I have this dotard theory that being so full of shit makes many of these conservatives a little bit insane. I mean, it does actual harm to them. I mean saying things when you know deep down -- subconsciously -- are wrong drives many of them a little nuts. Including causing an excessive lack of self-awareness.
As for that position on affirmative action, I present in support of same: Ron DeSantis, John Kennedy, Josh Hawley and even, to a degree, (allegedly) Trump. The world could not be possibly worse if they lost their slots to people admitted via affirmative action. Not that, you know, rationality or whatever is relevant here.
Hope Roy feels better for the venting. Must say (not a criticism) that when I saw the post's headline I expected a humor piece. But that's on me.
Laughing at the shitheads because their own stupidity-- I mean narcissistic blindness doesn’t make it a humor piece per sé. Example: DeSantis facial expressions: hysterical but not meant to be humorous.
First thing I thought of when presented with pictorial evidence of DeSantis' facial expressions: Esquire Magazine's Richard Nixon "Why is this man laughing?" Series.
Surrounding yourself with yes-men rots your brain; I think the most visible of example of this currently is actually Elongated Muskrat, whose actions make perfect sense once you understand that he's deep within a rightwing filter bubble and has fired everyone willing to talk to him like an adult.
The thing that's always wild to me about tough conservative truth-tellers is how unbelievably fragile they all are; my experiences post-2016 are that basically all of them are a tweet and a half worth of mild pushback away from a complete emotional meltdown.
Think of it this way: Liberals are accustomed to seeing disaster coming a mile away and being told by the rich and credentialed they're making a big deal over nothing. This trains certain habits of mind -- not all of them positive, but one benefit is a bone-deep understanding that there are better instruments for ascertaining the truth than consensus.
Conservatives have a funhouse mirror version of this: They often think official consensus -- such as climate change and the efficacy of mRNA vaccines -- is wrong, indeed must be because their propagandists disagree with it; but instead of other instruments (scientific experiments, research) they merely create a contradictory consensus and bray it as loud as they can.
So with Musk, who thought that buying Twitter would let him change reality itself, rather than merely providing a more gigantic stage for his buffoonery.
"...they merely create a contradictory consensus and bray it as loud as they can."
Yes, and the implicit basis for their "argument"--which they may be unconscious of but which they expect the world to agree with--is that objective, scientifically-validated fact is inherently oppressive to them. The fact that they're in the minority shows how unfair (one of Trump's favorite words) everything is. "If nice, sensible people disagree with me and think I'm an asshole, I'm a victim."
They defend their whining by invoking "freedom," but it's a child's position (hence "crybabies"). Sheer decency, and an adult's sense of justice and respect for other people = mommy and daddy. And everyone knows how unfair it is, that mommy and daddy are the boss of them. So they feel brave, and like swaggering outlaws, for adopting their contrarian positions. God knows the left has its problems with fostering and pandering to victimization. But look who these "victims" of the right are: white, priviledged, usually financially well off. They're a gang of adolescents, acting out rebellion (and feeling self-pity when it has consequences), while Mom and Dad pay for everything.
I'm reading this as, "New York and California taxpayers send you yet another $10 billion hurricane relief check while you continue to deny the reality of climate change."
Not long ago I said to a Florida friend that climate change is already doing undeniable damage to Florida, so conservatives there will be the first in the nation to come around to reality. Tip of the reality spear, as it were. She said no, she knows too many of them; she knows they'll be the first to go totally insane.
Roy's formulation applies here too. Everyone turns to something new when their consensus reality is proved mistaken: liberals to sharper instruments for discerning truth, conservatives to shouting into place a new consensus reality that requires no change on their part other than the increased shouting.
Actually, I had in mind elected officials who need to pander to unhinged voters, maybe our private sector leadership, all losing a connection to reality and stuff.
It's like The Renaissance Faire – everybody wants to be nobility, nobody wants to be the peasant. In fact, it's the peasants what has all the fun – heckling the nobles, stealing beers, laying about with the wenches...
First, HT to the boss for "I guess one thing she wasn’t worried about was public humiliation".
Second, to your affirmative point, Exactly. Until AA, any damn (white-skinned) mook could get in. That's why we suffered generations of decrepit, indecent, indescribably sub-substandard "leadership" in fields across this-here Shining Shitstain on a Hill of...whatever...
Imagine how great we truly could have been, with unchained citizens and enlightened governance.
For me, the epitome of the Rich White Guy Gets Pushback, Crumples Like A Wet Napkin was when Alan Dershowitz, after voluntarily placing himself in Trump’s corner, was bitching about how no one would eat bagels with him on Martha’s Vineyard anymore. Oh, the humanity! You know, if I could afford to summer at a swanky beach I’d regard fewer people speaking to me to be an acceptable trade off. I might even prefer it.
The thing with the people who run the NYT, WaPo, and the New Yorker is they are moderates with liberal leanings who consider themselves to be far, far more liberal/left than they actually are. Because of their economic and social class they are constantly rubbing elbows with Republicans and conservatives. In short, those guys are their pals. So when the real Left takes aim at their pals, it offends them on two fronts: one, since they consider themselves the standard-bearers of liberal values, anyone to the left of them must be a wild-eyed radical, and two, someone is attacking their friends, and their first instinct is to come to their friends’ defense.
May 18, 2023·edited May 18, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
Al got dropped from my invite list after I saw those pictures of him and his buddy Jeff, lounging around at the beach house all relaxed, looking like they just got a handjob from a thirteen year old.
Yeah, I'm guessing adding a soupcon of pedophilia to your Trump endorsement is a more common garnish for several of his supporters than has so far been widely publicized.
I seem to be in the midst of a Peggy Lee flavored "Is That All There Is" ennui today.
Today is going fine actually. Several good things will most likely happen. I should be in a swell mood. Instead I read Roy's perfectly cromulent piece and all I can think of is how Smooth Criminal Trustfund Babies need their ass beat.
Chin up. We can never beat all the asses that need whooping, so we must savor vicarious ass-whoopings where we can. For example, Rudy Giuliani's mounting legal woes are heartening.
“they are moderates with liberal leanings who consider themselves to be far, far more liberal/left than they actually are”
This is a keen observation. I’ve noticed similar dynamics in the comment sections of popular left-leaning blogs. The more socially and economically privileged the commenters are, the more they’re convinced that they’re the very furthest left people who are still acceptable. Consequently, they’re also the ones punching left and punching down the most vigorously to defend their position as the Best Liberals. Anybody to the left of Amy Klobuchar is a tankie or a Jill Stein voter, and those silly children are legion, and everything is their fault.
Oh, I bet you're one of those RADICALS who think we should invoke the 14th amendment instead of tanking the economy and throwing millions out of work! Can't you see the harm that would do, to... um... something? Like maybe the constitution, which apparently doesn't like being invoked? Hold on a bit, I'm still working on this part.
Honestly have not seen any articles or op-eds laying out why Biden doesn't declare the debt ceiling unconstitutional. Does it come down just to the worry that 5 voters on the Supreme Court are actively working for the dissolution of the United States? Because otherwise the 14th Amendment looks pretty airtight. (Although so does "well-regulated," so, shows what I know.)
Yep. Matt Yglesias has a lot more in common with Ross Douthat and Josh Barro than he has differences. They are all affluent white guys of around the same age who went to Harvard.
Punching left is both an identity thing (“wait, *I’m* the liberal Good Guy here, you must be a radical”) and frankly, a self-protective instinct. If the system is treating you pretty well and putting money in your pocket, you aren’t going to be eager to upset the apple cart.
When arguing with people is what you do for a living, the most important thing is that the supply of arguments never dries up, you don't really care if any of the arguments lead to an actual conclusion or perhaps even some action, better if they don't, then you can just endlessly recycle the same shit over and over and take off work early. What's that? You're saying there are actual problems that we need to do something about? Sorry, not my department, there's a reason my office is located here in the Argument Clinic, right next door to that nice Mr. Cleese.
"When arguing with people is what you do for a living, the most important thing is that the supply of arguments never dries up..." you're onto something there!
Just look at the most obvious crisis in so many cities right now: Housing costs have outpaced salaries by miles. There is one easy solution, build more ownable units. But the Deciders don't feel the crisis because they all own houses. On top of that, of course, the solution will devalue their houses. Why fix a problem that doesn't affect you and retire with $3 million when you could let it fester and retire with $6 million?
I think they have an answer for that, which is to repeal all those pesky housing regulations and let the free market solve the problem for us. One regulation they do NOT want repealed is the zoning that keeps their neighborhood single-family only.
So Rikki Schlott "felt like she had to hide" her Regenery Publishing book collection under the mattress. Did she really physically stash them there because Guy Montag and the Firemen could pop in for an inspection at any time? If it was the latter, NYU sounds like a pretty tough school! It's probably one of those smallish liberal arts places that has a limited demographic to draw from.
When I taught Freshman Composition, I had to repeatedly tell students that they couldn't use the things they were worried might happen or were afraid would happen or even were certain would happen as evidence for some claim; that evidence consisted only of things that had, you know, actually happened. I guess Schlott never had that lesson.
May 18, 2023·edited May 18, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
Katherine Cramer, a professor at UW-Madison, wrote a fairly popular book about rural Wisconsinites and how they see their state government in Madison (let's just say "not favorably.") Anyway, one story she recounts is talking to a woman whose son had gone fishing for a big fish-fry the family had planned. He caught WAAAY over his limit (you could sense the pride she had in relating this) and now their freezer was full of over-the-limit fish, and she could just IMAGINE a game warden coming into their house, inspecting the freezer (like all game wardens do, right?) and throwing the whole family in jail (or maybe writing out a citation? Sorry, haven't had many interactions with game wardens.)
Anyway, just the fact that she could IMAGINE such a thing happening was enough to fill her with aggrievement and outrage at the overweening liberal government in Madison. My thought was, "Well, if you have to imagine ways in which you might be oppressed, then maybe you're not so oppressed after all?"
May 18, 2023·edited May 18, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
If I had been doing the interviewing, I'd have played it deliberately obtuse: "So what did the game warden do when he saw all the fish? Oh, wait, there wasn't a game warden? I'm sorry, could you go back over that story again? I think I'm missing something."
Could be worse. Could actually catch 'em in the act of fishing illegally, cite them for a state violation (instead of local – always go big if given the option) and then get an unsympathetic DA who refuses to go after 'em.
Bitter? No, not much. But I woulda been the darling of the rangers at the lodge for a little while anyway. Still, there was all that frozen "evidence" leftover to make up for it.
If they owned a bookcase (LOL) Sowell's books would be turned 90 degrees with the covers facing out. And make sure the bookcase (again, LOL) is visible behind you as you sit at your computer, for those DEI trainings you're forced to participate in on Microsoft Teams.
As I wrote earlier tis week, my brother-in-law feels himself a victim of cancelculture because the liberals will not allow him to say the n-word in public. And, really, that's pretty much what all this cancelculture crap comes down to: These people want to say incredibly offensive things, and then feel persecuted when nobody applauds and normal people shy away.
And I will bet that one very real victim of actual cancelculture is barred from attending those Criminal Minds wankfests: Phil Donohue. Remember him? Said he opposed the invasion of Iraq and was instantly actually canceled! Show yanked off the air and him barred from TV for life. But I Phil's thought crimes were of the wrong flavor or something.
As has been pointed out many times, every white person is free to say the n-word. However, they are also free to catch hands when they do.
This whole cancel culture/freeze peach bullshit is so disingenuous. In 1985, if you worked for any non-Mom and Pop company and you called a coworker a bitch or the n-word you would have been fired. Consequences are not a new phenomenon. There have always been consequences for asshole behavior.
"Consequences are not a new phenomenon." The rich and powerful have been able to escape consequences all along, and have become accustomed to it. But they have of late been stunned to find that in the age of social media many if not most ordinary people consider them to be douchebags. It's not as big a deal as cash, but pride does suffer, so they've invented this "cancel culture" bullshit to assuage it.
Oh, absolutely. I was talking about the lumpen like Derelict’s brother-in-law, not the affluent assholes who are able to console themselves for their n-word free existence with townhouses in Georgetown or podcasts. Not only are they largely free of any consequences beyond wounded pride, they have an alternate cocktail-party circuit which will laud their bravery and write articles about them.
May 18, 2023·edited May 18, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
"The rich and powerful have been able to escape consequences all along..."
Hey, anybody checked in on Liz Holmes lately? Former Theranos CEO convicted of fraud, convicted and sentenced LAST NOVEMBER, and STILL not in jail? Seems the court ordered her to report to jail at the end of April, but then she asked (very nicely!) to stay out while she appealed and the court said, all strict and firm-like, "No, Elizabeth, you MUST go to jail, and we will tell you at some date in the future when that will be." This date in the future has not yet come to pass, because Holmes is still at home getting nice tongue-baths from NYTimes reporters.
We need a Law & Order: White Collar Unit. Every episode will end with the perp high-fiving his lawyer. Credits roll over him sitting at home on a couch made of baby seal skin and watching Law & Order SVU while getting a blowie from a $5000 hooker.
Remember, her initial date was April 27, I don't know what she did to buy an extra month delay except to ask for it, knowing the courts are slow as shit when white-collar criminals are involved.
I remember when that happened, and people talked about it for WEEKS, and how crazy it was, and what was the guy thinking, how could someone get that crazy, huh? Today, it would be considered Average Tuesday.
May 18, 2023·edited May 18, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
"Right. I had to go to the re-education camp in the Killing Fields an hour before I went to sleep, worked there all day making rainbow flags, and had 'D-E-I' branded on my penis!"
"And if you try to tell the woke young people of today that, they won't believe you."
"They perhaps identify as criminals because they have been caught at actions that normally carry consequences, and some have received rather gentle versions thereof. "
Or it could be the tired routine of cosplaying characters from "1984" and see, Orwell was a conservative and Soros is Big Brother and something something no I haven't actually read the book, why do you ask?
Gillespie has some weird conversations if they’re always about evil capitalism and how terrible America is. Not that I believe him for a minute. His conversations are more likely about what a bitch AOC is and what he did on his last trip to Mar-a-Lago. So these guys think there really is a Thought Police that monitors their babbling and makes them proud Criminals when they speak like a 1950’s Alabama redneck. Anyway, I came home to a month’s worth of New Yorkers so I haven’t read this Emma Green piece but I did get through her article about Hilldale College, which she tried to make sound half-way sane except that it’s hard to ignore that its President Arnn is a first class asshole hellbent on destroying America in the name of Classical Education.
May 18, 2023·edited May 18, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
Wait, is this the same Emma Green who wrote that piece calling the People's CDC a "ragtag" group that wants us to "wear masks forever"? Why yes, The Google tells me it is. And that would be the same Emma Green who, when she was at the Atlantic, wrote "The Liberals Who Can't Quit Lockdown" in May of 2021 (a few months before the Omicron wave) claiming the pandemic was basically over but Trump-haters just won't admit it. No, that one hasn't aged well, has it?
I like to think that a lot of right-wing claims which seem at first glance to be obvious, deliberate lies are actually transmissions from an Alternate Universe which have somehow arrived here. Gillespie was transmitting from an AU in which the New York Stock Exchange had been abolished and replaced by a satellite campus of Oberlin, which of course ruled the United States with an iron fist,
You know the Key & Peele sketch where Peele is a basketball player who's just led his team to the championship?
PEELE: Kids, let this teach you, if you believe in yourself, you can do ANYTHING! You can fly, you can literally fly!
KEY: Well, of course you don't really mean "literally," it's just a figure of speech --
PEELE: Nothing figurative about it! Kids, I want you all to get up on the roof and jump! Through the power of childish innocence, you will all become Peter Pan!
So maybe they cut the part where Green said to Gillespie, "Well, of course you don't mean literally EVERY conversation" and Gillespie answered "Yes, I mean literally! If you try talking about sports, the Thought Police just teleport in, because they're monitoring use of taboo words, and they take you away to Room 101 where they put a cage around your head with hungry rats in it..."
What the college commencement this is about, I think, is that Daddy is TALKING TO YOU, sit down and LISTEN, as long as you're living in my hou- er, country, you obey MY RULES, this is FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, don't pull that face with me, mister, and don't you DARE walk away! There should be consequences for not wanting to be lectured by Your Superiors.
I imagine they surreptitiously pass around "samizdat" with stats on black-on-white crime intermingled with Bergdorf's summer fashion catalog. Since their communist enemies think capitalism is evil they could get on a deep state kill list if they were seen with this stuff, just like behind the Iron Curtain. Or worse, they might be banned from attending the Met Gala. So brave.
May 18, 2023·edited May 18, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
I glanced at that article just to see what its angle might be, but saw that it went on and on and on forever about these preening dopes, so I closed it and finished Roy’s recap. I’m still not sure who it’s for, other than to be sympathetic to awful people in a Society Pages kind of way.
Between this and the NYT we need to shut down New York until we figure out what’s going on. Something is terribly wrong (yet somehow tedious at the same time!).
I've read the same article, only with the names switched out for right-wing actors. Stallone, Willis, Eastwood etc, Guys who just can't get a break because they love their country so much, and Hollywood is so damn left wing. They'll have you believe the White Rose resistance group had it easy in comparison. Solzhenitsyn may have done time in the Gulag, but did he ever get side-eye from some casting director?
Well, this morning I'm not regretting that New Yorker subscription I allowed to lapse. Likewise with the Atlantic subscription that also went bye-bye, since Green wrote similar bullshit for the Atlantic before being hired by the New Yorker (Is that a move up? Or just laterally? A question being hotly debated in a salon somewhere.)
BTW: If you're looking for an easy way to reassess those online subscriptions you're auto-paying by credit card, some of whom you may have even forgot you have, a neat trick is to lose your credit card and be issued a new one, and then watch the aggrieved emails pour in: "There seems to be a problem with your payment...". Each one is a nice opportunity to ask, "Do I really need this?" And then, simply by doing nothing, it all goes away.
That credit card suggestion is pure gold. I’ve done that myself. Or if you have to use PayPal you can turn off payment there, or (I think) deactivate the credit card used for subscriptions. Was also very helpful in cancelling subscriptions associated with an old email address that was long dead and therefore no help in logging in to cancel normally.
I'd prefer to think all the breadcrumbs Roy picked up in that article were dropped on purpose, both because I have a soft spot for the concept of the New Yorker and I don't want to believe any carbon-based life form could be dumb enough to believe that narrative. The genius of "cancel" and its little brother "woke" is that they are so gloriously vague, a hazy shade of victimhood allowing the pose of heroic truth-teller, like a kid tying a towel around his neck and jumping off the garage roof actually being considered Superman. To believe that this pose can be taken seriously enough to rate a supposedly serious essay in the New Yorker is depressing. It's as if white grievance has metastasized into a general privilege grievance, where being criticized for banging your student or serving up reheated 60 year old anti-affirmative action canards as a fresh hot take is to suffer the fate of Socrates and Galileo. It's just pathetic.
If I didn't know Green's "work", I might think this was a Chotiner-style thing, where you play out enough rope so your subject can hang himself. And a portion of the New Yorker's readership (and especially the grad-student contingent) might take it that way: "Ha ha, look at these rich assholes complaining about being canceled from their newly-purchased Georgetown homes! That Emma Green really nailed THEM!" Maybe it's a symptom of the overuse of sarcasm and irony to the point where we don't even know any more:
I knew what that link was before clicking it. The old Hall of Mirrors routine, clever people being so clever at the party they don't notice the mob gathering at the gate with torches and pitchforks. When I imaging some of these cancelled people feeling justified in their grievance, which I have to think some do, because humans can convince themselves of anything with sufficient motivation, I cannot conjure up a thought process to get there. I imagine a cloud of discomfort made up of comments and looks but that's it, my imagination fails me. The guy who banged his student though, he's running a con, like a villain in an Ayn Rand novel claiming he's been thrown in the gulag because his novel got a bad review in the Times.
> Since they’ve stopped trying [to downplay the stuff they believe], one needs less labor
> to scrape the veneer off their ridiculous ideas and lay them bare. That’s good for me, of
> course, and who knows, maybe good for the Republic too — because maybe more voters
> will catch on.
What's the verdict on that? On the one side,there's the electoral fates of some of the worst in the Blue Trickle,on the other the presence in our population of people who actually believe that sincerity were a sign that the sincere person were right, or at least good. (For once I will both-sides it because I've seen plenty of that last on the Left,as years of WBAI, KPFA, KALW, and KPFK made plain—but I'll allow that it's much less of a problem because in a propertarian society the Left is structurally always further away from actual power than the Right…and, to be sincere about [so you just _know_ I'm right], because I like the Left a lot more than the Right.)
They're nothing, irrelevant.
Anyway.
I have this dotard theory that being so full of shit makes many of these conservatives a little bit insane. I mean, it does actual harm to them. I mean saying things when you know deep down -- subconsciously -- are wrong drives many of them a little nuts. Including causing an excessive lack of self-awareness.
As for that position on affirmative action, I present in support of same: Ron DeSantis, John Kennedy, Josh Hawley and even, to a degree, (allegedly) Trump. The world could not be possibly worse if they lost their slots to people admitted via affirmative action. Not that, you know, rationality or whatever is relevant here.
Hope Roy feels better for the venting. Must say (not a criticism) that when I saw the post's headline I expected a humor piece. But that's on me.
It IS a humor piece. At least, I was laughing at these people as Roy ranted.
Laughing at the shitheads because their own stupidity-- I mean narcissistic blindness doesn’t make it a humor piece per sé. Example: DeSantis facial expressions: hysterical but not meant to be humorous.
First thing I thought of when presented with pictorial evidence of DeSantis' facial expressions: Esquire Magazine's Richard Nixon "Why is this man laughing?" Series.
The Dubious Awards! Now needed more than ever.
Sock it to ME??!!
One can create the darkest humor without writing a single joke...
Operative word is piece, not humor. Of course we can laugh at those people — there’s humor. A piece tho’ would be like one of Roy’s skits or parodies.
But your point is of course, like, an eternal truth.
Well thanks for that minor concession, my crabby friend... :)
Haha!
I'll be that guy: my theory is that anyone who presents themselves as a "humorist" really isn't.
How so that?
I dunno. You think if someone called Thurber a humorist he'd say, "Oh, no, that's not what I do at all"?
Clarification: at least not these days. I'm seeing right-wingers presenting themselves as "humorists" once they age out of "edgy".
The really important question is, do they say funny things or do they say things funny? Oh, neither? Never mind.
From the Whatever Happened To Series:
Whatever Happened To: Humorist P. J. O'Rourke?
The darkest fears are heard
from the safest places
come the bravest words
Oo...edgy...
It's from The Sound "New Dark Age" song. Adrian Borland was a prophet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWoNSADanoA
Surrounding yourself with yes-men rots your brain; I think the most visible of example of this currently is actually Elongated Muskrat, whose actions make perfect sense once you understand that he's deep within a rightwing filter bubble and has fired everyone willing to talk to him like an adult.
The thing that's always wild to me about tough conservative truth-tellers is how unbelievably fragile they all are; my experiences post-2016 are that basically all of them are a tweet and a half worth of mild pushback away from a complete emotional meltdown.
Think of it this way: Liberals are accustomed to seeing disaster coming a mile away and being told by the rich and credentialed they're making a big deal over nothing. This trains certain habits of mind -- not all of them positive, but one benefit is a bone-deep understanding that there are better instruments for ascertaining the truth than consensus.
Conservatives have a funhouse mirror version of this: They often think official consensus -- such as climate change and the efficacy of mRNA vaccines -- is wrong, indeed must be because their propagandists disagree with it; but instead of other instruments (scientific experiments, research) they merely create a contradictory consensus and bray it as loud as they can.
So with Musk, who thought that buying Twitter would let him change reality itself, rather than merely providing a more gigantic stage for his buffoonery.
"...they merely create a contradictory consensus and bray it as loud as they can."
Yes, and the implicit basis for their "argument"--which they may be unconscious of but which they expect the world to agree with--is that objective, scientifically-validated fact is inherently oppressive to them. The fact that they're in the minority shows how unfair (one of Trump's favorite words) everything is. "If nice, sensible people disagree with me and think I'm an asshole, I'm a victim."
They defend their whining by invoking "freedom," but it's a child's position (hence "crybabies"). Sheer decency, and an adult's sense of justice and respect for other people = mommy and daddy. And everyone knows how unfair it is, that mommy and daddy are the boss of them. So they feel brave, and like swaggering outlaws, for adopting their contrarian positions. God knows the left has its problems with fostering and pandering to victimization. But look who these "victims" of the right are: white, priviledged, usually financially well off. They're a gang of adolescents, acting out rebellion (and feeling self-pity when it has consequences), while Mom and Dad pay for everything.
Sheer decency is only acquired via many layers of sheer.
"while Mom and Dad pay for everything"
I'm reading this as, "New York and California taxpayers send you yet another $10 billion hurricane relief check while you continue to deny the reality of climate change."
Not long ago I said to a Florida friend that climate change is already doing undeniable damage to Florida, so conservatives there will be the first in the nation to come around to reality. Tip of the reality spear, as it were. She said no, she knows too many of them; she knows they'll be the first to go totally insane.
Roy's formulation applies here too. Everyone turns to something new when their consensus reality is proved mistaken: liberals to sharper instruments for discerning truth, conservatives to shouting into place a new consensus reality that requires no change on their part other than the increased shouting.
Florida...man...
“why would trans people do this?” - Conservatives, watching hurricanes suck Florida out to sea
"it does actual harm to them" -- thus, the aggrieved nobility! (At least among those not directly profiting from the grift.)
Actually, I had in mind elected officials who need to pander to unhinged voters, maybe our private sector leadership, all losing a connection to reality and stuff.
I've met reality, and losing all connection to it, well, I don't think I'd perceive that as harm.
It's like The Renaissance Faire – everybody wants to be nobility, nobody wants to be the peasant. In fact, it's the peasants what has all the fun – heckling the nobles, stealing beers, laying about with the wenches...
First, HT to the boss for "I guess one thing she wasn’t worried about was public humiliation".
Second, to your affirmative point, Exactly. Until AA, any damn (white-skinned) mook could get in. That's why we suffered generations of decrepit, indecent, indescribably sub-substandard "leadership" in fields across this-here Shining Shitstain on a Hill of...whatever...
Imagine how great we truly could have been, with unchained citizens and enlightened governance.
Ivies and wannabe Ivies are and have been, in part, nepo baby factories.
And I suppose on my list should be GW Bush, maybe even his pappy. OTOH, I was thinking of current congressional POS.
And as I periodically rant, even our private sector leadership is pretty unfit, sociopathic.
Sans doubt. And as ever, privately governing much of the public 'sector'.
For me, the epitome of the Rich White Guy Gets Pushback, Crumples Like A Wet Napkin was when Alan Dershowitz, after voluntarily placing himself in Trump’s corner, was bitching about how no one would eat bagels with him on Martha’s Vineyard anymore. Oh, the humanity! You know, if I could afford to summer at a swanky beach I’d regard fewer people speaking to me to be an acceptable trade off. I might even prefer it.
The thing with the people who run the NYT, WaPo, and the New Yorker is they are moderates with liberal leanings who consider themselves to be far, far more liberal/left than they actually are. Because of their economic and social class they are constantly rubbing elbows with Republicans and conservatives. In short, those guys are their pals. So when the real Left takes aim at their pals, it offends them on two fronts: one, since they consider themselves the standard-bearers of liberal values, anyone to the left of them must be a wild-eyed radical, and two, someone is attacking their friends, and their first instinct is to come to their friends’ defense.
Al got dropped from my invite list after I saw those pictures of him and his buddy Jeff, lounging around at the beach house all relaxed, looking like they just got a handjob from a thirteen year old.
Yeah, I'm guessing adding a soupcon of pedophilia to your Trump endorsement is a more common garnish for several of his supporters than has so far been widely publicized.
All good hosts know that the secrets to a successful party is having a wide variety of guests with many varied interests .
Well said -- you may have missed your calling, you have a talent for PR, lol.
I seem to be in the midst of a Peggy Lee flavored "Is That All There Is" ennui today.
Today is going fine actually. Several good things will most likely happen. I should be in a swell mood. Instead I read Roy's perfectly cromulent piece and all I can think of is how Smooth Criminal Trustfund Babies need their ass beat.
That's pretty sour.
Chin up. We can never beat all the asses that need whooping, so we must savor vicarious ass-whoopings where we can. For example, Rudy Giuliani's mounting legal woes are heartening.
“they are moderates with liberal leanings who consider themselves to be far, far more liberal/left than they actually are”
This is a keen observation. I’ve noticed similar dynamics in the comment sections of popular left-leaning blogs. The more socially and economically privileged the commenters are, the more they’re convinced that they’re the very furthest left people who are still acceptable. Consequently, they’re also the ones punching left and punching down the most vigorously to defend their position as the Best Liberals. Anybody to the left of Amy Klobuchar is a tankie or a Jill Stein voter, and those silly children are legion, and everything is their fault.
Oh, I bet you're one of those RADICALS who think we should invoke the 14th amendment instead of tanking the economy and throwing millions out of work! Can't you see the harm that would do, to... um... something? Like maybe the constitution, which apparently doesn't like being invoked? Hold on a bit, I'm still working on this part.
Honestly have not seen any articles or op-eds laying out why Biden doesn't declare the debt ceiling unconstitutional. Does it come down just to the worry that 5 voters on the Supreme Court are actively working for the dissolution of the United States? Because otherwise the 14th Amendment looks pretty airtight. (Although so does "well-regulated," so, shows what I know.)
TPM had an excellent article about it today: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/biden-must-consider-all-the-laws-not-just-the-debt-ceiling-as-x-date-approaches
Interesting, thanks! It completes thoughts begun by the Hockett essay it mentions, which I read a day or two ago.
Thanks for endorsement.
Yep. Matt Yglesias has a lot more in common with Ross Douthat and Josh Barro than he has differences. They are all affluent white guys of around the same age who went to Harvard.
Punching left is both an identity thing (“wait, *I’m* the liberal Good Guy here, you must be a radical”) and frankly, a self-protective instinct. If the system is treating you pretty well and putting money in your pocket, you aren’t going to be eager to upset the apple cart.
When arguing with people is what you do for a living, the most important thing is that the supply of arguments never dries up, you don't really care if any of the arguments lead to an actual conclusion or perhaps even some action, better if they don't, then you can just endlessly recycle the same shit over and over and take off work early. What's that? You're saying there are actual problems that we need to do something about? Sorry, not my department, there's a reason my office is located here in the Argument Clinic, right next door to that nice Mr. Cleese.
"When arguing with people is what you do for a living, the most important thing is that the supply of arguments never dries up..." you're onto something there!
“This is central to my point,” and “Heh, indeed.”
Unfortunately, the first rule of Debate Club is EVERYONE ALWAYS talks about Debate Club.
And I don't know why, when it usually leads to a pantsing or the dreaded Strawberry Swirlie.
Just look at the most obvious crisis in so many cities right now: Housing costs have outpaced salaries by miles. There is one easy solution, build more ownable units. But the Deciders don't feel the crisis because they all own houses. On top of that, of course, the solution will devalue their houses. Why fix a problem that doesn't affect you and retire with $3 million when you could let it fester and retire with $6 million?
I think they have an answer for that, which is to repeal all those pesky housing regulations and let the free market solve the problem for us. One regulation they do NOT want repealed is the zoning that keeps their neighborhood single-family only.
and they may want to bring back red lining
To this day, I wince when descending the escalator to my local subway...yes, the Red Line.
Never really went away, but yeah.
So Rikki Schlott "felt like she had to hide" her Regenery Publishing book collection under the mattress. Did she really physically stash them there because Guy Montag and the Firemen could pop in for an inspection at any time? If it was the latter, NYU sounds like a pretty tough school! It's probably one of those smallish liberal arts places that has a limited demographic to draw from.
When I taught Freshman Composition, I had to repeatedly tell students that they couldn't use the things they were worried might happen or were afraid would happen or even were certain would happen as evidence for some claim; that evidence consisted only of things that had, you know, actually happened. I guess Schlott never had that lesson.
Katherine Cramer, a professor at UW-Madison, wrote a fairly popular book about rural Wisconsinites and how they see their state government in Madison (let's just say "not favorably.") Anyway, one story she recounts is talking to a woman whose son had gone fishing for a big fish-fry the family had planned. He caught WAAAY over his limit (you could sense the pride she had in relating this) and now their freezer was full of over-the-limit fish, and she could just IMAGINE a game warden coming into their house, inspecting the freezer (like all game wardens do, right?) and throwing the whole family in jail (or maybe writing out a citation? Sorry, haven't had many interactions with game wardens.)
Anyway, just the fact that she could IMAGINE such a thing happening was enough to fill her with aggrievement and outrage at the overweening liberal government in Madison. My thought was, "Well, if you have to imagine ways in which you might be oppressed, then maybe you're not so oppressed after all?"
If I had been doing the interviewing, I'd have played it deliberately obtuse: "So what did the game warden do when he saw all the fish? Oh, wait, there wasn't a game warden? I'm sorry, could you go back over that story again? I think I'm missing something."
Could be worse. Could actually catch 'em in the act of fishing illegally, cite them for a state violation (instead of local – always go big if given the option) and then get an unsympathetic DA who refuses to go after 'em.
Bitter? No, not much. But I woulda been the darling of the rangers at the lodge for a little while anyway. Still, there was all that frozen "evidence" leftover to make up for it.
Ah, you're a snitch for the Deep State! (although not too deep, the trout like to feed near the surface.)
Steep Date!
Now take a wild guess as to where I taught Freshman Comp!
I did meet my wife at UW-Madison, so I guess I can't complain.
I am leaving for someone less couthful the opportunity herein offered to speculate on the comping of freshmen, and the teaching thereof.
It's basically conservative porn to begin with, so, yeah, she's just following tradition.
But lumpier than a copy of Penthouse, chronic back problems may explain their crankiness.
No one reads Thomas Sowell for insights into actual reality. (I mean, this is someone who has been on a sinecure from Stanford for fifty years now.)
Conservatives buy Thomas Sowell books for the picture on the cover, nothing more than that.
They have to be able to say they own books by Black authors.
Some of my best friends are Black authors and they agree with me that Black people are a real problem!
If they owned a bookcase (LOL) Sowell's books would be turned 90 degrees with the covers facing out. And make sure the bookcase (again, LOL) is visible behind you as you sit at your computer, for those DEI trainings you're forced to participate in on Microsoft Teams.
As I wrote earlier tis week, my brother-in-law feels himself a victim of cancelculture because the liberals will not allow him to say the n-word in public. And, really, that's pretty much what all this cancelculture crap comes down to: These people want to say incredibly offensive things, and then feel persecuted when nobody applauds and normal people shy away.
And I will bet that one very real victim of actual cancelculture is barred from attending those Criminal Minds wankfests: Phil Donohue. Remember him? Said he opposed the invasion of Iraq and was instantly actually canceled! Show yanked off the air and him barred from TV for life. But I Phil's thought crimes were of the wrong flavor or something.
As has been pointed out many times, every white person is free to say the n-word. However, they are also free to catch hands when they do.
This whole cancel culture/freeze peach bullshit is so disingenuous. In 1985, if you worked for any non-Mom and Pop company and you called a coworker a bitch or the n-word you would have been fired. Consequences are not a new phenomenon. There have always been consequences for asshole behavior.
"Consequences are not a new phenomenon." The rich and powerful have been able to escape consequences all along, and have become accustomed to it. But they have of late been stunned to find that in the age of social media many if not most ordinary people consider them to be douchebags. It's not as big a deal as cash, but pride does suffer, so they've invented this "cancel culture" bullshit to assuage it.
Oh, absolutely. I was talking about the lumpen like Derelict’s brother-in-law, not the affluent assholes who are able to console themselves for their n-word free existence with townhouses in Georgetown or podcasts. Not only are they largely free of any consequences beyond wounded pride, they have an alternate cocktail-party circuit which will laud their bravery and write articles about them.
"The rich and powerful have been able to escape consequences all along..."
Hey, anybody checked in on Liz Holmes lately? Former Theranos CEO convicted of fraud, convicted and sentenced LAST NOVEMBER, and STILL not in jail? Seems the court ordered her to report to jail at the end of April, but then she asked (very nicely!) to stay out while she appealed and the court said, all strict and firm-like, "No, Elizabeth, you MUST go to jail, and we will tell you at some date in the future when that will be." This date in the future has not yet come to pass, because Holmes is still at home getting nice tongue-baths from NYTimes reporters.
https://www.readtpa.com/p/as-the-press-humanizes-elizabeth
I expect them to run her for Congress before she ever goes to jail.
She was groomed by that bad Indian man, now she sees, and she's a mommy!
Such a Ted Talk candidate!
What's that? You don't say...Well I guess that about wraps it up for Ted Talks!
What's that? You don't say...
May 30 is what I heard today. May or May Not 30...
We need a Law & Order: White Collar Unit. Every episode will end with the perp high-fiving his lawyer. Credits roll over him sitting at home on a couch made of baby seal skin and watching Law & Order SVU while getting a blowie from a $5000 hooker.
The date is May 30
Until it's July 30, and then August 30, and then...
Remember, her initial date was April 27, I don't know what she did to buy an extra month delay except to ask for it, knowing the courts are slow as shit when white-collar criminals are involved.
I've heard it observed before that basically the only people who've ever been successfully cancelled are Michael Jackson and the Dixie Chicks.
Jackson has been cancelled so thoroughly that even his impersonators are cancelled with extreme prejudice.
I saw a great MJ impersonator on the street in Bogota Colombia
Forget us not Lenny Bruce.
Say things?
Why, they're not even allowed to kick the coolies anymore when they misbehave!
Oof. Taking one for the coolies.
Oof.
Taking one for the coolies.
in the goolies
Hey now, I didn't sign up for THAT!
And Dan Rather.
Tell us again what the frequency was...?
I remember when that happened, and people talked about it for WEEKS, and how crazy it was, and what was the guy thinking, how could someone get that crazy, huh? Today, it would be considered Average Tuesday.
exactly
Satire, RIP
"Right. I had to go to the re-education camp in the Killing Fields an hour before I went to sleep, worked there all day making rainbow flags, and had 'D-E-I' branded on my penis!"
"And if you try to tell the woke young people of today that, they won't believe you."
"Aye, aye."
Luxury!
"They perhaps identify as criminals because they have been caught at actions that normally carry consequences, and some have received rather gentle versions thereof. "
Or it could be the tired routine of cosplaying characters from "1984" and see, Orwell was a conservative and Soros is Big Brother and something something no I haven't actually read the book, why do you ask?
Gillespie has some weird conversations if they’re always about evil capitalism and how terrible America is. Not that I believe him for a minute. His conversations are more likely about what a bitch AOC is and what he did on his last trip to Mar-a-Lago. So these guys think there really is a Thought Police that monitors their babbling and makes them proud Criminals when they speak like a 1950’s Alabama redneck. Anyway, I came home to a month’s worth of New Yorkers so I haven’t read this Emma Green piece but I did get through her article about Hilldale College, which she tried to make sound half-way sane except that it’s hard to ignore that its President Arnn is a first class asshole hellbent on destroying America in the name of Classical Education.
Wait, is this the same Emma Green who wrote that piece calling the People's CDC a "ragtag" group that wants us to "wear masks forever"? Why yes, The Google tells me it is. And that would be the same Emma Green who, when she was at the Atlantic, wrote "The Liberals Who Can't Quit Lockdown" in May of 2021 (a few months before the Omicron wave) claiming the pandemic was basically over but Trump-haters just won't admit it. No, that one hasn't aged well, has it?
I’d call her a twit but that would be insulting to innocent birds called twits.
Thanks for delving so we do not have to.
Yeah. the conversations claim is unadulterated sputum.
I like to think that a lot of right-wing claims which seem at first glance to be obvious, deliberate lies are actually transmissions from an Alternate Universe which have somehow arrived here. Gillespie was transmitting from an AU in which the New York Stock Exchange had been abolished and replaced by a satellite campus of Oberlin, which of course ruled the United States with an iron fist,
You know the Key & Peele sketch where Peele is a basketball player who's just led his team to the championship?
PEELE: Kids, let this teach you, if you believe in yourself, you can do ANYTHING! You can fly, you can literally fly!
KEY: Well, of course you don't really mean "literally," it's just a figure of speech --
PEELE: Nothing figurative about it! Kids, I want you all to get up on the roof and jump! Through the power of childish innocence, you will all become Peter Pan!
So maybe they cut the part where Green said to Gillespie, "Well, of course you don't mean literally EVERY conversation" and Gillespie answered "Yes, I mean literally! If you try talking about sports, the Thought Police just teleport in, because they're monitoring use of taboo words, and they take you away to Room 101 where they put a cage around your head with hungry rats in it..."
What the college commencement this is about, I think, is that Daddy is TALKING TO YOU, sit down and LISTEN, as long as you're living in my hou- er, country, you obey MY RULES, this is FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, don't pull that face with me, mister, and don't you DARE walk away! There should be consequences for not wanting to be lectured by Your Superiors.
In loco parentis, I think the phrase is.
Without the "in."
muy loco
I imagine they surreptitiously pass around "samizdat" with stats on black-on-white crime intermingled with Bergdorf's summer fashion catalog. Since their communist enemies think capitalism is evil they could get on a deep state kill list if they were seen with this stuff, just like behind the Iron Curtain. Or worse, they might be banned from attending the Met Gala. So brave.
The piece really hit that NYT sweet spot where cultural/political think piece meets Style section ostentatious consumerism.
Kind of a "Living well is the best revenge" thing.
I glanced at that article just to see what its angle might be, but saw that it went on and on and on forever about these preening dopes, so I closed it and finished Roy’s recap. I’m still not sure who it’s for, other than to be sympathetic to awful people in a Society Pages kind of way.
Between this and the NYT we need to shut down New York until we figure out what’s going on. Something is terribly wrong (yet somehow tedious at the same time!).
I've read the same article, only with the names switched out for right-wing actors. Stallone, Willis, Eastwood etc, Guys who just can't get a break because they love their country so much, and Hollywood is so damn left wing. They'll have you believe the White Rose resistance group had it easy in comparison. Solzhenitsyn may have done time in the Gulag, but did he ever get side-eye from some casting director?
Yes, poor Clint Eastwood, it's a shame how he hasn't been able to get work.
Sophie Scholl was only guillotined. What is that when compared to social media opprobrium?
Well, this morning I'm not regretting that New Yorker subscription I allowed to lapse. Likewise with the Atlantic subscription that also went bye-bye, since Green wrote similar bullshit for the Atlantic before being hired by the New Yorker (Is that a move up? Or just laterally? A question being hotly debated in a salon somewhere.)
BTW: If you're looking for an easy way to reassess those online subscriptions you're auto-paying by credit card, some of whom you may have even forgot you have, a neat trick is to lose your credit card and be issued a new one, and then watch the aggrieved emails pour in: "There seems to be a problem with your payment...". Each one is a nice opportunity to ask, "Do I really need this?" And then, simply by doing nothing, it all goes away.
That credit card suggestion is pure gold. I’ve done that myself. Or if you have to use PayPal you can turn off payment there, or (I think) deactivate the credit card used for subscriptions. Was also very helpful in cancelling subscriptions associated with an old email address that was long dead and therefore no help in logging in to cancel normally.
Yes, what I like about this approach is that the subscription cancels when you simply do nothing, which I am quite skilled at doing.
I like the cut of your jib.
Is this a free market thing? Can we claim our status as masters of the universe when we cancel the plastic? If not, I want my money back.
I don't know what I would do without Roy
Get out more?
laugh less?
Learn cribbage?
I'd prefer to think all the breadcrumbs Roy picked up in that article were dropped on purpose, both because I have a soft spot for the concept of the New Yorker and I don't want to believe any carbon-based life form could be dumb enough to believe that narrative. The genius of "cancel" and its little brother "woke" is that they are so gloriously vague, a hazy shade of victimhood allowing the pose of heroic truth-teller, like a kid tying a towel around his neck and jumping off the garage roof actually being considered Superman. To believe that this pose can be taken seriously enough to rate a supposedly serious essay in the New Yorker is depressing. It's as if white grievance has metastasized into a general privilege grievance, where being criticized for banging your student or serving up reheated 60 year old anti-affirmative action canards as a fresh hot take is to suffer the fate of Socrates and Galileo. It's just pathetic.
If I didn't know Green's "work", I might think this was a Chotiner-style thing, where you play out enough rope so your subject can hang himself. And a portion of the New Yorker's readership (and especially the grad-student contingent) might take it that way: "Ha ha, look at these rich assholes complaining about being canceled from their newly-purchased Georgetown homes! That Emma Green really nailed THEM!" Maybe it's a symptom of the overuse of sarcasm and irony to the point where we don't even know any more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udJw-CzX7sA
I knew what that link was before clicking it. The old Hall of Mirrors routine, clever people being so clever at the party they don't notice the mob gathering at the gate with torches and pitchforks. When I imaging some of these cancelled people feeling justified in their grievance, which I have to think some do, because humans can convince themselves of anything with sufficient motivation, I cannot conjure up a thought process to get there. I imagine a cloud of discomfort made up of comments and looks but that's it, my imagination fails me. The guy who banged his student though, he's running a con, like a villain in an Ayn Rand novel claiming he's been thrown in the gulag because his novel got a bad review in the Times.
Hearted for the little brother.
Stalin knew about real "thought criminals".
If you gather Roy's essays for the week and posted a few cartoons this could be kinda like The New Yorker.
On the internet, everyone knows you're a dork.
From the "Village Voice" piece on Barr
> Since they’ve stopped trying [to downplay the stuff they believe], one needs less labor
> to scrape the veneer off their ridiculous ideas and lay them bare. That’s good for me, of
> course, and who knows, maybe good for the Republic too — because maybe more voters
> will catch on.
What's the verdict on that? On the one side,there's the electoral fates of some of the worst in the Blue Trickle,on the other the presence in our population of people who actually believe that sincerity were a sign that the sincere person were right, or at least good. (For once I will both-sides it because I've seen plenty of that last on the Left,as years of WBAI, KPFA, KALW, and KPFK made plain—but I'll allow that it's much less of a problem because in a propertarian society the Left is structurally always further away from actual power than the Right…and, to be sincere about [so you just _know_ I'm right], because I like the Left a lot more than the Right.)
"Gerry? Yeah, he's legit..."
But it is never enough to have the voters on your side – you need a majority!