Andrew Sullivan is a case in point why it takes me years and years to trust so-called conservative "converts." His support of Obama was a blip, not a sea-change.
But after enthusiastically going after trans people himself, now he's surprised his allies are coming for gays? As someone on twitter said, "oh look, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions."
When the American equivalent of Kristalnacht comes, Sullivan will be in the street smashing his own windows. He's desperate to get the people who want him dead to like him while they beat him to death.
"When the American equivalent of Kristalnacht comes". . . Sully won't be here. He has a go-bag packed, his UK passport, and a one-way ticket back to Blighty. He does not intend to sit and wait for the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the US to come and kill him.
From the other side of the Atlantic, he'll write columns about Gilead and its Handmaidens, judging the place entirely on how he imagines he himself would be treated. And yes, that last sentence had two "he"s and one "himself", it's hard to write about someone as self-absorbed as Sullivan without doing that.
Funny, especially about breaking his own windows, but I'm sure he expects his conservative allies to protect him. Reminds me of The Osterman Weekend: "Mr. Danforth, I won't betray my friends." "You don't have any friends, Tanner."
I must disagree: he assumes that as one of the good ones, nobody's coming for him or his windows, and on the day they do either he'll be too outraged to do anything, or, as another commenter suggests, be at least midway over the Atlantic Ocean.
Wow, that's insane, I had never heard of that group before - thanks for the link.
Relevant quote:
A possible reason why some German Jews supported Hitler may have been that they thought that his antisemitism was only for the purpose of "stirring up the masses".
Hah. I suppose "stirring up the masses" is an old-fashioned phrase for "playing to the base."
I think that, and the faith that the Army would step-in—as, to be fair, elements thereof tried a few times. Notably, if it had gone to war over Sudentenland, it might not have actually happened, as the knives were being sharpened for a coup attempt.
Also he'll eventually get defenestrated like Gabby Hayes in some old Western. Did Gabby Hayes ever get thrown through a saloon window? I don't watch many Westerns
The saddest irony is that when the American equivalent of Kristalnacht comes, especially when the anti-gay brigades hit the streets, many of the rocks and missiles will be stamped "Paid for by Peter Thiel."
Thiel better watch his back – Ernst Röhm learned (for a moment) what happens when you get out ahead of your squad...and don'cha just feel for the SA along about Kristallnacht, pinin' for the good ol' days when Ernst woulda been leadin' the charge, with the finest of masonry and the manliest of epithets...? Oh sure, they chucked a few bricks, but without old Ernst, it just wasn't the same kinda party...
Well, it's OK to be gay, but it's never OK to be an asshole.The thing I hate about Sully is that"Fine, I will try and explain this to you again though I doubt you are equipped to understand it" tone.
It's never OK to be a gay who would sell out his Queer Family to whatever gas chamber he could in order to maintain his feeble status as an "intellectual" or whatever he thinks he is.
Sully's status as gay (for he would NEVER claim the identity of "Queer") is otherwise irrelevant — anyways lots of cis-gay men are racist af, transphobic af, misogynist af. These guys are just as enthralled by the white patriarchal ragegasm as any of the others. And they always were.
This is sadly true. I know a lot of enlightened, politically savvy older gay men. But a few, especially more privileged cisgender white ones, don't grasp the concept of intersectionality and carry their own prejudices. Sullivan is a prime example of that type. Thankfully, I think that mindset is changing and the majority of younger gay men get it.
That's Magdalen College all over—as a gay, Catholic, non-u, student perhaps he felt security in out-Heroding Herod. (See Coward, Noël, son of a boarding-house–owner.)
(I'll admit that in my first programming job I made with the local culture similarly, for example hating Microsoft well before I'd done enough Microsoft programming to fully justify it.)
My golden parachute from that job was a copy of that new 'Windows NT' they were about to release, and which I never used—my _justified_ hate came later doing Win3/Toolbook work, I think it crystallised one day looking at a page of code that was half macros used by MS to maintain the illusion that they could maintain a single codebase.
I don't get how "Don't be a bigot" is some kind of "needle" in need of "threading" unless it's "Go ahead and exercise your bigotry on THEM, but don't point it at ME".
It's been a while, and I can't remember what form Sullivan's "support" of Obama took. I can't imagine it extended as far as support of Obama's actual policies, was it a "Yes, this is a historic moment for America, and shows we no longer have the racism" kinda thing?
TBQHWY I don’t remember all the specifics but my general recollection is Sullivan strongly fanboyed Obama and largely supported most of his policies.
But it was also very much a cult of personality approach – for example, Sully has always hated Hillary Clinton with a fury, and her policy positions at the time didn’t differ that much from Obama’s, other than on the Iraq war.
Unlike all the anti-CRT morons who couldn’t define what it is, Rufo was evil enough to see that very deficiency as the key to making a legal theory into the latest racist rallying cry. Nominally educated “intellectuals” like Sully don’t care what it means because it’s a perfect smokescreen for their own racism. Who is surprised that the high profile Iraq war supporter is also a racist? It’s not like he hasn’t promoted racism throughout his career
I figure Rufo must have slipped into momentary honesty because he was bedazzled by all the attention he was getting, a real pro would have known better. But now it's all slipping away, who's gonna get worked up about CRT when there's pedo-panic sweeping the land? I can imagine his desperate need to get in on The Next Big Thing or be left behind.
Sullivan is, of course, high up on my list of those prominent people who. Get a shit ton of publicity, as it were, while not mattering at all.
Sully, tho’, has earned much bad karma by my reckoning for:
Being Mort Zuckerman’s tool during the time that the New Republic — well, as I going say POS but let’s say of least relevance except to Zionists and, of course, published the Bell Curve piece; and
Preaching safe sex whilst famously engaging in not safe sex. I know calling out conservatives for hypocrisy is too obvious to bother with, but still.
Eh, maybe I should add being something of a proto-Glenn Greenwald.
All that said, while I’m sure the Maestro’s version of Sullivan is undoubtedly fully divorced from reality, it’s more than sufficiently mocking so 👍🏻
HIV status is not a moral judgment from above or from karma & I really wish str8 people would stfu about it.
Unless one has the entire medical case file front of you & can see the discrepancy, I'd advise not talking about it. It took a long time for the message to get thru the community. Infections were occurring back into the 70s. And a guy claiming "poz" status on dating app is usually looking for other guys who are "poz" or disclosing their status so their partner is aware. You know, to overcome the stigma that y'all put upon us. Because one is allowed to have sex after getting HIV. Contrary to our fucking Victorian sexual ethics...
Most men over the age of 45 are positive with HPV, but no one's telling you to stop fucking.
Again, the issue is hypocrisy of lecturing on safe sex while famously not so engaging. Dunno why you seem to think I was making any morality-related statement. The closest thing I have to any moral beliefs orientation-wise are hypocrisy of leaders and sadness (gross understatement) of those who need or feel a need to be closeted (for obvious reasons).
When you say "karma" as Western person, the implication is that it is retribution for bad actions. That's a moral statement.
If we're worried about hypocrisy, then a poz Sully wanting to fuck other poz guys doesn't even count. Especially because he's upfront about it within the limits of the community that disclosure was intended for.
Would you prefer he just say "Who needs protection"? Wouldn't that be more monstrous?
You’re still reading stuff that wasn’t intended. Promoting responsibility was undercutting the message is still a negative for moi.
As for the question at the end: if the hypocrisy results in fewer following his advice than had he not undercut the message, I’ll bite: admirable enough? I would say in a defense, tho, that I’d like to think that the number of people who took his advice because he was the one source they’d listen to... boggles my aged mind.
And back to karma: not sure that being Mort Zuckerman’s tool at TNR and running the Bell Curve piece are enough bad acts independent of all things sexual.
Then why bring it up at all????? That was the essence of my first statement.
Only person who thinks hetero-exclusively would bring the "Poz seeks Poz" thing up in this circumstance -- because they see it as another item to pile on the mound of Very Bad Things that Sully is.
I mean, yeah, but what did he think was going to happen after that?
Like, literally everyone on the left instantly recognized this as part of a broader attack on queer people's rights; did Sully really, honestly believe that it was going to stop after they finished throwing trans people into the wood chipper?
I'm seeing a lot of gay-not-queer people, if you know what I mean, failing to follow this logic through to the part where they're the next target. I'm disappointed in myself because I thought we'd learned this lesson.
It really has put the final piece in place in the Sullivan puzzle: He's a guy who does not consider the real-world application of his "thinking." My conclusion is that he is very much a product of the English educational system -- he didn't go to Eton or whatever the fuck, but I'm sure he wanted to -- and it seems that system forms young men whose idea of policy begins and ends with "Did I sound good in the debate?" So his concern is "threading the needle" of some philosophical blather, and not "What's it look like when you implement it?" Literally that is never part of it. You say the words in the room and there is no outside the room. So yes, he turned on Bush -- because Bush's invasion of Iraq did not uphold conservative values, which he correctly saw embodied in Obama. But for the same reason, he supports the Bell Curve -- because rhetorically it's airtight to say "are you suggesting we *don't* investigate how skull shape denotes intellect? Are you FOR perpetual ignorance?" Yeah yeah, that's the stuff. He is desperate to gain the judge's approval and claps on the backs from his teammates through cleverness; he never actually interacts with the people his moronic "principles" affect. That's why his move to New York City was a disaster. People there are first and foremost people. They are not going to engage you on your theory, they are going to put you on blast for its real-world fallout, and they'll tell you to your face at the cocktail party that you're a dope. That simply is not how it's done, in the system he idealizes. So in the end Sullivan can never really listen to what people are actually telling him, because he doesn't know discussion has a purpose other than trying to thread needles; so he never hears the US conservatives who, for the past 25 years at least, have had zero interest in philosophy and are all in on stampeding the id in whatever seems like an electorally useful direction. He is going to be standing at a podium naively and condescendingly saying "Now, friends, let us turn to Oakeshotte for inspiration" right up to the exact instant he is trampled into the dust by his furious audience of hate-filled morons.
That's along the lines of how I see him. Very good in a debate, loses sight of reality. The question that's tricky to answer is how much he uses his rhetorical skills in the service of propaganda. Too much, I'd say. But I find him a very interesting character and think progressives would do well to engage with his arguments, if not with hisself. He is more leftist than conservative in many, if not most ways. As progressives become ever more bizarro conservatives, I find Sullivan's place in the rhetorical spectrum very interesting. BTW, he did go to Oxford or whatever the fuck and has a truly world class education. Most of us wouldn't do well in a debate with him, no matter the ultimate right or wrong of what's being debated. That, I think, is what's ultimately tragic about him.
I don't think that progressives would do well to engage with any arguments that don't represent a constituency willing to engage back. I mean call me if there's a way that AOC matching Sullivan in a debate is going to make any little crowd of conservative voters go "Huh. AOC made a lot of sense. Fine -- I'll moderate my stance!" In a world where Ketanji Brown Jackson was accused by actual Senators of sympathizing with pedophiles and Nazis, I am not optimistic for the power of persuasion.
The problem isn't Republican voters, the problem is regular people who don't pay all the that much attention. Concerning his recent writings about Critical Race and Gender theories that are popular with many people who consider themselves progressive and much of the Democratic Party Leadership, Sullivan is squarely in the mainstream. He basically argues that everyone should be equal under the law, that black history should be taught and that he supports Trans peoples right to be whoever they want to be. On those subjects, his main argument is that any government policies or any subject that's taught in school should be solidly based on facts and that the arguments of many prominent CRT and Gender Theory advocates are not factual. For example, he believes that there are biological distinctions between people born physically male and those born physically female, and that white people and Jews who worked hard, and sometimes died, for civil rights in the sixties were not racists, and certainly nowhere near as bad as the Klan. Those are beliefs that most casual voters are going to agree with. Those are the kinds of arguments I believe we should engage with. Those are the kinds of arguments that can get the Democrats wiped out in coming elections.
I get from many of these comments that most people here haven't really read Sullivan. He is not remotely close to being like the Pantloads and other pathetic victims in Roy's world. His evil – though I don't like calling it that – maybe better to say his major malfunction, is of an infinitely higher order that any run of the mill conservative cretin. He is Oxford and Harvard, the New York Times and The New Republic – A voice of the highly educated elite. As I get older I find myself thinking of people like him more as tragedies more than villains. The best and the fucking brightest can talk themselves into the most ridiculously wrong beliefs. They can talk other people into them as well.
Appreciate your input as always, but the way you describe Sullivan makes him sound quite reasonable. So I'm not sure why you think he has a malfunction. My own reading of his arguments -- especially on "CRT," by which he seems to mean the accurate teaching of the history of American race relations, which he opposes as reverse racism for reasons that I uncharitably but (I think) fairly ascribe to the same animus that's had him banging the drum for The Bell Curve for decades -- is different. https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/removing-the-bedrock-of-liberalism-826?s=r
Yes, much of Sullivan does sound quite reasonable. In your link, for example, he argues that "an open-ended inquiry into buried history, a way openly to acknowledge the true brutality and evil that white supremacy once was, to stop whitewashing the past, and to face squarely the evils that America has contained — evils that continue to echo today. That project is a profoundly worthy one, and overdue."
But my pointing out that much of what he says is quite reasonable, at least from a leftist perspective, was aimed at many of the other commenters who have clearly not read Sullivan, not you, who has. The most popular comment in this thread, for example, describes Sullivan as "going after Trans people." Citation please, as the kids used to say.
No, Sullivan's major malfunction, or evil if you prefer, can be seen most clearly in his writing on Charles Murray and The Bell Curve and particularly in his back and forth about it with Ta Nehisi Coates. If I remember correctly, Coates questioned why Sullivan was so persistent on the topic. So I think it's legitimate to question where he's coming from on CRT, but in the end I end up believing it's best to judge the words on the page over a belief in a person's motives. At least for people who have consistently shown independence of thought.
In his recent writings, I think Sullivans malfunction shows up in his consistent use of right wing dog whistle terms, particularly using "woke" as a pejorative. And in the quote from your link I provided above, he says what white supremacy once was should be studied, seemingly ignoring what white supremacy currently is. It's those little tells that get him. Somewhere deep inside, or maybe not so deep, he's a messed up kinda guy, no doubt.
But he is also quite skilled as a rhetorician. One can argue he has bad ideas, but certainly not that he makes dumb arguments with shitty prose. If you deconstruct his writing, it is textbook good rhetoric. He has a clear thesis, presents facts, responds to counter-arguments, brings it all together in the end to forcefully make his point. That's what makes him so much more interesting than the Ericksons and myriad cretins of the wing nut world. Sullivan is very good at what he does. You can learn stuff from his writing, though not always what he's wanting to teach.
The only thing I know about Rufo is that he did something extremely unusual among right-wing activists: He openly admitted that the nonsense he was peddling was nonsense, but he didn't care because it was *effective* nonsense.
But time moves on, anti-CRT hysteria is so 2021, a man's got house and car payments to make, Rufo needs a piece of that lucrative "Groomers in the Schools" action.
And then Sullivan, who was thrilled to buy a bottle of Dr. Rufo's Miracle Elixir last year, is shocked, SHOCKED I TELL YOU, to find him selling Florida swampland this year. What a boob. What an absolute boob.
Mr Sullivan can't understand that the people who say 'a woman can not have a penis because that is not what a "woman" is' are the same people who say (note, not 'said') 'a man can not be married to a man because that is not what a "marriage" is' because in his mind the first is Right and the Second is Wrong, and what greater distinction could there be between two ideas than his opinion of them?
Pope Leo XIII who wrote that a good Catholic could not support unlimited freedom of speech or of thought because such would treat Truth and Error equally—though he _did_ allow for unlimited freedom on issues on which the LORD allowed differences of opinion.
(Note that the Pope's opinion on freedom to be wrong about Transubstantiation is uncomfortably close to mine with regard to racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, genocide…save that I'm against laws against such, I just want norms and corporate/academic rules against hostile environments—and a strong welfare state, so that people with opinions so odious that they can't find work don't starve, since by reflex I don't trust the judgements of the State _or_ the Market.)
Viola Voila was a femme scratch (not fatale by any measure) in "Temptress in a Teacup", one of Walt Kelly's better side tracks offa the main Pogo line...
Remember how right-wing opposition to gay marriage used to allegedly be based on the fear that it would cause apocalyptic damage to the almighty Institution of The Family? And then it turned out that it didn't do anything even vaguely like that, and the right-wingers' lives didn't change even a tiny bit? It was my impression that they had sort of given up, maybe even made some steps towards being generally less homophobic, but now that T**** has made open bigotry respectable again, with the entire GOP eagerly following suit, there's no need not to just be a naked, unalloyed shithead. The new "justification" seems to be just one tiny step above snarling "god hates fags" at people. I mean, that was ALWAYS a big part of the justification, but now that there's not even theoretically a more high-minded argument they can make, it seems like this is all we're going to be getting for the indefinite future.
The thing about today's PedoMania is that it's "What's the worst thing we can think of?" followed immediately by "Yeah, let's call the other team that."
Which Sullivan should totally recognize, because right after 9/11 when "worst thing we can think of" was "terrorist" (or at minimum "terrorist sympathizer") Sullivan was right in front with "Yeah, let's call the other team that."
This was so on target it could have been a transcription. Both Rufo and Sullivan ethered in the kill jar and pinned to the mounting paper. Two more for the collection.
Andrew Sullivan is a case in point why it takes me years and years to trust so-called conservative "converts." His support of Obama was a blip, not a sea-change.
But after enthusiastically going after trans people himself, now he's surprised his allies are coming for gays? As someone on twitter said, "oh look, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions."
When the American equivalent of Kristalnacht comes, Sullivan will be in the street smashing his own windows. He's desperate to get the people who want him dead to like him while they beat him to death.
"When the American equivalent of Kristalnacht comes". . . Sully won't be here. He has a go-bag packed, his UK passport, and a one-way ticket back to Blighty. He does not intend to sit and wait for the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the US to come and kill him.
From the other side of the Atlantic, he'll write columns about Gilead and its Handmaidens, judging the place entirely on how he imagines he himself would be treated. And yes, that last sentence had two "he"s and one "himself", it's hard to write about someone as self-absorbed as Sullivan without doing that.
Funny, especially about breaking his own windows, but I'm sure he expects his conservative allies to protect him. Reminds me of The Osterman Weekend: "Mr. Danforth, I won't betray my friends." "You don't have any friends, Tanner."
I remember that as being nearly unwatchable. Did I miss something?
I must disagree: he assumes that as one of the good ones, nobody's coming for him or his windows, and on the day they do either he'll be too outraged to do anything, or, as another commenter suggests, be at least midway over the Atlantic Ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National_Jews
Wow, that's insane, I had never heard of that group before - thanks for the link.
Relevant quote:
A possible reason why some German Jews supported Hitler may have been that they thought that his antisemitism was only for the purpose of "stirring up the masses".
Hah. I suppose "stirring up the masses" is an old-fashioned phrase for "playing to the base."
I think that, and the faith that the Army would step-in—as, to be fair, elements thereof tried a few times. Notably, if it had gone to war over Sudentenland, it might not have actually happened, as the knives were being sharpened for a coup attempt.
Also he'll eventually get defenestrated like Gabby Hayes in some old Western. Did Gabby Hayes ever get thrown through a saloon window? I don't watch many Westerns
Never let facts get in the way of a good image. Why, I can see Ol' Gabby now, hitting the street in a shower of candy-glass, the facts be damned.
Truthfully, I am not 100% sure I would recognize Ol' Gabby
1.5 marks for Gabby Hayes; now, if youda said Hopalong Cassidy, maybe...
Sadly, today "Hoppy" is just a word hipsters use to describe their IPAs.
I Am Hipster! Hear Me Chant the IBU, the ABV, and the 80 Names of Hops!
The saddest irony is that when the American equivalent of Kristalnacht comes, especially when the anti-gay brigades hit the streets, many of the rocks and missiles will be stamped "Paid for by Peter Thiel."
Thiel better watch his back – Ernst Röhm learned (for a moment) what happens when you get out ahead of your squad...and don'cha just feel for the SA along about Kristallnacht, pinin' for the good ol' days when Ernst woulda been leadin' the charge, with the finest of masonry and the manliest of epithets...? Oh sure, they chucked a few bricks, but without old Ernst, it just wasn't the same kinda party...
Well, it's OK to be gay, but it's never OK to be an asshole.The thing I hate about Sully is that"Fine, I will try and explain this to you again though I doubt you are equipped to understand it" tone.
It's never OK to be a gay who would sell out his Queer Family to whatever gas chamber he could in order to maintain his feeble status as an "intellectual" or whatever he thinks he is.
Sully's status as gay (for he would NEVER claim the identity of "Queer") is otherwise irrelevant — anyways lots of cis-gay men are racist af, transphobic af, misogynist af. These guys are just as enthralled by the white patriarchal ragegasm as any of the others. And they always were.
Weakest fucking link...
This is sadly true. I know a lot of enlightened, politically savvy older gay men. But a few, especially more privileged cisgender white ones, don't grasp the concept of intersectionality and carry their own prejudices. Sullivan is a prime example of that type. Thankfully, I think that mindset is changing and the majority of younger gay men get it.
Or maybe he’s like Roy Cohn; not gay, just has sex only with men.
Pro-choice, ya mean?
That's Magdalen College all over—as a gay, Catholic, non-u, student perhaps he felt security in out-Heroding Herod. (See Coward, Noël, son of a boarding-house–owner.)
(I'll admit that in my first programming job I made with the local culture similarly, for example hating Microsoft well before I'd done enough Microsoft programming to fully justify it.)
Was this before Windows Me? Using that was enough to hate MS
My golden parachute from that job was a copy of that new 'Windows NT' they were about to release, and which I never used—my _justified_ hate came later doing Win3/Toolbook work, I think it crystallised one day looking at a page of code that was half macros used by MS to maintain the illusion that they could maintain a single codebase.
I don't get how "Don't be a bigot" is some kind of "needle" in need of "threading" unless it's "Go ahead and exercise your bigotry on THEM, but don't point it at ME".
To alter a by-now-old joke, he was pretty sure he'd voted for the {Faces that don't look like _mine_}-Eating Leopard Party.
It's been a while, and I can't remember what form Sullivan's "support" of Obama took. I can't imagine it extended as far as support of Obama's actual policies, was it a "Yes, this is a historic moment for America, and shows we no longer have the racism" kinda thing?
TBQHWY I don’t remember all the specifics but my general recollection is Sullivan strongly fanboyed Obama and largely supported most of his policies.
But it was also very much a cult of personality approach – for example, Sully has always hated Hillary Clinton with a fury, and her policy positions at the time didn’t differ that much from Obama’s, other than on the Iraq war.
When historians look back on the early 21st century, I'm sure they'll identify hatred of Hillary Clinton as one of the most significant primal forces.
Pessimus Prime...?
Unlike all the anti-CRT morons who couldn’t define what it is, Rufo was evil enough to see that very deficiency as the key to making a legal theory into the latest racist rallying cry. Nominally educated “intellectuals” like Sully don’t care what it means because it’s a perfect smokescreen for their own racism. Who is surprised that the high profile Iraq war supporter is also a racist? It’s not like he hasn’t promoted racism throughout his career
"We need to pick some crappy country up and throw it against the wall" but in Estuary English.
Estuary English is just downstream from no-count shantyboat shuck 'n jive...
I figure Rufo must have slipped into momentary honesty because he was bedazzled by all the attention he was getting, a real pro would have known better. But now it's all slipping away, who's gonna get worked up about CRT when there's pedo-panic sweeping the land? I can imagine his desperate need to get in on The Next Big Thing or be left behind.
'Right behind', surely...
Leave No Grifter Behind. This bandwagon has room for all of 'em.
Nah, son. Grifter behind is just...I dunno...too...something...
Wasn't Sully a big fan of The Bell Curve? He solidified his racism with that.
Sullivan is, of course, high up on my list of those prominent people who. Get a shit ton of publicity, as it were, while not mattering at all.
Sully, tho’, has earned much bad karma by my reckoning for:
Being Mort Zuckerman’s tool during the time that the New Republic — well, as I going say POS but let’s say of least relevance except to Zionists and, of course, published the Bell Curve piece; and
Preaching safe sex whilst famously engaging in not safe sex. I know calling out conservatives for hypocrisy is too obvious to bother with, but still.
Eh, maybe I should add being something of a proto-Glenn Greenwald.
All that said, while I’m sure the Maestro’s version of Sullivan is undoubtedly fully divorced from reality, it’s more than sufficiently mocking so 👍🏻
HIV status is not a moral judgment from above or from karma & I really wish str8 people would stfu about it.
Unless one has the entire medical case file front of you & can see the discrepancy, I'd advise not talking about it. It took a long time for the message to get thru the community. Infections were occurring back into the 70s. And a guy claiming "poz" status on dating app is usually looking for other guys who are "poz" or disclosing their status so their partner is aware. You know, to overcome the stigma that y'all put upon us. Because one is allowed to have sex after getting HIV. Contrary to our fucking Victorian sexual ethics...
Most men over the age of 45 are positive with HPV, but no one's telling you to stop fucking.
Again, the issue is hypocrisy of lecturing on safe sex while famously not so engaging. Dunno why you seem to think I was making any morality-related statement. The closest thing I have to any moral beliefs orientation-wise are hypocrisy of leaders and sadness (gross understatement) of those who need or feel a need to be closeted (for obvious reasons).
When you say "karma" as Western person, the implication is that it is retribution for bad actions. That's a moral statement.
If we're worried about hypocrisy, then a poz Sully wanting to fuck other poz guys doesn't even count. Especially because he's upfront about it within the limits of the community that disclosure was intended for.
Would you prefer he just say "Who needs protection"? Wouldn't that be more monstrous?
You’re still reading stuff that wasn’t intended. Promoting responsibility was undercutting the message is still a negative for moi.
As for the question at the end: if the hypocrisy results in fewer following his advice than had he not undercut the message, I’ll bite: admirable enough? I would say in a defense, tho, that I’d like to think that the number of people who took his advice because he was the one source they’d listen to... boggles my aged mind.
And back to karma: not sure that being Mort Zuckerman’s tool at TNR and running the Bell Curve piece are enough bad acts independent of all things sexual.
Then why bring it up at all????? That was the essence of my first statement.
Only person who thinks hetero-exclusively would bring the "Poz seeks Poz" thing up in this circumstance -- because they see it as another item to pile on the mound of Very Bad Things that Sully is.
Please explain the PoZ thing. You young people with your slang.
Sully never thought the leopard would eat HIS face
Another reason why I would LOVE to be turned by a Vampire, so I can run around all night, and drain and rip the throats out of fools like this.
I wouldn’t be a monster…I’d be doing a public service!
Sort of a Dexter vampire?
BOOM.
I really, honestly want to know where Sullivan thought this whole anti-Trans push was going to end up.
Anywhere but at his own front door, apparently.
One assumes it ends with trans people being rights-less or dead
I mean, yeah, but what did he think was going to happen after that?
Like, literally everyone on the left instantly recognized this as part of a broader attack on queer people's rights; did Sully really, honestly believe that it was going to stop after they finished throwing trans people into the wood chipper?
I'm seeing a lot of gay-not-queer people, if you know what I mean, failing to follow this logic through to the part where they're the next target. I'm disappointed in myself because I thought we'd learned this lesson.
Better:
Did he even care?
Does it matter?
It really has put the final piece in place in the Sullivan puzzle: He's a guy who does not consider the real-world application of his "thinking." My conclusion is that he is very much a product of the English educational system -- he didn't go to Eton or whatever the fuck, but I'm sure he wanted to -- and it seems that system forms young men whose idea of policy begins and ends with "Did I sound good in the debate?" So his concern is "threading the needle" of some philosophical blather, and not "What's it look like when you implement it?" Literally that is never part of it. You say the words in the room and there is no outside the room. So yes, he turned on Bush -- because Bush's invasion of Iraq did not uphold conservative values, which he correctly saw embodied in Obama. But for the same reason, he supports the Bell Curve -- because rhetorically it's airtight to say "are you suggesting we *don't* investigate how skull shape denotes intellect? Are you FOR perpetual ignorance?" Yeah yeah, that's the stuff. He is desperate to gain the judge's approval and claps on the backs from his teammates through cleverness; he never actually interacts with the people his moronic "principles" affect. That's why his move to New York City was a disaster. People there are first and foremost people. They are not going to engage you on your theory, they are going to put you on blast for its real-world fallout, and they'll tell you to your face at the cocktail party that you're a dope. That simply is not how it's done, in the system he idealizes. So in the end Sullivan can never really listen to what people are actually telling him, because he doesn't know discussion has a purpose other than trying to thread needles; so he never hears the US conservatives who, for the past 25 years at least, have had zero interest in philosophy and are all in on stampeding the id in whatever seems like an electorally useful direction. He is going to be standing at a podium naively and condescendingly saying "Now, friends, let us turn to Oakeshotte for inspiration" right up to the exact instant he is trampled into the dust by his furious audience of hate-filled morons.
That's along the lines of how I see him. Very good in a debate, loses sight of reality. The question that's tricky to answer is how much he uses his rhetorical skills in the service of propaganda. Too much, I'd say. But I find him a very interesting character and think progressives would do well to engage with his arguments, if not with hisself. He is more leftist than conservative in many, if not most ways. As progressives become ever more bizarro conservatives, I find Sullivan's place in the rhetorical spectrum very interesting. BTW, he did go to Oxford or whatever the fuck and has a truly world class education. Most of us wouldn't do well in a debate with him, no matter the ultimate right or wrong of what's being debated. That, I think, is what's ultimately tragic about him.
I don't think that progressives would do well to engage with any arguments that don't represent a constituency willing to engage back. I mean call me if there's a way that AOC matching Sullivan in a debate is going to make any little crowd of conservative voters go "Huh. AOC made a lot of sense. Fine -- I'll moderate my stance!" In a world where Ketanji Brown Jackson was accused by actual Senators of sympathizing with pedophiles and Nazis, I am not optimistic for the power of persuasion.
The problem isn't Republican voters, the problem is regular people who don't pay all the that much attention. Concerning his recent writings about Critical Race and Gender theories that are popular with many people who consider themselves progressive and much of the Democratic Party Leadership, Sullivan is squarely in the mainstream. He basically argues that everyone should be equal under the law, that black history should be taught and that he supports Trans peoples right to be whoever they want to be. On those subjects, his main argument is that any government policies or any subject that's taught in school should be solidly based on facts and that the arguments of many prominent CRT and Gender Theory advocates are not factual. For example, he believes that there are biological distinctions between people born physically male and those born physically female, and that white people and Jews who worked hard, and sometimes died, for civil rights in the sixties were not racists, and certainly nowhere near as bad as the Klan. Those are beliefs that most casual voters are going to agree with. Those are the kinds of arguments I believe we should engage with. Those are the kinds of arguments that can get the Democrats wiped out in coming elections.
I get from many of these comments that most people here haven't really read Sullivan. He is not remotely close to being like the Pantloads and other pathetic victims in Roy's world. His evil – though I don't like calling it that – maybe better to say his major malfunction, is of an infinitely higher order that any run of the mill conservative cretin. He is Oxford and Harvard, the New York Times and The New Republic – A voice of the highly educated elite. As I get older I find myself thinking of people like him more as tragedies more than villains. The best and the fucking brightest can talk themselves into the most ridiculously wrong beliefs. They can talk other people into them as well.
Appreciate your input as always, but the way you describe Sullivan makes him sound quite reasonable. So I'm not sure why you think he has a malfunction. My own reading of his arguments -- especially on "CRT," by which he seems to mean the accurate teaching of the history of American race relations, which he opposes as reverse racism for reasons that I uncharitably but (I think) fairly ascribe to the same animus that's had him banging the drum for The Bell Curve for decades -- is different. https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/removing-the-bedrock-of-liberalism-826?s=r
Yes, much of Sullivan does sound quite reasonable. In your link, for example, he argues that "an open-ended inquiry into buried history, a way openly to acknowledge the true brutality and evil that white supremacy once was, to stop whitewashing the past, and to face squarely the evils that America has contained — evils that continue to echo today. That project is a profoundly worthy one, and overdue."
But my pointing out that much of what he says is quite reasonable, at least from a leftist perspective, was aimed at many of the other commenters who have clearly not read Sullivan, not you, who has. The most popular comment in this thread, for example, describes Sullivan as "going after Trans people." Citation please, as the kids used to say.
No, Sullivan's major malfunction, or evil if you prefer, can be seen most clearly in his writing on Charles Murray and The Bell Curve and particularly in his back and forth about it with Ta Nehisi Coates. If I remember correctly, Coates questioned why Sullivan was so persistent on the topic. So I think it's legitimate to question where he's coming from on CRT, but in the end I end up believing it's best to judge the words on the page over a belief in a person's motives. At least for people who have consistently shown independence of thought.
In his recent writings, I think Sullivans malfunction shows up in his consistent use of right wing dog whistle terms, particularly using "woke" as a pejorative. And in the quote from your link I provided above, he says what white supremacy once was should be studied, seemingly ignoring what white supremacy currently is. It's those little tells that get him. Somewhere deep inside, or maybe not so deep, he's a messed up kinda guy, no doubt.
But he is also quite skilled as a rhetorician. One can argue he has bad ideas, but certainly not that he makes dumb arguments with shitty prose. If you deconstruct his writing, it is textbook good rhetoric. He has a clear thesis, presents facts, responds to counter-arguments, brings it all together in the end to forcefully make his point. That's what makes him so much more interesting than the Ericksons and myriad cretins of the wing nut world. Sullivan is very good at what he does. You can learn stuff from his writing, though not always what he's wanting to teach.
Bravo!
The only thing I know about Rufo is that he did something extremely unusual among right-wing activists: He openly admitted that the nonsense he was peddling was nonsense, but he didn't care because it was *effective* nonsense.
But time moves on, anti-CRT hysteria is so 2021, a man's got house and car payments to make, Rufo needs a piece of that lucrative "Groomers in the Schools" action.
And then Sullivan, who was thrilled to buy a bottle of Dr. Rufo's Miracle Elixir last year, is shocked, SHOCKED I TELL YOU, to find him selling Florida swampland this year. What a boob. What an absolute boob.
Mr Sullivan can't understand that the people who say 'a woman can not have a penis because that is not what a "woman" is' are the same people who say (note, not 'said') 'a man can not be married to a man because that is not what a "marriage" is' because in his mind the first is Right and the Second is Wrong, and what greater distinction could there be between two ideas than his opinion of them?
Pope Leo XIII who wrote that a good Catholic could not support unlimited freedom of speech or of thought because such would treat Truth and Error equally—though he _did_ allow for unlimited freedom on issues on which the LORD allowed differences of opinion.
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_20061888_libertas.htm
(Note that the Pope's opinion on freedom to be wrong about Transubstantiation is uncomfortably close to mine with regard to racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, genocide…save that I'm against laws against such, I just want norms and corporate/academic rules against hostile environments—and a strong welfare state, so that people with opinions so odious that they can't find work don't starve, since by reflex I don't trust the judgements of the State _or_ the Market.)
"what greater distinction could there be between two ideas than his opinion of them?"
Viola!
Yeah, I loved that line too, which means I'll probably be stealing it.
I remember him pitching for the Twins
Viola Voila was a femme scratch (not fatale by any measure) in "Temptress in a Teacup", one of Walt Kelly's better side tracks offa the main Pogo line...
A name to conjure with.
Remember how right-wing opposition to gay marriage used to allegedly be based on the fear that it would cause apocalyptic damage to the almighty Institution of The Family? And then it turned out that it didn't do anything even vaguely like that, and the right-wingers' lives didn't change even a tiny bit? It was my impression that they had sort of given up, maybe even made some steps towards being generally less homophobic, but now that T**** has made open bigotry respectable again, with the entire GOP eagerly following suit, there's no need not to just be a naked, unalloyed shithead. The new "justification" seems to be just one tiny step above snarling "god hates fags" at people. I mean, that was ALWAYS a big part of the justification, but now that there's not even theoretically a more high-minded argument they can make, it seems like this is all we're going to be getting for the indefinite future.
The thing about today's PedoMania is that it's "What's the worst thing we can think of?" followed immediately by "Yeah, let's call the other team that."
Which Sullivan should totally recognize, because right after 9/11 when "worst thing we can think of" was "terrorist" (or at minimum "terrorist sympathizer") Sullivan was right in front with "Yeah, let's call the other team that."
Any number of Republicans can, uh, define projection for you.
This was so on target it could have been a transcription. Both Rufo and Sullivan ethered in the kill jar and pinned to the mounting paper. Two more for the collection.