerful of single socks, a few of which vaguely resemble some others.

  42. 42.

    opiejeanne

    @Iowa Old Lady: I have struggled with finding flights to places like that. Some of the secondary flights made it so expensive that we rented cars and drove the last 200-300 miles. Madison WI was one of those.

  43. 43.

    Iowa Old Lady

    @opiejeanne: It was a shock when we moved here from Detroit, which was a Northwest hub at the time. Fares went up and we couldn’t get direct flights to anywhere.

  48. 48.

    Heliopause

    @rk:

    This piece of Chait’s suffers from the same problems as the first one. People fall into one of three categories: liberals as Chait perceives them, conservatives, and Marxists (or “radical leftists”). The problems with this simple-minded analysis are that (1) Chait’s version of liberalism is the one that he and his three or four dozen New York buddies share, making “Marxism” an impossibly large, hence meaningless, category, and (2) his complete lack of awareness of the simple anthropological truth that all in-groups create and enforce “PC” norms.

    So perhaps it comes as a surprise to Balloon Juicers that although they are mostly social liberals, generally supportive of the Democratic Party, and range from mild to intense supporters of Barack Obama, they are in fact Marxists. Otherwise you’d all be on board with Chait and his three dozen buddies, right?

  49. 49.

    opiejeanne

    @Iowa Old Lady: yes.

    I would think KC would be closer for a commuter connection; we really aren’t part of a loyalty program with any airline and I know that makes a difference in how we travel.

  50. 50.

    jl

    @AnonPhenom: Bohm was a commie! OMG Chait is right.

    OK, maybe Bohm was not a commie, but I read he was pink enough for the US government to classify his PhD dissertation and deny him access to it before he could finish it. We could have a debate over whether that made any sense, if it does not involve too much of this PC stuff.

  51. 51.

    WereBear

    To some people, bestowing politeness and human recognition is just being “politically correct.” And they don’t explain why being correct is such a bad thing.

  53. 53.

    opiejeanne

    @Heliopause: thank you for that clarification

    . I had noticed republicans enforcing their own PC language but hadn’t seen anyone else mention it.

  54. 54.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    Because I can’t follow how, exactly, this poses a threat to “liberalism”, that makes me think that’s not what it’s about. I think he has to take this “is it effective?” approach because he doesn’t know how else to criticize something he doesn’t like.

    This is the crux of his question (supposedly):

    I continue the debate with the left and right about whether political correctness works, and for who

  55. 55.

    Cacti

    @Kay:

    This is a common complaint, or refrain. To me, it’s just a variation of “stop talking about what interests you! Talk about what interests me!”

    Pretty much.

    Chait gets all angsty when the girls and the browns talk about things that aren’t the preferred topics of their white male progressive betters.

    The essence of brogressive politics.

  56. 56.

    Suzanne

    What some call “PC” is just what I call “trying to be nice to people”. So whenever I hear Chait or someone else complaining about being “too PC”, all I hear is “I want to be a dick with social impugnity”.

    However, it’s interesting what people consider PC versus just maybe impolite. I objected once on this blog to the use of a sexist term (might have been “bitch”, can’t remember), and was told that BJ isn’t a PC blog, suck it up. But said commenter would never ever use “ni-CLANG”, because that’s racist. So what’s the line?

    B/c it’s frustrating to see other kinds of bigotry be considered OK. Example: fat shaming.

  57. 57.

    Napoleon

    Too funny

    Chait is 100% right and the assholes upthread who have done more to destroy liberalism then all the Rep together are upset

  58. 58.

    opiejeanne

    @WereBear: I had someone make a crack to me about how X was just being politically correct and I said, blandly as if I hadn’t understood, that I thought X was being polite.

    I’m with you In not understanding the crime inherent in being polite.

  59. 59.

    Bobby Thomson

    Christ, what an asshole. I think Phil Donahue and Ashleigh Banfield, among others, might have some choice words for that warmongering douchebag.

  61. 61.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Kay: You didn’t mean jails. You must mean the concentration camps. We have to be as hyperbolic as possible a la Chait.

  63. 63.

    Kay

    @Heliopause:

    Chait’s version of liberalism is the one that he and his three or four dozen New York buddies share, making “Marxism” an impossibly large, hence meaningless, category,

    I just don’t know why he feels he has to define them out of the club, or give them a task or a goal. I’m not clear where the “you’re not meeting my effectiveness metric” comes from. What’s the threat? They don;t meet the goal he set? They get credit for something they’re not doing ?

  64. 64.

    Mike J

    @SRW1:

    Also, too: at what godforsaken place did he catch a glimps of Marxists in the American wild?

    MRAs like calling everyone who disagrees with them “cultural marxists.”

  66. 66.

    jl

    @opiejeanne:

    ‘ I had noticed republicans enforcing their own PC language but hadn’t seen anyone else mention it. ‘

    Chait seems to think that the reactionaries do not have their own version of PC and what PC goes on among liberals and the left dominates other issues and dominates all other lines of attack reactionaries make against liberals and progressives. I don’t think that is true at all.

    I do not see how it is nearly the big deal as Chait makes it out to be. Unless it is really about Chait feeling threatened and his fears being made uncomfortable, or of everyone not agreeing with whatever he says and how he says it.

  67. 67.

    Redshift

    @Suzanne: I’ve always hated “political correctness” because it took something that already existed (saying offensive things about people is objectionable) and gave it a name that assholes could proudly oppose. And substituted “you are incorrect” for making any effort to convince people that what’s considered offensive needs to be expanded.

  69. 69.

    Kay

    @Patricia Kayden:

    Ultimately, it sounds ungenerous to me.

    “We don’t have TIME for your ineffective off-topic TALK because it doesn’t WORK!”

    Because we were all doing such efficient, productive grunt work until these rabble rousers showed up? When was that?

  70. 70.

    ruemara

    The last time I brought up race as a factor in a discussion with supposedly very liberal persons, I was told to stop bringing up race because the other person – guess the race and gender! – was tired of hearing about race. Chait does seem to have an audience who truly believes hearing it is worse than living it.

  75. 75.

    Tree With Water

    I misplaced my handbook of The Rigorous Set Of Norms that justify heresy (andI forget everything nowadays). Does anyone have an extra copy they can spare?

  77. 77.

    Origuy

    We had a discussion a few days ago about the impending canonization of Junipero Serra. A new book is coming out next week, A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions by Elias Castillo. The San Jose Metro had an article about it this week. Some excerpts:

    In a native society controlled by men, it was an Indian medicine woman of the Gabrieleno tribe named Toypurina who, in 1785, organized warriors to attack the missions and kill those who had invaded and now controlled her people’s land. Hers would be the only known Indian rebellion in North America to have a woman at its helm.

    Six years after founding the first California mission in San Diego, Friar Junipero Serra wrote a letter requesting that four Indians who had dared flee from Mission Carmel be severely whipped two or three times.

    ETA: Link to Metro article

  78. 78.

    Mary G

    Isn’t he also a former TNR writer/editor? Thinks it’s cool to be a lefties who despises leftie? I tried to read both columns, but I kept dozing off but what I’m seeing between the lines is a combination of “GET OFF MY LAWN” and “people are being mean to me on Twitter.

  79. 79.

    Eric U.

    @Patricia Kayden: I believe they are obummer’s FEMA camps that we are sending these violators of PC

    @jl: the thing is, the villagers, and particularly TNR alum, cannot see the PC of the right as being PC. I don’t know if it’s the blazing rage with which the right expresses their PC or if it’s just the village being sprung loaded for republicans

  82. 82.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @jl: The reactionary version of PC is infinitely more vicious than anything the left has come up with.

  83. 83.

    JaneE

    “p.c. ideology as a form of Marxist thought” – who knew that tolerance, empathy, and showing respect for others was an economic/political system.

  84. 84.

    Marks

    It’s like Chait doesn’t know that the dudebro Marxists on the tweeter are the first people to derail discussions about race and gender identity because class is ALL THAT MATTERS. Jeez.

  85. 85.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @SRW1: Well, there’s Fred Dickenson, who may very well actually be Doug J keeping his stealth trolling skills sharp.

  86. 86.

    Citizen_X

    My essay describes p.c. ideology as a form of Marxist thought, substituting race and gender identities for economic ones

    So…a form of thought that is not Marxist, in other words.

  87. 87.

    jake the antisoshul soshulist

    @opiejeanne:
    When my brother lived on Madison, they would drive to Chicago, park on long-term, and fly out of there.
    That was more cost effective than flying out of Madison.

  88. 88.

    Kay

    @Mary G:

    i don’t like piling on, generally, and I try not to do it, so I get the objection there but why not just say that instead of putting it into this elaborate theory on The Left?

    Does he like mean people if they’re not “PC”? Is “PC” really the defining characteristic he’s objecting to? What about just regular asshole liberals who are centrists but nasty people who pile on? Are they a threat to The Cause too?

  89. 89.

    Betty Cracker

    @Kay:

    I think he has to take this “is it effective?” approach because he doesn’t know how else to criticize something he doesn’t like.

    Yeah, it’s that and the need to make an issue that is fundamentally trivial seem important that lures him into the deep end sans a pool noodle.

    I believe the phenomenon he describes actually does exist — there are lefty scolds who obnoxiously police speech. But they comprise about 5% of what wingnuts classify as PC, and their numbers are tiny compared with wingnuts who police speech for offenses against god and guns.

    It’s just not that freaking important, and dressing it up as the new Marxism and a grave threat to liberalism itself is beyond boneheaded.

  91. 91.

    jl

    @Betty Cracker:

    ‘ offenses against god and guns. ‘

    Like putting up a widescreen mega-pic of a bunny rabbit during Christmas season! Some wisecracker at a miserable lefty blog pulled that disrespectful stunt. I saw what they did there.

  92. 92.

    Kay

    @Betty Cracker:

    there are lefty scolds who obnoxiously police speech. But they comprise about 5% of what wingnuts classify as PC,

    Right, and I actually agree with him about the piling-on effect that happens. That’s repellent to me but that can happen independently of “PC” or with it. I don’t think one causes the other. There are people who pile on in all sorts of situations and the mob action can feel out of control, just as it does in real life. It reminds me of when people would fight in high school and there was that cheering on thing that just made me want to run away from my peer group :)

    I see his objection to that but I never put that within Marxism.

    I can’t help this feeling, too – it just reminds me of those people who were always warning during the Clinton years that “the Leftists” were ruining everything!

    Ruining what? What were the rest of us up to? I didn’t have any clear policy goals, that I recall. Did Lefties make us fail?

  94. 94.

    different-church-lady

    From the comments at Chait’s article:

    Sticks and stones will break your bones, but Chait’s columns put me in a persistent vegetative state.

  95. 95.

    Linnaeus

    Looks like a lot of folks here have said what I wanted to say, but I’ll say it anyway:

    1. If “political correctness” functions in the manner Chait argues it does, then he’s wrong to attribute it only to a particular kind of left wing tendency. We’ve always had “political correctness” in America of some kind or another, but we didn’t call it that. It wasn’t at all politically correct to be, for example, a communist in America in 1950 (or any other time, for that matter).

    2. Chait conflates pretty much everything to his left as being “Marxist”, which not only oversimplifies the real differences among self-identified Marxists (particularly in the 20th century), but also leaves out the fact that there are leftists who don’t identify as such.

    3. I read a very astute comment on another blog that posited that Chait’s argument is self-refuting in the sense that if “PC” ideas are as self-evidently bad as Chait says they are, then the “marketplace of ideas” to which Chait alludes to, directly or indirectly, should be trusted to resolve this in his favor. Otherwise, we’re then left with the possibility that markets, of any kind, don’t actually work the way that we are told they do. This is probably more of a problem for the conservatives who approvingly cite Chait than Chait himself, but I think it’s worth noting.

    4. Chait’s “PC” criticism reads to me like a repackaged “vital center”/Cold War liberalism. He hasn’t been the only one to argue for a resurgent political correctness – Michelle Goldberg, Isaac Chotinier, Timothy Egan, etc. have written on this before (particularly Goldberg). To me, this says a lot more about their own political anxieties than it does about the people they are criticizing.

  96. 96.

    patrick II

    @Kay:

    why not just say that instead of putting it into this elaborate theory on The Left?

    Exactly. There are people on the left who are mirror images of people on the right. For some people on the right, nothing is about race or gender, for some people on the left everything is about race or gender. I think Chait can’t just can’t say that, he has to show he is a public intellectual and build some pseudo-intellectual structure to say about the same thing.

  98. 98.

    kindness

    I really don’t get where Chait is coming from. Some times he writes great stuff. But far to often he pulls this shit. I get the impression that folk like him, Yglasias and a few others are aiming at being the next generation of Serious Village Sages.

  99. 99.

    The Ancient Randonneur

    The spawn of TNR will always be with us. At least Sullivan really has gone away. For now.

  100. 100.

    sm*t cl*de

    My essay describes p.c. ideology as a form of Marxist thought

    Surprisingly, when you begin by proclaiming that any behaviour from conservatives is not “PC ideology” as part of your definition of the term, you arrive at the conclusion that only left-wingers do it.

  101. 101.

    low-tech cyclist

    “Bless his heart,” as in “he doesn’t have the sense God gave a billy goat, bless his heart.”

    And in this case, completely true. As this Yankee might say, he’s become a repeat violator of the First Law of Holes: if you’re in a hole, stop digging.

    Chait does have his good moments, so I’d really like to see him quit digging. But he can’t leave well enough alone.

    Take “But only the p.c. left has worked out a rigorous set of norms that explicitly justify the suppression of heresy.” Yeah, right – practically everybody on the right agrees with practically everyone else on the right by sheer coincidence. (For instance, why do they even give a damn about the Keystone XL pipeline? Why is it so important to supporters who have no financial interest in it? And yet, you’d probably be called a RINO if you said the fight wasn’t worth the candle.) How uninformed do you have to be to not know better than this? Chait’s really lost it here. I wish it weren’t so, but there it is.

  102. 102.

    opiejeanne

    @jake the antisoshul soshulist: we flew into Minneapolis, spent a couple of days there, went to a ball game on the train, marveled at the people having their picture taken at that mall, then picked up a car and drove to Madison. Pretty drive.

  103. 103.

    BruceFromOhio

    My essay describes p.c. ideology as a form of Marxist thought,

    Out of 333 million+ citizens of this country, find me any ten people under the age of 40 who are *not* poli-sci majors that can define Marxist thought, and I’ll give them each a free 1-yr subscription to Mother Jones.

  105. 105.

    ThresherK

    @opiejeanne: From before the internet, I remember Miss Manners once writing “Calling someone oversensitive is not a valid response when they take exception to your insulting them.”

    I don’t know if the actual term “PC” was in that column, but it might as well have been.

  109. 109.

    Joel

    Fundamentally, Chait is just pissed that social norms are changing. And whether he likes it or not, opposing those changes is a decidedly conservative position.

  110. 110.

    Tom Levenson

    @Betty Cracker: Yup. That’s the whole can of Chef Boyardee. Mostly, this is about a (relative, not absolute) diminishment of Chait et al.s cultural influence. More than anything else, Chait reminds me of the nice polite moderates of late Weimar,who wished those who really pointed out the deficiencies of Germany’s right wing wouldn’t be so damn strident. Fiddling while the republic burns, IOW.

  116. 116.

    Lurking Canadian

    Ever since somebody made fun of me on Twitter I realize how outraged I was by Chappaquidick.

  117. 117.

    low-tech cyclist

    @Morzer:

    I wonder how long it will take FeeFee de Boer and Conor Friedersdorf to nod approvingly and then be cited by Chait as liberals in good standing.

    Chait’s already cited Don’t Douthat after Douthat said something in his support. So citing Freddie or Conor would be no big deal by comparison; he’s already hit Peak Grasping-At-Straws.

  118. 118.

    Heliopause

    @Morzer:

    I wonder how long it will take FeeFee de Boer and Conor Friedersdorf to nod approvingly

    “So, to state the obvious: Jon Chait is a jerk who somehow manages to be both condescending and wounded in his piece on political correctness. He gets the basic nature of language policing wrong, and his solutions are wrong, and he’s a centrist Democrat scold who is just as eager to shut people out of the debate as the people he criticizes. That’s true.”

  119. 119.

    patrick II

    @Fred Fnord:

    Or to rephrase your argument: “Yes I see every argument in the terms of the race of the person making the argument.”

    ibi est testimonium

  120. 120.

    slag

    @Heliopause:

    But the prohibition against ever telling anyone to be friendlier and more forgiving is so powerful and calcified it’s a permanent feature of today’s progressivism.

    fredrikdeboer.com/2015/01/29/i-dont-know-what-to-do-you-guys/

    Seriously? That is a world I do not inhabit. The world I inhabit is one in which women and men of color who share an opinion are constantly berated, threatened, and harassed. The world I inhabit is predominantly one in which non-white, non-male people are, when not being harassed, completely ignored. Nonexistent in almost every conceivable way. Unless of course, they’re being shot to death for not being white and male. Or being imprisoned for not being white and male. Or being given lower grades for not being white and male. Or being paid less for not being white and male. Or…

    Sorry, white dudes. I get it. People can be jerks. Even people who are not you can be jerks. But the injustices you see, while sometimes real, are maybe a little less concerning to the rest of us than they are to you. If that makes you feel berated, threatened, harassed, or ignored, then welcome to the club. Finally.

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